Beatrice Chestnut - The Complete Enneagram (part 1)

[Music] beatrice chestnut welcome to the new school at commonweal thank you very much Michael it's an honor to be here it's such a delight to have you here Beatrice I find your book the complete Enneagram 27 paths to Greater self-knowledge and your new book on leadership to be two of the really remarkable presentations of a very great tradition and so I'm very honored that you've been willing to come and do four hours of workshop with us and conversations you are a psychotherapist a coach a consultant to businesses and individuals you've been working with Enneagram for how many years now 28 years 28 years and we will get into the detail of all of that which is completely fascinating you worked with Claudia Naranjo one of the the great seminal figures in the field and with many others so I guess where I'd like to start before you do your presentation is just to ask you to describe briefly where you find yourself in this work after 28 years of doing it where are you as we sit here today in in your self exploration and of what purpose you seek to serve in dedicating your life to the UH nia ground what a beautiful place to start I think where I find myself now is how to find ways to use the Enneagram to continue to deepen my own personal journey my own personal self work and also find better ways to help others to do the same I think the beautiful thing about the Enneagram is its its insights the work you can do with it is never-ending you know it certainly lasts a lifetime and for me it's been invaluable and I'm use it every day you know in terms of being aware of what I need to be aware of to be a more self-aware person a more healthy person so on the one hand I'm continuing to use it to guide my own work and always sort of be making efforts to be aware one of my mentors and teachers used to say self remembering never becomes habitual so it's a continual practice of remembering myself and trying to be more self aware and then in addition to that trying to find ways to partner with others to continue to write to continue to create opportunities for people to come to the Enneagram work to make it accessible to people to make it interesting and enjoyable but also more and more working with my business partner in my co-teacher Ronnie o pious shifting from kind of using the Enneagram in sort of a kind and gentle way which is I think very much to encourage compassion and empathy for yourself and others but also to use it more and more also to confront the ego because I think especially today and the world part of the crisis that we're facing or the crises we're facing I I believe comes from too being too lost in the needs of the ego of the personal ego and the Enneagram I think is an invaluable tool because what it teaches us is the more aware we are of our ego needs of the functioning of our ego or personality the more we can see what it's doing and move away from its self-limiting patterns that can keep us too narrowly focused on our self-image on fear on getting our needs met on survival and broaden our focus to the people around us - what's good not only for ourselves but for other people because I think we're more than the sum of our parts when we come together in community and so understanding ourselves at a deeper level and the way our egos can drive the show creating more room for self-reflection allows for us to make different choices more conscious choices have empathy for others for people we may not understand at first and and in my view this is an important project for shifting things and making things better for everyone mm-hmm I love your focus on confronting the ego and the personality as you say in the complete anagram many people are completely identified with their personality that's they think that's who they are but in fact the ancient traditions teach us that and Gurdjieff the Russian mystic who brought the Anna crown to the west teaches us that in fact were much more than the personality and that or the ego and that we are in fact in a kind of waking sleep that it's possible to wake up and that the Enneagram is a great tool exactly but as you point out you don't see it and many other teachers have not seen it as a standalone tool right and you teach it for the perspective of an immersion in a wide variety of fields so that it's tremendously useful but you teach it as many others have as as part of a deeper set of approaches to self-awareness I mean you go back I gave a talk the other day on the bhagavad-gita and in fact the Gita is a deep teaching on on confronting the ego in a certain sense and when when krishna presents himself to Arjuna in all his glory that's the true self you know and and you know there's that the there's the the individual spark of the true self that's within us and then there's the divine self and so the Enneagram itself can be seen as as nine approaches nine faces of the divine and a in a deep sense so one of the other points that you make on your blog online is that on your excellent website is that you caution against people who use the antia gram as a kind of parlor trick or a or teach it lightly or write books about it without a deep sense of its sacredness and its seriousness of purpose right yes definitely yeah I think the Enneagram is a powerful tool and because of that we need to treat it with great care right I think in order the thing I like about the Enneagram one of the many things is that you can talk about it in purely psychological language you can talk about it in purely spiritual language you can talk about it in both at the same time or neither you can talk about it in simply practical terms as when I go into businesses and work with them but if you're going to teach the any gram if you're going to use it as a tool not just for your own personal development but with others I think it's really important to bring a greater expertise to the table I think you necessarily need training and education in either psychology or spirituality or organization development or something like that because it is such a powerful tool it almost needs to be used in context of an understanding of what it takes to to develop and how a tool like this is best used you know one thing that I was going to mention later but I'll mention it now because it's I'm fascinated the anagram has gotten quite a lot of reach in sort of the counterculture new-age community it's gotten a lot of reach in divinity schools it's gotten quite a lot of reach in organizational development but and tell me if I'm wrong about this it seems to me that it has never gotten the respect I believe it deserves in the community of archetypal psychology in other words why is it that the unions the post unions James Hillman many people who I have tremendous respect for why is it that asset Joleon psycho synthesis why is it that those traditions have found their way into what I regard as a higher level of cultural credibility than the any ground now I have thoughts about that but I'm curious number one do you share my assumption that that's true and number two do you have ideas about why that's true yes I completely agree with you I think that is true and I think both in mainstream psychology and sort of what you're talking about a tipple astrology I think that's true more surprising in the world of our tipple psychology or what we might even call transpersonal psychology which I think psycho synthesis would be a part of that and I think it's interesting I think there may be an academic bias where it need you need to be based on something you know I think for instance the MBTI has gotten far not only because they created a good test but because it was based on you me in thinking and you Mian is such a solid foundation a good source very credible not and not everyone understands that the Enneagram also isn't completely aligned with a lot of the you know foundational ideas and psychology I wrote a a paper several years ago integrating object relations theory with the Enneagram but of course no one read it because he was going to read that you know that the psychologists sort of aren't interested because the Enneagram seems a little bit odd or strange or out there and some and it was a little bit too academic for some of the anagram audience so I think it's I have found that some of my some of my psychotherapist friends have gotten buried into the Enneagram usually because of our personal connection but when I've tried to introduce it a little bit outside my personal circle it doesn't really catch on and I'm not exactly sure why that is my my hunch my guess is that it is people get really kind of entrenched in their way of seeing or their theory or what they think works for them and it works for them so it's almost like there's a lack of openness to considering this even though there's a way I mean I think of the Enneagram as a grand theory in Psychological theory in that if you understand the anagram you can see how all these different theories either fit inside it or aligned with it or overlap with it in significant ways yeah my my theory about the lack of respect because the reason the lack of respect fascinates me is that you know I've studied depth psychology for 50 years and and really it's one of my primary interests and you know I personally regard Jung as the great figure even more than Freud in modern psychology you know William James an incredible figure and so on but I think that some of the reasons that Enneagram may not have gotten the respect it deserves has to do with its provenance I think that coming from a controversial rusted Russian mystic kerchief representing a very ancient system but then the modern movement coming out of Oscar Chow so and Claudio Naranjo both of whom come from Latin America and it seems to me that had they come from England had they come from Europe it would have been different but there I think there actually is a kind of a prejudice that nothing of the highest calibre in psychology could possibly come out of Latin America which is fascinating there was if you read Naranjo his range of cultural reference is actually greater oh yeah by a long stretch right then most of the people who critique him in the United States and we forget that Latin American intellectuals and intelligence you have this deep relationship with European thought right and therefore they have this frame of reference that actually exceeds the richness of American frame of reference you know so it just fascinates me because in of all the depth psychologies that I've studied Enneagram to me has the most powerful explanatory capacity right you know right right I think you're I think you would make a great point and you're probably right my teaching partner is from Brazil mm-hmm and he often says that there's a kind of underdog quality young people from Latin America and so I think that could very well could be an important element I think another element may be in the early years of Enneagram movements of course both the chozo and Naranjo in the early years didn't want it to get out they wanted it wanted it to be secret and so their intention was very much to keep it within a small closed community now it leaked out from neuron hose community in the in Berkeley to a few other people who then shared it with other people who ended up writing a couple of the first some of the first books about it and I'm trained as an academic and part of my internal frustration with the anagram in the way that the literature has come out has been that it isn't it hasn't followed a kind of academic trajectory it isn't the books that were written weren't firmly based on the foundation of Naranjo and achaz Oh in a way and so it's almost as if people wrote books about it that we're a little bit more just descriptions of the personalities and not tethered to the deeper theory which of course is very rich and especially Naranjo wrote about so much because like you say he he understood so much about spirituality about verges forth way about psychiatry psychology literature philosophy the human eye National Movement the human potential movement you know you worked with Fritz Perot it's with Fritz Perls in your salt Esalen and so I think what happened is because there was this break the people who wrote the first books we're not writing with Claudia's blessing or in some ways in homage or interfacing their work on his seminal work I think it'd be it's sort of like it became more of a popular movement than something that was attached to or tethered to its deeper roots and I think is it fair to say that your book the complete Enneagram 27 pass to greater self knowledge is the first comprehensive book to be deeply based on the Roundhouse teaching and achaz oh that was certainly my intention yeah I think that's true I think it shines through great just this deep sense like that from all the fine people who have interpreted any gram you go back to a Chavo and especially Naranjo and and really base your work deeply on his teaching yeah yeah wonderful well that's a good place to stop the introductory piece and ask you to give us an overview of Enneagram okay yeah thank you for that very thorough introduction so I my intention is to give kind of an overview of how I came to the Enneagram a little bit about what the Enneagram is and its ancient roots and how the Enneagram works to bring about healing and transformation I think that's the most important topic and what my work with the anagram is right now just ending with that so I I know that the the people in the room and the people in the audience may know something about the Enneagram so I am assuming a bit of knowledge I'm not starting from the beginning and doing the basics but I trust we can follow up as needed either with the book or in the conversation or with greater learning so I learned the Enneagram in 1990 from a friend's dad I was a very dear friend of mine from junior high on was David Daniels who is the son of David Daniels the any early Enneagram teacher and pioneering teacher David Daniels was if you don't know him he formed one of the first Enneagram schools with Helen Palmer so it was an interesting partnership because of course Helen Palmer wrote one of the first popular books on the Enneagram and that was the first book I read and she connected up with dr. Daniels who was a psychiatrist based at Stanford so this was and of course Helen although she certainly doesn't advertise this at the top of her resume as an into twerked as an intuitive for many years so in part she came to the Enneagram because of the berkeley community around Naranjo but also because of her interest in intuition and what gets in the way of us being in contact with our intuition which turns out to be the personality and our habits connected to our personality so I met dr. Daniels because I was good friends with his son and his son died in 1990 and so I had occasion to be around his family in an intensive way and one night at dinner it was my turn to be taught about the Enneagram so one night at dinner having having spending a lot of time with the Daniel's family after their son's death which was of course a huge tragedy dr. Daniels they wanted to have his friends around and one night it was my turn and so dr. Daniels turned to me and said so I think you're a 2 on the NEA grant and here's the book so I took Helens book home and I read all about it and it absolutely blew my mind it was just stunning to me that I'd never really been interested in psychology at all it was the one class I always joked it was the one class an undergraduate and my undergraduate career at UCLA that I got a C in with psychology and I always thought it was just like giving sort of jargony names to things that seemed really obvious and so I wasn't really interested until I came upon the Enneagram and I was just amazed that there was something that could describe me to myself in such detail that was so thorough and deep and so it not only I think really helped me understand myself but it redirected the course of my career reconnected me with a sense of spirituality and there was just something about it that made me sort of believe in something that there was some deeper reality that I wasn't in touch with so I because of my connection with dr. Daniels I went through the training program that he and Helen Palmer created and became certified in 1997 as soon as I finished my dissertation which was on I got a P I was getting a PhD at the time in communication studies and I studied maths media and politics and my dissertation was on iran-contra and why Bush and and Reagan could have been prosecuted for crimes but weren't and how they framed the news to make it so they didn't seem guilty and I'd finished that in 1996 then I went right back to school to become a therapist and I went to the California Institute of integral studies in San Francisco became a therapist and the what was interesting about my psychological education was that I from the moment I started that I had known the Enneagram for about six years so I went into studying psychology Stern psychology with the Enneagram in my head so when I want everything I learned as I was going through all the different theories you learn I immediately could see how it was related to the Enneagram and in my transpersonal psychology class I wrote a 50 page paper about the Enneagram and how it's the ideal transpersonal tool of course not very many people were into the Enneagram then but but it was definitely something that shaped not only my education and my understanding of psychology but also the way I worked with clients so when I first started working with clients of course it's really hard to be a new therapist because you're you know people are coming to you for help and you're don't really know what you're doing and I used to think about my fellow students and I think like how are you doing this without the Enneagram because to me the Enneagram gave me a very quick way to understand what's the issue with this person and what do they need i after after i became a therapist i in 2000 started going to international Enneagram conferences and so became part of the international anagram community i was on the international Enneagram association for six years from 2004 to 2009 i was president from 2006 to 2007 and in 2004 a big thing happened and that is we invited claudia neuron to come to the IEA conference the annual conference in Washington DC now this was a big event because Naranjo had been basically alienated from the mainstream or the at least most of the us-based Enneagram community for many years because he was still mad about the way it leaked out from his original group in the 70s and how people were writing books about it he saw those books as not really what they should be and so mostly was teaching in Latin America Central America and Europe but he came back in 2004 and he brought 15 of his associates which are some of the highest caliber gestalt therapists psychodrama therapists around in the world and he taught a three morning workshop on the subtypes and the subtypes are the three versions of each of the nine types based on which of three instincts is most prominent in your experience I'll talk a little bit more about that a little bit later but basically you can have a dominant self-preservation survival instinct or a dominant social instinct about getting along with the herd of the group or a dominant one-to-one or sexual instinct about bonding with specific others and this was a an aspect of the Enneagram system that I had heard about since the early my early training but one I would never very interested in because I thought it was rather vague it didn't really tell me very much I couldn't figure out which subtype I was and it didn't seem very helpful so I had mainly ignored it until Naranjo came and he described the 27 subtypes the three versions of each of the nine types in a way I had never heard before he and his associates helped me understand that I was a self-preservation too and what that meant and it was like a whole new world it was it was as shocking and life-changing as finding my type in 1990 it was like a whole world opened up at underneath what I was doing with the Enneagram and that I learned that I was repressing a lot of fear I learned what it meant to be self-preservation dominant that added a whole new level to my own personal work in therapy I brought I brought it to my therapist and said hey I found out I'm really afraid and he said yeah finally you figured that out I've been noticing you're really anxious ever since I met you when I come to get you in the waiting room you've seemed terrified and so that was a big significant personal revelation for me and after that conference interestingly everyone acted like it hadn't happened and again I think this is partly due to sort of this breach between Naranjo and the rest of the community and the ongoing tension that existed there and I also think you know people were already teaching the subtypes the way they were and they weren't necessarily open to this new piece of information but I went on a mission to learn everything I could about what neuron who is teaching relative to the subtypes because I thought it clarified the system it deepened the system it expanded its range in a really important way so right wanting to bring more of neuron hose not what I call modern wisdom about the enniaa that Enneagram subtypes out into the world motivated a lot my my wanting to write a book about the Enneagram I I felt pretty shy about this because it's like what do I know there's already these books out there that are really popular everyone likes and I heard people say when my book did come out like I didn't think we needed another Enneagram book but but she said but this is a good one but there were two reasons I wanted to write a book one was to bring the Naranjo subtypes out to more people and the other one was I had been working with the aina gram as a psychotherapist for a while and I was finding it so valuable and I was learning so much that I wanted there to be a book that was written by a practicing psychotherapist that really helped people understand the psychology behind the Enneagram or within the Enneagram in a way that was accessible so I wanted to bring insights psychological insights relative to Enneagram two more people so I wanted to write a book that was easy to read maybe even fun to read but that also was connected to the tradition connected to what Naranjo had said the seminal authors and brought that forward in a way that was both really true to the tradition and what the Enneagram can be but also of great depth in a way that people could connect with and then I wrote the nine types of leadership in 2017 in response to an agent calling