Enneagram Quotes

The Enneagram is a tool that awakens our compassion for people just as they are, not the people we wish they would become so our lives would become easier.

The Enneagram doesn’t put you in a box. It shows you the box you’re already in and how to get out of it.

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In the space there is the power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. —Victor Frankl

Much of what is called Christianity has more to do with disguising the ego behind the screen of religion and culture than any real movement toward a God beyond the small self, and a new self in God.

Once you know the dark side of your personality, simply give God consent to do for you what you’ve never been able to do for yourself, namely, bring meaningful and lasting change to your life.

If we observe ourselves truthfully and non-judgmentally, seeing the mechanisms of our personality in action, we can wake up, and our lives can be a miraculous unfolding of beauty and joy.

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

Risking vulnerability and love is what takes courage.

[T]he Enneagram is, at its most abstract, a universal mandala of the self—a symbol of each of us.

your number is not determined by what you do so much as by why you do it.

perfection is like an ice sculpture: it lasts only as long as there’s no change in the atmosphere.

If you babble enneagram, I am a five. If you boast myers-briggs, I am an introvert-intuition-thinking-perceiving.

Whenever someone asks me what my Enneagram is, I’m like, ‘Whichever is the lazy, affectionate, cheese-loving one.

Self-acceptance is a way of viewing oneself compassionately, without condemnation or justification. It is a starting point in life which makes other things possible. It celebrates the fullness of joy of being alive and of being who we are: accepting ourselves, however, does not mean embracing our neuroses or bad habits and celebrating them as if they were virtues. On the contrary, self-acceptance involves loving ourselves enough to accept painful truths about ourselves. . . . Self-acceptance is, at its simplest, the experience of one's self, here and now, as a complete human being, with all the glories and problems that condition entails.

How, as John Calvin put it, “without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God.” “For

Self-understanding is the prelude to transformation, to moving beyond the ego and all that makes up what is called "false personality.

Maybe there's no one right way to be a good person, and maybe there's no advisory board signing off on who does and doesn't deserve badges.

Either way, always maintain a compassionate stance toward yourself as God does. Self-contempt will never produce lasting, healing change in our lives, only love.

Every moment has the possibility of delighting us, nurturing us, supporting us - if we are here to see it. Life is a tremendous gift, but most of us are missing it because we are watching a mental movie of our lives instead. As we learn to trust in the moment and to value awareness, we learn how to turn off the internal mood projector and start living a much more interesting life - the one we are actually starring in.

Ironically, the term personality is derived from the Greek word for mask ( persona), reflecting our tendency to confuse the masks we wear with our true selves, even long after the threats of early childhood have passed.

Kierkegaard's advice. He suggested that we become subjective toward others and objective toward ourselves. That is, when we judge the actions of others, we should put ourselves in their place, trying to understand how they see themselves and their world. And when we judge ourselves, we should see ourselves as others see us, overcoming the ease with which we find extenuating circumstances for ourselves.

Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.

everyone wants insight into others, few people are as willing to look so intently at themselves.

Learning to see ourselves for who we truly are—the good, the bad, the ugly—is a gift of grace. The Enneagram helps us do just that.

It is important to stress the ways that people are different from each other, because so much of the suffering that we experience in our relationships with other people is caused by the fact that we are blind to their point of view.

My own consistent struggle is to recognize my addictive tendency to validate my worth (dignity) by curating an unrealistic and unattainable projection of who I think I need to be (identity).

Nouwen suggested we all find ourselves bouncing around three very human lies that we believe about our identity: I am what I have, I am what I do, and I am what other people say or think about me.

In fact, life is our greatest teacher. Whatever we are doing can be instructive, whether we are at the office, or talking to our spouse, or driving a car on the freeway. If we are present to our experiences, the impressions of our activities will be fresh and alive, and we will always learn something new from them. But if we are not present, every moment will be like every other, and nothing of the preciousness of life will touch us.

Anyone who says they’re “trying” to be a good Christian right away reveals they have no idea what a Christian is. Christianity is not something you do as much as something that gets done to you. Once you know the dark side of your personality, simply give God consent to do for you what you’ve never been able to do for yourself, namely, bring meaningful and lasting change to your life.

Sooner or later we must distinguish between what we are not and what we are. We must accept the fact that we are not what we would like to be. We must cast off our false, exterior self like the cheap and showy garment that it is

The process of transforming the heart can be difficult because as we open it, we inevitably encounter our own pain and become more aware of the pain of others. In fact, much of our personality is designed to keep us from experiencing this suffering. We close down the sensitivity of our hearts so that we can block our pain and get on with things, but we are never entirely successful in avoiding it. Often, we are aware of our suffering just enough to make ourselves and everyone around us miserable. Carl Jung's famous dictum that "neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering" points to this truth. But if we are not willing to experience our own hurt and grief, it can never be healed. Shutting out our real pain also renders us unable to feel joy, compassion, love, or any of the other capacities of the heart.

