We Can Be Our Many Selves

After more than thirty years as an Enneagram author and coach, my awareness of the Enneagram's meaning and purpose has shifted substantially, triggered by my own and by clients' transformational experiences.

I'm concerned that we've all contributed to identifying exclusively with a "number" or "point," with countless enthusiasts losing sight of the Enneagram's intended spiritual purpose. In Cynthia Bourgeault's The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three she writes: 

"The enneagram of personality has captured the popular imagination, that’s for sure. And you have to admit that there is something brilliant and even damnably strategic in its design. Using that classic ego bait—“let me learn my type, some interesting new thing about me”—it draws people in, only to put in their hands basic tools for self-observation and nonidentification. . . Progressing enneagram students rapidly develop the capacity to see that they are in fact not their type; it is simply an impersonal, mechanical pattern that plays out within them" (p 58).

Russ Hudson has said, "The Enneagram doesn't put us in a box. It shows us the box we're in and how to get out of it " His conversation with A.H. Almaas in the video "The Transformational Power of the Enneagram" speaks to this, as does Michael Goldberg in an interview with Vivianna Trucco, "The Lines are the Basic Building Blocks of the Enneagram, Not the Points."

An Enneagram line is an archetype, a collection of themes . . . meant to be engaged, participated in, wrestled with . . . the enneagram number . . . remains part of a line, part of an ongoing story . . . We have choices. We can be our many selves. Our lives have meaning because we are consciously living a dynamic story . . . When someone becomes fixated, stuck, the storytelling stops. We pretend that the line does not exist for us, only our "point." there is no living story, just a stagnant point of view. Only one end of the archetype is heard from, only one part of the discussion is allowed a voice. This is the fixation.

The work of the enneagram is to bring the story back to life . . .Working to "evolve" your fixation is, in an American idiom, like putting make-up on a corpse . . . Evolving within your point is the fantasy of the Ego. This is why they are called "ego fixations . . ."  The real work with the enneagram is undermining/deconstructing the fixation, not building it up, not "evolving" it. And the way that you do that is flesh out the forgotten story, so as to avoid being stuck on automatic.

(For Goldberg's discussion of the wings, go to The Enneagram Monthly.)

Among the initial influences that far too few people are aware of, William Patrick Patterson studied with Lord John Pentland, appointed by Gurdjieff to head his Work in America. In the Prologue to his spiritual autobiography Eating the "I," Patterson writes:

"What I have tried to depict here is what it is like to voluntarily and intentionally undergo the unorthodox and uncompromising spiritual discipline of The Fourth Way. It is written as narrative because that is how I view it--as story. The account necessarily is personal, the perspective is not. The story is the outer trapping. Deeper is an introduction to an ancient teaching of self-transformation bridled and supported within its nine-chapter architecture."

Surely everyone learning about the Enneagram has at least heard the name "Gurdjieff," but I suspect very few are familiar with his works in detail, and may find it easier--as I did--to learn about it through Patterson's experiences and growing understanding:

"The idea that really grabbed me was that each person has no real individual I but is made up of many 'I's . . . Gurdjieff said everything was not to be believed but to be verified by one's own observed experience. To verify one had to first self-remember . . . dividing the attention between body and mind, inner and outer. One part of the attention experiences the body, while the other is aware of the mind and its impressions. This creates a kind of 'double attention.' (p. 17, Eating the "I")

In Patterson's book, Taking with the Left Hand (p. 10) he says Gurdjieff knew that counter currents could deflect from the sacred teaching's original impulse, and details the "anticipated deflections and distortions" of "the Enneagram craze," in which Ennea-typers "have stripped the enneagram, a principal symbol of the Fourth Way, from Gurdjieff's teaching and used it as a secular personality tool."

My point in quoting the above sources is not to discredit any Enneagram authors or teachers but to share that I'm not alone in my concerns about overemphasizing the nine personality "types" and losing the Enneagram's spiritual wholeness, and many others are now offering suggestions for a more wholistic focus. In "Praise for Keys to the Enneagram" Jessica Dibb describes the "growing realization among some of us who teach the Enneagram for awakening that the transformational power of working with all nine fixations and journeying on all nine paths of essential qualities is paramount."

