I just finished giving a presentation on how Enneagram work can assist us in moving from fear based ego to liberated Wholeness to Laina Orlando’s Center for Awareness book club. I promised to post more info on this potentially trans formative work. If you are not aware of  this work, I highly recommend it. You can discover your type by taking the free sampler test on my site at mcSOULutions.com

Here it is:

Are you familiar with the Enneagram? It is one of the most profound transformational tools available to assist us in uncovering our deepest motivations and fears that lie at the core of our ego personality or “false self” and transcend to Essence or the “true self”. It’s a psycho-spiritual tool that provides much more than personality profile.

What is it exactly? The Enneagram is a geometric symbol that maps the nine fundamental personality types of human nature as well as the very complex interrelationships between the various types. Every one is a mix of these fundamental types, although one type, in particular, is your “home base” or the best description of your personality as a whole. Knowing your Enneagram type is extremely valuable in bringing instant awareness of your ego’s core fears and desires and a direct path towards Essence.

Here’s how it works: Each Enneagram type has a core fear, core desire, favorite strategy or vice, as well as a principle virtue. The more your ego engages in vice to avoid fear and gain its desire, although providing temporary relief, ultimately brings a person closer to their core fear. The more you determine to be present with your fear and engage your virtue, the closer you come to your core desire. Your ego tends to choose a quick fix resulting in a protecting or grasping strategy. This is either inflating or deflating and always causes separation. The virtue is always grounded in love and wholeness and therefore, brings an individual closer to their Essence.

Within the nine types, three are more body-centered (8, 9 &1), three are more heart-centered (2, 3 & 4) and three are more mind-centered (5, 6 & 7). What does this mean? Both your greatest strengths as well as your favorite defense strategies originate from your particular center.

Here is a personal example from my life: My ego’s personality type is Seven, the Enthusiast, Epicure or Adventurer. My personality center is the mind. Through the mind, when I’m at my best (integrated), I’m able to think quickly, provide insight and ingenuity and offer creative and practical solutions to solve problems. Through this same mind, when at my worst (un-integrated) I can allow charm to replace substance, allow ideas to distract me from the real work that needs to be done and let my spontaneity, playfulness and head-in-the-clouds interfere with keeping commitments. It is hard to admit these things. Yet, I’ve learned that either we I own our “shadow” or our shadow owns us. I most humbly choose the former.

If I can find a way to see my ego’s shadow, accept these tendencies as the ego’s way of attempting to protect me from my pain and vulnerability, I can change. For me as an Enneagram Seven, I’ve made the conscious choice to replace gluttony of the mind through escaping into future planning to what I call “sacred groundedness”. This is about practicing grounding in present moment awareness with a background sense of the beauty, abundance and preciousness of the life that I’ve been given.

Here’s a brief history of the Enneagram: The Enneagram of Personality Types is a modern synthesis of a number of ancient wisdom traditions. The person who originally put the modern system together was Oscar Ichazo. Ichazo was born in Bolivia, raised in Peru, and as a young man moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina to learn from a school of Inner Work. Thereafter he journeyed in Asia gathering other knowledge before returning to South America to begin constructing a systematic approach to all he had learned.

After many years of developing his ideas, he created the Arica School as a vehicle for transmitting this knowledge, teaching in Chile in the late 1960’s and early 70’s. He then moved to the United States where he still resides.

In 1970, while Ichazo was still living in South America, a group of Americans, including noted psychologists and writers Claudio Naranjo and John Lilly, went to Arica, Chile to study with Ichazo and to experience first-hand the methods for attaining self-realization that he had developed.

This group spent several weeks with Ichazo, learning the basics of his system and engaged in the practices he taught them. The Arica school, like any serious system of inner work, is a vast, interwoven, and sometimes complex body of teachings on psychology, cosmology, metaphysics, spirituality, and so forth, combined with various practices to bring about transformations of human consciousness. (The authors are not affiliated with this school, and therefore cannot describe it with any justice, but those seeking to learn more about it can do so through Arica Publications).

Among the highlights for many of the participants was a system of teachings based on the ancient symbol of the Enneagram. The Enneagram symbol has roots in antiquity and can be traced back at least as far as the works of Pythagoras.

The symbol was reintroduced to the modern world by George Gurdjieff, the founder of a highly influential inner work school. Gurdjieff taught the symbol primarily through a series of sacred dances or movements, designed to give the participant a direct, felt sense of the meaning of symbol and the processes it represents. What Gurdjieff clearly did not teach was a system of types associated with the symbol.

Gurdjieff did reveal to advanced students what he called their chief feature. The chief feature is the lynchpin of a person’s ego structure—the basic characteristic that defines them. Gurdjieff generally used colorful language to describe a person’s chief feature, often using the Sufi tradition of telling the person what kind of idiot they were. People could be round idiots, square idiots, subjective hopeless idiots, squirming idiots, and so forth. But Gurdjieff never taught anything about a system of understanding character related to the Enneagram symbol.

For these and other reasons, many early Enneagram enthusiasts have mistakenly attributed the system of the nine types to Gurdjieff or to the Sufis because of Gurdjieff’s use of some Sufi techniques. This has led to the widespread and erroneous belief that the Enneagram system has been handed down from the Sufis or from some other ancient school as an ongoing “oral tradition.” While it is true that Ichazo drew on his knowledge of a number of such traditions, the actual combination of those traditions connected with the Enneagram symbol is purely his creation.

Thus, the modern Enneagram system only goes back to the 1960’s when Ichazo was first teaching it, although the philosophy behind the Enneagram contains components from mystical Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Buddhism, and ancient Greek philosophy.