me up and said I saying I think there's a good opening for an Enneagram book for business and I took the opportunity in that book I had had to give up a little bit when I wrote the complete Enneagram the goal of wanting to write to reach out to people who didn't know anything about the Enneagram the more introductory book the complete Enneagram ended up being a little bit sophisticated for the you know the total beginner so the nine types of leadership was not only to help leaders understand themselves and workplace relationships but also to kind of go a little bit more to the introductory level and invite people into the system that might be brand new to it so what is in what is the any room it is and and this is some of what kerchief said it's a symbol of perpetual motion it's a framework for a personality typology with nine types and three versions of each types twenty-seven subtypes it's a powerful powerful tool for increasing self-awareness first and foremost but also understanding others and increasing emotional intelligence which is basically self-awareness plus empathy for others and social awareness and it's also a process map it's a map of process so not only are these just these numbers distinct points that represent personality archetypes but it's also a map of movement and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment so what kerchief said is that you can't really understand the Enneagram without seeing it as in motion so in order to be understood the Enneagram needs to be thought of as in motion a fixed Enneagram symbol is a dead symbol so sometimes you'll see any Graham's symbols without the arrow lines I always feel a little bit uncomfortable when I see that because the airline's remind us that we need to be seeing it as in motion not only is the Enneagram it's something that should be seen in motion but it's also three-dimensional and so this this two-dimensional drawing doesn't really give you the full effect it's actually the circle is actually a sphere and when we move up and down it we actually are moving in a spiral around the sphere and the any that triangle in the middle is really the Merkabah it's really a two pyramids one going up and one going down that is a lot about that has deep symbolic meaning I won't go into too much more than that now but just to give you a sense that there is so much more to the Enneagram than then is often understood when we see the basic two-dimensional diagram so Burgess said and Gurdjieff of course as Michael mentioned was an Armenian mystic who lived in the first part of the 20th century and was the way one of the principal ways that we learned about the Enneagram symbol and its meaning and its connection to mystical spiritual traditions he did not talk about the nine types he did talk about each different people having chief features and he did which will turn out to match up with some Enneagram type information and he also talked about types generally but he mainly focused on three types he called it man number one man number two and man number three and these were people who used who came from the three different centres of intelligence so someone who is a more body based person as man number one someone is a more heart based person as man number two and someone who is a more head based person as he is man number three so we talked about these three types he talked about chief bee but even more than that he told us about the deep powerful symbolic meaning of the symbol he basically said that that we tend to think of our moment in time or in history as the the the forefront like the the farthest moment in of progress of the human condition right but what he said is actually in the distant past they actually knew more than we know now in some ways and so there were secret schools of people who had figured out a lot of the secrets of the universe hundreds maybe thousands of years ago and these people needed a way to convey to future generations some of these secrets they discovered and so they created symbols they encoded their the knowledge the the the wisdom that they developed in symbols because they knew they knew that language was untrustworthy as a conveyor of information over eras of time because the human ego can get in the way and transform the meaning of language he said that the Enneagram is the Philosopher's Stone of the alchemists he said it's a symbol of unity and multiplicity and he said that if you know how to read the Enneagram it makes books and libraries entirely unnecessary which is of course a big statement and I also think it should make us very humble about our ability to really interpret all the wisdom that the Enneagram conveys and I think we are at the very beginning of rediscovering all that's encoded in the Enneagram so the Enneagram is a it we I don't have time to go into this but I'll just mention it it's symbol it's a symbol of unity and multiplicity in that of course we understand there are of course millions of unique individual people in the world however there are also patterns that we share and so sometimes when people first learn the Enneagram they think how they're only benign types when there are so many people and it's based on this idea that there are pattern there are naturally occurring patterns in nature that we see in the shapes and the order of the universe in everything from galaxies to the shell of a snail to a flower to all of these things and that these things according to Gurdjieff could be described by various laws and the Enneagram is the combination of three basic laws the law of one which is conveyed by the circle the idea that everything is connected the law of three which is this the inner triangle of the Enneagram communicates this and this is the law of three is sometimes called the law of creation and it's the idea that it takes three forces for anything to come to be created in the world and the law of seven which is signified by the periodic figure the other lines and the law of seven is about sequence about the way events unfold in a series of seven steps and you can see this in the musical scale or octave so the Enneagram is i when i teach the Enneagram especially in businesses or to new when i'm teaching it to people for the first time I like to start with the Centers of intelligence the idea that the Enneagram is based on this idea not that we have one Center of intelligence and the West we tend to think of it as our head but really on three centers of intelligence and this is the body the heart and the mind so each of these is a center of intelligence a way that we process information from the outside world within these and if the idea is is that humans when we're in personality we're out of balance and that is we tend to use one Center more than the other two so there are three types three personality types that overuse the body center three types that overuse the heart center and three types that overuse or live more from the head Center and of course part of working with the Enneagram and using it as a tool for transformation is understand how you use that Center and how you're coming from that Center over much so that you can balance it out by developing your access to the other two centers now within each Center there are three types and each of us will tend to favor or come from or identify with or play out the patterns of one of those three types so you can already see the effect of the law of three everything in the Enneagram comes in threes and then although while you identify with one type like I'm a two so I'm in the heart center and I identify with type two and I when I learned the anagram I could see that I was very much acting out the patterns of thinking a feeling and behaving of the type two personality there's another level of it which is the subtype level and this is based on which of one of three instincts is most dominant so we tend to favor one Center within that Center we tend to identify with one type and then within that type we tend to overuse one instinct of these three instincts self-preservation social or sexual we tend to overuse that as we try to survive in the world and not only do we overuse one of those three instincts but we under use another one we and this is something that I started this is the idea that teaching around the instincts is something I started developing and based on the subtype information I had gotten from Naranjo in 2004 but much of it also comes from my teaching partner irani o pious who I am increasingly partnering with in the way that I do workshops with the Enneagram and he has a deep that has done it many multi-year deep study in the gur shift work and also in the Sufi tradition so some of what I'm saying about the instincts comes from him and we not only one instinct tends to dominate our experience and the instincts are very fast they're connected to the reptilian brain and they're based in the belly center but we also tend to repress one of our instincts we tend to not use it as much and then there's usually one that's kind of in the middle that we use sort of more in normal range so having a dominant instinct simply means that if I'm a self-preservation type I think my preservation is threatened much more than it is right because my personality part of what happens with the instinct the instinct is our animal wisdom which is a good thing however when it's when when the lower emotional center of the personality gets involved it directs the instincts so the problem occurs when the instincts get integrated into the functioning of the personality and we overuse one instinct and so it drives us in certain ways in habitual ways that we often don't see to over for as me for a self-preservation over emphasize my preservation and and not realize that my life isn't threatened as much as I think I don't really have to be thinking about what I'm having for dinner when I'm eating breakfast that sort of all be okay I'm not gonna starve that kind of thing so I usually don't use the names of the types I didn't use them in my books but sometimes when I'm introducing it I tend to use them only because it gives people some information to hang their new knowledge on so nine is called the peacemaker or the mediator one is sometimes called the perfectionist or the reformer but interestingly there's one subtype of one that's really the perfectionist and there's another subtype of one that's really the reformer so you can already see how these names in the names of the types can be a little bit of a blunt instrument a little bit crude too is sometimes called the helper the giver I have renamed it the befriender because I think there's too much emphasis on helping and giving when it comes to twos and not as much information about the darkside behind that three's achiever performer fours individualist sometimes artist five is the investigator or the observer six is the contrarian or the devil's advocate seven the enthusiast and eight the Challenger and it's interesting to know one of neuron hoes inside was that each type is actually kind of a combination of the types on either side of it there's a lot that has to do with sort of the asymmetry of the Enneagram things on certain that traits that types on one side have versus the other side on the bottom the top so there's just a lot in it that I won't go into right now but those are the types there's the inner triangle of the anagram I