So where does our Enneagram type come from? How is it formed within us?

The Enneagram’s nine ways or nine types describe the raw material of humanity’s integral fears and desires. It’s widely agreed upon that every one of us possesses bits of all nine types, but a dominant type emerges in each of us. What’s less widely agreed upon is how type comes to be part of our human experience. Is Enneagram type a product of nurture or nature?

Some believe that our first experiences of being human, coupled with adversity, suffering, or trauma, form mental and emotional rails, so to speak. Our ego then sets the train car (our personality) on these rails. Notions of the Enneagram’s Original Wounds1 or Childhood Wounds help support this theory, but the word wound in this instance can be misleading. For example, do primary caregivers really wound their firstborn by bringing another child into the family? Surely a young, tender ego may find the loss of attention to be a wound (or at least the loss of being the sole center of attention), but these sorts of early childhood experiences are common enough and, when assessed, don’t create predictable personality structures.

One would imagine that if our dominant type were largely the fruit of our environment and nurturing, then parenting formulas could force or produce Enneagram types in children. But as any parent knows, it’s nearly impossible to control personality through parenting techniques.

Though I understand the intention around using the language of Childhood Wounds, it’s important to be clear about what we mean when appealing to the term. Perhaps the Enneagram’s Childhood Wound might be better framed as the way we absorb the burden of our caregiver(s) transferring their shadow.

As children, we internalized the pain of imperfect upbringings because we didn’t have the psychological capacity to process the impression of our caregiver’s shadow which develops when we let our pain go unprocessed and unresolved. Our shadow—and we all have one—is the part of our ego we are unable to consciously recognize. Though it is neither good nor bad, it is where we unconsciously “park” some of the worst of ourselves—destructive patterns, addictions, or other seemingly unpresentable parts.

This internalization of pain isn’t a real wound per se but a result of transmitting and absorbing our human inability to love perfectly as well as receive love perfectly.

This doesn’t mean our caregivers get a pass for the mistakes they made, but it does take the blame off them. There are real physical and emotional wounds we experience as children, but the Enneagram’s Childhood Wound idea is better understood as an attack on our original innocence or our original Virtue, not necessarily a physical or emotional trauma (though both could be true). And so I sometimes opt to use “attack on Virtue” as a clearer term for what is traditionally meant by “Childhood Wound.” This term helps explain the Childhood Wound of the Enneagram as a loss of contact with our True Self or a loss of contact with presence.

For more than twenty years I directed an international organization focused on meeting the needs of vulnerable children living in under-resourced communities. The work included helping set up children’s homes, drop-in centers for extremely poor and vulnerable youth, care facilities for children impacted by the global AIDS pandemic, and small business initiatives for young women who had been trafficked into the commercial sex industry. Most of the children and youth we worked among had experienced unspeakable harm and abuse in the forms of violence, sexual exploitation, loss of family, and loss of home—real childhood wounds, in many cases intentionally perpetrated against them. If personality structure is predictable, then these kids should have proved the case that Enneagram type is directly correlated to nurture and that actual wounds form or fortify type. But there was little to no direct correlation between the trauma they had experienced and the Enneagram types they reflected.

Even among the experts, the descriptions of the Childhood Wounds or the nine attacks on the nine Virtues are hotly debated. I find the consensus about the different descriptions generally accurate, but it is important to remember these are more or less (over)simplifications rather than clinically diagnosed pathologies. In fact, it’s common for people to agree a version of these descriptions feels familiar from their childhood, and it’s important to validate a person’s sense of what may have caused their own disconnect from their original Virtue.

In my opinion, one of the best resource for locating basic descriptions of each of the nine attacks on our Enneagram Virtues is the EnneaApp created by Elan BenAmi, MA, LPC, with material provided by Lori Ohlson, MA, LPC. This list may be the clearest, but it may simply explain impressions rather than actual experiences.

These descriptions of what prompts our loss of contact with our True Self should birth in us a deep compassion for our own selves as well as others. If we understand these experiences as our caregivers’ inability to love perfectly and the ways we absorbed that, we are more capable of viewing these pains as invitations for inner growth and healing.

I’m reminded of the story in John 9:1–3:

As Jesus walked along, he saw someone who had been blind from birth. The disciples asked Jesus, “Rabbi, was it this individual’s sin that caused the blindness, or that of the parents?” “Neither,” answered Jesus. “It wasn’t because of anyone’s sin—not this person’s, nor the parents’. Rather, it was to let God’s works shine forth in this person.”

