Who do you think you are?

I think about the Enneagram as a two stage process. The first is about accurately identifying your personality Type. This can often be mistaken as the goal - with the thinking that once we know what Type we are, the exercise is finished. In reality however, it is really only the beginning because the Enneagram doesn't tell us who we are, it tells us who we think we are. It reveals to us our ego self, not our essential self.

The second part is the understanding that this idea of ourselves is not the whole story, that our idea of ourselves is limited and therefore a limitation. It was formed during our childhoods and is an important part of the developmental process. However you could say that there comes a point in our lives when it is past its sell-by-date. In a sense, our idea of our self (our ego) is a distraction - it acts as a metaphorical layer of clothing - something by which we signal to ourselves and others who we are. It gives us our identity and we are reassured by it but after a certain point it starts to reinforce our idea of self to our own detriment in that anything that comes into our life that challenges that view, anything new that unsettles or questions it, is often easily rejected. It is profoundly threatening to confront anything that questions our ideas, especially our idea of who we are.

However if we can stay with the discomfort, if we can open ourselves to enquiry, allow ourselves to be curious about how we function, we become more open and less entrenched in ego. It is awareness and presence in the moment that help to dissolve the ego.

Our idea, it turns out, is like an outfit we wore and it can feel a relief to see it for what it is, to know that we are not it, that we are so much more. With this understanding we start to free ourselves from it and increase our ability to simply be.