The Practical Enneagram

Writer, publisher, entrepreneur, and inner work veteran Jason Stern (Sexual 9), talks about essence, personality, and the inner work opportunities he offers in the Fourth Way method.  Along with the clarity I found in this conversation, I was touched and inspired by what Jason shared about why he writes. 

• Jason's business in the world, and Chronogram magazine's reason for being [2.25]
• What has motivated his seeking [8.52]
• The role of psychological work and the difference between essence and personality work [11.25]
• Jason's intention in/when writing the columns for Chronogram [17.35]
• His thoughts on using a system (i.e. the Enneagram) to map essence [20.40]
• An overview of Gurdjieff's philosophy [25.43]
• The practical work happening during the inner work groups that Jason leads [30.20], along with an example of a practice.

Book reference:
Beezlebub's Tales to His Grandson

Find/learn more about Jason
Jason’s website and inner work opportunities
His book: Learning to be Human

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Email me: [email protected]

Music: Purple Planet Music, Valley of Eden

Multi-disciplinary spiritual teacher, Adi Vajra (Sexual 5), describes what tantra is and does, along with his beautiful synthesis of tantra methodology - visualisations and body/energy work - with the Enneagram, including his joining of the Holy Ideas with tantra.  

• Adi's story and how he came into contact with the Enneagram through Eli Jackson-Bear [3.00]
• What's a non-dual approach to the Enneagram [5.07]
• Adi's type [6.03]
• What's Adi's spiritual location these days [6.55]
• How Adi uses the Enneagram in his work with people [7.58]
• What is tantra? [10.01]
• Is the Tantric world/experience accessible for all? [14.50]
• Adi's work that joins tantra with the Holy Ideas [17.55]
• Is it important to have an experience of the Holy Idea for our type first? [23.35]
• Are the Holy Ideas mental states/perspectives? [24.24]
• Do we sustain the embodiment of the Holy Ideas? [25.05]
• I ask Adi a question about a reference that A.H. Almaas makes to a tantra practice in his latest book, the Keys to the Enneagram [27.50]
• How do Enneagram Nines get along with tantra? [31.10]
• What about Sixes? [33.20]
• Adi's thoughts on Keys to the Enneagram [34.40]
• How would a person begin with tantra? [38.02] 
  
  

Adi-related links

• Essential teachings, Adi's podcast 
• Insight Timer
• Adi's website, Vajra heart
• Flow Hood river yoga

 
Books we referred to:

• Fixation to Freedom: the Enneagram of Liberation, Eli Jackson-Bear
• Keys to the Enneagram, A.H. Almaas
• The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram, Sandra Maitri 

Stay connected to the Practical Enneagram:

• Website
• Youtube

Email me: [email protected]

Music: Thinking Ahead, Purple Planet Music

Kundalini yoga teacher, Enneagram teacher and goddess of Athens, Lynn Roulo (Sexual 7), describes the support that kundalini breathwork can offer in interrupting our type patterns. Lynn also shares about her book about intimate relationships - an amazing collection of narratives on relationships between each type combo - and her own growth journey. 

• Who is Lynn Roulo? [2.29]
• What's Lynn's type and subtype [5.11]
• What is Kundalini yoga and why pair it with the Enneagram? [5.39]
• Is Kundalini yoga and such particularly beneficial for head types? [9.48]
• The theory behind matching kriyas and meditations to certain types [11.16]
• How do we know a kriya has 'worked'? [12.58]
• Do we need to do a kriya for 40 or 90 days? [14.02]
• What's a kriya and what's the science behind a kriya? [16.43]
• Lynn on her book, the Nine Keys [19.31]
• How doing life from sx7 is going  [23.46]
• An unsavoury email from a lawyer of an Enneagram organisation [26.14]
• How attention to diet has sourced Lynn's development [28.49]
• Can kundalini help us with instinct-related fears [29.54]
• Accessibility of kundalini [33.32]

Links:

• Lynn's website and Youtube
• Books The Nine Keys: A Guide Book To Unlock Your Relationships Using Kundalini Yoga and the Enneagram and Headstart for Happiness: A Guide Book Combining Kundalini Yoga and the Enneagram

Stay connected to the Practical Enneagram:
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Email me: [email protected]

Music: Feeling good, Purple Planet Music

A practitioner-style interview with Dr Janeshree Govindasamy (Self-preservation 9), a 20+ year medical doctor and healer who offers Retreats into Presence using the Enneagram among other modalities. 

