Enneagram for Ego Mastery
Welcome to Enneagram for Ego Mastery
“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?” ~ Thomas Merton
There once was a tinsmith who had been unjustly imprisoned. He was allowed to receive a rug woven by his wife, upon which he prayed five times a day, day after day. Over time, as he observed the pattern in front of his nose during his prostrations to the Divine, he came to see what appeared to be an image of a key woven into the design of the rug. Knowing the jailers did not earn a lot of money, he was able to persuade them to bring him tin and tools and he began making small artifacts for them to sell for a profit in the market. Meanwhile, he used the tools to make a key fitting the lock, and one day was able to escape from his prison cell.
This Sufi parable of the tinsmith in part is a metaphor for how most of us live life, confined to a narrow sense of ourselves. As a child dependent on those around us for all context of being and our safety, we experienced what brought us a sense of feeling safe and loved by those around us and, even more informatively, we experienced a sense of wounding when that feeling of being connected and accepted for our fullest, purest self was changed or lost.
Smart and adaptive to our internal landscape and emotions before we even had cognitive ability or words for what we were experiencing, we learned which of our behaviors and thoughts brought comfort and which brought pain through non-acceptance from those around us. We began to hide away those things which we judged as unsafe to be loved. Walking the same paths again and again, we developed repetitive feelings, thought patterns, interpretations, and coping strategies to avoid the pain of loss as we traveled away from the completeness of ourselves.
Our travel repeatedly through these patterns reinforced the path until they became habituated responses forming the peripatetic prison of our personal ego structure.
As adults believing the world around us is how it “is”, we are unaware that we have locked ourselves in an optional and self-created prison that has us living a vastly limited version of reality. Feeling a deep inner restlessness that we can’t quite define, we find ourselves stymied when we’ve sought after something that would feel more real, true and lasting. Caught between sensing something ineffable and infinite yet unable to fully glimpse it, we continue to sense our childhood pain and in our efforts to avoid it we experience ongoing suffering brought by attaching to and identifying with inauthentic, incomplete and impermanent aspects of our fictional ego self and personality.
In a rare quiet space, we may hear our heart’s desire to know who we truly are, and why we are here. But taught from a very young age to look externally for the answers to these vital questions and not being able to see the filters through which we engage and receive the world around us, we end up being able to access only a tiny portion of what is truly available to us as we live this human life.
Fortunately, with focus we can begin to see how and where we express who we believe ourselves to be through our conditioned responses that limit our human perception and receptivity to our full potential, to our connection to all that is.
With compassionate self-inquiry, we can learn to see what our prison bars and walls are made of and how we can work with our jailer. Using the Enneagram, we find our own tinsmith’s rug, a key design woven into it that will unlock us from the nature of our own ‘prison cell’ with a corresponding map back to our most robust and authentic self - the Soul.
Development of the Ego: from Jailer into Ally
We usually relate to the word ‘ego’ negatively, associating it with being egotistical, with behavior that seems arrogant, proud, or selfish to us, that it’s something we need to destroy, kill, or eliminate. While there is an element of truth here in that these behaviors do stem from the ego, the more complete picture of what the ego actually is is both much more subtle and robust, so it’s important that you begin to let these culturally created concepts go and understand the ego from the proper perspective as we embark on this journey to break free of the prison it locks us in.
At its basic level, the ego is an essential tool in the way our human mind is designed to work. As a conceptual structure in our minds, our ego is responsible for how we see the world and ourselves within it. It creates and maintains our relationship to the world by creating a separate self that is ceaselessly interpreting our experience, telling us stories and creating concepts to try to make coherent sense of it. It’s the human-self story that is completely fictional but seems as if it’s real because of how much you’ve become identified with it.
“Ego is any image you have of yourself that gives you a sense of identity—and that identity derives from the things you tell yourself and the things other people have been saying about you that you've decided to accept as truth.”
~ Eckhart Tolle
Ego is how humans make meaning out of their lives, and it has a path of growth and development that impacts and changes how it creates our individual perceptions of the world as we move along the path. On the negative side, it’s the genesis of all of our evils born of selfishness and survival. An undeveloped ego is one prone to more “evil” through unawareness, non-acceptance, and judgement/hatred. A developed ego can operate conceptually beyond the immediate fear-based gratification of the local self and extends its self-concept into the interconnected nature of all beings considered. Becoming more aware of and accepting of the “self,” facing and relinquishing fears of the “other” develops the ego to the point where transcending it becomes more natural.
In order to sustain freedom from the ego, we first must develop it.
