Pathway to Self-Discovery and Greater Personal Awareness

The Enneagram is a powerful tool to look into the makeup of our nature. It is uniquely positioned to provide insights into the complexities of our personality, our inherent drives, and our habitual actions. With the Enneagram, we get to see how all of these elements lie buried under our more readily accessible demeanors, our undiscovered blind spots and the defense mechanisms that we count on to protect ourselves — our identity, beliefs, and values — in our daily lives.

Through the nine points or personality expressions on the Enneagram framework, we can uncover the motivations that shape our reality for better or worse. Although there is no right or wrong way of moving through life, the Enneagram holds a mirror to our behavior, shows us our weaknesses and our strengths, and helps us to master the pitfalls laid out by our vices. More significantly, the Enneagram helps us to access our places of joy and wisdom.

The Enneagram is not a solution but a starting point from which we can travel deeper into ourselves. As we come to understand our core Enneagram type — the personality that we most resonate with — we can quickly learn whether it’s our body, heart or mind that we tend to use first in our daily interactions with others. Unlike our personality, which has been shaped by all of our lived experiences, our instinctual nature is hard-wired, and it often expresses itself through our unconscious motivations which the Enneagram helps us to uncover.

The Enneagram also relies on key psychodynamic concepts — such as idealization, self-image, personal worldview, and defense mechanism — to address our vulnerabilities as well as the hinderances we would rather avoid dealing with. The Enneagram holds the perspective that our essence or higher self combines with our psychological “wounding” and impacts our behavior from one moment to the next. This dynamic makes it difficult to let go of old habits and develop new ones that better serve our interests.

Although there are endless possibilities and nuances to be explored through this powerful tool, the purpose of the Enneagram is to bring us into fresh awareness when stress and fear arise in our lives —and to teach us how to handle these stressors in an effective way. By doing away with the extra armor and baggage we have unwittingly taken upon ourselves, the path of integration is not only possible but doable at every turn. In working with the Enneagram, we are freed from illusions and distractions and brought closer to our unique authentic essence. We can achieve a rich and balanced life and discover our underlying purpose — to be all that we were meant to be.