It’s curious that Jesus’ companions wanted to place blame on someone for the man’s disability. I imagine if we hold on to the language of Childhood Wound here, we also will find ways of attributing blame to our caregiver(s) for many of our own personal limitations.

But Jesus acknowledges the blindness wasn’t the fault of anyone, but rather an opportunity for God’s restoration to be made manifest.

The story continues in John 9:6–7:

Jesus spat on the ground, made mud with his saliva and smeared the blind one’s eyes with the mud. Then Jesus said, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam.” So the person went off to wash, and came back able to see.

This story helps us answer the question, are we suffering the pathology of how we were hurt or neglected in our childhood? Is it because someone harmed us or is it because we actually need an obvious limitation as an invitation to give ourselves to our inner work?

The symbols here are loaded with significance. Jesus heals the man’s blindness by rubbing mud (the raw material of our humanity, getting back to where we came from and where we’re ultimately headed) in his eyes sockets and then instructing him to go wash in the water.

This is what the Enneagram shows us: that in returning to the literal organic matter of our humanity (the soil that echoes, “From dust we came and to dust we shall return”) we come to terms with not only our limitations but the miraculous potential of that which we uncover.

Washing the mud out of our eyes is a subtle metaphor for baptism, a second form of birth that cleanses the harm from our childhood while also inviting us to return to what wounded us as children so that our eyes may be opened to the gift of who we are and who we can become.

This biblical account helps shed light on the mystery of type and shows how the very effects and limitations of our Childhood Wound are invitations to wholeness, not tragic flaws that can’t be overcome.

While some Enneagram experts argue that type is essentially formed by nurture, others suggest we are born with an affinity toward a dominant type and predisposed to that type regardless of our earliest childhood impressions. I’d argue that this theory finds support in sets of twins who grew up in the same (or similar in some cases) home, in the same environment, with the same caregiver(s), and with the same access to opportunity and resources, but in their adult lives clearly identify with different Enneagram types.

My first Enneagram teacher and mentor, Father Richard Rohr, has suggested that Enneagram type is one-third nature, one-third nurture, and one-third the decision we make as children to fill a role needed to survive or thrive in our families and environments.

I personally believe we are born into our type and there’s nothing our environment can do to change that. Rather, every experience we translate through our type consolidates its impression on us. It’s as if when we’re born, our soul lands on an arbitrary place on the circle of the Enneagram, and from that perspective of the world we develop attitudes we embrace as a way of framing context for every experience we’ll ever have.

This theory suggests then that the Childhood Wound doesn’t actually form type in people but is absorbed as a form of confirmation bias, or used to validate the affinity toward a dominant type that is gifted to us at birth.

Another common question frequently raised is when does our type take hold? Again, conflicting positions have yet to congeal around an accepted consensus.

Many of the great teachers caution people to steer clear of the Enneagram until they’ve entered their late twenties or early thirties. But my sense is that in the evolution of our human consciousness, we are more capable of recognizing our dominant type at earlier ages—especially if we have experienced great love or loss, great pain or joy, or have given ourselves to developing a rich inner life through spiritual practice and contemplative prayer—mindful ways of nurturing our spirituality that are framed by solitude, silence, and stillness.

However, I frequently find myself cautioning parents who think they’ve been able to type their children, sometimes even before the children could speak. Coming to terms with our type is a rite of passage, a sacred experience that should be owned by each of us when we are ready for it. Additionally, for the first few decades of life, we’re still coming into our own sense of self, stretching the limits of our personalities and psyches. Having the freedom to do that without our type being assumed for us by a caregiver allows necessary personal development to remain unhindered.

In some cases I have seen young adults come to terms with their type after having been typed differently by a caregiver. Sometimes the impact of the mistyping can be devastating, causing enormous pain and profound confusion. Parents do better to focus on their own type and how it affects their parenting commitments rather than typing (or mistyping) their children—a mistake that could have agonizing consequences.

Resisting the impulse to attempt to type others, especially our children, allows for the mystery of type to emerge apart from other aspects of one’s personality. This is helpful because, without understanding the “why” behind type, we sometimes mistake personality or temperament for essence, which only keeps our type hidden from us.

Temperament is an aspect of type, but it’s just one fragment that makes up the whole of who we are. For example, some of us draw energy from being around other people, which is frequently noted as a mark of an extroverted temperament, while others who acquire inner energy from being alone are assumed to be more introverted. While attitudes and moods fluctuate, our temperament is a disposition that nonetheless may change as we mature. It’s not uncommon for extremely extroverted people to move toward introversion later in life. Temperament is also exposed in people who tend to be naturally optimistic while others are pessimistic. But optimism and pessimism often fluctuate depending on our frame of mind, the kind of company we keep, or the phases of life we cycle through.