Engaging in ego development work isn’t about making a stronger ego for ourselves the way muscle development is viewed. Instead, our stage of ego development influences what we notice and can become aware of—and therefore, what we can describe, articulate, cultivate, influence, change, and accept. As healthy development unfolds, autonomy, freedom, tolerance for difference and ambiguity, as well as flexibility, self-awareness, and skill in interacting with the environment increases and expands, while defenses the ego uses to protect our self-concept decrease.
Thus, ego development is a game of awareness and acceptance—the more your ego can expand its awareness, and the more it can embrace of that awareness, the more it evolves. The more it evolves, the more your mind becomes safe to disidentify with what the ego says is real, liberating itself from limiting structures in how you relate to the world around you.
Intentionally focusing on developing and expanding your conscious awareness as far as your soul would have you go helps you climb the spiral staircase of ego development in an ascension into greater realms of consciousness. The more expansive your consciousness becomes, the more likely you will be able to see the ego for what it truly is and make full use of its gifts while transcending its limitations.
Rather than being the jailer and the prison, you begin to know your ego for what it truly is...your soul’s sacred servant and ally, getting you ready for entry to Heaven on Earth by having you suffer in a multitude of ways that point to the growth work your soul came to Earth to complete.
Simply put, one perspective on achieving spiritual enlightenment can be seen as having developed your ego to the point of transcending it, and is part of what we seek to achieve through Enneagram work. We have begun this work through your mindfulness training where you have started your ‘beingness’ practice through meditation and other forms of mindful living. The next stage is to understand your ego structure and the path to your soul through the Enneagram.
What is the Enneagram and why do we use it in this work?
The Enneagram is used to bridge psychology and spirituality in identifying your personality ego structure and increasing your capacity to know and accept what is happening in the present moment.
Through mindfulness, you become more aware of your internal landscape as it is unfolding in the present moment—your automated and patterned thoughts, your emotions and body sensations, your memories, your conditioned associations and stories you tell yourself about what all of it means and who you must be.
In any transformational work, the ego will always seek to see itself as more “advanced” than it actually is and thus attempt to bypass the deep psychological work needed in order for you to genuinely reach the spiritual heights that you are capable of attaining. Real self-knowledge can be excavated using the Enneagram because it starts nonjudgmentally where you actually are—to shed light on the aspects of your conditioned self and where you hide in your shadows, dark, hidden and unfree.
When you combine mindful self-inquiry and a willingness to honestly and compassionately explore yourself and your personality patterns, you begin to see things in yourself and others with an openness that wasn't there before, giving you space to see the world through something other than your conditioned relational habits of reactivity.
As a tool for transformation, the Enneagram delineates and describes the realms of ego energy and their relational habits through nine different personality or ego types. Each of the nine types forms a different archetypal human character structure, representing the basic archetypes of humanity’s tragic flaws, primary fears, unconscious needs and desires, and interpersonal strengths.
Since much of the character structure is unconscious and because you can only let something go if you can perceive it first, the Enneagram is valuable as a tool in that it acts as a mirror for your type to make your nebulous ego more visible to you, as it operates within your specific self and experience of life as described in your type.
No one type is ‘better’ than another and we each contain within us all nine types with varying degrees of expression, with one particular type that we return to again and again. Within each type, we find its characteristic mental, emotional, and behavioral patterns that developed from the defenses, compensations and coping strategies against the pain of that type's childhood wound. As we explore our specific or primary type, we begin to see our ego’s particular set of coping strategies that it cleverly uses to hide who we really are in our fullest Being.
You can imagine your Enneagram type as the shape and characteristics of your ego vehicle that you use to navigate up the spiral of ego development. As you explore, contemplate, and dis-identify with aspects of your ego by overcoming its obstacles, you master your vehicle and accelerate to more developed stages.
While the Enneagram in and of itself is not a complete spiritual path, it centers on the element of self-knowledge, which is fundamental to all spiritual paths. By providing highly specific insights into your psychological and spiritual makeup, it can help you see what prevents you from remembering fully and in all moments the truth of your spiritual nature as well as give you a direction in which to work.
At its core, this work is a way through the separation you feel from Being by removing the layers of ego and who you believe yourself to be (identification), revealing your particular path back home to your original and true self as Divine Essence, your path to divine Love.
