About This Blog

What is an Enneagram?

The enneagram figure is believed to have originated around 2500 BC. It is a nine-pointed figure inscribed in a circle and it's name derives from two Greek words, ennea (nine) and grammi (line).



The meaning of the symbol itself, together with specific category types organized around the nine points, convey a system of knowledge about nine distinct but interrelated areas of personal growth - or nine ways of seeing and experiencing the world.

My goal is to utilise the Enneagram for mapping and understanding nine areas of personal growth and development; for us to look at ourselves in new and different ways, and for us to ultimately become better people.

These areas are:

Family
Desmond Tutu once wrote, "You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them." I will forever be indebted for what my family has sacrificed for me, present and past. And I hope to grow by continuing to appreciate everything they are for me. The Joyce Brothers wrote, "When you look at your life, the greatest happinesses are family happinesses."

Spiritual
Jack Kornfield wrote, "To undertake a genuine spiritual path is not to avoid difficulties, but to learn the art of making mistakes wakefully, to bring them to the transformative power of our heart." The goal of this blog is that very journey of learning that art.

Financial
"We live by the Golden Rule. Those who have the gold make the rules," Buzzie Bavasi once said, and Zig Ziglar reinforced this when he said. "Money isn't the most important thing in life, but it's reasonably close to oxygen on the "gotta have it" scale." For me money is about balance to which this blog seeks to find, as George Horace Lorimer once said, "It's good to have money and the things that money can buy, but it's good, too, to check up once in a while and make sure that you haven't lost the things that money can't buy."

Self/Personal
Louis L'Amour's quote captures the very essence of this blog, "Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him. Then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say, "This I am today; that I will be tomorrow."

Also, H.F. Hedge wrote, "Every man is his own ancestor, and every man his own heir. He devises his own future, and he inherits his own past." In The Prison and the Angel, Henry Van Dyke said, "Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul." Through this blog I hope we can break out of our individual prisons and comfort zones to become the best we can possibly be.

Professional/Work
In Scnes de la vie Parisienne, Honoré de Balzac wrote, "An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence." A view Jackson Browne reinforced, "Find a job you like and you add five days to every week." he said. Our jobs and careers can bring out the best in us.

Charles Kingsley wrote, "Thank God every morning when you get up, that you have something to do that day which must be done, whether you like it or not. Being forced to work and forced to do your best will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle never know."

Health
The greatest wealth is health. James West wrote, "Health is a large word. It embraces not the body only, but the mind and spirit as well;... and not today's pain or pleasure alone, but the whole being and outlook of a man." Arguably the most important of all the nine, as (George William Curtis wrote) "Happiness lies, first of all, in health."

Social
My blog Dom Forth Presents... focused heavily on some of the better social aspects of life. We are (afterall) social creatures. Yet, socializing nonstop without personal improvement is an opportunity wasted. "We Are the Sum Total of the Five People We Spend The Most Time With" Jim Rohn once said. Do the goals of your social groups match your own?

Education
This quote by William Haley encapsulates the very essence of my belief in education. "Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it. Great stuff!

Finally, the last area is Travel. Jawaharial Nehru once wrote, “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” I hope that through my travels I can become complete, but am fully aware that it is not travel itself that determines the individual. As Henry Miller wrote, “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” Too true.

Is it a coincidence that it is these 9 areas that are so important? The number nine is a most remarkable number in many respects. It is held in great reverence by all who study the occult sciences; and in mathematical science it possesses properties and powers which are found in no other number.

In his book, The Enneagram, Understanding Yourself and the Others in Your Life, Palmer wrote that each Enneagram number, or style, is based on a pattern of where attention goes. By learning about what kinds of things one habitually attends to and puts energy into, one can observe oneself more accurately and develop more self-awareness.

And, that enhancing one’s self awareness with the help of the Enneagram, one can exercise more choice about one’s functioning rather than engaging in patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior in an automatic, habitual, unconscious way.

It is my goal for us to improve all of theses areas by really challenging these 9 specific areas of life. If it can help us look at ourselves in new and different ways, and we become better people then I'll be happy :)

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