Atticus tells her, “Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

the source of most of your problems is you.

You are invited to believe that you are the point of you.

I love a lot of people, understand none of them.” Flannery O’Connor

I often wonder whether the playground of the imagination is our truest space after all.

The testimony of the greatest humans who have ever lived is that the way to make the most of ourselves is by transcending ourselves. We must learn to move beyond self-centeredness to make room within ourselves for others. When you transcend yourself, the fact will be confirmed by the quality of your life. We will attain – even if only momentarily – a transparency and a radiance of being which results from living both within and beyond yourself. This is the promise and the excitement of self-understanding.

In the artist of all kinds I think one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found....

The moral of the story is that seeking truth, rather than fear of pain or the desire for happiness, is the correct orientation toward inner work, since seeking happiness makes you its prisoner just as surely as does pain.

When we integrate, it should surprise us. It should be an unexpected reward for doing what is nourishing for our soul—and that wonderful shock of observing the gifts of our integration is the validation of the astonishing grace it is.

When we give ourselves to the hard work of integrating what we have come to learn about ourselves, the Enneagram becomes a sacred map of our soul, one that shows us the places where we have vulnerabilities or tendencies to get stuck as well as the possibilities of where we can go for deeper freedom and inner peace.

Attaining the goal of a full, happy life, ripe with experiences well-used, means that each of us will become a paradox—free, yet constrained by necessity; shrewd, yet innocent; open to others, yet self-reliant; strong, yet able to yield; centered on the highest values, yet able to accept imperfection; realistic about the suffering existence imposes on us, yet full of gratitude for life as it is.

Just be. Let go. Give in to the silence.

We don’t always understand what we don’t understand and we are limited to the degree that we don’t recognize our limitations.

Sadly, the unlived lives of parents sometimes push their children toward destinies not of their own choosing.

One of our deepest unconscious patterns is the false belief that we already know ourselves well enough to understand why we think, feel, and act the way we do.

The Shadow represents everything we refuse to acknowledge about ourselves that nonetheless impacts the way we behave.

Don't try to change people. Love them. Only in acceptance can people embrace healthy transformation.

Information is not transformation.

e.e. cummings puts it: “To become an artist means nothing, whereas to become alive; or one’s self, means everything.

A mark of spiritual growth is when we stop polishing the mask and instead start working on our character.

Nines must resist the urge to escape into “premature Buddhahood”... and away from the mundane world. They must remember that "the only way out is through.

You don’t see things as they are. You see things as you are. -- Talmud

Reconnecting means opening up to whatever part of our experience we were not previously allowing in . . . If our problem has been with another person, we will not react to them in the ways that our habits have previously compelled us to. When we are entranced by our personality, we believe that we know what the other person is always like and what they will do, but when we reconnect with them, we realize how much we do not know about them. We appreciate and respect the mystery of there Being because we are more connected with our own Being. Once we allow ourselves to "not know" what the person is going to do or say, or what they are thinking, a much more real and immediate relationship with then becomes possible.

The English word personality is derived from the Latin word for “mask.” Simply put, our personality is the mask we wear. Taking off that mask, trying to get behind the mask, is the work of the spiritual journey. A mark of spiritual growth is when we stop polishing the mask and instead start working on our character. The Enneagram helps us do that character-structure work.

Being blind to parts of ourselves means that there is often a difference between the person we think we are—or the person we would like to see ourselves as—and who we really are as we walk through the world.

As Russ Hudson frequently emphasizes, “Type isn’t a ‘type’ of person, but a path to God.” The nine types of the Enneagram form a sort of color wheel that describes the basic archetypes of humanity’s tragic flaws, sin tendencies, primary fears, and unconscious needs. The understanding of these components, when shaped through contemplative practice, helps us wake up to our True Self and come home to our essential nature.

