The Enneagram: A Brief Introduction: April 16, 2004

I first learned about the Enneagram in November 1997 at a workshop put on the Beginning Experience of Winnipeg.

I guess I'd better explain what Beginning Experience is. The Beginning Experience (B.E.) movement began in Texas in 1974, and has since spread to Canada, the U.S., Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. The purpose to B.E. is to help separated, divorced, and widowed people to work through their pain and grief, provide a safe space for them to work through their emotional healing and begin a process of self-awareness, and ultimately to free them to live again and love themselves, others and God. It is, at heart, a faith-based peer ministry, organized and led by former B.E. participants (of various Christian denominations) who have undergone some training and have become lay facilitators to help the newer participants through the first steps of the grief and healing process. I went because I had never dealt with my guilt and anger over the failure of my 2-1/2 year marriage in 1991.

B.E. consists of retreat weekends, as well as a weekly "levels" program, levels 1 through 4 of weekly classes. Lower levels focus on the failed/ended relatonship; upper levels tend to focus more on self-awareness and personal growth. After a participant completes level 4, there is a Level 5 available: Enneagram workshops.

I attended two 10-week sessions during 1997-1998 as part of a group of about 20 B.E. facilitators. Our workshop leader was a tiny French-Canadian Roman Catholic nun called Sister Thérèse, a member of the Holy Cross religious community and a co-founder ofContemplative Outreach Canada. I took lots of notes during the sessions, and put them away in a binder, along with my Myers-Briggs personality type stuff, etc. I had to put the Enneagram aside to deal with more pressing matters (i.e. burning out of my job AND coming out the closet to myself). I had other, much more serious, things to worry about than some silly personality system.

Last year, I decided to pull out my 1997/1998 Enneagram workshop notes and read through them again, and I was surprised at how much wisdom there was in what Sister Thérèse had said, and how that fit in with my previous readings on self-awareness (Anthony de Mello, for example). So I made the decision to contact her again. I have since been talking with her regularly as a sort of spiritual counsellor or "guru". I have learned a lot more about the Enneagram along the way, from Sr. Thérèse and from my readings, and what follows is my (admittedly amateur) attempt to explain "what's it all about":

Basically, the Enneagram is a geometric figure that maps out the nine fundamental personality types of human nature and their complex interrelationships (Riso, Don Richard. The Wisdom of the Enneagram, p. 9). Now you may say, you can't break everybody on Earth down into only nine personality types, that's ridiculous. As it turns out, the Enneagram does subdivide and subdivide further, so there are actually hundreds of personality types rather than "just nine". But at its most basic level, it comes down to nine.

One of the things that impressed me most was how well my description fit me, and after a lot more reading and thinking, I would discuss the Enneagram with other people. And every single person I encountered (friends, relatives, coworkers, etc.) seemed to fit somewhere into the system. And often, when I would discuss the Enneagram with them and read them a section of a book that described them to a T, there would be an "Aha!" moment: they would laugh, or blush, or look startled. I had found out where they fit on the Enneagram, and they themselves realized it! These "Aha!" moments kept me reading and thinking...

The key is this: variations of human personality are infinite, but if you scratch below the surface, you will find that the fears and desires which drive any people's thoughts, feelings, and actions are finite. In other words, deep down inside, there are only so many things that people are really afraid of, and only so many things that people really want. The enneagram shows the relationships between these fears and desires, and it shows an individualized path for growth and development of these various types of people.

So, what are the basic fears and the basic desires?

Take your time and think back over your life, especially when you were younger. What were you like? What were you afraid of? It's OK if you don't know now, but over time you might figure out, deep down inside, what is it that drives you: your deepest fears and desires.