The Enneagram is an ancient, powerful tool for personal and collective transformation. Stemming from the Greek words ennea (nine) and grammos (a written symbol), the nine-pointed Enneagram symbol represents nine distinct strategies for relating to the self, others and the world.

How do we know what is real?

I’m sure you’ve heard the story of a group of people who are blind describing an elephant, each from a different vantage. One person, feeling the elephant’s tail, described a rope. Another, arms encircling a leg, said it was like a pillar or tree. And so on. Every viewpoint is a view from a point. The more ways of knowing we use, the closer we come to understanding, and yet the full picture will always elude us. In this way, mystery is endlessly knowable.

Learning more about your own vantage point is empowering because you can begin to substitute instinct for new learning. In other words, we get to choose our response rather than react reflexively. Basically, we get to know more fully what the whole picture looks like and thereby have more options about how we want to be in any given moment.

When people say, “Well, that’s just the way I am.”, I gently tell them if how they are is working for them, to continue onward, but if they are finding that they are running into blocks and obstacles and perhaps relationships are proving to be harder than they’d like, then the Enneagram is a tool to begin practicing new ways of being in an effort to receive new outcomes.