No, the enneagram is not a specific philosophy. Often, the enneagram is taken as part of a specific knowledge, when in fact this body of knowledge uses an enneagram for its purposes and interests. This confusion happens, mainly, when someone knows the application of an enneagram as if it were the enneagram itself. Today we can find hundreds of applications of enneagrams, in the most diverse areas. As shown by this variety, the International Enneagram Association –IEA(www.internationalenneagram.org), has as one of its objectives to publicize the various applications of the enneagram.
At the Enneagram Institute, we use enneagrams (9-pointed symbols) as maps, encouraging participants in our courses to conduct an investigation of how the elements described in them are present in our lives, and in what situations are beneficial or harmful.
The main objective is to increase awareness of ourselves and the differences between people, learning to respect ourselves and others.
Each organization that intends to deal with human beings needs to have a clear therapeutic orientation. When it comes to the enneagram, we find different institutions, with different guidelines.
At the Eneagram Institute, the therapeutic basis is Reichian-oriented body psychotherapy (Wilhelm Reich, 1897-1957). Mainly in the context of the phases of personality development, muscular armor of the character and character of the defenses.
This therapeutic basis allows us to use the enneagram of the 9 Emotional Addictions (anger, pride, vanity, envy, avarice, fear, gluttony, lust and indolence), offering a direct relationship of these emotions with the muscular organization. When we talk about fear, for example, we are not only attached to suspicious behavior, but to the typical tensions that are related to this emotion, such as high diaphragm, short breathing, anxiety and tension in the eye segment. We create the context of how we organize ourselves to sustain all the parallel functions related to fear, and we describe typical contents that manifest in the consciousness sustained by that emotion.
This orientation allows us to recognize identical behaviors sustained by different emotions, or even opposite behaviors sustained by the same emotion. We left the question of what the person does and what he says, for how he does it and how he says it, offering participants an objective observation tool, and not necessarily an interpretative one.
There is no better standard of behavior than another. What we offer through our courses is to increase the recognition of how we organize our own standard, and where are the dysfunctions that are not healthy and do not contribute to our quality of life.
The increase in awareness of ourselves and the people around us, allows us to seek new ways of expressing ourselves, responding more to our real desires and less to the desires related to the pattern of behavior.
Throughout the work with the enneagram, we emphasize the fact that we are not a Standard of Behavior, but rather, we adopt one. That the map we use guides us to understand the way people around us organize themselves in their lives, and learn to respect that. (See Enneagram Ethics).
At work in companies, with people from the same team, we constantly point to the need to learn how to deal with the other, not to change the other, but understanding that what is poison to one can be an antidote to another. Which are the differences that allow us to broaden our awareness and even find new ways to solve old problems.
Unfortunately, there are people who make inappropriate use of the tool, and when we met them, we realized that they were already in the habit of labeling people before meeting the enneagram.
We all adopt patterns of behavior, from common day-to-day things, like the way we dry ourselves after a shower, the way we greet a person introduced to us, how we brush our teeth, etc. Even on more complex issues, such as how we judge others, what is right for us, how we perceive reality, etc.
When, in the Enneagram, we say that someone has a Behavior Pattern or Type, we are referring to the set of actions, thoughts and feelings attached to a predominant emotion. A set that is very personal, dynamic and, in this sense, also singular. Even so, our reference is the emotion that sustains this set, called Emotional Addiction.
Using the Enneagram of Emotional Vices allows us to recognize how each of the 9 emotions is present in our lives and, consequently, which is the most present and predominant. When this work is directed, as in the Eneagram Institute, the participant recognizes that, even acting differently in each situation and discovering things in each of the 9 patterns, there is a basic motivation as unconscious as it is constant. That each phase is involved with a set of emotions and the same as predominant. That throughout life we seek the same thing, in different ways.
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