Enneagram Quotes

The Enneagram is a tool that awakens our compassion for people just as they are, not the people we wish they would become so our lives would become easier. ~ Ian Morgan Cron

[T]he Enneagram is, at its most abstract, a universal mandala of the self - a symbol of each of us. ~ Don Richard Riso

This invitation [to deny oneself] is less about depriving the self, and more about disowning, or renouncing a relationship with the part of ourself that is not what God created us to be. ~ Marilyn Vancil

If you babble enneagram, I am a five. If you boast myers-briggs, I am an introvert-intuition-thinking-perceiving. ~ Santosh Kalwar

Choosing the good of all is always your highest calling, even if that means people don't like you for it. Being liked is meaningless if real love is not at the heart of your purpose. ~ Sean Patrick Brennan

The superego is the inner voice that is always putting us down for not living up to certain standards or rewarding our ego when we fulfill its demands . . .

In fact, our superego is one of the most powerful agents of the personality: it is the "inner critic" that keeps us restricted to certain limited possibilities for ourselves.

A large part of our initial transformational work centers on becoming more aware of the superego's "voice" in its many guises, both positive and negative. Its voices continually draw us back into identifying with our personality and acting out in self-defeating ways. When we are present, we are able to hear our superego voices without identifying with them; we are able to see the stances and positions of the superego as if they were characters in a play waiting in the wings, ready to jump in and control or attack us once again. When we are present, we hear the superego's voice but we do not give it any energy; the "all-powerful" voice then becomes just another aspect of the moment.

However, we must also be on the lookout for the formation of new layers of superego that come from our psychological and spiritual work . . . In fact, one of the biggest dangers that we face in using the Enneagram is our superego's tendency to take over our work and start criticizing us, for example, for not moving up the Levels of Development or going in the Direction of Integration fast enough. The more we are present, however, the more ~ Don Richard Riso

In the course of working on ourselves, we learn in time that when we stay on the surface of ourselves, which is to say when we are identified with and operating from our outer shell - our personality - we suffer. The more asleep we are to the reality beneath our shells, the less we feel that life is fulfilling, meaningful, and pleasurable. Or, in the language of the enneagram, the more fixated we are, the less we partake of the loving nature of reality, for we have lost our connection with Holy Love. Our suffering is not the result of being alone or of being in the wrong relationship, is not because we don't have enough money or because we have too much of it, or because of anything of the sort.

Nor is it because our outer surface doesn't look as pretty as we think it should or because our personality isn't as pleasant as we think it might be. We suffer because we are living at a distance from our depths - it's as simple as that. The more our souls are infused with Being, the better we feel and the better life seems to us, no matter what our outer circumstances happen to be. ~ Sandra Maitri

Maybe there's no one right way to be a good person, and maybe there's no advisory board signing off on who does and doesn't deserve badges. ~ Hannah Paasch