Welcome to Litsy!

I rated this book a “Pick” mainly because of his helpfulness in greater understanding of the Types. However, much of his analysis was hard for me to comprehend, over the top with terms and concepts which were not useful. Although I personally believe in the value of prayer, he seemed to present it as the primary, if not the only, tool for spiritual development. There are much more.⭐️⭐️⭐️

At this point, I've read quite a few books about the Enneagram. I felt like I was being drawn into something truly profound. But I didn't know what the next step was. I've learned a lot about my type, but I needed a next step, a "this is what you need to do to grow" sort of guide. And, Mr. Heuertz's book is exactly that. Truly wonderful.

Eights are among the Rejection Dominant Affect Group, using their powerful presence to move against the nurturing they need (and are frequently incapable of offering themselves in constructive or healthy ways) as a way of preemptively forcing rejection or, conversely, building trust.

Those in the Head Center, the types most dialed into figuring out and preventing threats to certainty, safety, and freedom, require a healthy dose of silence to quiet the constant churning of their thoughts. In the peace of inner quiet, head types can hear the truth that they have enough, refuting the lie “I am what I have” and loosening the addictive grasp that security and survival have in and through this center.

Gut people who are obsessed with control, heart people who are obsessed with connections, and head people who are obsessed with competence all need to find freedom from the ways they deal with their inner dread.

The Scriptures tell us, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but most of us never really learn to love ourselves, thinking we can make up for this deficit if we practice loving others. We have to practice what love is by making room for who we are—the good and the bad. Otherwise, the love we offer others will always lack the depth of its potential.

The Eight exemplifies the fundamental need to be against. Eights are against everything. Even when they agree, they‘ll find a way to turn anything into combat or sparring. This is how Eights build trust—through pushing and fighting. It‘s their attempt to size up the trustworthiness of others, an unconscious way of determining if people will stand up to them by standing up for themselves.

Those in the Body Center are gut people who experience life through intuitive instincts and tactile engagement with their senses. People in the instinctive center engage the world through activity in an effort to assert and maintain a sense of their control. Gut people are generally more impassioned than emotional, and their great determination is often the source of their pain.

When heart people allow comparison to lead to feelings of disconnection, they blame themselves and can be overcome with profound experiences of shame. Shame in turn produces a sense of fear—the fear that they are unworthy to experience their own needs. This fear is followed by a feeling of even more shame that comes from having needs in the first place.

Heart people are social types who feel their way through life by leaning into their emotional intelligence. Those in the Feeling Center teeter between compulsions for connection with others and comparison with others to validate their own sense of worth.

Fundamentally, head people are obsessed with quieting their inner distress in an effort to create external peace and security. Head people don‘t have time for the irrational impulses of the instinctive types, nor do they have the patience to truly engage the emotional complexities of the feeling types; rather, they methodically face each of life‘s problems searching for solutions.

Head people, those in the intellectual center, have highly developed mental faculties they use to assess and address everything in life that is experienced as a threat or an assault on their inner state. Head people believe in competency as the cure for instability. Through mastering their environment, head people think they‘re able to secure their own self-preservation.

Another way of looking at the Enneagram is just like that: if you believe in the doctrine of original sin, then the Enneagram exposes the shape of your tragic flaw—the aspect of you that is most vulnerable to sin—as it is forced from your soul through the pressure of guilt, shame, stress, anxiety, fear, frustration, or anger.

The contemporary Enneagram of Personality* illustrates the nine ways we get lost, but also the nine ways we can come home to our True Self. Put another way, it exposes nine ways we lie to ourselves about who we think we are, nine ways we can come clean about those illusions, and nine ways we can find our way back to God.

This was recommended by a friend and didn‘t resonate all that strongly with me, but there are several insights about personality and spirituality that I appreciated. Too woo-woo for me overall, at least at this point in my life.

I knew very little about the Enneagram when I started this book and now I am completely fascinated. I chose this as part of my winter #Booked2019 list for A Book From A Podcast. (This one doesn't have one specifically but there are many on the Enneagram.) And I'm so glad I did. I will be listening more on podcasts about it as well as reading more. 🤓

It's dark and stormy here so I am soaking in great reading time near the fire with these two. (Sabrina and Ramses 🐶🐶) 🤓

I am just starting to learn about this but so far I'm quite fascinated... 🤓

I‘m soooo freaking obsessed with the enneagram! Is anyone else? I want to read all the books. 👍🏾 #type6

“Nines tend to attach to relationships or scenarios that need mediation and reconciliation so they don‘t have to face their own reconciled inner self.”

Well call me out why don‘t you? 😳