The Enneagram is commonly used as a typology of personality types for the purposes of self-understanding and personal effectiveness. It can easily be forgotten that the focus on the patterns of thinking and feeling making up our personality is not the end of the matter but the beginning of adult spiritual development: recovering our essence beyond personality. This process is a work of transformation which correlates with the seven practices of Essential Spirituality and in turn reminds us of the Enneagram’s higher spiritual purpose. The following maps out the way we integrate the Enneagram and the seven practices at Spirit Gym.

Practice 1: Redirecting Motivation

Instinctual Drives

Working on balancing our instinctive need for:

Self-Preservation

Sexual/1:1 bonding

Social grouping

Thereby re-focusing the positive primal emotions: Seeking, Lust, Playing and Caring

Practice 2: Transforming Emotions

Enneagram of Passions

Exercises to cultivate Emotional Wisdom. Healing your heart and Learning to Love. Working on the negative primal emotions of Fear, Anger and Grief around which the enneagram passions constellate.

Practice 3: Living Ethically

Enneagram of Virtues

Exercises to practice the nine virtues as expressions of love in life and work, the affective dispositions we access beyond the passions

Practice 4: Training Attention

Core Exercises to concentrate and calm your mind: balancing the emotional and intellectual centres of our being; where affective and cognitive neurobiology meet in practices of reflection, contemplation and meditation

Practice 5: Refining Awareness

Enneagram of Fixations

Exercises to overcome negative patterns of thinking, the fixations of left brain dominance and awaken your spiritual vision. Seeing clearly and recognizing the sacred in all things

Practice 6: Cultivating Wisdom

Enneagram of Holy Ideas

Exercises to access the higher intellectual centre, relax into right-brain comprehension, develop wisdom and understand life

Practice 7: Serving Others

Exercises to express spirit in action, embracing generosity and the joy of service towards higher goals of planetary sustainability and cosmic ecology