Enneagram

“I often describe it as like, it's like Myers-Briggs, but actually useful.”

“And then I'd say the best exercise I've done on this dimension is learning about the Enneagram. Which are for those not familiar is it's kind of, you probably heard of Myers-Briggs or different personality typing systems. I think of the Enneagram is like it's …”

“Our attention when we're not present is sort of welded to these preoccupations and patterns, and that's what we're looking at with the Enneagram. That's what our type does without presence. It tends to become the survival machine.”

“You have a type, most definitely, but you are not a type. It's not who you are. It's not what you are.”

“There was a major study of temperament in infants done at New York University back in, she was early 19 sixties by two famous psychologists, Thomas and Chess. And in that study, just Looking at it empirically, they boiled it down to nine basic patterns of temp…”

“What we can say is that, that the basic template Is there in temperament? Meaning it's, we're born with it. We don't know if it's genetic or if it's forms while we're still in the womb, but it's very early. In other words, we're sort of set on a certain track …”

“How much I'm wedged into my type, how much I'm stuck in that stuff is a function of nurture, because if I'm growing up in a crazy, difficult, scary, heartbreaking environment, and that's always going to be true to some degree, but if it's a lot, then, of cours…”

“I don't think people can do anything about what their dominant type is, but what we can do is work at freeing ourself up from the scary parts of it and opening to the beautiful parts of it.”

“As we get liberated from being Identified with the pattern. As we get less stuck in it, the good sides of all of the nine points, which also represent human capacities or talents or gifts, start to come into play more and more.”

“And the Enneagram, in a sense, we're going into the core motivations. So it goes very deep. It's not like Myers-Briggs or some of the others, which is no diss to those systems. It's just that the Enneagram is looking at a deeper Layer of human motivation.”

“People, when they're having difficulties, are always hoping that someone will show up for them in the way they would for us when they're at their best.”

“For the eight, nine, and one, they're looking for respect. They're looking for a field of respect.”

“Two, three, and four Want to be seen, known, and validated. You see me, you get me, you're validating, you're okaying, you're with my feelings.”

“Five, six, and seven, it's a little harder to put into words, but they're looking for someone who can just be there with them in a steady way. Not approaching, not withdrawing, not glomming on, or taking over, or fixing, and not abandoning.”

“There are three ways you can grow in self-awareness. One is to become more self-reflective... The other way to grow in self-awareness is to use some instrument... And the third way to grow in self-awareness is to create an incredibly feedback rich environment …”