You may be wondering what is the Enneagram. It is simply a 9-point personality typing system based on an ancient symbol(see above) and ideals. It can be as simple as learning the 9 different personalities or you can expand your knowledge by exploring arrows, wings and triads and more. Facets of it are based on spiritual teachings of many different sages and teachers from many areas of the world.
The beginning of the exploration of the Enneagram started with George Guirdjieff who was born in the late 1800’s. He was of Greek/Armenian decent and spent his life exploring the human condition. He wanted to learn about ancient wisdoms and started learning about human transformation using the concepts of the Enneagram as we know it today. Beatrice Chestnut writes in her book, The Complete Enneagram, “He(Gurdjieff) taught that the Personality consists of different ways we buffer ourselves against the reality of our lives, helping us maintain a kind of illusion about what we can actually “do” in the world. Through active self-observation and intentional “self-remembering”, he said, we could eventually evolve beyond the mechanical state associated with our Personality.” (Pg 52)
Oscar Ichazo become aware of the teachings of the Enneagram and started formulating it into what we know of the Enneagram today. He was born in Bolivia and eventually moved to Chile in the 1950’s and 60’s where he started the Arica School. Claudio Naranjo who is from Chile, traveled to the Arica School in the 1970’s to learn the teachings of Ichazo and then moved to Berkeley, California and started the movement of human potential using the Enneagram.
The Enneagram is a fascinating personality typing system that helps people know themselves and people around them. We have this concept that if people would just think like we do, then it would be a better world but as this system teaches, we are all different and we take in the world and function with many different ideals and beliefs. Once our personality is established in childhood through nurture, nature and culture, our personality will not change, as they express in the Enneagram community. How we process the world will change and hopefully will get healthier as we get to know ourselves better and learn to manage our shadow sides that can wreak havoc with our lives if we don’t recognize them and teach ourselves to react differently.
If you would like to learn more about the Enneagram, there are a ton of resources and podcasts on the subject. The two I’ve used for this post are The Complete Enneagram by Beatrice Chestnut and The Wisdom of the Enneagram by Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson.
