the Enneagram and the Paths forward

You’ve read the stuff or taken a test and you know your enneagram number. You have heard people talk about paths forward or moving towards growth or doing the work but so far all you see is a drawing with numbers and lines. How is this supposed to help with all the gunk in your life?

The answer is fairly simple, and oh so not simple.

Simply put, you do your work by facing the shadow part of your life, with compassion: the reactions and behaviours and unacceptable parts of yourself that you have shoved out of even your own sight so you can live with just the preferable parts.

Not so simple after all.

It’s important to pause on the words “with compassion.” Aundi Kolber says, “It’s always the basic things that really build us, because if we try to go to step 5 when we’re on step 1 we won’t be able to move forward.” Allowing room for ourselves to see the parts of us that shine, as well as the parts of us we keep pushing back into the shadow because they don’t stay there, is compassionate. Recognizing that just as we create defences, and put up barriers, and get reactive over “little” things that are big things, so do other people react in their way to their things and are deserving of compassion from us. Once we can see that each of us is trying to make a way in the world, and that each of us has areas of strength and weakness, we are on the path forward.

The next step is to start to notice: 1) when we are reactive, 2) what’s going on inside. Once we can identify that we are reactive we pause to notice what’s going on. At this point we’re not trying to change anything, but we are trying to observe without judgement. When we observe in this way we can often see that what we are reacting to is not the thing that it appears to be. Again, we are not judging anything here- not ourselves, or the other, or our thoughts and emotions. We may want to notice the thing under the point of reactivity- that which is the deeper source of it (for example, sadness that comes out as anger, or irritation masking an underlying fear). Or we may not have time to look at it with any depth; we can note the emotions, set them aside until a later time when we can revisit the event and the emotion in order to investigate it more deeply. It’s when we face the thing, the pain or fear or whatever we see it is, that we can begin to dismantle the hold it has on us. When we push it down and away into the place I call the shadow, it actually grows and has a stronger hold over us instead of disappearing just because we don’t look at it.

These steps at first can take a while, but eventually become more habitual and easier to access. The journey towards growth begins here. In another post I will talk about how this works with the supporting wings and lines of the enneagram.