Enneagram of Essential Wholeness
Life Brings Us to Spirit and Spirit Brings Us to Life
It is suffering that generally brings people to psychotherapy and spirituality. In the beginning it is the desire to be free from suffering that drives us to look deeper within or beyond our usual sense of self. Self-realization and psychotherapy are, on one hand, a retrograde process. In it, we are relaxing back through our layers of constructed trance-like reality and come to rest in radical acknowledgement and acceptance of where we actually are on the human level. We then, take one step deeper into the ground of our being.
On the other hand, as we realize our wholeness of being, there is a natural desire to honor the contribution we must make in the evolution of how we live together on this planet. This is how we can say, from a scientific point of view, that personality is necessary, but can be restrictive. Ground of being, the hub of the mind, is where we can find one another––and even find ourselves.
The happier, more loving and freer we feel, the more we want to share our wealth of spirit. In Buddhism this state is called the Bodhisattva promise and is the commitment to work towards the liberation of sentient beings until they are free from suffering and realize their true nature. The sharing of our gifts facilitates the realization of our full potential at whatever our level of development.
The more we realize our essential wholeness, the more possible it is for us to become all that we can be for the benefit of all beings. We can use this awakening of the Buddha as a template. The Buddha realized the emptiness that is the oneness with everything. In that wholeness of being, he initially could see no reason to get involved in the world because he felt complete and in a state of unconditional well being. But, because there is only one wholeness of being, Buddha could not separate himself from the rest of humanity. Without the perception of separation there is automatically, and effortlessly, compassion for all beings and a desire to help them. In other words, the happier a person is the more they naturally want to share that happiness with others. Every problem or wish for a better life provides opportunities to wake up to our true nature and learn how to live and love more consciously in the world.
The Enneagram from an Essential Wholeness perspective shows us the more we allow ourselves and everything to be as it is, the more we flow through the nine developmental phases of change the Enneagram is a visual representation of. When out of touch with our spiritual nature we tend to be overly identified with one of the the phases and resist the evolutionary ripening of our souls in favour of predictable self-repeating patterns. Each complete cycle, like a spiral, takes us to a higher level of realisation. The major shifts in these levels of consciousness are best described by Don Beck in Spiral Dynamics and Ken Wilber in Integral Psychology
Experience a profound introduction to this integrated approach with Essential Wholeness professional training for therapists and coaches. Coming soon:
