What is the Enneagram?
The Enneagram is an extraordinarily precise and powerful framework for transformational development.
The Enneagram image is of a circle with 9 interconnected points along the circle’s circumference. The circle of the Enneagram represents our wholeness. The 9 points serve as 9 different starting points for coming home to our life purpose and embodying our fullest potential. The 9 points also represent 9 fundamentally different worldviews and life gifts. Learning how we interact with our core point (our “Ennea-Type”) as well as all of the others helps us to develop greater compassion and empathy.
The Enneagram then is not only an intimate “Map of You” that points each of us toward our individual wholeness but it is also a relational “Map of Us” that supports us all understanding and embracing our differences and honoring our collective unity.
A map of wholeness
A map of you
The Enneagram supports each of us in embodying our highest potential.
Learning about our core Enneagram Personality Type (aka “Ennea-Type”) offers us invaluable guidance in uncovering our core, often unconscious, motivators as well as our inborn gifts and life purpose. This, however, is just the beginning! More than a map of personality, the Enneagram helps us each to see how the lens of our personality identifications can distort the way we perceive and thus relate to ourselves, others, and the world at large. It helps us to cultivate greater presence, which is vital not only to personal fulfillment and inner peace but also, for those on the spiritual path, to opening to the sacred.
The Enneagram stands out from other personality typing systems in that it does not attempt to put people into a box; rather, it names the often-transparent sphere of attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that we each tend to orbit and help us to enlarge the possibilities for our lives.
A map of wholeness
A map of us
The lines on the Enneagram map our path toward greater peace, compassion, understanding, and unity.
When the Enneagram is studied as a whole system (and not just as a personality typing system), it can help couples, families, organizations, and businesses to cultivate more vibrant, collaborative, and co-creative relationships internally and with the world at large.
What is extraordinary about the Enneagram is that beyond mapping our internal worlds, the Enneagram also serves as an astonishing accurate map of our interrelatedness, showing us how individuals of different Ennea-Type biases tend to relate to individuals of other Ennea-Types.
The Enneagram thus helps us to better understand, embrace, and work with differences–whether at home or work. Ultimately, through the Enneagram, we can come to appreciate how the diversity among us need not create division but rather can be used to in service to the vibrancy of the whole.
