THE EXPLORATION OF YOUR HUMAN NATURE AND DIVINE POTENTIAL

This is one of my favorite passages in “Who You Are Meant To Be” by Rosemary Hurwitz.

  

— The Enneagram can teach you about both your human nature and divine potential. You have read a short story of each of the nine universal types; you have learned about the strengths and challenges, passions and blind spots, Wellness Maps and wing styles, instinctual centers and ways to practice balance. Remember that these mainstays are about general patterns of thinking and behaving. There may be as many nuances within each of the nine universal personality types as there are people in the world. Discovering your unique nuances is your wonderful work within the Enneagram. Your inner work is a great investment in you, and your relationships whatever combination of personal growth tools you use.

You now know that having an understanding of your personality type and your own potential is the start of the inner work of personal transformation. After all, actually realizing who you are meant to be takes more than the knowing.

Your deepened awareness and acceptance of that newfound awareness may provide a new pathway within you. Your practice of new behaviors that free you and get you out of your own way will provide you with profound shifts.

The effects you feel will be so worth any work you have done to realize your growth. Be patient with yourself.  Sometimes after an aha insight, you change behavior immediately. More often, other times it takes baby steps to see progress within yourself.

The good news is that the Enneagram gives you practical ways to gain consciousness and make a resourceful choice. You will come from your own internal safety not your own often self-created stress. One way that cannot be emphasized enough is through breathwork. Breathing into the emotional passion that gets triggered can help to deepen your awareness of it.

Science has now shown us that with repeated practice, we can break out of our habitual patterns and reactions more often.

Dr. Donald Hebb of McGill University has investigated the neural circuits in the brain, the connections that fire or light up when we are thinking certain thoughts or are engaged in certain behaviors. His conclusion? “What fires together wires together.”

In other words, when your neural circuits fire together in a certain way repeatedly, they tend to do more of the same. In Enneagram terms, your habitual patterns make deep grooves within your personality. When you change the pattern through conscious choice, instead of continually going on autopilot, you disrupt the pattern, and the grooves, lose their edge and soften.

Liz Tobin, Family Health Practitioner, taught it to me this way:

“Connect to your detached observer within and notice how your feelings, perceptions and interactions change. The next time you are faced with a situation that pushes your buttons, stop and pause. Say to yourself, “Here is an opportunity for me to change this way of mine. I have the power to change my response. I do not have to react in the same old way.”

People can change and grow. It takes effort but like anything that gets practiced it gets easier with time.

Remember Dr. David Daniel’s 4 As related to the Enneagram: Awareness, Acceptance, Action, and Adherence. 

Awareness of yourself is your type’s wisdom that resonates within you  Acceptance of your whole self entails both sun and shadow sides  Action: making changes in your patterns by using this newfound awareness to make choices that are balanced for your greater well-being.  Adherence or practice: repeatedly using your Wellness Map and Enneagram wisdom.  Becoming aware is the first step, accepting your new awareness and using strategies to create new behavior, is action. Repeating these new behaviors is adherence or practice.

On Amazon!