Feb 3-5, 2006
Most of us originally discover the Enneagram as a typology: it draws meaningful distinctions about the nine different ways that people approach their lives and relationships. Finding our own basic personality type can be a fascinating journey of discovery. It can also help us recognize many unrecognized features of our personalities as well as of the personalities of the important people in our lives.
More profoundly, the Enneagram is a map of wholeness, a way of recognizing and investigating different dimensions of our inner experience. Quite literally, all nine of the Enneagram types operate within each of us. Some of them are part of our familiar self-image, while others remain more unconscious and obscure. The Enneagram symbol itself suggests how the nine types are not merely “points,” but facets of a dynamic and deeply interrelated wholeness. The nine energies flow from one to another in specific and meaningful ways. Indeed, the Fourth Way tradition from which the Enneagram is drawn teaches the symbol not as nine static categories but as a mandala of dynamic unity. Likewise, our approach emphasizes the fluid, growth-oriented aspects of the Enneagram, both as a way of moving beyond simply categorizing people and as a way of opening us up to a more direct experience of the qualities of Living Presence that move in all of us.
Each of the nine Enneagram types have different manifestations depending on the degree of a person’s psychological health at a given time. A person might be healthy (or high-functioning), average (or “normal”), or unhealthy (and destructive of self and others) depending on what was motivating him or her at any given time. While people’s basic type tends to remain the same throughout life, their state within the continuum of their type fluctuates a great deal from day to day, as well as during the whole of a person’s life. The Levels of Development provides a way of tracking each type’s movement along a continuum toward more freedom, consciousness, and Being in the higher Levels — or toward more reactivity, self-destructiveness, and compulsivity in the lower ones.
Each layer of the healthy, average, and unhealthy ranges of Levels has within it three subordinate Levels, thus yielding a total of nine Levels for each type. By introducing this vertical axis to the types, the Levels make room in Enneagram theory for some of the most important things that we find in human nature itself: evolution, change, fluidity, compulsion, conflict, contradiction, paradox, continuity, choice, freedom, and mystery — among many other truly human qualities. Ken Wilbur has stated that only with this vertical dimension taken into account does the Enneagram system move toward being a complete psychology.
Russ Hudson is one of the principal scholars and innovative thinkers in the Enneagram world today. He is Executive Director of Enneagram Personality Types, Inc., and co-founder of The Enneagram InstituteSM. He has been co-teaching the Enneagram Professional Training Program since 1991 and is a Founding Director and former Vice-President of the International Enneagram Association. He is co-author of The Wisdom of the Enneagram, Personality Types (Revised Edition), Understanding the Enneagram (Revised Edition), and The Power of the Enneagram. He also assisted Don Riso in writing Discovering Your Personality Type and Enneagram Transformations. These five best-selling books are available in British, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Dutch, Hungarian, and Portuguese editions. He’s so smart and the workshops so excellent we keep inviting him back to teach us more.