Deepen Your Meditation Practice By Using The Enneagram Of Personality

An increasing number of people are responding to the spiritual awakening call and are turning to meditation to connect more deeply with their true selves. The awakening process begins when people realize that we have a dual nature—our conditioned self, which includes our personality (ego) and our true self, which our soul energizes.

This impulse to grow and evolve into our true selves is within us from birth.

Awakening to our true selves is often unsettling for many people.

I hear from people worldwide trying to answer questions that leave folks feeling lost, confused, and stuck – Who am I? How can I feel more peaceful? What’s missing in my life? How can I live with more meaning and purpose?

These powerful spiritual questions arise when our souls are saturated with the material aspects of life and we’re ready to awaken to our true selves.

Several years ago, asking these questions and feeling lost triggered my search for deeper meaning, purpose, and connection.

After many years of soul-searching and navigating the awakening journey, I’ve learned that meditation and the Enneagram map of personality are the dream team if you feel called to shed your limiting and conditioned beliefs so that you are free to grow into your true self.

Meditation includes powerful practices that physically, emotionally, and spiritually shift things inside you. The Enneagram provides a map for understanding yourself and learning about your motivations and habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Enriching your meditation with the wisdom of the Enneagram gives you a streamlined and intentional way to navigate your awakening journey. In the article, 4 Pillars For Awakening Your Best Self, I share a framework that will help you flourish.

The Enneagram map of personality helps you to SEE your true self, and meditation enables you to BE your true self.

Let’s start with meditation.

Like many folks drawn to meditation, I was stressed, suffering and looking for relief to feel happier and more content.

I wanted to feel more peaceful and resilient like I was fully thriving and not just getting by.

After practicing meditation daily, I noticed a plateau in my growth. My body, mind, and heart seemed more peaceful, but I still couldn’t answer the questions: Who am I? What’s missing when I have so much to be grateful for? What does my future best self look like?

I wondered whether I needed to deepen my meditation practice and considered attending a multi-day retreat. I had already committed to a 20-minute sitting practice twice daily.

Something was inside me; however, I didn’t want to do that. It’s like my inner knowing sensed that sitting longer in silence wouldn’t give me the answers.

My gut knowledge was validated when I listened to a webinar with Ken Wilbur, an American philosopher and writer on transpersonal psychology and integral theory. Wilbur discussed the science of self-actualization and explained that humans are evolving and that meditation and mindfulness don’t account for this.

Meditation and mindfulness practices can help with many things. Still, they don’t enable you to look inside and see your level of development or personality type, which results in your habitual thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.

Meditation will help you work with your body, emotions, and mind but doesn’t get to the root of why you have a habitual pattern that ultimately causes stress and suffering to arise in the first place.

We can meditate for hours or sit in a silent retreat for a month, and we won’t be able to look inside ourselves and see our evolutionary path. Who am I meant to become? What is holding me back from becoming it? What does my true self look like?

All this is to say that meditation and mindfulness are powerful and valuable practices that aren’t meant to stand alone. They’ll only take us so far on our awakening journey.

On the spiritual path, we need to learn how to discern the difference between our small self or personality and our soul, which is connected to the spirit.

How do we discern the difference between our personality and soul?

The answer to this question came from learning about the Enneagram consciousness map.

What is the Enneagram of personality?

The Enneagram is an ancient symbol that has evolved into a psychospiritual soul map that an increasing number of spiritual teachers, psychologists, coaches, and counsellors use for personal growth and client work.

According to the Enneagram, nine personality types are motivated by different things. Each type has a different path to self-actualization. For example, we have three intelligence sources: the head, the heart, and the body. Depending on your type, you’ll have different things to work on. That’s why a one-size-fits-all approach to meditation doesn’t work.

We can structure our practices based on knowledge gained from understanding our personality. For example, a head type needs silence, a heart type needs solitude, and a body type needs stillness. This helps explain why a heart-type client needs solitude to connect with their deeper needs. Their attention is always outward toward others, so they lose touch with themselves.

Knowing our Enneagram personality type, we can structure our meditation, mindfulness, and inner growth practices to meet our unique needs.

Understanding our personality type and who we are not, in turn, helps us see the prison of our soul and provides the key to getting out. Each type has unique gifts AND its flavour of suffering that trip them up from fully thriving and fulfilling their potential.

The Enneagram is all about self-awareness. Without awareness and the ability to witness our personalities, they are like a straitjacket, causing inner turmoil, relationship troubles, and limiting fears that prevent us from living a more authentic and fulfilling life.

If you are curious, you can take the free Riso & Hudson Enneagram Personality (RHETI) sampler test. Please note that it is only a sampler meant to spark your curiosity. Understanding ourselves and using the Enneagram as a tool for growth is a life-long journey.

How can the Enneagram guide us in becoming our true selves?

Understanding our personality is vitally important because our personality is not who we are. We have a personality, but we are not our personality.

Our personality that at one time in our lives helped us survive, over time, becomes our prison – causing all sorts of symptoms that result in health, relationship, and vocational problems.

When we are called to awaken spiritually, we are essentially beginning to wake up to our dual nature. We bring awareness to who we are not (our conditioned self) to connect more deeply with our true selves.

For this reason, the first step in awakening is, as Plato said,

Do thine own work, and know thyself.

Meditation and the Enneagram are a dream team that provides the way forward and the necessary tools to grow into our true selves.

As we enter into the right relationship with ourselves, we can flourish fully in our lives. We begin to thrive on the inside and create lives on the outside that feel vital, connected and meaningful.

Are you aware of your Enneagram of personality type? If you feel called, please leave a comment below. Our community would love to hear from you!