• Who is Janeshree? [1.40]
• How she became clear that presence was integral to healing [3.45]
• How she relates to the Enneagram [7.20]
• Janeshree's identification of her type [9.50]
• Is quality of presence similar to 'essence'? [11.30]
• How does the Enneagram help us to become more present? Is there a process? [13.11]
• Beatrice Chestnut and Uranio Paes's levels of awareness model [16.41]
• How did the Retreats into Presence come to be? [18.20]
• Does her group work touch on instinct work? [23.04]
• The limits of studying pathology when it comes to healing [25.05]
• How Janeshree integrates the HeartMath work [28.22]
• Is there a go-to presence practice that Janeshree uses? [31.20]
• How do we embody people? [33.28]
• The reason that the retreats are structured the way they are [35.30]

Contact Janeshree to learn more about the retreats.

Stay connected to the Practical Enneagram:
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Email me: [email protected] 

Music: New Beginnings, Purple Planet Music

Instincts have been getting much of my attention this past year, which is why I was very happy to get to sit with the exciting John Luckovich (SX Four), whose new Enneagram book is just brilliant and illuminating. 

• Just a few of my insights from John's book [2.21]
• What prompted John's obsession with instinctual drives [3.25]
• What the Instinctual Approaches are and how John developed them [5.32]
• Can anyone use the Instinctual Approaches? [11.39]
• The Self-preservation Approaches, Grounding, Sensing and Pragmatism [16.24 -23.15]
• The Sexual Approaches, Pursuing, Magnetism, Intensification [24.39-36.46]
• The Social Approaches, Availability, Signalling and Navigating [40.20-50.12]
• Do we combine the Approaches with different behaviours around our blind instinct? [50.57]
• How to use the middle instinct to access the blind spot [55.00]
• Are we always going to be a self-preservation (etc) type? [56.47]
• How do we know when we are integrating the blind instinct? [1.00.05]
• What's next for John? [01.02.19]

A written list of the Instinctual Approaches:
Self-preservation
Grounding: Rooting to one’s center and place of balance through the body.
Sensing: Sensitivity to one’s own state through the senses and signals of the body. Attention is on physical feedback and impressions.
Pragmatism: A through-line of attention orienting to processes and progression. Sensible, pragmatic, and enduring attention.

Sexual
Pursuing: Locking on to what attracts with focused energy and attention. Letting what’s extraneous fall away. “Tunnel vision” on the object of desire.
Magnetism: Displaying oneself, while vacillating between pushing and pulling back attention and energy to create interest, tension, and preoccupation. Provocative display to draw attention, attract some and repel others
Intensification: Amplifying and galvanizing energy and excitation with the aim of dissolving or penetrating boundaries. Bringing a quality of activating urgency that encourages the surrendering of boundaries in self and other.

Social
Availability: Opening personal boundaries to invite and receive others. Attention is fanned outward and open, with easefulness about what enters and leaves our field of attention. Includes being receptive to the inner life of other.
Signalling: Sensing my impact on others and sensing the flow of exchange and conveying feelings and intentions appropriately to the situation with in body language. This is allowing relatedness to impact and express through the body.
Navigating: Sensing the layers, boundaries, and nuances of social environments and circumstances, opening to an “overview” sensibility. This brings texture to social contexts that help in recognizing the mechanics of interpersonal dynamics, knowing one’s place, role, or relationship within them.
 
More about John:
John's must-read Enneagram book: Instinctual Drives & the Enneagram
John's website.

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Stay connected to the Practical Enneagram:
Website

Email me: [email protected]

Queen of dreams, Denise Grobbelaar (SP9) shares her Jungian-informed view of the Enneagram and a little about how she works with it in private practice.

• What Denise does and how she found the Enneagram [1.55]
• Discovering type and how her practice changed as a result [4.37] 
• What is Jungian work? [5.55]
• What are Jungian archetypes? [9.00]
• How does Denise bring the two frameworks together [10.15]
• What process do Jungian analysts use? Is this a marriage of process and content [11.50]
• The various approaches to dreams [14.13]
• What is dream appreciation [15.33]
• The subjective versus objective viewpoint [15.52]
• Dream number 1 [18.22] (a type Five dream)
• Dream number 2 [19.58] (a type Three dream)
• General pointers for working with dreams [24.30]

References:
Denise's online course and website.

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Creator of Tritype, Katherine Fauvre (Sexual 8) shares a little about the origins of her research and answers my goofy questions about how to bring Tritype into a psychological/spiritual growth journey with the Enneagram. 

