Sarah Howard - The Enneagram Journey: Finding The Road Back to the Spirituality Within You--The Made Easy Guide to the 9 Sacred Personality Types: For Healthy Relationships in Couples

Most of us go through life trying to cope with our own struggles, challenges, and demands unaware of the fact that theres a difference between the real self and the ego self of your personality dealing with everyday life. "Being yourself" is easier said than done in our society because we are often embroiled in mass consciousness and the status quo, leaving little room for authentic self-expression and self-understanding. Enter: the Enneagram. Its a tool designed to help you simplify and increase your self-knowledge and transcend your present level of human consciousness in the process.

In a world of illusions, where everyone wears a mask daily, those who have become tired of masquerades are thirsty for truth and authentic self-expression. This is not something new; for centuries now the quest has been going on. There have always been those who have been searching for the real knowledge of who they are since Socrates' time and further back. In our society, however, something is changing.

Humanity is making a momentous leap in consciousness by experiencing the need to develop higher, better, more detailed thinking and behaviours to cope with as our lives become more complex. However, what most of us are discovering is that this approach doesnt work too well.

The best way to thrive as the world continues to make a global shift is not to look for more complicated coping mechanisms to tackle the new emerging world, but rather to simplify the way we relate and partner with life. In other words, we realize that seeking simple solutions to our complex problems is the best option. We're learning to prioritize and appreciate this quest for truth, and we've become curious to find out if there's more to us than we've grown up to believe about ourselves.

Have you reached a point in your life where you need to find out who you've grown like, yet you don't know where to start? Sometimes it can be difficult to understand your own behaviour and actions, or why you react in certain situations as you do. It's a very sobering moment when one day you wake up to realizing you don't even know who youre deep within. The path to the inner world is full of great mystery and can often intimidate us, especially when for decades we have been locked out of our own truth. This is where tools and proven systems are becoming useful.

The Enneagram is an ancient system and tool created to help those of us who care to uncover the layers of mass consciousness so that we can dive to discover our true selves. And this book is designed to help make the journey of self-discovery and this ancient tool simpler, easier to understand and faster to use.

T he term Enneagram is of Greek origin. Ennea is Greek's number nine, and gram is a drawing. We'd interpret it as a nine-point drawing translated into ordinary English.

In section one of this book, we'll explore in great detail what this drawing looks like and what it means. The critical thing to realize for now is that we're not talking about some new age method to help you cope with life's increasing stresses. Theres more to it than meets the eye.

At first, it may seem another one of those entertaining yet juvenile personality tests that have no concrete basis for assuring personal transformation, but if you read through the context of this material and apply proper understanding to it, you will reap the benefits of the contained power.

Some current teachers of this material believe that its possible to trace variations of the Enneagram symbol to the sacred geometry of Pythagorean mathematicians and mystical mathematicians. While theres a lot of controversy over this theory and who actually originated it, the fact is that it works and is used both in the business world and for spiritual growth. While the Enneagram symbol itself has its roots in ancient times, many individuals have developed the actual system that we use not too long ago today in different ways.

George Gurdijieff, a Russian mystic and teacher is one of those individuals who is credited with the modern reintroduction of the Enneagram symbol. He was a founder of an influential school specialized in' inner work' and his primary way of teaching and using the symbol was through a series of sacred dances or what he called' movements.' He believed in giving his students a direct sense of the meaning of the symbol and the process it represents, but what he did not do was include the ennea-type system as we know it today. We will have to introduce Oscar Ichazo into the story for us to understand who was behind thee system as we know it today.

Oscar Ichazo is credited as the primary individual behind the contemporary Enneagram system. He was a Bolivian man who moved to Peru and later to Buenos Aries in Argentina to study' inner work.' This led to further traveling and searching for wisdom in Asia where he gathered more knowledge across different wisdom traditions that helped him create a systematic way of understanding and applying everything he had learned in his travels. Ichazo combined Taoism, Buddhism, ancient Greek philosophy, Islam, Christianity, and mystical Judaism teachings to form his own school of thought using the ancient Enneagram symbol. Thus from the 1960s, when he began his schooling in Chile, the personality-based Enneagram was offered as a system to help with self-realization and transformation.

The Arica school in Chile, where he taught in the 1960s and early 1970s, was where he first introduced his system of 108 Enneagrams (or Ennneagons, in his terminology). Broadly, these are known as the Passion Enneagram, the Enneagram of the Virtues, the Fixations Enneagram, and the Holy Ideas Enneagram.

During this time in Chile, an American group interested in his work came to South America to study his methods and to experience them firsthand. One of the group's participants was remarkable American psychologist Claudio Naranjo, who recreated his updated version of the personality system of the Enneagram. Although Ichazo and Naranjo began as a teacher and student, each of them went their own way teaching different theories of this Enneagram system and seeing different schools of thought continue to emerge on the subject, don't be surprised to find that some ideas don't always align. Yet, the fundamental goal is not to enter into a debate about who is right or wrong. We are here to develop a healthy understanding of our human psyche. This tool has proven to be very useful to those who practice it and will help you to understand the people around you and yourself better.