mentioned in the introduction that I had done a paper sort of integrating the Enneagram and object relations theory and there are a lot of three-stage theories about human development that map perfectly onto the inner triangle of the Enneagram in this case you see that it's it also maps perfectly along with the three Buddhist poisons and Naranjo makes this point that these three sort of focuses are important and they're sort of foundational in that they are associated with the points on the core points of the inner triangle but the types on either side of each of these also share these traits so ignorance being a Buddhist word for the idea that we all fall asleep the idea that humankind is asleep and again nines type nines have that as a central feature they tend to go to sleep to themselves and have a hard time acting on their own behalf but this is something that all of us share that all humans are kind of an awaking sleep we all tend to go to sleep to our experience and so that's a foundational idea aversion or fear at tight at the six point fear is something all humans share we all are motivated by fear in some ways to defend ourselves and that any grand personality types are foundationally they are a mode of defense adopted in childhood their adaptations that were adopted in perceived emergency situations when we are young children to adapt to our environment and to stay safe and to survive so fear is the core of the type six and five and seven their personalities are shaped also in response to childhood fear and then at the three point we have craving in the Buddhist system but also vanity in terms of the sort of identifying with a personality and becoming an authentic that the three heart types share two three and four also I think it's important to say that the core emotions are also here and that the core emotion associated with the heart types is sadness there's a kind of sadness that grows up around heart types often gotten the message in childhood that they needed to be something other than they were to get love and appreciation and so they create an image to get the love and appreciation or approval from the outside world but there's a longing for love which is related to this idea of craving there's a longing for I never really got the love that I wanted for who I really essentially am that is at the core that creates that sort of shapes the personality not only of type 3 but of all of all three heart types so this is just a sense of the foundation the psychological and spiritual foundation of the Enneagram so how does the anagram work well the Enneagram as a growth tool starts from the idea and this is the personality tool side of it from the idea that if you can have a map that highlights your key patterns associated with your core childhood survival strategy you can learn about yourself and eventually let go of this pattern of defense and be more of who you are it comes from the ancient Greek idea that the key to life the key to know everything you can learn in life is know thyself and of course this is in surah the temple of Delfy this was the basis of knowledge in in in ancient Greece and a lot of esoteric or mystical spiritual traditions will say that we should study ourselves in the same way a scientist studies the outside world so just like you would measure things in the outside world to learn about them you need to be tuning in to yourself to understand yourself and that this will also teach you about the world so the idea here is that we are asleep come it's a kind of an Eastern idea and this is certainly a lot of what Gurdjieff said is that we think that we're awake but we're really kind of an awaking sleep and so one of the things that we need to do is wake up and the Enneagram is if nothing else a tool for awakening for helping you understand what you're doing every day and how you are caught up in in patterns of behavior and thinking and feeling that you've been doing so long that are so familiar that they're completely invisible to you and so the Enneagram is great strength is that it highlights these patterns that can guide self observation so that you can learn about yourself it's almost like a shortcut to learning about yourself I always would say you know when people were in therapy you went to my clients we use the inia Graham because it's gonna save us a lot of time you know you could come in here and you could talk about what's going on with you and I could try to figure out how to help you but if we can figure out where you land in the Enneagram we can go right to the heart of the matter it also helps us have empathy for others one of the first things people always say when they learn the Enneagram and that there are these nine world views these nine patterns these nine ways of seeing the world and Helen Palmer II used to say we see it's like we see 360 degrees of reality through a narrow slice based on our focus of attention when we learn that we have this specific focus of attention but it's not the same as the eight other kinds of people and they have different focuses of attention we have much more empathy for others but we cuz we can see we're not having a conflict with this person because one of us is wrong or bad or anything like that it's that we're coming from different angles on the topic we're just seeing things completely differently so it and I use this a lot in couples counseling it's a great way to come all of a sudden understand why your partner's doing what they're doing and the fact that and have empathy for their position and their feelings so the ancient roots of the Enneagram and I think we'll talk about this more later but so I'll just say a few things about this we don't know the exact origins of the Enneagram we believe it's probably thousands of years old it probably came through Egypt through Pythagoras who studied in in the Far East and also in Egypt it may have come through Babylonia certainly we see signs of it in in ancient Egypt in ancient Greece I'm gonna focus for a moment on Homer's Odyssey but as you can see it came it come in in the modern era it came we know about the symbol through Gurdjieff and it came through oscar chozo who brought it forth in the late 60s early 70s cláudio neuron oh who learned the system from a Chavo and then developed it a lot and then of course it leaked out from his group but it's connected to I think the perennial philosophy that exists that that tells us that at the basis of all the world's religion is the same message and that was one of the things that fascinated me about it so I want to talk a little bit just about Homer's Odyssey and that is that Homer's Odyssey is where we see I think pretty convincing evidence that the Enneagram is at least this old the the Odyssey and the Iliad of course by Homer or two of the first books written down in Western literature and they told the story of the Trojan War and the Iliad and Odysseus this journey home after the Trojan War now Odysseus was the clever Greek warrior who had the idea of the Trojan horse now after the Greeks win the Trojan War he sets off on a journey home to Ithaca home to his wife and his kingdom and his journey home is the subject of the Odyssey now where this is thought by scholars to be a metaphorical journey home to the true self so it's a story about how coming home to who you truly are and what's fascinating about the Odyssey is that in the middle section of the poem the great wanderings where he tells the story of his journey home from the Trojan War he visits nine mythic lands and meets these mythic creatures where he's tested and he has to undergo trials in order to move forward well what do you know it turns out these nine lands turn out to match up with the Enneagram archetypes exactly and he travels to them in order starting with the Lotus Eaters at nine and going clockwise around the circle interestingly the very center of the poem of the Odyssey the very center like the the the line that's the center of the poem where is he he's in Hades in the underworld and the underworld on the anagram symbol is is symbolized by the break between five and four and so he is at the middle of the poem as as he comes there so we have this very interesting very obvious parallel between the Enneagram and the Odyssey and of course what's the this the myth that was a story of the Odyssey is is this journey home to the true self but it's also this idea that we need to learn about ourselves in order to go forward and and it was it was thought to be this is a story that had been told by traveling bards or storytellers for potentially hundreds of years first time is written down and Odyssey and so it this this myth was one of the ways to bring forward one of the big ideas about what what life is all about so the the the journey as we can see in that the journey metaphor the Enneagram maps a fall from consciousness and it's this both the both encoded in the biblical idea of the fall from consciousness the the fall in the Garden of Eden but also what Freud talked about about 80 percent of us is unconscious that there is a kind of degradation of consciousness when we come into a human life as we grow from from a child babies are thought to be very much in touch with their essential nature but as we grow we kind of fall out of that deeper connection we we fall more into unconsciousness and a kind of forgetting and so one of the things I've done is connected up the idea of journey or with the hero's journey and that the idea that there's an under conscious undertaking of a journey departure initiation and return but I won't go into too much of this now because in the interest of time and moving on but just to give you a flavor of all that's encoded in the Enneagram now there's an acorn parable in my book I was going to read it but I don't think I will because I think but you can read it yourself but basically the acorn parable that I quote in my book the complete Enneagram I got from Cynthia burrows book the wisdom way of knowing which is a beautiful little book but she got it from Maurice Nicoll who was a follower of gorgeous and basically it's this story where there are this there's this kingdom of acorns and they sit at the foot of this big oak tree and they go about their business polishing their shells and taking self-help courses about how to keep your shell shiny and one day this capitalist dirty stranger kind of drops out of the sky and says something kind of weird he basically says we are that pointing up to the oak tree and they think he's crazy they don't know what he's talking about they say well that's nuts nuts we're acorns not oak trees and then one of them just decides for the sake of argument to engage them in conversation says well how would we become that and he says well it has something to do with going into the ground and having your shell crack open so one of the most one of the most important things about the Enneagram is that it shows us our blind spots it shows us our shadow and there's um and I think this is why it's almost why I find it more effective than any other tool out there because it you know if you believe in the idea that the girge if said it comes from objective knowledge it shows us what we're not seeing we naturally resist seeing our shadow it's the part of ourselves that we believe is unacceptable but if we are going to become whole if we are going to manifest our higher