The Enneagram is a dynamic system that cultivates self-awareness, compassion, and wisdom. It describes nine types, each with distinct ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Importantly, it illuminates the underlying motivations that answer the question of why we do what we do.
Renée Rosario, MA, LPC, is a transpersonal, body-centered psychotherapist, Enneagram consultant, and Core Faculty member of The Narrative Enneagram. She maintains a private practice in Colorado.
The Enneagram describes nine personality types with distinctive motivations and perspectives. Although we are each unique individuals influenced by our various cultures, we share common human needs and have developed strategies to meet them. The nine types orient around these survival strategies and help us navigate our relationships and our inner and shared worlds.
The Enneagram provides a map for navigating your psychological well-being by illuminating the habitual patterns that can limit growth. Our types bring us many gifts, which when overused tend to create challenges. As we learn about the system, understanding and compassion deepen.
All psychological and spiritual experience happens in the body, and most decisions are informed by experiences held there, even when we are unaware of that input. To change how we respond to ourselves, others, and the environment, we need to sense what is arising somatically and allow ourselves to be with it.
The Enneagram is also a spiritual map, offering guidance to access a greater reality beyond our type structures. Developing the capacity to witness our type patterns allows us to see beyond our conditioned sense of self—everything we've learned about who we are—and discover we are more than we may ever have imagined.
The Enneagram provides the key to unlock the repetitive struggles that can happen in relationships. It helps us understand why we can experience the same interaction so differently from those we care about, cultivating greater understanding and compassion.