In Keys to the Enneagram: How to Unlock the Highest Potential of Every Personality Type), A.H. Almaas writes:-

"Even though one type will dominate as we begin studying ourselves   using the tool of the Enneagram, all the fixations are present in every ego. . . if we are genuinely interested in spiritual learning and liberation though the Enneagram, we need to study all the fixations--their cores and their shells--as they manifest in our lives." 

To open your thinking about this, I encourage experimenting with different ways to think of patterns or propensities instead of types. In the 11-month experiential approach to Keys to the Enneagram I attended in 2022-2023, Russ Hudson and Sandra Maitri modelled this. During the weekend on point Six, for example, instead of denoting someone as "a 6," Russ referred to "the Six part of us" and Sandra spoke of "the Six sector of our own personality." Remember that the Enneagram's purpose is to show us ways to become more present (nine "gateways" to presence, as described by Russ in this Sounds True interview).

As I continue to absorb the teachings and experience revelations from having participated in the Keys to the Enneagram course, I am also in the midst of a life-threatening illness, an autoimmune disease that's been attacking my lungs, now reduced to less than 50% capacity and with no clear expectation of how much longer I might  live (I'm on a heavy dose of an immune system suppressing drug that was developed for organ transplant patients; each individual responds differently, some continuing steadily downhill and others leveling off for months or even years). 

This seems the perfect time, then, to stop "doing" and learn to approach death with equanimity, which I'm doing with the help of several books and tapes by Pema Chodren and Almaas's The Unfolding Now, continuing to increase my own mindfulness, going deeper and deeper into previously unconscious patterns, reflecting on--in Michael Goldberg's words--"undermining and deconstructing" all nine fixations in me.  I am so grateful for this time.

Present-Centeredness

"We first thought of presence as being fully conscious and aware in the present moment. Then we began to appreciate presence as deep listening, of being open beyond one's preconceptions and historical ways of making sense. We came to see the importance of letting go of old identities and the need to control . . . leading to a state of 'letting come,' of consciously participating in a larger field for change." (Peter M. Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, Betty Sue Flowers, Presence, pp. 13-14).

 

The most important and basic practice toward liberation from any one Enneagram fixation is to observe your patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior without judging or interpreting. This quality of awareness, which Enneagram teachers refer to as "the observer," is similar to the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, holding full awareness in the present, noticing your flow of thoughts, accepting your experiences without judgment, without attempts to control.

1. Being present moment by moment to automatic, unconscious, and habitual behavior. Become simply a mirror to yourself--what are you thinking, feeling, experiencing? Pay attention to how self-judgment is part of a set of habitual patterns that form a fixation. (I remember my big "ah-hah" moment in a long-ago workshop with Claudio Naranjo, when he pointed out that self-judgment is part of what keeps us fixed at one of the nine points--self-judgment is simply another mechanism of the fixation that we can observe and release.) The true observer is outside the points and lines of the Enneagram; it simply sees what is.
2. Noticing and learning from not being present. When you've been chugging along, enacting one of the points automatically, instead of criticizing  yourself or feeling regret, simply stop and describe how you have avoided being present. It's natural to drift away from self-observation. When did you first notice yourself operating from the fixation? What, exactly, did you do? What did you say to yourself?

Self-awareness without judgment is the pathway to releasing a fixation. Instead of theorizing about or labeling your behavior, simply identify, embrace, and learn from your patterns. In Enneagram Spirituality, Suzanne Zuercher used the term "active contemplation" to connote this spiritual stance of mindfulness: awareness of our habits of attention, the intention to invite our unknown and disowned parts to come forth, and the readiness to take specific actions that shift our focus of attention.

From this perspective you can stay present while doing what is most difficult for you, without avoiding or denying or projecting blame. One way to begin--write down one pattern of behavior that's been characteristic of your key fixation and has caused you difficulty.

1. Hold the intention to invite the pattern instead of ignoring or trying to overcome it. Do this for several days. Notice any annoyance or frustration that it's still with you. Let go of self-judgment.
2. Engage in the patterned behavior consciously, but change one small thing from the way you usually do it. You might exaggerate it, or add to it. When you do this, what are you thinking, feeling, experiencing? Let go of self-judgment.