As we gathered at the weekend to explore our inner and outer patternings together at a Soul Shed Unfurlings event for subscribers here, I felt excited. Humans from THREE continents gathered together and created a space of presence to one another, to explore together. It still always blows my mind how we can do this now in online meetings across time zones and space - it offers so much to our mutual human understanding.
Exploring the enneagram patterns moving through three centres of intelligence in my being has offered me some powerful openings into new possibilities in my life, I already knew I would learn a LOT from those that were coming, but I had no idea how much. I am very grateful for the community that moves with, around and through this creative inner and outer journeying.
Your centres have very different jobs and very different intelligences! Doing, feeling and thinking are three distinct human capabilities. The inner ecology of the relationship between your three centres is running how you turn up as a human in your life. The more these parts of you can be in living in harmony with one another, the more capacity you are likely to have for choosing how you human. without being hi-jacked by your emotions or your nervous system.
I discovered that I can access a new form of power in myself. And it infuses my heart and adds to my momentum and to the contribution I am able to make in this world. Getting a really embodied sense of the gut type energy contribution in each tritype was profound. I thought I knew this stuff already. Enneagram people need this kind of learning. Off the page, into the body, blood, bones and heart.
-Participant reflecting on our Unfurlings gathering on Saturday.
It can be quite illuminating to explore with the head, with its capacity to follow up on our curiosity, our pattern recognition and openness to exploring ideas, and it is this centre with which most of us first meet the Enneagram wisdom teachings; as students and even researchers into our own habits. It is often much later that exploring the centres becomes part of the journey. The instinctual domain of the body, and the capacity for emotion of the heart are territories that it can be very helpful to explore, to become more embodied and present to life unfolding. Offering yourself a three centred map can be orienting and fruitful.
Did you discover your three centred enneagram pattern in my recent posts? : Understanding your humaning as a living pattern and Embodied archetypes in our Ecosystems? For a deeper experience of this article, you may like to read them and to be investigating your own three-centred enneagram pattern.
Not all adults have easy access to the heart. It has been ‘trained’ out of us in many ways. The heart is not thinking about efficiency or productivity or self protection or winning. Retrieving this access is a ring of fire that the assertive enneagram types 3, 7 and 8 in particular, have to walk through on their inner journey, and it is no accident that my teachers of heart space have been a seven and an eight.
Without knowing ourselves in the heart, a human can refine ideas, make plans, and do all kinds of very clever things, but they will not be able to serve humanity, to love very long or far at all, and at worst, it will lead to us creating ecosystems upholding the excesses of narcissism and dissociated violence that humanity struggles with. Understanding ourselves and what we are currently doing as humans so we can choose better, is a moral imperative and perhaps the way that you can be the change you want to see.
And so, with heart in mind, and mind in heart, it was the body centre that we turned to on Saturday, with the understanding that knowing its capacities will shape how we can work with our patterns in the world. Here are the 27 three-part enneagram archetypes, organised in columns with the three body strategies first.
Last night we explored in particular with the body, and we mapped with the following slide which shows that the body type in your three-centred enneagram number will influence you in some powerful ways. Whatever type you lead with, see which columns your body number (8,9 or 1) is in and consider the words at the bottom of the column. If you dont know your three part number, there is guidence for exploring here.
If you know your three-centred enneagram number and archetype , here are some questions that might help you to explore the dynamics between your centres a bit more. You are likely to discover that your body, heart and head are experiencing this quite differently!
In all our live interactive gatherings at the Soul Shed, which I call ‘Unfurlings’ we explore in a three-centred way. Every month there is an event, free to Soul Shed paid subscribers, offering creative practices and engagement with the themes I have been writing about here. However these are open to all that are curious, and if you would prefer to simply come along to one of these gatherings you can book on and contribute an amount that suits you. Also, if you would like to explore your archetype one to one in an online session or two, I offer this at the soul shed as well! You can have a look here.
I will close with a wonderful quote from Mahatma Gandhi, and I look forward to next time.
Thank you, Sam. You presented us with a thoughtful way of checking in with our three centers, type and instinctual drive as an invitation to welcome wholeness, nothing left out. If used to observe oneself in this moment it potentizes awareness here, now, within and around us. I appreciate that you connect knowing oneself as a moral imperative for the benefit of all. I can breathe with that...