Unlike temperament, our dominant Enneagram type stays with us throughout our lives; type does not change. I like to think of the various results of the profile tools and tests we appeal to in an effort to learn about ourselves as the egoic spaces we inhabit.

One way to illustrate this is to view our temperament (often categorized as one of sixteen combinations of basic preferences that can be determined through the MBTI® inventory—a typology developed by Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother Katharine Briggs based on Carl Jung’s typology theory) as the specific room we stay in; our StrengthsFinder® results (based on Gallup University’s list of thirty-four talent themes, a weighted list of innate strengths that carry potential to increase a person’s performance success) as the way we decorate our room; but our Enneagram type as the kind of home we build (maybe some of us live in a hip urban condo, others prefer a gable-roofed Thai-inspired house, while others are happy to call home a one-story ranch). Our Enneagram type is the home we are likely born in and will most definitely die in.

But let’s not get too fatalistic about the Enneagram. It’s not static like most popular profile systems; rather, it’s dynamic and constantly in motion, just like our personal patterns of progress and regress. The Enneagram’s movement hinges on the directions our type takes based on every choice we make, every action we take, every thought we have—all of these contribute either to our overall health, which brings about movement toward integration, or to a disordered state of unhealth, which causes movement toward disintegration.

How Do I Determine My Type?

Once you learn about the Enneagram, how do you determine your type?

There are three basic approaches to discerning type, but before mentioning those I want to emphasize that our type is ours to bring forward. Because the shaping of our type is partially confirmed to us though the experience of our Original or Childhood Wound, learning about our type can be painful to our memories and humiliating to our ego.

So it’s worse than a “party foul” to type someone; it is an intrusion or an overreach. It’s also an indication that someone doesn’t understand the power and potential of the Enneagram. Moving beyond a caricature of personality traits to understand the essence behind type unearths the true offering of the Enneagram: access to incredible transformation. Until someone is ready for that, their thin understanding of the Enneagram can lead to more harm than good.

So please be careful not to “out” someone’s type, even if you believe you’re helping someone you think has mistyped; their type is really theirs to discover and theirs to share when they feel ready to do so.

Online Tests

When attempting to determine your type, the most popular approach is taking one of numerous Enneagram tests. Many free Enneagram tests are available online, and most of them are a suitable start to exploring what your type might be. However, if an online test is your preferred method of typing, I’d suggest paying for the Enneagram Institute’s RHETI test because it is widely regarded as the most accurate, thorough, and time-tested.

Though online Enneagram tests are readily accessible, some experts advise against them for a variety of reasons, including racial, national, ethnic, or cultural biases2 built into the assumptions of the questions contained within a test.

Another caution is our human tendency to “test” the test, to try to force an outcome by answering questions based on hoped-for results. If you approach an Enneagram test in this manner you will not get an accurate analysis.

Finally, another common caution is that a lack of self-awareness could lead you to answer questions based on who you wish you were, who you want to be, or even how you think other people see you.

If you do end up taking an online Enneagram test, you may find that the way the results are compiled is confusing. At nearly every workshop I teach, I hear someone suggest they are a “Seven with a Four wing” or a “Two with a Nine wing” (both impossible, as these types do not live next to each other on the circle, and both lead to confusion, not clarity, about type). Many of the online tests produce outcomes that require the testee to appeal to a professional to translate the results, which sometimes requires additional financial commitment. I generally advise people to consider only their top result when reviewing the results of their tests. If the primary type isn’t accurate, then try another test or another method of determining your type.

Meet with a Trained Professional

A second approach to determining your type is meeting with someone trained in conducting typing process interviews. The Narrative Enneagram3 offers an excellent typing process training that produces capable conversation partners who have been equipped with the skills to guide an interviewee through a series of questions that allows them to bring forward their own type through self-reflection and self-discovery.

A typing interview can last up to an hour and may require payment to the professional conducting the interview. A typing interview is particularly beneficial if you are stuck between two types and can’t figure out which is your dominant type. In an interview format, the professional helps an interviewee navigate through common mistyping pairs for clarity and type discernment.4

Do Your Own Research

Finally, most experts agree that if you are honest with yourself and courageous enough to explore the borderlands of your own psyche, then merely reading the thick descriptions of each of the nine types will be a sufficient method for determining your type. As you read through the materials, the type you feel most exposed by or most uncomfortable with is usually the one that ends up being yours. Doing your own research requires a level of maturity that assumes self-awareness and truthfulness. Because these assumptions are critical to an accurate self-typing process, many of the Enneagram’s experts have cautioned people against exploring the Enneagram until they’ve reached their thirties.

