Revival Part 4
January 10, 2025
Revival Part 4
Who would ever have believed that one system of knowledge could show us our tremendous strengths and blind spots in one diagram called the Enneagram? Unlike other personality systems, it is not based on categorizing people and using a static nomenclature to label them. Instead, the Enneagram reflects the truth of nature: that each of us is a fluid and changing being. Therefore, we do not fit into the narrow confines of one label. Rather, we flow through many states of being and psychological structures in our own way and in our own timing. The Enneagram is a sacred map of those states of being.
The Enneagram of Personality illustrates the attributes of our personality and its traps, deficiencies, and blind spots. Furthermore, it shows how by adopting the positive characteristics of one of the other eight personalities on the diagram, we have an antidote to our dilemmas and become more authentic beings. And then there is the fact that another number on the Enneagram of Personality seems to answer our life’s dilemmas. But it is actually the point that disintegrates us because its unobvious, unhealthy characteristics are so alluring. Knowing the perils of this point is a tremendous strength.
When I learned this system in my late thirties, it answered many questions about helping myself and others reach self-understanding and personality integration. The Enneagram of Personality beautifully combines spirituality and the psychological sciences. This was a wonderful thing because, for so long, our culture seemed to relegate science and spirituality into separate “boxes.” The Enneagram reflected the truth of the universe, the truth that Christ also taught: each of us is a unique individual with complexities, temptations, weaknesses, griefs, and the need for forgiveness, as well as the need to forgive others. And because of our own self-centeredness, we cannot see ourselves or others clearly.
But the Enneagram of Personality can take us deeper into Christ’s truth than personality integration. It parallels his teaching on the soul and how we can nurture and eventually live from our essential nature, the seed that was planted in us at our beginning. The Enneagram of Personality is not an end point to the Enneagram. In fact it is only one of 108 Enneagrams discerned by Oscar Ichazo. The Enneagram is life changing but its miraculous component is that it paves the way for us to conceptualize ourselves as a soul who we are. The Enneagram of Personality actually evolves into another deeper and more profound Enneagram.
I call it the Enneagram of Soul, and it takes us much deeper into our true nature and essence than our personality, our ego, and the face we show to the world. It takes us to our private thoughts, most profound purpose, woes, fears, ecstasies, brilliance, conflicts, complexes, and our divine nature! We start our work with the Enneagram of the Soul by reviving our true nature, our soul child, our essence. Our soul child is a gateway to our soul and resides inside us all.
Just imagine all of the wonderful things in our essence, our soul child. There is our Holy Idea, which holds our Holy Purpose. Our soul carries our sacred energy, one of the nine fundamental energies that uphold the universe and into which we were born. In our soul is our Beatitude, which gives us infinite purpose and blesses us as we live that purpose. There are also our Gifts and Fruits of the Spirit.
All the essential aspects of our soul make up our spiritual identity. In our soul is the know-how to apply our virtue. And possibly the most profoundly essential aspect of our soul is the inner sanctum — the sacred place where we live from our relationship with the Divine. All of these and even more qualities compose our unique soulality. Our soulality is our most authentic identity, more of who we are than our personality. When revived, it paves the way to the Kingdom of Heaven.
Spiritual practice: Write about how your life may change if you knew more of your soul and gravitated to your soulality more than your personality.
Self-inquiry: What intrigues you the most, knowing your personality or soul? Why is this so?
Dear God,
For too long my essence has been held under the crust of ego. Now, I pray to revive it. Amen s expressions of soul — my soulality.