As I turned my head and looked out the window, I saw that everything around me was glowing from within. The sunlight on the trees, the swaying of the leaves in the wind, the slight rattle of the panes of glass in the old window frame, were too beautiful for words. I was enthralled at how miraculous everything was. Absolutely everything was beautiful. . . . I saw clearly that everyone is made of light—that we are like forms of light—but that a crust has formed over it. The crust is black and rubbery like tar and has obscured the inner light that is everyone’s real, inner self. Some blotches of tar are very thick; other areas are thinner and more transparent. Those who have worked on themselves for longer have less tar and they radiate more of their inner light. Because of their personal history, others are covered with more tar and need a great deal of work to get free of it. . . If we observe ourselves truthfully and non-judgmentally, seeing the mechanisms of our personality in action, we can wake up, and our lives can be a miraculous unfolding of beauty and joy.

specifically and the perennial philosophy generally. Before we do the conscious work of self-development, we are the seeds of what we may become. To transform from our “acorn-self” into our “oak tree–Self,” we must traverse our underground territory—allow our defenses to crack open and break down—and consciously integrate our disowned feelings, blind spots, and Shadow traits so that we can shake off the limiting outer shell of our personality and grow into all that we are meant to be. Nature brings us part of the way, but to fully manifest our potential, we need to make conscious efforts to grow—and the Enneagram can guide us in this transformation.

One of the main tools for entering into the vivid immediacy of quiet mind is "not knowing." Ordinarily, our minds are filled with all kinds of opinions about who we are, what we are doing, what is important and not important, what is right and wrong, and how things ought to turn out. Because our mind is full of opinions and old thoughts, it has no internal space for a fresh impression of the real world around us. We learn nothing new. This also prevents us from really seeing other people - especially the people we love. We imagine that we really know people or even what they are thinking. Many of us know from experience, though, that to experience freshly someone we know can instantly transform our state and theirs. In some cases, this can save a relationship. Not knowing involves suspending our opinions and letting our curiosity within the realm of quiet mind take the lead.

One of the ego's main defenses against doing so (experiencing our Essence)is the belief that spirituality is something rarefied, impractical, and very far away. In fact, it is closer than we think, as the mystics assure us: we do not have to go anywhere or accomplish anything. What we must learn is to stop running away from ourselves . . . The good news is that you are already here: your Essence already exists entirely and perfectly . . . We do not need to learn something new or anything to be our True Nature. Spiritual progress involves seeing what is right under our noses - really, what is right under the layers of our personality. Spiritual work is therefore a matter of subtraction, of letting go, rather than of adding anything to what is already present.

The body is extremely important for Inner Work, because it is a reliable reality check in ways that our minds and emotions (the other two centers) cannot be. This is because, as we mentioned earlier, the body is always here, in the present moment. Our minds or feelings can be anyplace - imagining the future, dwelling on the past, or ruminating on a fantasy - but our body is always here and now. It cannot be anywhere else. Therefore, if we are aware of the sensations of our bodies, it is a solid piece of evidence that we are present.

What’s more, the centers explain something about each of the nine Enneagram types by helping identify a person’s most accessible emotional response or reaction: anxiety or distress for the Head Center, fear or shame for the Heart Center, and frustration or anger for the Body Center.

The Enneagram is not a system of personality, as it is so often presented, but rather a definition of character fixation. The same character fixation can manifest across a full range of personalities. Jack Nicholson and Slobodan Milosevic have the same character fixation but different personalities.

Generally speaking, 99 percent of the time life is benign and supportive. The ego leads us to fixate on the 1 percent when it is painful, dark, or tragic - although even in these times, it is usually only painful and tragic to us (our tragedy might be someone else's good luck). Although the mind imagines worst-case scenarios - like car crashes - most of our lives are not composed of these kinds of events. If we look at our lives more objectively, we see that reality is actually highly supportive of us - a miracle, if we could see it for what it is. The universe is much more generous than most of us have ever recognized or acknowledged, and in the face of this overwhelming abundance, it simply makes sense to awaken and open ourselves to this generosity.

Human beings are wired for survival. As little kids we instinctually place a mask called personality over parts of our authentic self to protect us from harm and make our way in the world. Made up of innate qualities, coping strategies, conditioned reflexes and defense mechanisms, among lots of other things, our personality helps us know and do what we sense is required to please our parents, to fit in and relate well to our friends, to satisfy the expectations of our culture and to get our basic needs met.

Whenever possible, perform acts of anonymous service.

We don’t know ourselves by what we get right; we know ourselves by what we get wrong.

There is a sweetness in longing they do not find in possession.

Live the life you love. Love the life you live.

Peace, it does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things, and still be calm in your heart.” We

affection by trying to make things happen for the others. This puts a Giver in the uncomfortable position of having to receive. It may feel like the Eight is dominating even

it’s really important that Ones minimize the temptation to overdo by stopping to ask the question: “What is mine to do?

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?” THOMAS MERTON

When you say, “I’m here for you, no matter what,” you’re echoing words that God has spoken over you.