Personally, I don’t think age needs to be a determining factor in this process. As noted earlier, we’ve seen rapid evolution in human consciousness, and people are experiencing their “middle passage” (the Jungian term for what is often colloquially referred to as a “midlife crisis”) earlier and more frequently than in past generations. As people come into a deeper awareness of self at younger ages, or bump around the bottom of life making tragic and painful mistakes earlier in life, they seem to be capable of discerning their type at younger ages as well.

Regardless of how you find your type, your personal discovery of your own type is the key to opening the sacred map of the Enneagram and beginning your journey home.

The Theory of the Enneagram’s Wings

Like a color wheel that displays the blending of hues and shades around a vibrant circle, the Enneagram illustrates how each type mingles and mixes with the numbers on either side of it.

Most Enneagram experts agree that we can balance our type with its wings, or the numbers on each side of it. For example, if you are dominant in type Six, you may find yourself leaning into some of the characteristics of type Five and/or type Seven. Theories on the wings differ; some think we develop only one wing while others believe we can develop both or sit loosely between them. Father Richard suggests that as we mature, our wings may become more prominent and our dominant type less socially visible.

While we may observe that at different phases in life we’re more dependent on one wing than the other, the dynamic possibilities of countless differences within type are partially rooted in our movement between and toward our wings.

I’ve found this true in my own life. Personally, as someone dominant in type Eight with a very strong Seven wing (signaled by playful energy), I have had to learn how to lean into my Nine wing (characterized by cooperation) to find ways of bringing diverse conversation partners together around difficult conversations or intense work environments. This of course is necessary for all Eights, who often come across as offensive or abrasive, combative or shocking; to understand how the energy of Eights can impact people requires the hard work of developing the Nine wing as a bridge for others to feel safe with them.

As always with the Enneagram, a heightened awareness of our type and tendencies can propel us into growth.

The Fixations and Passions of the Enneagram

Before introducing the Fixations and Passions of the Enneagram, perhaps the most well-known aspects of each type’s structure, let’s briefly return to the Holy Ideas and Virtues for context.

If you believe that in the earliest days of infancy we are as close to perfect as we’ll ever be in our lives—the most unencumbered from our tragic flaw and the most uncontaminated by its consequences—then the Holy Ideas and Virtues of the Enneagram types are the two fundamental aspects of our soul’s essence that reveal in us the raw material of our True Self.

These two features show us the original righteousness of hearts (Virtues) and minds (Holy Ideas) fully at rest in their essence.

Genesis 1:27 reads, “Humankind was created as God’s reflection: in the divine image God created them; female and male, God made them.” And Genesis 1:31 concludes, “God looked at all of this creation, and proclaimed that this was good—very good” (emphasis mine). This proclamation was made before Eve and Adam were sent out of Eden. Still, humanity, very good? Seriously?

If you grew up believing in original sin, you’ve probably had a hard time seeing anything “very good” in your own humanity. But the Enneagram’s Holy Ideas and Virtues may actually point to what was very good at the beginning of creation—our best and purest sense of self before sin gummed things up.

The American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr popularized this doctrine as “original righteousness”—not just innocence, but faithfulness in relationship to God. The experience of sin then marred humanity’s original righteousness.

In the incarnation, when God became human, the notion that there is goodness in humanity was restored. And with the possibility of restoration came hope for redemption. We see this when Jesus submitted himself to the sacrament of baptism (John 1:29–34), not just to locate his identity in a broader community of faith but also to reveal original righteousness for all of us: “We must do this to completely fulfill God’s justice,” or “righteousness,” as it’s translated in many other versions (Matthew 3:15).

Our Holy Idea and our Virtue, rooted in our original righteousness, spotlight our indispensable purpose for being.

It is the loss of our original righteousness, that Edenic state of sinless perfection and unbroken relationship with the Source of love, that creates the delusions of our Holy Idea and Virtue.

In the structure of each Enneagram type, the shadow of the Holy Idea is the type’s traditional Fixation—how the mind copes with the True Self’s loss of perfection and presence.

The shadow of the Virtue is the type’s Passion—how the heart aches and longs to reconnect with the Virtue of the True Self.

