Enneagram for Self-Inquiry
What is the Enneagram?
The Enneagram is a mandala of the human experience that fuses together sacred geometry, ancient consciousness technology, and modern psychology. It maps out nine archetypal personality patterns — the ways that humans tend to lose contact with Divine Essence. These ways of forgetting are the basis for our ego structures and identity fixations. They also reveal our most persistent and challenging patterns, and point to our essential gifts.
Many spiritual traditions and practices focus on expanding our awareness into other dimensions, accessing unity consciousness, or ascending to reach transcendental, transpersonal states of hypergnosis (non-ordinary seeing or knowing beyond what we would typically experience in everyday life).
The Enneagram teaches us how to live with this knowing of Oneness or Nothingness once we resume our travel in the human dimension. It helps us notice and navigate the core fears and core desires that fuel our ego. It helps us free ourselves from patterns so we can more consciously choose our path and more fully inhabit our body-bound journey.
Background and lineage
Wendy May is a purpose coach and self-inquiry guide with 400+ combined hours of training in Enneagram and integral coaching. She has been a student of the Enneagram wisdom tradition since 1999. Wendy officially started her teacher certification training with The Enneagram Institute in 2014, and completed all certification requirements and exams in early 2020.
The Enneagram Institute — located in Stone Ridge, NY, USA — is a school based on the “insight tradition” of the Enneagram. This approach, using the Enneagram as a tool for deepening self-inquiry, was developed by Wendy’s teacher Russ Hudson along with his research and teaching colleague Don Riso. Russ Hudson’s teacher was a French-Swiss woman known to her students as Madame de Salzmann and her teacher was the Greek-Armenian spiritual philosopher and teacher George Gurdjieff who is best known for his “Fourth Way” teachings.
Our ego is not the problem. Our ego is the path.
Quote from Michael Singer, The Surrender Experiment:
“Something much wiser than me had reached into my psyche that night and rearranged my entire relationship with myself. I no longer saw the lower aspect of myself, with all his personal issues and melodramas, as the enemy that had to be destroyed. I looked at him now with a new understanding. I needed to use all these disturbed personal energies for my ascent. It was perfectly clear to me that since he was the problem, he was also the solution. I actually felt a tinge of compassion toward that struggling person within me.”
The patterns repeating, the heartache recurring, the mind narratives running… they have a purpose. They show us what we’re meant to share here, what we’re meant to learn. They light a path for our soul’s growth.
The wisdom of the Enneagram offers more than just a system to sort humans into categories. Recognizing our “type” is only the beginning. From there, we can see where we’re stuck in a misunderstanding about our essence nature, and reclaim the keys to bring forth more of our gifts.
Our ego structures are designed with an intelligent, sacred geometry. They are part of the hidden architecture of human consciousness, elegantly and artfully arranged for evolution. By working with this understanding, we can intentionally unravel our identifications, without bypassing our human experience.
This work has gifted me greater compassion for myself and others, healthy detachment from identity, and a lot more freedom and fluidity in how I navigate my human story and reality. I love sharing it with others.
If you’re interested in learning your Enneagram energy signature and engaging in guided self-inquiry around your personal evolutionary process, please get in touch with me. (Contact details below.)