In the course of working on ourselves, we learn in time that when we stay on the surface of ourselves, which is to say when we are identified with and operating from our outer shell—our personality—we suffer. The more asleep we are to the reality beneath our shells, the less we feel that life is fulfilling, meaningful, and pleasurable. Or, in the language of the enneagram, the more fixated we are, the less we partake of the loving nature of reality, for we have lost our connection with Holy Love. Our suffering is not the result of being alone or of being in the wrong relationship, is not because we don’t have enough money or because we have too much of it, or because of anything of the sort. Nor is it because our outer surface doesn’t look as pretty as we think it should or because our personality isn’t as pleasant as we think it might be. We suffer because we are living at a distance from our depths—it’s as simple as that. The more our souls are infused with Being, the better we feel and the better life seems to us, no matter what our outer circumstances happen to be.

Choosing the good of all is always your highest calling, even if that means people don’t like you for it. Being liked is meaningless if real love is not at the heart of your purpose.

This invitation [to deny oneself] is less about depriving the self, and more about disowning, or renouncing a relationship with the part of ourself that is not what God created us to be.

Buried in the deepest precincts of being I sense there’s a truer, more luminous expression of myself, and that as long as I remain estranged from it I will never feel fully alive or whole.

Thomas Merton wrote, “For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.

May you recognize in your life the presence, power, and light of your soul. May you realize that you are never alone, that your soul in its brightness and belonging connects you intimately with the rhythm of the universe. May you have respect for your individuality and difference. May you realize that the shape of your soul is unique, that you have a special destiny here, that behind the façade of your life there is something beautiful and eternal happening. May you learn to see your self with the same delight, pride, and expectation with which God sees you in every moment.

The good news is we have a God who would know our scrawny butt anywhere. He remembers who we are, the person he knit together in our mother’s womb, and he wants to help restore us to our authentic selves.

What’s needed then is an immersion experience—allowing whatever that experience is and becoming involved in it as completely as possible, in order to understand it. Notice in your experience of understanding yourself, part of the process is this immersion, is an involvement with the experience, whether it is a belief, an emotion, a contraction in the body, a sense of frustration, a sense of attachment to something—whatever is there is experienced completely, without trying to get rid of it. When there is a complete involvement with what is there in you, then after a while an understanding arises. Without involvement, the understanding will not arise.

The superego is the inner voice that is always putting us down for not living up to certain standards or rewarding our ego when we fulfill its demands . . . In fact, our superego is one of the most powerful agents of the personality: it is the "inner critic" that keeps us restricted to certain limited possibilities for ourselves. A large part of our initial transformational work centers on becoming more aware of the superego's "voice" in its many guises, both positive and negative. Its voices continually draw us back into identifying with our personality and acting out in self-defeating ways. When we are present, we are able to hear our superego voices without identifying with them; we are able to see the stances and positions of the superego as if they were characters in a play waiting in the wings, ready to jump in and control or attack us once again. When we are present, we hear the superego's voice but we do not give it any energy; the "all-powerful" voice then becomes just another aspect of the moment. However, we must also be on the lookout for the formation of new layers of superego that come from our psychological and spiritual work . . . In fact, one of the biggest dangers that we face in using the Enneagram is our superego's tendency to take over our work and start criticizing us, for example, for not moving up the Levels of Development or going in the Direction of Integration fast enough. The more we are present, however, the more we will recognize the irrelevance of these voices and successfully resist giving them energy. Eventually, they lose their power, and we can regain the space and quiet we need to be receptive to other, more life-giving forces within us. . . . If we feel anxious, depressed, lost, hopeless, fearful, wretched, or weak, we can be sure that our superego is on duty.

Having firm and constant support for others means that you are not someone who is easily discouraged or shaken. You stand by those you love through the good times and bad, through triumph or failure, through scandal or greatness.

This “waking sleep” is also the starting point for the crucial process of waking up. The ability to wake up is not only possible, but also an inherent part of being human. We fall asleep as we come into this world and acquire a personality, but the potential for conscious growth and transformation is part of our makeup. In fact, many ancient wisdom traditions say that this task of waking up to become aware of who we are represents the purpose of human life on earth.

Stop fantasizing about the ideal relationship, career or community and getting stuck in longing for it. Instead, work hard for what’s possible and see it through to completion. Don’t look for beauty and meaning only in the extraordinary or unusual but in the ordinary and simple as well. When the past calls, let it go to voicemail. It has nothing new to say to you. Don’t embellish and get swept up in your feelings. In the words of Jack Kornfield, “No emotion is final.

Most people don’t ever anticipate that a sudden change in cabin pressure might occur in their home, triggering the hope that an oxygen mask would fall from somewhere overhead to replace the air that shock has just sucked out of their lungs.