Watercolor illustrations from Chris Heuertz’s - The Enneagram of Belonging
Using the Enneagram in Ego Mastery Coaching
With Ego Mastery Coaching, we use the Enneagram of personality as a contemplative tool of discovery combined with a proprietary mindfulness practice designed to create awakening experiences. Through your own direct-realizations experienced in awakening, you work to eventually achieve Total Embrace. The Enneagram facet of Ego Mastery coaching helps us explore these three typically unknown aspects of you:
Shadow self-awareness: your shadow self is the often hidden and subconscious aspects of your personality that can destabilize and keep you from reaching and maintaining presence through negative reactive patterns. It’s the part of yourself that the ego can’t acknowledge, yet it has incredible power to overcome you when you are under stress or fear-based reactivity. Through the Enneagram, you will be exposed to your shadow self in a gentle way that allows for mindful orientation and the beginnings of integration that lead to a more stable, non-reactive present state of being.
Identification with ego vs higher self (soul-self): the ultimate utility of the Enneagram of personality isn’t to get you to identify further with your type (number); it is to show you a more holistic perspective of your ego so that you may begin to dis-identify with it. Even though you have a primary type, who you truly are isn’t any type at all. Life before the Enneagram is as if you’ve been living life without ever coming in contact with a mirror, and suddenly finding one, saying, “this is me?!” No, this isn’t you, it’s just a reflection of how you appear. The point isn’t to live life from the perspective of the mirror’s reflection, but to be able to eventually set the mirror down realizing you are so much more than what a mirror could show you.
Ego-structure orientation: the state of pure presence cannot be obtained when your ego is running your mind. Presence is an ego-transcendent state in that presence only exists when the ego is at rest—not running your life through its perceptions of superiority and inferiority, comparison, judgment, defensiveness, offensiveness, fearfulness, and the like. In order to achieve more permanent presence, you must be able to identify what is and isn’t your ego so as to build a subject/object relationship with it. If you are ‘in ego,’ the subject and the object are one and you totally believe in and are totally identified with the prison you are captive in. When you can perceive the object that is your ego (realizing you are not your prison) and use mindfulness to transcend it (becoming awareness itself), you seat the ego in a resting, passive state. Only then can your soul—the naturally relaxed, undefended presence contained within you—become dominant and act through your personality (authentic power).
What to Expect with Enneagram Work
Throughout our coaching together, we continually work with the Enneagram and its complete set of energies in order to achieve Ego Mastery. So while you have a number that is ‘your type’, you are actually the entire Enneagram—manifested as different perspectives given the particular situation. You find out what your ‘type’ is by taking this test (RHETI).
Our purpose in using ‘your type’ in coaching is to navigate through your type’s primary, archetypal patterns in operation within your ego. This helps you see how traits you take as ‘your self’ are actually a personality trait your Soul picked from a menu of 27 different possibilities shared by all of humanity. This helps take the nebulous nature of disidentifying with your ego more tangible.
Rather than identifying with your type (“oh, I’m a ___ and so I am this way”) the way you would with a Meyers Briggs type test, you might approach the work as if you are examining a clothing outfit you prefer to wear because it is comfortable and familiar. If you find a stain on a sleeve, you wouldn’t identify that you yourself are stained. When you can examine the clothing of your ego and shed compassionate light on what is found, it strengthens the process of separating from and disidentifying with your ego, allowing you to shift in your beliefs and disrupt the patterns that keep you from experiencing more of your unique radiant essence.
While we use the Enneagram to focus our work, our time together is not intended to teach you directly about its many pieces and aspects. It is a complex system with many facets and layered aspects that create subtle distinctions and rich structure for deep exploration on the journey of awakening to and embodying your fullest self. Fortunately, however, it is not necessary to understand all, or even a large portion of it at this point in your process for it to be quite beneficial in your spiritual growth. Much of the information will be more easily understood when explored through the lens of your own type, using your own experiences of your thoughts, feelings and body sensations to see the landscape of who you have thought yourself to be (self-concept).
In this light, the Enneagram work will unfold in the following ways:
Enneagram Practices, customized to your Enneagram type in order to challenge you to consciously engage your ego structures
Contemplative audio tracks and worksheets will provide guidance and space to see where your ego structures are in operation. These will orient around specific practices for your type and can be listened to throughout the day and week to guide your self-exploration
Familiarizing yourself with your RHETI type report from the Enneagram institute is an expedient way to illuminate parts of you that you’ve hidden away or denied. We’ll talk more about aspects of your report as we explore together.
Exploring supplemental materials connected to your type on the Enneagram Institute website, as well as any aspects of the system you feel drawn to explore more deeply. For an overall explanation of the major pieces of the system and how they fit together, visit https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/how-the-enneagram-system-works
As you deepen the connection between your mind, body and heart, please remember that spiritual growth is a process that requires us to be gentle and patient with ourselves. Self-compassion in this work is non-negotiable, so do be kindful!