I haven’t posted anything for a year and a half, and then I post twice in one day. Lockdown life. Just kidding!
I’ve resumed blogging because finally, I have something to say. That and I have an online course in the making, and want to give you an idea of what that’ll be like.
The plan is, whenever I write a long post, to accompany it with a ‘little’ (a la Gretchen Rubin’s podcast) for those who don’t have the attention span for a 3000-word post. That’s the intention anyway. Let’s see how we get on.
Shall I finally talk about the subject now?
I knew I had to write about the patterns between Shadow Work and the Enneagram types when I noticed, during some recent training in Shadow, that the Enneagram wasn’t mentioned once (not even once!) This post is my release valve on all the tension that built up as a result. Better that then blurt it all out on a Zoom call with a hundred participants, I thought.
The gist of the post is twofold:
1. If you want to clean up, then do Shadow Work. Without identifying, holding and eventually resolving our Shadow issues, we are not as fully conscious as we could be. There is just no chance of embodying our fullest potentials without doing Shadow Work. (Being in) Personality is purgatory. Until we name the activity of the ego, we will not be free.
2. The Enneagram is a shortcut for doing Shadow Work. The sacred typology helps us to identify Shadow, witness it, and reconstruct it. The main ways are through observing your type’s Fixation (also called Passion), looking to the types that your type is connected to for clues of aspects of ourselves we haven’t integrated, and exploring the mistaken childhood impressions (often called wounds).
That’s it. That’s saved fifteen minutes of your life. Your welcome.
So what’s this about terraces and gluttony?
Not entirely necessary I admit, just me trying to be a bit clever and arty. Okay, me borrowing Beatrice Chesnut’s cleverness, and artistry (she won’t mind).
BC, the legend, discovered the links between Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Enneagram.
I’ve never read the poem so don’t quote me on it but, in the second part, Purgatorio, Dante has to deal with these annoying terraces, which represent sins.
Well, it turns out that these terraces correspond to the Enneagram type Fixations. The Fixation, as I elaborate on in the longer post, is the Shadow-in-Chief of each Enneagram type; a replacement for a specific virtue that we lost connection with. Unless we observe it and make a conscious effort to disengage from it, we suffer, whether we are aware of it or not. It’s all very heartbreaking.
My terrace is Gluttony (the Fixation for Enneagram Type Seven). Didn’t feel flattering to learn that was my terrace, way back when. We are on friendlier terms these days.
Which is good, as I’m still doing time on my terrace.
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