The Enneagram’s Fixations, the nine type-specific mental tactics used to convince an uncentered mind that its Passion is legitimate, are the inverse of the Enneagram’s Holy Ideas. And the Enneagram’s Passions, the nine type-specific coping skills related to each type’s state of emotional imbalance, are the inverse of the Enneagram’s Virtues.

At the root of nearly every decision we make in life is the desire to find our way home, back to our essential nature, our True Self, and back to God. Sadly, the reality of living in the broken world outside of Eden is that we often go about this in all the wrong ways. So the Fixation and Passion of each Enneagram type become a sort of addiction loop, a misguided attempt to find our way home, back to our True Self where we are aligned with our Holy Idea and Virtue.

I think of the Fixation and Passion as a tiny flashlight that our ego attempts to use to find our way home in the dark. These are the most primitive of all our coping skills, and when we rely on them they become self-destructive patterns that ironically keep us in the dark.

The traditional Fixations of the Enneagram are: The traditional Passions of the Enneagram are:

For many people, their Enneagram Passion is the fragment of their type to which they subconsciously give permission to lay claim to the whole of their sense of self. For example, some Threes end up believing their own deceptions about how they portray themselves socially and lose sight of the gift of their essence. Some Sixes may be so preoccupied with their fear that they overcompensate by positioning themselves as guardians, losing sight of their other contributions.

It’s easy to overidentify with our Passion because it often drives so much of what we do. In fact, when people attempt to self-diagnose their type, the list of Passions often seems most relatable. By accepting our Passion as an intrinsic part of ourselves (or our innate fatal flaw when it becomes an addiction), we find confidence in the Enneagram’s ability to describe our character structure. But naming and taking responsibility for our Passion is devastating to the ego and can be extremely painful. At the same time, taking ownership of our Passion also leads to tremendous growth. That’s why it’s fundamentally important that we understand what is meant by the traditional Passions of the Enneagram.

Historically when Christians have tried to translate the Passions, they’ve wrapped “sin” language around them or overlaid the seven deadly sins5 with the capital sins to come up with a list of nine. But frankly, this is a bit of a stretch and has only led us further away from coming home to our True Self.

I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with the customary alignment of the Enneagram’s Passions with notions of sin. Technically the word passion comes from the Latin word passionem which means “suffering” or “enduring.”

Today and throughout history, Christians have used the term passion to describe the suffering of Christ. But if Christ was sinless, then there wasn’t any sin in his suffering—unless the connection to the passion of Christ is in relationship to carrying the suffering of the sin of humanity. Even in this reach for meaning we see many prominent theologians now reconsidering atonement theories.

So this brings us to the meaning of the Enneagram’s Passions as the ways each type manages and suffers the heart’s disconnect from its True Self—the painful emotional experience of enduring the ego’s tethering to its tragic flaw. What we are really getting at here is the anguish of having lost contact with our Holy Idea and Virtue.

I’m dominant in type Eight, and so my traditional Passion is lust; however, I would agree with those who clarify its meaning by suggesting it is more accurately a “lust for intensity.” So if my type’s Basic Fear is of dying, then my lust for intensity is a subconscious attempt to cling to life, to feel truly alive in the purity of innocence. What is sinful about that? What is sinful about trying to reconnect with my True Self or return to my Holy Idea of truth and my Virtue of innocence?

Clearly too much of anything often leads to destructive patterns or addictions, where sin can be found. Certainly our Passions can distort into sin. This is especially true when the consequences of our addictive behaviors catch up to us. I imagine this is what the nineteenth-century American philosopher Elbert Hubbard was suggesting when he wrote, “We are punished by our sins not for them.”6

In one of my favorite books on the Enneagram, The Enneagram of Society: Healing the Soul to Heal the World, Claudio Naranjo does an excellent job explaining the actual sense of the Enneagram’s Passions.

Naranjo translates Augustine’s notion of sin as it relates to ignorantia (ignorance) and dificultas (difficulties, distresses, embarrassments) as “a disorder of awareness and an interference with action.”7

We might think of ignorance as our ego’s incomprehension of our Holy Idea (the mind at rest with its True Self) and of distress as the ego’s ache from not living into its Virtue (the heart at rest with its True Self). It is this “disordered awareness” or detachment from our True Self that so often drives our action in destructive ways. Disordered awareness and action are exactly what block the fruit of our Holy Idea and Virtue from being realized, keeping us from our True Self and stuck in sin.

