The Enneagram as a Spiritual Path

I began practicing Buddhism with the understanding that it would fix whatever was wrong with me. It would turn me from a grouchy, depressed, insecure person into someone who was patient, loving, and confident. I could hardly wait for these results to take root. 

Yet, after years and years of spiritual practice, I was still . . . myself. My “self ” was what I was hoping to vanquish, yet she hung around constantly, pawing at me, irritating me with her problems and defects, endlessly needy at every turn. It was so embarrassing. I worked harder and harder still, but I stubbornly remained myself. I continued to meditate with the hope that one day I would finally break through to the person I knew I could be if only I could stop being myself. 

One day as I was sitting down to practice, rather than being serene and joyful at yet another opportunity to release stress and reconnect with the “universe” (whatever that means), I looked at my meditation cushion and thought, Fuck you, you fucking fuck. Stop taunting me with your gaily colored slipcover and well-worn indentations in the exact shape of my personal butt indicating many hours of sitting, which have apparently got me exactly nowhere. I GIVE UP. I’m not going to meditate anymore, not for. One. More. Second. I’m just going to sit here and . . . and . . . and . . . BE MYSELF. 

And so I did. I just sat there. No technique, no “mindfulness” of this or that, no ambition, no hope. When the practice was over, instead of dunning myself for yet another fruitless session (I was still myself, after all), I experienced the release that comes with relinquishing any attempt to get anywhere. I remember thinking, This is what meditation is actually meant to be. It’s not a gambit to finally become someone worthy and lovable; it’s a way, perhaps, of demonstrating and discovering worthiness and love through letting go of all efforts to grasp such things. Upon doing so one discovers, it appears, that worthiness and love are all that are left. (Don’t take my word for that. Or anything, really. Promise.) 

Both Buddhist meditation practice and the enneagram have this in common: they blossom and empower through the light of awareness without agenda. When an agenda is applied—I need my awareness to show me how to change, be better, do more, feel otherwise—what is sought shimmies away. Remember, what is most longed for, as mentioned earlier—wisdom, love, creative self-expression, and so on—comes to us on the winds of receptivity rather than effort. These are qualities that are sensed, felt, discovered rather than crafted. While your conventional mind may be exceedingly beautiful, brilliant, sweet, and sharp (which I’m sure it is!) it also presents the most interesting roadblock. Some systems call this roadblock “ego.” Personally, I bristle at the way the word is most often used. Too often, also as mentioned earlier, we take it to mean something like “You don’t matter” and the best thing you can do is ignore yourself and . . . what? What do you have to work with if not yourself? My friends, this does not work. Believe me, I have tried. Your “self ” is the working basis for every discovery you will ever make. I mean! What else do you have? 

To work with self as the foundation of the journey to enlightenment, three qualities are useful. They are called shila (ethical conduct), samadhi (absorption), and prajna (wisdom). . . . When it comes to working with the enneagram as a path, shila, samadhi, and prajna are equally useful. 

Ennea-shila

Ennea-shila may be the most painful and difficult to apply, but also the most liberating. It begins with simply seeing yourself. See. Yourself. See yourself! See yourself without looking through the refractions of others’ lenses. Who did your mother expect you to be? What values were prized in your community? What did the dominant culture have to say about your personality, looks, desires, revulsions? I’m not saying all of those things are bad. They may have been quite wonderful. But until you look at yourself through your own eyes, they will cause pain. The enneagram presents a perfectly pitched way to do so. The primary question at this point is: Do you actually want to see? A reasonable question, if you ask me. Don’t say “yes” because you think that’s the right answer. Or “no” for that matter. Usually, “I don’t know” is the most trustworthy response. 

