What is the Enneagram?
 
The Enneagram is a powerful and dynamic personality* system that describes nine distinct and fundamentally different patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. Each of the nine patterns is based on an explicit perceptual filter. This filter determines the focus of your attention and how you direct your energy. Underneath each of the nine pattern is a basic proposition or belief about what you need in life for survival and satisfaction.
 
Each one of us developed one of the nine patterns to protect a specific aspect of our essence or essential self that felt threatened as our personality was developing. As you discover your Enneagram personality type, you will discover more about your original whole self.  You will also understand more about the unconscious motivation from which you operate. (why you do the things you do.)
 
Discovering your Enneagram personality type can help you achieve an understanding of how to bring positive change into your life.  It can help change the way you relate to yourself and others, as well as give you a greater understanding of the circumstances and issues facing you.  Of course, each of us has some aspects of all of the types.
 
The Enneagram connects the psychological and spiritual dimensions of life.
 
The Enneagram brings together the observable psychological and the spiritual aspects of life and shows how to integrate the two.  It is said that no other psychological tool is as efficient at highlighting the links between these two levels of being.   (Another word for spiritual is essence.)
 
 
*What is personality?
 
Personality is all the characteristic and habitual behaviours of a person. In Enneagram usage, personality may be defined as the nine particular patterns (habits of mind) into which attention is organized and into the corresponding mental and emotional preoccupations. In spiritual traditions these patterns sometimes are referred to as the false self, the acquired personality, or false personality.