It seems that human beings cannot see what they are not readied to see. We cannot hear what we have not been prepared to hear. The “obvious” seems to have little correlation with our acceptance of it. We all have an amazing capacity for missing the point.

Tragically, most of us start with our sense of identity, believing that if we build out the mythology of who we think we are, then the more attractive our identity and the more valuable we become. But when we equate our dignity with the sum value of the fortification of stories we tell about our identity, we create a no-win scenario that will always lead to disillusionment and pain. Overidentifying with our success or failure, allowing the fragments of our identity to lay claim to the whole, and falling into the addictive loop of our mental and emotional preoccupations keep us stuck.

Perhaps one of the most challenging notions for us to accept at the beginning of transformational work is that the personality—the ego and its structures—is an artificial construct. But it only seems real because up until now it has been our entire reality. Identifying with our personality has been how we have lived and gotten by in life. Insofar as it has enabled us to do so, the personality has been a useful, even highly valuable, friend. As our insights deepen, however, we come to accept the hard truth that our personality is largely a collection of internal defenses and reactions, deeply ingrained beliefs and habits about the self and the world that have come from the past, particularly from our childhood. To put this more simply, our personality is a mechanism from the past, perhaps one that has helped us survive until now, but one whose limitations can now be seen. We all suffer from a case of mistaken identity: we have forgotten our True Nature and have come to believe that we are the personality. The reason we must explore the defenses of the personality and the vulnerabilities it is protecting is so that we can reexperience our Essential nature—our spiritual core—and know directly who we really are.

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them. Thomas Merton

Neuroscientists have determined the brain’s dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is associated with decision making and cost-benefit assessments. If MRI brain scans had been performed on my friends and me one summer’s night when we were fifteen, they would have revealed a dark spot indicating a complete absence of activity in this region of our brains.

At the root of nearly every decision we make in life is the desire to find our way home, back to our essential nature, our True Self, and back to God. Sadly, the reality of living in the broken world outside of Eden is that we often go about this in all the wrong ways. So the Fixation and Passion of each Enneagram type become a sort of addiction loop, a misguided attempt to find our way home, back to our True Self where we are aligned with our Holy Idea and Virtue. I think of the Fixation and Passion as a tiny flashlight that our ego attempts to use to find our way home in the dark. These are the most primitive of all our coping skills, and when we rely on them they become self-destructive patterns that ironically keep us in the dark.

When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change,” he says. “But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform.

My roommate in graduate school once observed that I never got angry. I was surprised by this at first, but then I realized it was true. To serve my main life strategy of getting along with others and avoiding any kind of problem in relationships, I had lost touch with the natural flow of my emotions and the ability to know what I needed and wanted. And, for a long time, I didn’t even know this was happening.

When Twos consent to solitude, they agree to be alone in order to stop trying to please everyone—even God. Twos who constantly attempt to delight God fill all the surrounding space with their insecure energy and so are unable to receive Divine Love, which is already reaching toward them, even within them. Twos who withdraw to solitude consent to be present to God rather than to please God, which allows them to be filled by God with the love they long for.

This is an inseparable facet of civilization. When we say that we are “civilized” people, we mean that we are people of a certain dignity, a certain cultural refinement, a certain psychological or spiritual evolution, a certain quality. We think that we are civilized and not barbarian, not primitive. But is that so? Up until now, civilized man has shown himself to be the most destructive of animals. And if we do not realize this, it is because we idealize ourselves and reinterpret our will for power as meritorious privilege, as in the case of the oligarchic or aristocratic character.

Because these Anchor Points sit in the middle of their Intelligence Centers, neither of their wings reach outside their center. Because their wings don’t reach outside their center, they ironically are the most disconnected from their center. The Threes are the most estranged from their hearts (often manifested in their loneliness), the Sixes the most detached from their minds (which explains how irrational they can sometimes be), and the Nines the most disjointed from their bodies (experienced in the ways they calm down their external environments through the mellowing energy they project).

For example, while 5s are driven by their desire to know all the answers in the world, they are also scared by the idea that perhaps one day, God will appear to them and expose the secrets of the universe, which could collapse their world as they know it. Unhealthy 5s could believe that God will come to them and show them those people who they have hurt or how the difficult lessons that they have mastered are all based on some large conspiracy, etc. This paradoxical conflict can cause a lot of damage to the minds of 5s. Again, interestingly, most 5s opine that belief in God is not necessary to learn and master things. Yet, they also feel a deep reverence for the complexities in the universe. Paradoxically, they also believe that the world is so complex and deep that it could ruin them.