Naranjo goes on to suggest that it may be appropriate to use a sense of pathology, essentially cause and effect, to bring clarity and to “rescue the original sense of the word sin that had almost been forgotten after the contamination of the notion of wrongness as a dysfunction with that of wrongness as evil.”8

This idea advances the question, what do we mean by the Passions, specifically when working with the Enneagram? To differentiate these concepts, Naranjo argues, “The difference between sins and pathologies is, however, the locus of responsibility: in so far as ‘sin’ accuses, making the individual responsible, ‘pathology’ excuses, making past or present causes beyond the individual responsible. While we are victims of mental and interpersonal pathologies, we are responsible for our sins.”9

Both sins and pathologies, of course, cause suffering. This gets to our longing for a reconnection with presence to which our Passions point. The human condition into which we are born gifts us with these Passions for more. “The [P]assions reveal themselves to be a thirst for Being, ultimately based on a loss of contact with the Being.10

Regardless of whether the Passions of the Enneagram are more pathologies than sins or tragic flaws, “The King’s Diamond,” a traditional Jewish parable,11 helps us make sense of what is exposed through our understanding of our type.

Long ago lived a wealthy king whose fortune was unrivaled. He possessed valuable treasures from all known lands including paintings and sculptures from the world’s greatest artists. The legend of his prosperity was punctuated by his most prized possession, a precious diamond bigger than any that had ever been seen before. In fact, it was larger than the king’s own hand and nearly flawless in its color and clarity.

When the king wasn’t admiring it himself, the diamond was put on display for all his loyal subjects to admire—protected by armed guards, of course. Visitors from far and wide came to gaze upon its mythical beauty.

As the king’s fame grew and his kingdom flourished, he credited this very special diamond as the source of his prosperity.

One afternoon as the king gazed upon the diamond, holding the precious stone up to the sunlight, to his horror he noticed a deep and long crack from the top of the stone to the very bottom.

“How could this have happened?” he exclaimed, heartbroken with the devastating knowledge that it would be impossible to fix this terrible flaw.

His court gathered around him with his most esteemed advisors attempting to appease his fears. The best jewelers throughout his kingdom visited his throne room to examine the flawed diamond. After inspecting the crack, most were concerned that any attempt to work on the stone would cause further damage, splitting it into countless smaller stones. The only ones to offer solutions suggested cutting the diamond into two new gems which would still be the largest in the land. But the king refused, holding on to an unrealistic hope.

Finally, a poor, elderly man arrived at the palace and asked if he could examine the stone. Initially the king’s guards thought he may be a homeless wanderer but quickly learned he was a gifted lapidary whose engraving artistry was thought to be the best known to humanity.

After scrutinizing the flawed diamond, this old man looked at the king and said, “Your Highness, I know what to do. I can fix this. Not only will I restore its beauty, but I will make it more valuable than you could even imagine.” The king sat in disbelief wondering about the audacity of this old man’s claims.

“Your Majesty, all I ask is that you let me do my work undisturbed, unmonitored. In two weeks’ time I will return your diamond to you. In the meantime, allow your patience and trust to give me the privacy I need to focus on my work.”

The king, concerned this might be a con, agreed, adding the condition that the elderly stonecutter must do his work in the palace. A room was prepared and guards appointed to keep watch over the old man’s coming and goings. With that, the old man took the stone and began the slow, undramatic work of restoration.

The king couldn’t rest, obsessing over the future of his most prized possession.

After two weeks, the old man let the guards know that he was finished with the work and would like to present the diamond to his king. The palace guards rushed to the king’s throne room with the most anticipated news of the kingdom, and the court was assembled for the presentation.

Standing before His Majesty, the elderly lapidary held up the diamond, wrapped in a dirty old polishing rag. He carefully pulled the stone from the cloth. There, engraved on the top of the diamond, was an exquisite flower, and the crack down the middle of the stone was its stem.

The king was astonished; the diamond was actually more stunning than before and more beautiful than anyone could have dreamed.

Whether we understand the Enneagram’s Passions as sins, sin tendencies, the shape of each type’s tragic flaw, or the yearning to return to our True Self, the invitation here is to find the beauty in our imperfections however they manifest themselves.

This is one of the most useful ways to approach the Enneagram, learning to honestly yet compassionately observe both our attempts to return home to our True Self and our compulsions that derail us from living into our potential.

