Self-Understanding - Enneagram Coaching in Marbella
SELF-UNDERSTANDING AS PART OF YOGA
For me self-understanding is an important part of yoga. Real transformation happens only if we bring the awareness to the way our ego-structure functions and perceive consciously our thought patterns and our automatic behaviors. This is my own experience as a spiritual seeker. That is the reason why I included the self-understanding through the Enneagram.
From all the coaching techniques I have experienced the Enneagram was the one that brought the most profound transformation in my daily life. I use the Enneagram therapy method to help you to look into your ego-structure and use it as a tool together with the other techniques in order to achieve a real change in your daily life.
ENNEAGRAM - SELF-UNDERSTANDING THROUGH AWARENESS
The Enneagram is a system that describes nine personality types, based on thought patterns, inner motivations and basic beliefs. Those who find their main type are often amazed to find an accurate portrait of themselves.
The Enneagram is a self-understanding method that brings the awareness to aspects of our behavior and explains the motivation for our way of thinking, acting and reacting. Often people feel resistant to be put into a box, when they first hear about the Enneagram, but the truth is that the Enneagram is the way out of the box. Through bringing the awareness to the functioning of our ego-structure, the unconscious thoughts and behaviors lose their power over us. We can stop living on automatic pilot, take more conscious choices and reduce our suffering.
The Enneagram shows us how we are caught, but also shows us our capacities and is helpful in our daily life, teaching us how to use our abilities and live a creative life. This system helps us also to understand other people and have compassion for them, improving the relationships to our loved ones and at work.
Everyone emerges from childhood with one of the nine types dominating their personality. Subsequently, this inborn orientation largely determines the ways in which we learn to adapt to our early childhood environment.
The Enneagram with Riso-Hudson type names
Type One is principled, purposeful, self-controlled and perfectionistic
Type Two is demonstrative, generous, people-pleasing and possessive
Type Three is adaptive, excelling, driven and image-conscious
Type Four is expressive, dramatic, self-absorbed and temperamental
Type Five is perceptive, innovative, secretive and isolated
Type Six is engaging, responsible, anxious and suspicious
Type Seven is spontaneous, versatile, distractible and scattered
Type Eight is self-confident, decisive, willful and confrontational
Type Nine is receptive, reassuring, agreeable and complacent
The Centers of the Enneagram
The Enneagram is divided into three centers:
- the Instintive Center (type 8, 9 and 1)
the Feeling Center (type 2, 3 and 4)
the Thinking Center (type 5, 6 and 7)
The inclusion of each type in its center is not arbitrary. Each type results from a particular relationship with issues that characterize that center. These issues resolve around a powerful, largely unconscious emotional response to the loss of contact with the core of the self. In the Instinctive Center, the emotion is Anger. In the Feeling Center, the emotion is Shame and in the Thinking Center it is Anxiety. All nine types contain all three of these emotions, but in each Center, the personalities of the types are particularly affected by that Center’s emotional theme.
The Wing
No one is a pure personality type: everyone is a unique mixture of his or her basic type and usually one of the two types adjacent to it on the circumference of the Enneagram. One of the two types adjacent to your basic type is called your wing.
Your basic type dominates your personality, while the wing complements it and adds important elements to your total personality. Your wing is the second side of your personality, and it must be taken into consideration to better understand yourself or someone else.
The Three Subtypes
The three subtypes, also called instincts are a third set of distinctions that are important for understanding personality. We each are endowed with specific instinctual intelligences that are necessary for our survival. We each have a self-preservation instinct (for preserving the body and its life and functioning), a sexual instinct (for extending ourselves in the environment and through the generations), and a social instinct (for getting along with others and forming secure social bonds).
While we have all three instincts in us, one of them is the dominant focus of our attention and behavior - the set of attitudes and values that we are most attracted to and comfortable with. These instinctual drives profoundly influence our personalities, and at the same time, our personalities largely determine how each person prioritizes these instinctual needs. Thus, while every human being has all three instincts operating in him or her, our personality causes us to be more concerned with one of these instincts than the other two. We call this instinct our dominant subtype.
Taking into consideration that the personality types have one or the other wing and at the same time one of the three subtypes, in the end we have 54 personality types in the Enneagram.
Directions of Integration (Growth) and Disintegration (Stress)
The inner lines of the Enneagram connect the types in a sequence that denotes what each type will do under different conditions. There are two lines connected to each type, and they connect with two other types. One line connects with a type that represents how a person of the first type behaves when they are moving toward health and growth. This is called the Direction of Integration or Growth. The other line goes to another type that represents how the person is likely to act out if they are under increased stress and pressure. This second line is called the Direction of Stress or Disintegration.
The Direction of Stress or Disintegration for each type is indicated by the sequence of numbers 1-4-2-8-5-7-1 and 9-6-3-9. This means that an average to unhealthy One under stress will eventually behave like an average to unhealthy Four; an average to unhealthy Four will act out their stress like an average to unhealthy Two; an average to unhealthy Two will act out under stress like an Eight, an Eight will act out under stress like a Five, a Five will act out like a Seven, and a Seven will act out like a One.
The Direction of Integration or Growth is indicated for each type by the reverse of the sequences for disintegration. Each type moves toward integration in a direction that is the opposite of its unhealthy direction. Thus, the sequence for the Direction of Integration is 1-7-5-8-2-4-1 and 9-3-6-9.
No matter which personality type you are, the types in both your Direction of Integration and your Direction of Stress or Disintegration are important influences. To obtain a complete picture of yourself (or of someone else), you must take into consideration the basic type and wing as well as the two types in the Directions of Integration and Disintegration.
More information about the Enneagram is to be found in the following webpages I recommend: