Enneagram
“In the study of personality, the Enneagram is designed for self-inquiry. By discovering one’s Enneagrammic personality, one comes to know the many layers of self in a personal and particular way. The Enneagram points out how a person’s strengths can become more stable and more dynamic, and how weaknesses can be brought to consciousness and even healed.”—Joseph Howell in Becoming Conscious: The Enneagram’s Forgotten Passageway (Balboa Press, 2012).
We once spent a weekend at an Enneagram conference led by Dr. Howell at Kanuga. This nine-point ancient study of the personality can help us learn about ourselves and our strengths and the healing of wounds that led to our forming certain personality traits. Understanding the Enneagram can also help us become compassionate with ourselves and others of different personality types.
On the Enneagram, I am a two, the helper, with a strong three wing, the achiever. Another wing, the four, the creative type, can lead me to the source of my basic essence or God within. That may explain why I write this daily message about spiritual direction and practices.
At the conference, there were nine tables where people could talk to others who shared one of the nine personality types. I immediately identified with the twos’ table. I heard the music in my mind and in my body from “Going Home,” the theme from Dvorak’s Largo in his New World Symphony. I was with a group of people who knew me, and I knew them. I could see their woundedness and easily recognize their soul, the God in them.
When someone with some experience with the Enneagram comes to spiritual direction, I try to use this tool to help that person see God, the soul within—for this is what the ancient practice is all about.
Rebecca Spooner led an Enneagram Retreat at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Little Rock, Saturday, February 29, 2020, which was so helpful. This was one of the last things we did before the pandemic changed our lives. It seems so long ago. Today I will review what Rebecca taught us to remember a different outside world and how it affected our inner world.