potential if we are going to let go of that personality part of us that's whole purpose whole reason for being is to defend us from those shadow elements and the ways we might feel about it we need to let go of our personality patterns we need to become conscious of our shadow and integrate our blind spots and I love this quote from Naranjo he says that the that the problem with with seeing and integrating our shadow is that we don't know what we don't know our blind spots are blind and I love this quote from his his book character neurosis which is is his you know foundational seminal integration of the Enneagram in psychology he says the fall from consciousness to unconsciousness is such that awareness comes to be blind in regard to its own blindness and limited to the point of believing itself free that's my favorite quote from him and it's this idea that how are we to move forward and become more whole if we don't see what our work is if we don't understand and what we don't understand about ourselves or we don't see and accept what we don't see so I want to check in on time because I know you're good yeah oh good okay so here here are the different ways in a nutshell we might use the Enneagram for personal growth first of all is for self observation right it's just you can read in a good book about the Enneagram here are the defensive patterns of of your particular type so it's a lot about self-awareness just becoming aware like every day saying oh here I go again noticing what you do now you have to do this with compassion right because what you might start doing it first this oh I did it again and you might be get self-critical and angry at yourself the key is to self observe with compassion that just to say oh there now I'm seeing it now I'm learning it's a learning process also integrating blindspots learning about what you don't know and of course when you're working in a group and nor and Gurdjieff was famous for saying alone one man can do nothing that you can only really grow in a group or community because you need other people helping you see your blind spots so one of the things when I work with businesses or when I work with in my workshops is about taking in feedback right are you open enough to take in feedback from other people or do you get defensive this is a key element to know are you working on yourself or do you just think you're working on yourself so noting noticing your blind spots taking in information from the outside about what you might not be seeing vice to virtue conversion is another piece this refers to the vice or the passion each of the nine types is associated with a passion sins that that seven deadly sins in the Christian tradition plus fear and deceit and Richard Rohr says interesting that the Catholics would leave out fear and deceit but it's an interesting half to go from the passion or the sin of the type which is sort of the focus of the lower emotional center and it's a key emotional motivation that shapes the personality is the passion and I'll say in a moment what that is for every type but for me for instance it's pride and so pride is something that I really need to learn to be aware of if I'm using the anagram as a growth tool it's very unconscious when when you first start working on yourself when I first learned the anagram and I learned I was a two I didn't really understand what pride was at all prides probably one of the trickiest of the passions because unlike fear which we all tend to know an anger which is pretty straightforward pride sounds like a good thing but it's actually in Dantes sense the worst sin of all it's at the lowest pit of hell but what pride is is it's just a need to see yourself as better than you are I need to be important a passion for self-elevation for puffing yourself up and so twos need to feel important and so that's one of the things that they need to learn to self observe so when I first learned the Enneagram I didn't get what pride was I felt like I had low self-esteem that I wasn't really self elevating but when I really started to understand what it was I saw everywhere and so that's part of the trick is to start seeing your passion everywhere if you're a six it's fear I'll just go forward for a second for if you're if you're a 1 its anger 2 is pride 3 is self-deceit thinking mistaking yourself for your image or your person or your persona 4 4 it's envy comparing yourself to others for a 5 it's avarice withholding and for 6 it's fear 7 is gluttony 8 is lust and 9 is sloth so these are central motivating factors and of course the Enneagram types are known not by their behaviors because different types can do the same behaviors but by their motivation and their focus of attention so knowing what you're observing your passion or your vice and aiming for its opposite is one big way to use the Enneagram and then another big way to use the anagram is drawing on the inner dynamism or the movement of the symbol that I talked about at the beginning and I'm using eight here in the graphic as an example one is by using the types on either side of you sometimes called wings I don't believe that wings are subtypes in and of themselves so in other words I don't think there's a thing called an eight with a seven wing where all eight through the seven wing look alike and have a share a specific set of traits I do think that we are we have greater access to our wing points that they are influences but I think it varies by person to person what those influences are and more than anything else I think that wing points the types on either side are developmental opportunities there are ways of broadening your focus in ways that are good places to start because you already have easier access to the types on either side of you also the points that are connected to you within the diagram by these airlines are very important I'm doing whole workshops now with my teaching partner on how to use these wings for development the types that are connected to your main type by these internal airlines are natural antidotes for your main types so they're very important ways of creating balanced and growing and stretching using the Enneagram map so those are what we already talked about very important so I'm almost done this is a poem that I love because I think it sums up perfectly how the Enneagram works so I'm going to read this it's by Porsha Nelson it's called autobiography in five short chapters and it here's how it goes I walk down the street there is a deep hole in the sidewalk I fall in I lost I am helpless it's not my fault it takes forever to find a way out I walk down the same street there's a deep hole in the sidewalk I pretend I don't see it I've fallen again I can't believe I am in this same place but it isn't my fault it still takes a long time to get out I walk down the same street there is a deep hole in the sidewalk I see it is there I still fall in it's a habit but my eyes are open I know where I am it is my fault I get out immediately I walk down the same street there is a deep hole in the sidewalk I walk around it I walk down another Street so I think this this this sums up for me what it what my work with the anagram has been a little bit like and then I love this quote ultimately happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them I love that there's an honest nin quote that's a little bit like that you know something like the pain that it took to open the bud is more than it took to stay closed in it in a bud beautiful so then this is just a little bit about what I'm doing today with the Enneagram I work with leaders and teams and organizations through the chestnut group which is an association I have with some friends and colleagues that also do organizational work I give international workshops on the Enneagram on the subtypes I give a workshop now every year in Florence Italy on the Divine Comedy Dante's Divine Comedy and how it lines up with the Enneagram and how it deepens our understanding of the messages of the Enneagram and then I also do workshops with my teaching partner erroneous ronnie o pious we are forming a school this year the chestnut pius Enneagram Academy that's the working title anyway and we offer workshops for professionals coaches and therapists and how if you're using the Enneagram how to use it in the best possible way how to understand the intagram at the deepest levels so that you can really use it well we're doing interwork retreats for personal growth for inner transformation so we're calling the professional tract workshops for outer impact and inner work retreats for personal growth and inner transformation and we're on EO and ir believed that the Enneagram is purpose in this world is to help people do the deepest kind of inner work and we're really dedicated to providing a space in which people can really understand themselves at a deep level and transform and and and let go of the limiting patterns and their personality so they can be all of who they really are and we're offering certification programs in those and more than anything else we want to build the community of people who are doing this kind of work because we think it we can't do it alone and which i think is so much in the spirit of commonweal and so providing a community of people who are dedicated to doing this kind of work with the Enneagram and just to sum up the Enneagram map helps us to know ourselves fundamentally as we truly are the false self of the personality is really a pathway back to the true self to a remembrance of the true self and it helps us have more understanding for and compassion for others and of course this is something that's so needed in our world today but having more empathy for what other people's worldview is what their pain is what what motivates them it helps us make our unconscious patterns conscious and of course this is one of the big functions of psychotherapy and psychology so that we can grow beyond habitual limiting patterns that we adopt in childhood that we often don't know we have and it helps us manifest our higher potential it helps us be as I say and my in my book our oaktree self as opposed to staying bound up in our a corn self helps us let go of survival mode and defensiveness and open up to two to being you know the best person that we truly are that we really already are that we just need to kind of unveil thank you and I just want to thank you for all the years that you've put into this so so profound you know there's so many places I could start but because your work is based so deeply on each Osso and Naranjo I forget whether you knew each other did you take you ever meet him no I've never met I've taken just a couple of courses in the arica school you know that he started so I've trained with a few of his teachers but very little Naranjo is still alive right living in Berkeley ugly yeah yeah and I've watched some of his more recent videos he's older but when you you were part of us SAP program meetings I've done three of his sought workshops on training set stock retreats and when did you do those I did one in 2014 one in 2016 and one in 2017 so he continues to do them yeah Wow yeah sometimes they happen without him there with this teachers and sometimes he's there less and less he's there and often they'll say oh this is the last one he's doing but then he feels well enough to do another yeah how would you give us a