I have a new toy!
I just discovered my Enneagram type last night, and can't get enough of it now. I'm watching all these videos and stunned how deeply it "sees" me. Kind of creepy, but also very ego gratifying, 'cause what ego doesn't want to hear all about itself? (from the privacy of anonymously watching a video alone in one's living room, of course)
Now obviously I'm nothing remotely in the vicinity of an Enneagram expert, not now or ever. But if you know absolutely nothing about it, I at least know more than you. In that spirit, let me share the basics with you.
The genesis seems to be among spiritual devotees long ago. The types were created to better understand the obstacles different people faced when trying to achieve spiritual progress. Turns out there are 27 different habitual patterns of how humans resist allowing their true self to shine through. These are sometimes thought of as trance states.
The basic idea behind these trances is that even if we realize we're doing it and that it is having less than desirable effects, we find it hard/impossible to break out of the pattern. These are habitual ways of relating to life that prevent us from being present with what is real in the moment, both real outside us and also real within our authentic, healthy response that is inaccessible.
So once you know your type, you know how to catch yourself relating from the trance rather than being authentic and free. This knowledge creates an opening in which growth has a chance to happen.
You learn your primary type (your core personality), your wing (the flavor from neighboring personalities), how your personality manifests when you're under extreme stress, and how your personality manifests when you're fully at ease and feeling good.
Once you now the primary type, the others follow automatically from there. So you only need to learn one and then figure out which of the 2 wings of it better fits you. It's possible that both wings fit you equally, hence 9 primary types offer 27 possible personality makeups.
I'm not going to give away my type in this post, but suffice to say that when I got it the impact on me was pretty intense. Watching these videos, some parts actually made me cry. I could see patterns that I hadn't quite been conscious of previously, and also the suffering those patterns cause me. I could also see how powerless I'd always felt in being free of those patterns.
There is a lot of suffering we all cause ourselves, no matter what our type is. Though there are elements of many types that will resonate for a given person, when you find your core type, it hits hard when you hear the downside, and feels like a "finally someone said it!" when you hear the upside. The upside sounds like someone who accurately gets reality (your experience of reality at least), whereas the downside sounds like all your pains spoken clearly.
All of us have upsides and downsides to our personalities. The key is to become self-aware, so that we can begin to neutralize the downside and benefit more from the upside.
Those of you who have followed me for a while know that a few times I've spoken about a time when I had this satori experience (temporary spiritual enlightenment) in which I could heal people by looking at them. This went on for several weeks!
It took me many years to understand what had happened (and to stop trying to regain it), but finally what I understood was that I embodied the knowing of their perfection so powerfully that my knowing of their perfection "overwrote" their belief in their illness. They instantly then became "perfect." Their belief in their imperfection was like an aura around them that then disappeared, leaving only perfection behind.
Well turns out, that pretty much is the enlightened aspect of my Enneagram type! That's why my enlightenment looks like that. My core issue is feeling like the world is unacceptably fucked up. Knowing it as perfect is the completely healed state for me. That knowing pretty much solves all the problems I create for myself, and apparently makes me a healing force in the lives of others too.
(Those who already know the Enneagram, probably know my type by now, but I appreciate your not sharing it in the comments if you do.)
As a side note, I heard of the Ennegram many years ago when I was in grad school. I say I only just got my type last night because I mis-identified my type back then.
Remember that type we go to when under extreme stress? Well my entire life was lived in that traumatized state back then. As such, I identified with that "disintegrated" type as my primary type.
I think that's why the Enneagram never interested me as having something valuable for me. Whenever I'd come across it over the years, I would pay attention to the info for that type, but it wasn't helping me because it wasn't my type.
Now that I have a happy life, I can see what my type really is quite clearly. My baseline that I most effortlessly gravitate to from day to day is definitely my newly identified type. And I can clearly see how my life during the bad times was very much like the point of disintegration for this type. I also see that when I am absolutely at my best my personality becomes just like it says my type would move to in that situation. It really fits me to a T.
So yeah, now fascinated by this!
If you've heard of the Enneagram over the years, but never really jibed with it, consider that you too may have simply not found your core type yet.
Or maybe you just aren't that introspective, so really don't care about this personality stuff regardless. 😁
(All text and images (except the AT logo) are by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for HIVE.)