• What Katherine found when she started her research [2.05]
• Difference between Oscar Ichazo's Trifix and Katherine's Tritype [06.40]
• Q1: Does Tritype tell us anything about behaviour? [9.22]
• Q2: Is it a case of one type per Center? Are we like (for e.g.) Fours in our Hearts, Nines in our Actions, and Sixes in our Minds? [10.39]
• Q3: Does each Tritype have an essential quality or qualities? [15.15]
• Q4: Is Tritype a distraction from the main work? [18.18]

Useful links:

1. Tritype test: https://enneagramtritypetest.com/
2. More about Tritype: https://www.katherinefauvre.com/tritype
3. Katherine's books where you can learn more about each Tritype archetype and their purposes/blindspots: https://www.katherinefauvre.com/products

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Stay connected to the Practical Enneagram:
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Enneagram OG Dr. Jerome (Jerry) Wagner (SP5) talks with a very giggly me about the interesting areas of confluence between the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and the Enneagram, and what that may mean for growth and development. 

• What is the Myers Briggs? [2.18]
• What is the MBTI used for? [10.05]
• Why is it useful to look at both of the frameworks together? [11.02]
• Is the Myers Briggs a simpler framework? [15.10]
• Does the MBTI have a developmental journey built-in? [16.14]
• Me butchering Personality Hacker's car model [19.40]
• How to use the Enneagram to bring balance to your MBTI - a tour through the types! [21.33]
• Are sensing types even interested in the Enneagram? [30.56]
• Would we use both of these or one or the other? [34.03]

Main references:

• The Wagner Enneagram Personality Style Scales (WEPPs) 
• Spectrum training 
• Enneagram and MBTI webinar (now passed, but contact organiser to purchase a copy) 
• Personality's Hacker's Car model 

Jerry's website
Enneagramspectrum.com  

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Shining bastion of Threeness, Dr Drew Moser (Self-presrvation 3), talks with me about his Enneagram of Discernment framework as set out in his brilliant book, the Enneagram of Discernment.

• Drew's early cynical encounters with the Enneagram and how it became core to his work [4.00]
• Why did he write about discernment [7.27]
• What is discernment ('a gift and a practice') [9.08]
• Major barriers to discernment in Drew's framework [13.00]
• The three territories of discernment: vocation (awareness of our type), wisdom (integrate missing stance/center), practice triads (cultivating sacred pause, sacred delay and sacred vision) [17.00]
• What was difficult about writing the book? [27.50]
• The settling statements from the book (what each type seeks but settles for)[29.50]
• The type-specific editions of the book [37.00]
• A preview of the new season of Fathoms! [38.30]

Drew's 9 questions

1. Who am I?
2. Why am I here?
3. Where am I going?
4. What am I doing?
5. What am I feeling?
6. What am I thinking?
7. What am I remembering?
8. What am I experiencing?
9. What am I anticipating? 

Learn more about Drew's work:
Buy the book, The Enneagram of Discernment (Amazon link)
Listen to Fathoms, an Enneagram podcast
Drew's coaching training/website, TypeTrail

Stay connected to the Practical Enneagram:
Website
Email me: [email protected]

Entrepreneur, author of the Career Within You,  and longtime Enneagram teacher and student, Ingrid Stabb (Self-preservation 7), explains how nobody does a certain thing better than our type - and the sooner that we're aware of that thing, the better for our career fulfilment and collaboration potential. 

• How Ingrid started with the Enneagram [1.45]
• How she started to combine the Enneagram with careers [5.53]
• Who is the Career Within You for? [7.53]
• What is the key career strength for each type? [9.43]
• Are other aspects of the Enneagram, i.e. subtype, important for careers? [11.43]
• How a person's Enneagram type affects the expression of their cognitive functions in the Myers Briggs system [13.38]
• What can happen when people don't use their strengths in their careers [18.38]
• How does the Enneagram compare with StrengthsFinder? [24.18]
• How Ingrid actually uses the Enneagram in one on one situations [27.00]
• Does each type have a deal-breaker for their career? [29.30]
• How has 'doing 7' been an asset and a limitation [32.33]

Each type's unique strength

1. Making Improvements
2. Meeting Needs
3. Achieving a Successful Image
4. Expressing Individuality
5. Acquiring Knowledge
6. Managing Risk
7. Exploring Possibilities
8. Asserting Boundaries
9. Maintaining Harmony

Book references:
Do what you are
What color is your parachute?
The Enneagram made easy
The Career Within You (Ingrid's book)
The Enneagram of Death

Other:
Peter O'Hanrahan and Rene Rosario are teachers from the Narrative Tradition. 

Ingrid's website
Strengths in Numbers

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Stay connected to the Practical Enneagram:
Website
Email me: [email protected]