portrait of a kind of a brief depth portrait of who this man Claudia Naranjo actually well as I don't I don't claim to know him you know I'm not I'm not sort of one of his longtime students so I want to be clear about that I am especially as an academic I think I admire him because I I so appreciate what he did in bringing the Enneagram forward and it almost seems like it took someone like him who had such a broad depth of knowledge about so many things not to bring something like the Enneagram forward I think it's also had that too but you know claudio had was a american trained psychiatrist from chile someone who had been very interested in the spiritual you know since he was young and I think when he when he learned it chose OHS system he was able to develop it in a way that maybe no one else could have I think he's you know incredibly brilliant really you know was part of the human potential movement was very equally dedicated to spiritual work and psychological work and really I think a lot of his mission is confronting the ego and so I think part of what I did in my book was translating him a bit he is not someone who thinks too much about prettying up the language to make people feel good because as I've heard him say you know the personality what we're talking about we're talking about the any room types this is an ego game and so he I think bristles when people want to make it sound good and it's funny when I was writing my book a lot of people I would run into would say things like well make sure you talk about the strengths and and and I do talk about the strengths partly because if you don't people close down pretty fast but he's not someone too to to need to use language that will make people feel good and he also comes out of more of a psychoanalytic tradition where you're using the words that you use aren't always very nice sounding you know skis away you know borderline these are words that people you know narcissistic that people necessarily any understand and we have reactions to but I think that he has just such a deep knowledge in so many different areas you know so he talks about musician great composers and what they're any REM types were he's even played at conferences played music of the different composers and talked about how the music reflected their type he talks about philosophers and what their Enneagram types were and how to understand the types through their work so it's a he's a he's someone who is very very focused on the the knowledge and on using it to really help people see themselves in a direct way hmm he comes from an interesting family do you my memory is from Santiago I believe and I believe his mother held set of gatherings for interesting people that were quite well-known do you know the story I don't know this alright no yeah I'm pretty sure I've got this right I think it's a Jewish family I'm not a hundred percent sure of that do you know that I don't okay but I do know his mother held gatherings sort of what do you call them so long right yes felt so Long's and he was actually very deeply involved with music himself yeah yeah yeah so he comes from a very interesting background and for me reading him which I do as I said the depth and breadth of his frame of cultural reference far exceeds most American psychologists definitely far exceed effin and therefore and and we forget that the Latin American intelligence here was so deeply connected with Europe right and therefore inherits the European tradition which were somewhat cut off from right so you know it's interesting that you say that it it hasn't any gram hasn't gotten the respect it deserves because it doesn't have the academic base and I get that the you know the measurement base and so on but I would say in addition to that that that we don't remember what European cultural history has done for depth psychology right we don't remember that in a very real sense that Carl Jung's great contribution was that he took the entire lineage that came down to him you know he used to say that he thought he was a you know that his grandmother had had an affair with good time I don't know if you know that you know and that he was actually a linear a descendant of Goethe but he he brings in you know Goethe and the whole Romantic movement and all of the stuff which got erased by rationalism and so on and so forth thread and then it comes over here diluted right and and never gets as much traction as Freud did and so on exactly yeah the American Psychological tradition is so much more positivist the deposits more sun based on the scientific model and empiricism and less than sort of humanities and right you know there's a great book that I love by Bruno Bettelheim called Freud and man's soul mm-hmm and you know that's why I'm off and always it's already with him you know Freud said that psychotherapy is a cure through love mm-hmm and I think that you're right that in Europe there's such a depth to these intellectual traditions that isn't just based on science science is an important part of it of course but it's complemented by different strands and and and and these different you know ways of thinking so so I think you really right to point to that that there is a way that it's almost like the depth of the European tradition and and as Claudio expresses it it almost didn't come through can you flip over to the slide that shows us the lineage going back to a tigress and so currently because to me that's line in a certain sense says it all yeah there we go so the slide shows us starting with the Homer's Odyssey Pythagoras Plato latinas the neoplatonist and then branching out to the Jewish mystics Philo and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life the Christian Desert Fathers Evagrius who I don't know Ramon Llull who I don't know are the Sufi orders al-ghazali and the Naqshbandi order of the Sufis remind me of who of Audrey is for Marius was a weak a Christian contemplative around 300 AD okay living in Egypt he had started off I think in Turkey or thereabout he he was he had started off as part of the court but he had sort of retreated from life as a sort of an elite to become a one of the Christian desert rather Desert Fathers which were basically these people who retired to the desert to meditate to pray to contemplate and he came forward with eight thoughts that get in the way of meditation so when you're meditating you know here here are what the eight things that kind of get in their way of between me and God and what do you know they match up with the Enneagram types with the passions of the types so that's another piece of in fort of another sort of touch point of potential evidence that the Enneagram goes back and we don't know exactly whether he we don't think he invented we think he was getting them from a deeper mystical tradition and a lot of his writings and his contemporaries who wrote along similar lines were burned it's heresy around that time because of course the church hierarchy should want the message out there that you can you know connect with spirit or with the divine in a direct way and these works and interestingly the Catholic Church still strikes back against the Enneagram even though Richard Rohr literally wrote the book on write the anagram for Christian traditions um yeah yeah I think I would say more the upper hierarchy yes right my aunt my aunt is a my great aunt is a Catholic nun and she's always saying when will you come talk to the nuns you know and they all know the anagram and they all use it and like it cor has a great line I'm an anagram five and Rohr has a great line in his book you know the onion ground five is the observer and sort of the the most isolated point on the anagram drawer has a great line in his book he's teaching Enneagram in a monastery and and you know he comments that the fives always want the rooms at the end of the hall and they want us to be by themselves and they love us and he said that before he understood any graham he used to look up to them because they were so you know reserved and contemplatively offered he said but then he realized they were just five they don't have some special spiritual yeah so tell us who remand long yeah so this is this is sort of remote all is on my to-do list of someone to study much more in-depth so before I've collected a lot of books but haven't dealt too deeply he was basically based in Spain around the 1300 and there was kind of this resurgence of some ancient wisdom that we think might be connected to venogram in the like kind of right before the Renaissance this is white weight may have come through to Dante for instance Ramon lo isn't it and he kind of and in his work we see different diagrams that look a lot like the anagram oh so he and he was bringing together different traditions in Spain he was influenced by the Jewish tradition he was in flow is a clergy and the church but he was interested he was interested in different strains that were alive in Spain and he was kind of trying to integrate different mystical traditions and actually you find the Enneagram in his writings why in your chart does the Kabbalistic Tree of Life come after Philo and the Jewish mystics I always think of it as very ancient you know this this I didn't originate this joke okay well I will say that so I'm not sure about that okay I'm not sure where Philo fits in there but I do know that the Kabbalah matches them the Enneagram as well perched perfectly yeah and let's get the Sufi orders all Ghazali and the Naqshbandi order I know there's a tradition that you see it in the Sufi tradition right but how much do we know about Enneagram like structures in the Sufi tradition well um kerchief ref Wengert have never said exactly where he got his knowledge he references esoteric Christianity and he also references Sufism he doesn't say this directly came from there ma I know that the Sufis teach the Enneagram quite a bit part of it's related to the whirling tradition the dervish tradition but the Naqshbandi order was known as an order that taught about the Enneagram and there is a book that I am a friend of mine is helping me translate in from Spanish to English called the Sufi Enneagram and it's written by abdul kareem budino who is a sufi teacher in argentina and it's quite powerful in terms of how to use the Enneagram in in ways that I haven't heard described quite that way before so I think there's a way that the Sufis developed different understandings of the map and as I said my my teaching partner has studied extensively in Sufism and so some of what he talks about is drawn from the Sufis in terms of understanding what the spiritual meaning of the Enneagram map as processes one other thing that's fascinated me about Enneagram for a long time is that the resonances - psycho synthesis and - the ancient Greek and Hindu assistance of gods so for example the Greeks when somebody had a problem that they were dealing with psychological or whatever they felt that they were this person was under the influence of one of the gods and so they would try to figure out which God they needed to worship - and so you had you know you had the system of gods which were analogous let us say to the personality types likewise you could say that to some degree of the Hindus but the Greeks were more obvious and obviously the Greeks were the ones that influenced young and Hillman and so on so then you have