Our mind uses the Fixation of our type as a way of convincing our heart that the Passion is justified, creating an inevitable loop of which we must be aware. For example, if the Passion of type Two is pride or, perhaps more accurately, self-abnegation, and the Fixation is flattery, then Twos need to watch for the ways they flatter themselves and the ways their false humility leads to pride. Those dominant in type Seven need to remember that their Passion of gluttony or overdoing what brings them pleasure is kept in play with their Fixation of anticipation—always thinking about what comes next after they’ve finished feasting on all that their gluttony consumes. This mental and emotional loop of coping doesn’t have to control us. Instead, by learning to observe it, we learn to correct its claims on our well-being.

This has been the Enneagram’s gift to me.

How the Enneagram Found Me

It was during the summer of 2000, in the slums of Cambodia, that the Enneagram first found me. I met Craig Greenfield, a New Zealander humanitarian and activist living in one of Phnom Penh’s poorest neighborhoods. It turns out Craig was my first Enneagram guide. As he explained the Enneagram to me, I was immediately curious but simultaneously suspicious. It made sense, but I resisted being typed until a couple of weeks later when I returned home.

If I’m honest, the symbol itself threw me. It looked super evil, like two demonic pentagrams having sex, and I was immediately concerned that it might not be congruent with my Christian faith.

But it had captivated my attention, and I found myself returning to Craig’s introduction over and over again. I found several free online tests, took quite a few of them, and then aggregated the various results on a spreadsheet that I emailed to Craig, asking him to help translate what they meant.

From our time together in Cambodia, he already had a sense of my type, so rather than explaining common mistypings or how to understand the various test result methods, he just told me, “I’m pretty sure I know what your type is, but let me ask you this . . . ,” and then he posed a question (actually, less a question and more an assumption) about how I relate to my mother.

Somehow, he accurately described a complicated yet subtle dynamic in the way I view and respond to my mom.

I was stunned. Was it that obvious? Could someone really size up all of humanity with just a few inquiries about everyday familial patterns?

I felt exposed, as if he saw right through me. At that moment everything changed for me, and I began seriously exploring the teachings of the Enneagram.

Still, I’d be lying if I said the Enneagram didn’t continue to weird me out.

More than once, friends bought me copies of Riso and Hudson’s The Wisdom of the Enneagram, only for me to quietly return those new copies of the book because much of the interspiritual language felt uncomfortable to me at the time. But the Enneagram is relentless, and once it finds you, it doesn’t let go—truth and light are like that. I did give in eventually, delving deeper and deeper into all the material I could find on my type (which is common and what most of us do, but there’s so much more to the Enneagram than just the material available about our types).

As is typical of young converts to anything, I started promoting the Enneagram among my friends and professional community. The practical application for interpersonal relationships was transformative. I read many of the classic Enneagram texts, and eventually I had the great honor of being tutored in the Enneagram by my mentor, teacher, and friend Father Richard.

At that time, tragically and of my own doing, I had been bumping around the bottom of life for a while, suffering the consequences of some major life crises created by some unfortunate personal decisions.

After one such humiliation I made a trip to Albuquerque, where I first met Father Richard. Hoping to lean into urgent inner work and much-needed personal restoration, I spent ten days with a few other conversation partners exploring contemplative practices and contemplative spirituality. Father Richard’s pastoral care and gentle mentoring further deepened my experience and understanding of spiritual practice.

One day, sitting at a picnic table under New Mexico’s hot sun, I shared lunch with Father Richard. I was uncharacteristically quiet. Keenly perceptive, Father Richard recognized the sadness and pain in my eyes and asked if I was okay. My tears fell quietly down my cheeks, and, like I feel with so few others, I knew I was safe with him.

Father Richard wouldn’t let me off the hook; he pressed in and asked me why I was there. Hardly answering his question, I broke down. Trying to fight back the tears, I couldn’t talk. It was then that Father Richard’s teaching of the Enneagram started with a smile and a gaze that seemed to penetrate my soul with pastoral concern.

After hearing the why for my visit, he asked me if I knew my Enneagram type. That was it. That was all he needed to know. In the moments that followed, his smile grew and grew, celebrating the pain I was experiencing as the beginning of good things for me. I didn’t understand what he knew nor did I have the ability to truly digest those earliest bits of wisdom he was offering, but I did my best and kept learning.

A couple of years later I once again found myself in New Mexico, but this time in a better place spiritually and emotionally. And that’s when Father Richard really let me have it. I spent a week with him, uninterrupted hours absorbing wisdom about the Enneagram I hadn’t come across in any of the books. It was absolutely incredible.

