Tag: true nature

Enneagram

Finding your Enneagram type

Suzanne Hollifield-Eller

One of the most amazing tools I’ve ever found for self-discovery is the Enneagram. Unlike many other personality typing systems, the Enneagram doesn’t just give you a description of your type and then leave you dangling and wondering how you can possibly overcome your fears and hang-ups. Instead, it provides you with a road-map for growth, and it gives you red flags for the times when you are stressed and regressing to former less healthy, fear-based reactions instead of responding with empathy, love and your true nature.

The Enneagram is centuries old. Some date it as far back as the Ancient Greeks, and a more developed theory is found in Sufi mysticism and Christian desert mysticism. Modern teachers such as Don Riso, Russ Hudson, Helen Palmer, David Daniels, and Tom Condon, among others, see it as an elegant psycho-spiritual tool for self-development.

It is better to discover your own Enneagram type than to have yourself typed by someone else. This is because only you can know your true motivations for what you do and what you believe. Motivation is more important to typing than actual behavior.

For example, I may nurse you when you are sick. If I do this out of a sincere desire to help you during a time of difficulty, it is a different motivation than if I do it because I want you to think I am a really good person whom you should depend upon and need so I will feel safe in our relationship. Only I can know why I helped although others probably guess at our true motivations far more often than we give them credit. Indeed, we may need to do a little digging to face our true motivations. Sometimes we don’t want to face our darker inclinations. The Enneagram helps us do that.

There are lots of Enneagram resources on the Internet. The Enneagram Institute, where I was trained, has great examples of each type and tests you can take to help you determine your type.  I’ve also included two handouts to help you explore your Enneagram type.

The first, At_a_Glance, is a two-page PDF that I have used in Enneagram trainings and classes that describes each type in a nutshell. The source is mostly my Enneagram training at the Enneagram Institute with Don Riso and Russ Hudson, but it also has information from other sources, which I have noted at the bottom of the PDF. You will probably see other people in the descriptions at first. You may even find yourself vacillating between two or three possible  descriptions for yourself. If so, look at the descriptions of the numbers before and after. One of those will be your Wing. I am a Four on the Enneagram with a Three Wing. I sometimes think I may be a Six, but I have more Four qualities. Also, I had a Six mother and a Six sister. Four is what works.

The second handout, Chakras and the Enneagram, is taken directly from Mary Horsley’s book, The Enneagram for the Spirit, and is used with permission. It describes how imbalances in each chakra might affect each Enneagram type and which essential oils are most effective in crating balance.

If these handouts tweak your interest, I hope you will spend some time researching the Enneagram. Chances are there are workshops near you.  Learning about your type is fun and informative and can be a tool for spiritual growth.

Self-Care & Finding True Nature

Forgiving Ourselves

Suzanne Hollifield-Eller
man in shadow
Getting free of our superego’s constant criticism can enable us to relate more authentically with ourselves and others.

I always look forward to the Easter season. When I was working in the public schools, I got a week’s vacation, and that was worth something in itself. But now that I’m a massage therapist and not teaching, I still look forward to Easter. Maybe more so this year because the winter was so cold.

Easter heralds spring and new life. Not a little of its charm, I think, is its coming after the season of Lent when we are charged to look into our own hearts and to acknowledge the ways we have fallen short in our lives. Somehow, as it is meant to do, Easter morning redeems that forty days of introspection, and everything feels crisp, clean, and possible.

One of the challenges of Lent and Easter is to forgive the people who have taken advantage of us, who have broken faith, who have ignored our wishes and needs. That is easier for me to do when I remember to live in the present moment and don’t constantly replay the tapes of my past. Indeed, living in the present cures more than just my victim mentality.

Still, when it comes right down to it, the hardest person for me to forgive is the one who looks back from the mirror each morning. I guess part of our hardwiring as human beings includes a superego voice whose sole purpose it to judge and criticize our every thought and move–to make us feel bad about ourselves.

Of course, occasionally the superego pats us on the back and tells us how much better we are than some other poor slob, but that kind of narcissism is just as deadly to our self-forgiveness as the constant critical voice.

Indeed, if we are honest, we often don’t forgive others because they have in fact hit the very sore spot that our superego has been attacking our whole lives. 

The only way we can be free to forgive ourselves (and others) is to tell the superego to shut up! When I first started trying to do this, I was met with even more guilt and shame because it felt to me like I was telling my mother to shut up, which was not a good idea in my childhood home. A wise friend helped me see that the difference was that my mother’s criticism came from a place of love, but my superego has no emotions. Its purpose it to make me feel rotten about myself or rotten about everyone else.

Originally, my superego may have started as the voice of my mother trying to protect me, and its function may have been to protect me. But I have outgrown its scare tactics and its self-righteous analysis of events. I am not a child anymore. I have experience of my own to draw upon. I don’t need protecting and certainly not by a disembodied, cold, cruel imitation of someone who actually had my best interests at heart. I can tell it to shut up!

Once my superego is silenced, I begin to see that whether my mistakes of the past were made from ignorance, fear, anger, or even hatred, they came from a place that now deserves compassion. (Surprisingly, I also see the same is true for others.) I can begin to atone for my mistakes, either directly if it is possible, or indirectly if direct recompense would make matters worse. I can begin to acknowledge my weaknesses and also begin to see my strengths. I can get in touch with something inside myself that is good and true. I can begin to really like that person in the mirror. 

The critical voice of the superego is not honest conscience. My Enneagram teacher, Don Riso, told me that you will know the difference between the two by their fruits. My conscience tells me what is good, decent and right. My superego attacks no matter what decision I make. It is just as relentless when I am gentle and kind as it is when I am forceful and cruel.

When I silence my superego, I can begin to allow a deeper place to open inside. That is the place of my true self. It is a place that knows what is good and true and beautiful because that is its own nature. It is connected to Source. It can be found in the silence that comes when I tell my superego, “Shut Up!”