in si Jolie psycho synthesis you have all the various sub personalities in the unconscious conscious and the super conscious right and it's like that except as a Jolie doesn't give you the information of the nine types they're essentially blank right right right that reminds me si Jolie is work reminds me of kerchief used to talk a lot about how the many eyes right that we have many voices inside ourselves contending for you know now want this and now we want that and personal growth work is necessarily about kids you know according alchemically bringing together in the I into one I yeah so as the Jolene's work always reminds me of that if and voice dialogue work which some people have done it's it there's a way of if you can identify the different voices and become more aware of them you cannot have so many contending voices does anybody ever looked at Joseph Campbell's work on meth which and and young and asked whether the the global archetypes that young and Campbell and different was found in myth array in any relationship to any room I don't think anyone's done that I just we just did a keynote speech at the European any Ram conference in Amsterdam and we and the theme of the conference was the wisdom of the true self and so we did a whole talk on the journey of the true self mapped in the anagram and we drew on young and and the idea of individuation so that was more about process and also Jung's idea of the monomyth so we more looked at it in terms of process as opposed to archetypes Jung's art types are interesting because you have more like the mud you know the mother archetype or the anima and animus and things like that which aren't exactly the same kind of art types but I think there's probably work to be done in there I've also heard recently a woman from Australia I was telling me that there are if you look in the Mayan religion there it this one for a part of their teaching there are these nine gods mm-hmm I just there is a guy I just heard give a talk from Egypt about the nine names of gods and the Sufi religion and how there are certain names of God that are that that are that match up perfectly with these any kind of like when you were saying we can be over identified with one of these ways of being and we need to go to the high side of that name of God you mentioned that the roar points out that in Christianity the seven deadly sins missed what Jared deceits you see makes that joke right but I mean I think as a catholic myself they lost two along the way yeah um I wonder why but interestingly in the diagnostic psychiatric manual people say that the one that's missing is the intagram three right and that it's missing because the United States is an achiever it's the three countries the culture and therefore we don't regard you don't regard that as abnormal yeah exactly but Naranjo was the one that mapped Enneagram onto the diagnostic psychiatric system right like he took what he got from it chozo and he he put it in more psychological language and drew some of these these different and it's not perfect but there's a broad general connection so what I get from this is that in the a bruh of the Abrahamic faiths out of Jerusalem and the tradition out of Athens that both Jerusalem and Athens have either independently or woven together found the same nine personality or archetypal personalities for thousands of years yeah for thousands of years and since Naranjo points out that the the highest intention of any theory of psychology as a theory of character type and different people create all different kinds of character type structures here we have one that's been stable in the West for thousands of years right so why doesn't it get some respect that is a great question why doesn't it get respect yeah I think that's totally fast it is fascinating yeah yeah I mean I think it's shifting you know I think it's shifting but it's I think it's a little bit like you know I studied at California Institute of integral studies and we have a great archetypal astrologer there Bert Arnaz yeah and he he you know wrote his book about Western civilization and his big thing is about how 2,000 years ago science and spirituality came apart and they've been a part of her since but they they're kind of coming back together and I wonder sometimes if that's part of it because you even have people in the Enneagram community who are more scientifically inclined who don't believe the any graham has ancient roots no so I think they're I think there is a way that it has to do with maybe not understanding kind of what you're putting your finger on here about how there is this tradition that's been around for thousands of years it's taken different shapes and it's come out in different forms but it's now kind of hopefully more and more coming together and and and being brought out but I think I think that's a great question why it doesn't get more respect and I think people are sensitive I think especially in the u.s. to things that are too woowoo - New Age my pet people tell me okay but you need to call it something else or you need to not use this symbol and it's like well what would what would why would I do that you know but there's been there been people who thought well this isn't gonna get anywhere because it looks like you know something scary what was the intention of keeping the teaching secret I think for I think certainly at least what I've read is the reason was it needed to be passed on from master to student in the controlled environment because of the sensitivity and the depth and the power of the knowledge and that in other words if you kind of let it out to people who weren't ready for it who aren't in a safe container either Gurdjieff used to say either it doesn't do anything or it can do damage so I think that was one thing was the idea that people aren't really ready for this people won't really understand it people will misuse I think that maybe shifting now and I've heard Naranjo say that while he didn't like the way the Enneagram got disseminated at the end of talking a lot about that he'll say and maybe there was a purpose to it getting out there so I do think that it's a mark of evolution that it has gotten out there more and when I was writing my book about leadership you know I kept thinking of it as the Myers Biggs of the 21st century it's like and I just I read I just heard someone speaking on YouTube the other night and he was saying that the reason why businesses like the myers-briggs so much is that it doesn't offend anyone and I think that's true you know not to say it doesn't have uses but it doesn't offend anyone and I think the any graham types there is this sense when you find your type because it's so right on because it shows you your blind spots there is a way that it's it's kind of can be kind of disturbing or upsetting or it's what a friend of mine calls the ick factor that we warn people about like you make this may not feel good when you really read the truth about yourself at first and so I think that's that's part of it my freaks of course comes out of the Jungian tradition right and people have tried to map myers-briggs and anagram it doesn't work out really well yeah there isn't really a direct correspondence I'm starting to have conversations with there's some people at a organization called personality hacker and they're they're using the myers-briggs I think in some really great ways they're surly point they're trying to use it more more effectively as a real growth tool as opposed to just naming differences one big difference and I think why it's hard to line them up completely is that the myers-briggs types and Jung talks only about cognitive functioning it's just about the head level whereas the Enneagram talks about the head the heart and the body and so the types are these very interesting combinations of head patterns and heart patterns and body based or behavior action pattern which is kind of why it can be difficult to sort of draw real correlations with the with the myers-briggs types you have three beautiful blog posts up on your website and one of them is about taking the Enneagram seriously the second is about coaching and using it in coaching and therapy and the third is about do people really use the any ground to grow and and all three of them are very worth reading but the one about do people really use the any ground to grow I think that's really striking because I know for myself that I can I mean one of the things about being in Enneagram five at least they say but it certainly seems to me true is that a lot of other points on the intagram people have a fairly high x actor about it but the five can actually be quite satisfying a five I mean I mean or onslaughts Berg who I've worked with our executive director for for four years and after a year or so of working with me he turned to me he said I noticed you don't stress much and it's true because detachment is my middle name you know and also because I lead with the mind and not with emotion so emotion isn't there to get in the way very much and so you know I'm able to do stuff without without too much stress a lot of the time yeah but therefore protects perhaps particularly for me but I think is true for all it's quite easy to say to yourself you recognize what you're doing and you say yeah but that's because I'm a fine you know and so or I'm a three or on the seven or eight but that doesn't necessarily engage you in the real purpose of the anagram which is as a guide to the hard work to overcoming the personality and finding your true self and I think that's a really vital point about this that you know that that that's what it's really all about right right right yeah some people just get to the point of description and say well I'm doing this because of that you know which is you know that's self understanding but I do think the real purpose of it is to go beyond that is to early say here's what I tend to focus on here's how I'm potentially limiting myself here's what I'm not seeing and and use that as information to to expand I find it much easier so for example my wife is a four which is as you said the individualist or we have quite a number of fours here Jennifer's Tulsa for Kiera Epstein's before we have quite a number of fours around commonweal we have some ones and sevens and so on but I find that it's very helpful to me and compassionate understanding of both myself and other people even if I'm not driven to grow initially or you need to work on that more I love your point about how self observation never becomes habitual that's really beautiful yeah I know that the you know coming back to the but I find a number of the rest of us find it useful in compassionately understanding each other as we work together you know and in a marriage it's unbelievably helpful you know oh yeah a lot of people say the anagrams save their marriage exactly yeah or any kind of deep relationship yeah and any kind of deep relationship I mean you know the two on the for the most emotionally attached the five is the most you know isolated so my wife you know wants attachment and I'm sitting back in my study reading or something right so that does that but understanding each other comes deeply into the picture yeah I heard one of the greatest stories I ever heard of five tell on a Enneagram panel you know when people to people of one type talk about themselves it was