I recently attended an inner work retreat called “The Experiential Enneagram” with expert teachers Beatrice Chestnut and Uranio Paes of CP Enneagram Academy. It was a profound experience that left me forever changed.
It was also integral in showing me firsthand how deep you can go with the Enneagram beyond just describing the characteristics of the nine personality types.
The Enneagram is a powerful spiritual tool and guide to psychological and emotional development.
How Do We Use the Enneagram for Personal Development?
When used properly, the Enneagram has the capacity for all of us to do deep inner work.
We all have stories that have shaped us throughout our lifetime. It’s crucial to get in touch with past traumas and childhood wounds to purge ourselves from the guilt, shame, sadness, or any other negative feeling we may have to move past it and become the best version of ourselves.
We take on our personality in these early years as a defense against people or things trying to harm us. And while it often works when we’re little, we forget to break out of that personality and lose touch with our true selves in the process.
The good news is we can get back to who we truly are, commonly referred to as our “Essence.” But we must do deep, often very hard, inner work to get there.
As a friend of mine often says, “the only way out is through.”
3 Ways to Use the Enneagram for Personal Development
The Enneagram is almost like a glorified cheatsheet. It gives us a guide to our personality type and ways in which we can get past it.
Using the Enneagram for personal growth can accelerate our inner growth process and can be used to help us improve our emotional, psychological, and spiritual well-being.
1. Emotional Work
We all embody four core emotions that we either underuse or overuse. The four core emotions are sadness, anger, fear, and happiness.
The Enneagram helps us determine which emotions we may be overusing in our personality and which ones we may be underusing according to our type.
For example, Type 7s overuse joy and happiness to avoid their fear of suffering. This type would benefit by getting more in touch with sadness and processing their deeper emotions when doing inner work.
2. Psychological Work
As mentioned earlier, doing psychological work is imperative to take your personal development to the next level. This includes talking to a psychotherapist regularly to work out past traumas and understand childhood wounds.
Doing psychological work is a practice that ALL Enneagram types can benefit from. It’s essential to work on these issues before embarking on or in conjunction with spiritual practices.
3. Spiritual Work
Before becoming more mainstream in the last few years, the Enneagram was mainly used as a spiritual tool. That’s because it teaches us that our personality type is just a cover to who we really are.
We are spiritual beings living in human bodies.
There are many resources available that talk about how we can go from “vice to virtue,” meaning going from a lower emotional state (the “vice” or “passion” of our type) to a higher emotional state (“virtue”).
This is not easy work. It can take some people a lifetime to get to this level, but it can be done.
For example, a Type 2 can go from their vice/passion of pride, (learn more about Enneagram passions here), where they unconsciously make themselves more important than others, to the virtue of humility, in which they understand that they are no more or no less than anyone else.
Using the Enneagram for personal development and being on a path of deep inner work will have its highs and many, many lows. But it can all be worth it when we embark on a journey of returning to our higher selves.
If you’re interested in going deeper with this work, I encourage you to check out CP Enneagram Academy’s Personal Mastery Program. Bea and Uranio facilitate a combination of psychotherapy and spiritual work during their retreats, and it’s amazing how much you learn about yourself and the other Enneagram types in the process.
