The Wisdom of the Enneagram

The Enneagram is a profound and powerful way to help you understand personality. It can provide numerous, often immediate, practical applications in virtually all areas of life including intimate relationships and family life, spiritual development, therapeutic settings, business, education, government and non-profit organizations.

The Enneagram enhances, affirms and augments other psychologies and training methods. It is a psychospiritual tool that connects the observable psychological perspective to the spiritual level and shows how to integrate the two. No other psychological tool is as efficient at highlighting the links between these two levels of being.

Determining our personality type through the Enneagram does not put us in a box, but instead helps us see the box from which we view the world, so that we can step outside of our limited perspective and constraints. By gaining a better sense of how we have unknowingly and automatically constrained ourselves, we can develop healthier relationships, lead more productive and fulfilling lives, and experience our true essence.

The Enneagram is not a static symbol or body of knowledge but a dynamic, ever-evolving matrix of energy that affects every aspect of our lives as they unfold. The Enneagram is about self-knowledge. It is important for each of us to continue to ask questions of ourselves and broaden our understanding of our own patterns, as well as those of others, for how else can we move towards bringing more balance and peace into our lives?

What is the Enneagram’s value in personal development and fulfillment?

Fundamental and universal, the Enneagram gets right to the core of motivation. Each type has a simple Basic Proposition about what is necessary for survival and satisfaction in life, and a corresponding pattern of attention or set of perceptual filters that determine what is experienced and what isn’t.

These motivations, beliefs and patterns often operate outside of our awareness. Through self-observation using the Enneagram, you can become more conscious of your own patterns, which leads to more conscious conduct.

The Enneagram recognizes three centers of intelligence: the mind, heart and body. We all have these three centers, but depending on our type we tend to be more focused in one of them. The Enneagram identifies the three centers as equally important and suggests ways to achieve a more balanced life through balancing the use of the centers.

As an ancient symbol, the Enneagram also represents the cosmic idea of unity in multiplicity. While no two individuals are alike, the Enneagram teachings show that we share specific discernible patterns of thought, feeling and behavior, opening up paths to mutual understanding despite our differences.