a five and he was he was trying to get across the idea of how he relates to his emotions and he said his ex-wife was a four and he said here's the problem in our marriage in a nutshell he said if emotions were money she would be a millionaire and I would have a few pennies exactly and she always wanted more from me and I would give her like 12 of my 16 pennies and she would think that was nothing and to me that was a lot but fortunately or unfortunately the top of my stack of self-preservation and sexual and social is either social or sexual they're close and so the sexual five is the one with the most emotional access so fortunately I have more pennies and that's great yeah to do that yeah and then the social I mean so the sexual is as you say the one-to-one it's the you know that I don't like groups and less I'm doing something intentional like in school but or unless I'm working but the my two strengths are the one-to-one and then the social which is the new school yeah and it's it's you know it's called totem right yeah and so what you seek out is extraordinary people and then you want to be in one-to-one dialogue right you know yeah you want to create community based on your common interests exactly and bring people together around those things so we could do this with every point but I'm just drawing on you know my direct personal experience so you've taught all over the world what are the cultural differences between how Enneagram is held and understood in Europe and the United States and Latin America what are the cultural shifts I mean where is it most respected and seen most deeply if you can speak to that or just how is it held in different sectors it's very interesting the countries where and there's a lot of Enneagram or where it's really well respected or you have a really alive community I mean the interest one the first thing to be said about the Enneagram culturally internationally is that it's the same no matter where you go likes that the types you know a 5 or a 6 or an 8 is the same no matter what country you're in for the most part however there are cultural overlays I would say there's a lot of Enneagram in Brazil there's an organization in Argentina there's in Europe I would say interestingly in the Scandinavian countries there's a lot of Enneagram in Denmark has a really big community Finland and Denmark probably mainly and Sweden and now a growing one in Norway there's some in Italy interestingly in Germany there's any ground but they don't interact with the international community they don't come to conferences mmm I've heard Germans say that and I have a big connection in Germany because my brother lives there but I've heard Germans say that that one reason for that may be that when they come together they want to speak their own language and also I had a friend who is actually Austrian from Vienna she went to an any grammar conference in Germany and she said it was very interesting they were congratulating themselves for all getting together but there were basically three groups that didn't interact with each other so it's I think in some ways there's politics that gets in the way of expanding Enneagram communities but where else I know about Denmark what about New Zealand's in Asia there's a lot of intagram it's very big in China and it's really come up through the coaching community it's not tied together with coaching and coaching is really big in China and so the Enneagram is it's even in universities in China in Korea so the only the only two languages that might that the complete Enneagram has been translated into right now or Korean and Thai interesting so there's a Thai version in a Korean version and that Korea has a very nice community again there's politics there are a few different groups there but they have you know I went there a couple years ago and did a two-day workshop and we had 150 people there which was big there's some in Japan there's some in Singapore I've gotten emails from a guy in India recently in Pakistan so but it's also your true isn't it that at least people say that different cultures can be terms of national character type 2bath so Germany is considered a six colors ethics right and the United States is a three co-writes what are some of the other cultures that map so Brazil is a seven culture you can see that with their soccer team I think they're playing right now yeah don't tell me who won and France I believe is a four maybe even a sexual four country my Brazilian friend now lives in the UK and it's interesting in UK and Australia there's some Enneagram but it hasn't been really grown up especially because it's not accepted in business but in the UK my friend says he thinks it's either a 1 or a 5 culture probably five and what else do comes some degree also type religions to different points right generally in a loose way I think of like Buddhism is a five religion Christianity is a heart type potentially a to the same with Sufism is being the mystical branch of Islam Islam itself being more of an eight I thought Sufism was supposed to be a nine so that you said it's a very heart base it's very hard post next room but Islam itself is probably more eight right but the Asian country is very deferential do they type to a place on the anagram I don't know well enough I've heard different things like interestingly I've heard China's at three country uh-huh that's what they tell you on ourselves probably not the same subtype as the US which i think is probably social three I think Japan I mean they say it's a shame culture it feels maybe like four or five Korea I was just asking my Korean friends and I can't remember what they've said I've heard three and four Argentina is said to be either four or two social - or sexual for the tango is a sexual for dance so the people who love Enneagram the five certainly love it yeah but what are the other Enneagram types that are drawn yeah well I find that fours and twos come to it a lot currently because they're motivated to understand relationships no so it like I probably when I was more practicing as a psychotherapist I probably had the most fours and twos and all my clients fives like it because of the intellectual interest of it I thought I find that sixes often first have a have a reaction against it but when sixes get into it they can really like it the ones that you usually don't see as much as at Enneagram workshops or like eights and threes mm-hmm and in some ways their defense defensive mode is rewarded in our culture especially in the US and in that three culture getting results no my experiences the threes I'm close to don't want to have anything to do with any room I do have several I mean I've been around the anagram for a long time now I'm several friends no threes that are deeply into beta gram you know no yeah yeah so as we close the morning session I'd like to come back to your acorn metaphor which your friend got from ger g47 Chris Oh Cynthia Burge Oh got from a follower virgin right it's a parable and I believe Parker Palmer also uses the Acorn oh yeah yeah it's such a lovely metaphor you know that we're designed to grow into these trees and here we are these little things but as you said in that in that story that the that the dirty funky honey Graham I mean he says to the shiny ones I think it has something to do with getting buried in the dirt and breaking open right yeah yeah you know you know there's a lovely there's a lovely Jewish mystical story that someone asked a rabbi why it was that the Torah said that the words of Torah were written on the heart and not in the heart and the rabbi responded that that was because you had to wait till the heart broke open for the Enneagram for the you know the Torah to truly entered and so it's that need if we're going to awaken to be broken open to be deeply broken opening which actually leads me to the last thing I'll ask you you you teared up when you spoke of as a David Daniels son was he a boyfriend or simply a friend he was not a boyfriend he was a very very good friend like a best friend hmm yeah and had been since age 13 you know 13 to 25 when he died yeah how did he die under mysterious circumstances in New York City in the subway that one really knows what happened and he was at an incredible guy on his way to be was he worked in New York City as a investment banker he was about to move to London and the Friday night before he was out with friends and went into the subway to take it home and no one knows what happened hmm but they found his body yeah so is there some sense of destiny that you have that it was through your deep friendship with him that this emerged in your life there is that aspect to it you know it's it's almost like when something like that happens it's hard to find a reason for it you know and I think it's I've always the thing that's come to me is that idea of like something beautiful grows out of destruction and so it did have it did have that feeling to it like I was brought towards something and always joke I went into the family business because his kids are also involved in psychology his surviving children and so yeah there is that element to it that his friendship led me there and his father died in the last few years yeah yeah you just died last year mm-hmm yeah and he was how you were introduced yes yeah an incredible teacher taught at Stanford's taught at Stanford yeah and watching him interview people on any grand panels is what made me want to become a therapist you know what was he like Irene oh he was lovely it's a self preservation six very warm in the name of self preservation six is warmth warm gentle funny he had a beautiful way of both supporting people but thing kind of like putting his finger on exactly the thing they needed to kind of look at or her question or understand he would just pose a question that would be sort of a little bit ambition and mischievous but really wise and you know he saw the anagram as his calling as his life's work and really dedicated himself to it completely which you know for a Stanford psychiatrist to come to something like the Enneagram in the late 80s was was a big deal and I think he really helped it legitimate it anyways by how deeply he believed and he said it was by far the most helpful tool the most powerful tool he'd ever come across and how after his death is anybody continuing it at Stanford you know it hasn't been at Stanford for a while a little bit here and there a friend of mine was teaching and like the adult education program but it hasn't been around Stanford in it in the same kind of way in many many years so again unlike Jungian or Freudian it hasn't achieved that level of academic credibility yeah and that's just fascinating yeah I mean here's this amazing tool that used in business you know widely used in certain areas of the culture used in divinity schools deeply in the Catholic tradition and and yet and and you know what maybe that's a good thing yeah maybe that's the way it's supposed to be maybe those opposed well thank you for this morning and we will continue this afternoon [Applause] [Music] you [Music] you you

Channel: NewSchoolCommonweal

Views: 22,179

Rating: 4.8235292 out of 5

Keywords: TNS, Enneagram, psychology, archetype, archetypal, Gurdjieff, Jung, personality, Naranjo

Id: 3tHX5xojD58

Length: 112min 55sec (6775 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 25 2018