Working with the Enneagram for nearly two decades has been transformational. Growing in self-awareness and self-knowledge has changed everything. No doubt it can be devastating to come to terms with our fatal flaws, our characteristic sin tendency, and the primary fear hiding in our subconscious. But awareness of these aspects, or fragments, of our identities is what catalyzes growth.

I’m convinced that approaching the Enneagram from a contemplative posture—a spirituality marked by solitude, silence, and stillness—is the most effective way to work with this character-structure system for whole-person growth and transformation.

Moving beyond the mere discovery of our type’s common traits into a deeper exploration that involves learning to discern with our type, facing the temptations and fears of our type, and ultimately praying through our type leads to real inner freedom. And that’s when our true identity can be unleashed.

Endnotes

  1. I find Kathleen Hurley and Theodore Dobson’s term “Original Wound” a more accurate portrayal of the original shock our three levels of consciousness absorb than the term “Childhood Wound” because of the assumption that Childhood Wounds were caused by or inflicted upon us by our caregiver(s). ↩︎
  2. An often under-interrogated but urgent invitation for the Western Enneagram community lies in the obvious and lamentable lack of ethnic diversity among its leading experts. Though the modern use of the Enneagram was codified and propagated by Óscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo (both South Americans), the Enneagram has since been disseminated largely through white, North American teachers. This observation has led to fierce critique of white, Western privilege and racial bias assumed to be fused into the way the Enneagram is currently taught and utilized. On the rise, however, are remarkable Enneagram authorities such as Nina Barnes, Nhien Vuong, Danielle Fanfair, Henna Minhas Garg, Talía Guerrero Gonzalez, Avon Manney, Priabpran Punyabukkana (who runs PRANA Consulting in Bangkok, Thailand), and many others who are decolonizing some of the cultural bias overlaid on much of the contemporary Western Enneagram material. ↩︎
  3. The Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition also trains and certifies teachers who conduct interactive panel interviews during which participants are taken through a sophisticated inquiry process that allows them to bring their own type forward. Though a powerful method to help a person discover their type, Enneagram panels can also be confusing when participants who have unknowingly mistyped attempt to represent a type other than their own—which demonstrates another reason why professionally trained Enneagram teachers are in urgent demand. ↩︎
  4. Please check out Appendix 2 in The Sacred Enneagram: Finding Your Unique Path to Spiritual Growthhttps://amzn.to/3YZq0z4 for another helpful tool to find clarity regarding common mistyped pairs. ↩︎
  5. These include anger, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, and sloth. These capital vices or cardinal sins are not listed or identified as the “deadly sins” in Scripture, but were arranged by the desert father Evagrius Ponticus. ↩︎
  6. Elbert Hubbard, The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard: Mottoes, Epigrams, Short Essays, Passages, Orphic Sayings and Preachments (New York: Wm. B. Wise & Co., 1927), 12 ↩︎
  7. Claudio Naranjo, The Enneagram of Society: Healing the Soul to Heal the World (Nevada City, CA: Gateways Books and Tapes, 2004), 22. ↩︎
  8. Ibid. ↩︎
  9. Ibid., 23. ↩︎
  10. Ibid. ↩︎
  11. I first came across this story in Clarence Thomson’s Parables and the Enneagram and have since seen several other versions. I have done my best to honor the original intent of the story that is attributed to Jacob ben Wolf Kranz of Dubno. ↩︎

While living and working all over the world for 20 years with an international humanitarian organization, Chris Heuertz was first introduced to the Enneagram in a slum in Southeast Asia. Since then, he has trained under some of the great living Enneagram masters — including Marion Gilbert, Helen Palmer, Father Richard Rohr, and Russ Hudson.

As an International Enneagram Association Accredited Professional Chris now works as an Enneagram one-on-one coach and consultant, teaches the Enneagram all around the world, hosts the Enneagram Mapmakers podcast, delivered a TEDx talk on the Enneagram, and has published seven books including two bestselling Enneagram books: the award-winning The Sacred Enneagram and The Enneagram of Belonging.

This article first appeared in Enneagram Monthly, Aug./Sept 2017. © Christopher L. Heuertz. Enneagram illustrations by Elnora Turner; do not use without permission. Cover image by Yannick Menard, courtesy of Unsplash. Content is a revised and updated excerpt from Chris Heuertz’s The Sacred Enneagram: Finding Your Unique Path to Spiritual Growth, copyright © 2017 by Chris Heuertz. Used by permission of Zondervan. www.zondervan.com. Do not reprint or share without permission.