When I was a child, I saw myself as a failure. I sucked at school. I mean, I SUCKED. Parents, teachers, counselors all scratched their heads. “She’s not stupid,” was the most complimentary of the observations. My school failures were not the result of me being some secret genius who was just too bored by the plebian demands of lesser minds and thus spaced out into personal reflections on pre-Socratic philosophies or the inevitability of 3-D printers. No, my friends. I tried really hard to do well in school. Hashtag FAIL. I flunked eighth grade. I barely graduated high school. I did not graduate from college. Okay. A lot of years have passed between those failures and this moment, and somehow I figured out a way to learn things. Eventually I forgot about those early efforts to exceed “She’s not stupid” in the eyes of others, although I dragged the “I’m a failure” notion with me until quite recently. It all came to a head in 2007 when I took meditation instructor training and FLUNKED. Of the 40 or so participants who had qualified for the training based on a decade plus of meditation practice and study, graduation from a Buddhist seminary, and seven intensive 12-hour days of training, I was the sole failure. 

Both Buddhist meditation practice and the enneagram have this in common: they blossom and empower through the light of awareness without agenda.

I stayed till the very end of the program. It culminated in the other (non-stupid) students taking with great solemnity what was then called the “meditation instructor’s vow” (to do no harm and so on), watched by me, sitting on the sidelines and trying not to cry. Until I got in my car to drive home when I burst into tears. I AM A FAILURE. What is wrong with me? I hadn’t asked myself that question within a learning environment for decades but at this moment, all the shame and frustration of being a terrible student (and therefore a bad person and a failure) came back to me. Was I stupid? How come everyone else, it seemed, could succeed where I fail? 

I ended up undergoing, at the advice of a therapist, batteries of intelligence tests. I have no idea if what they revealed is credible in scientific communities, but the results helped me a great deal. Anyway, long story short, when it comes to learning styles, I am extremely kinesthetic, meaning: I have to do it to understand it. Visual learning style? Auditory learning style? Not so much. In fact, almost not at all. Suddenly, my whole school experience made sense and explained why the only thing I was really good at was gym class. (Seriously.) I found this extremely liberating. Instead of looking at myself through the eyes of long-past theories of education and the fear and disappointment of my parents, I just saw . . . me. I was fine. Once I dropped the other lenses, I saw someone who just was who she was. I’m not smarter or stupider than anyone else. I’m just me. That is the beginning of ethical conduct. (PS I was tasked with six months of remedial training to become an authorized meditation instructor, which I completed successfully. Somehow.) The moral of this story, if there is one, is: You are just who you are. Period. 

Who is that? 

The best (only?) way to find out is to examine yourself very closely—not to fix or improve, but to know. What you examine could be called your “ego.” Of course! We all have one. It includes the ideas we have about who we are, who we ought to be, what we like, don’t like, and so on. There are many spiritual teachers who say that in order to experience transcendence, you have to destroy your ego. You know what? They’re probably right. However, the way most of us go about navigating beyond ego is to hate on ourselves while diminishing our most powerful experiences of desire, rage, and joy as “just my ego.” Okay. That’s true. But how useful is it to shame yourself as a path to liberation? As one who has exhausted that methodology, I can say with confidence: none whatsoever. Now what? 

Please consider that because you have an “ego” you also have the potential for freedom from ego. In this sense, ego and egolessness are intertwined and even inseparable. Because we have one, we also have the other. However, we can’t start at the end and just rush somehow to egolessness by pretending that we don’t matter and then embracing its corollary: pretending others don’t matter. We have to take a much more nuanced—and interesting—journey than that. It begins with turning toward yourself. Seeing yourself clearly. Loving yourself rather than attempting to push yourself aside. 

The enneagram describes nine perfectly formed, utterly gorgeous blocks or ego matrices. These blocks are who we think we are. On one hand, we’re right. But they also illustrate exactly what obscures who we really are—beyond who we think we are. We may veer between seeing our blocks as beautiful (which they are) and treacherous (which they are). Some, upon discovering their type, only see the block and wonder what possible good this system is if all it does is point out what is wrong with us. What is “wrong” with us is also what points us in the direction of liberation from it. 

My go-to state, melancholy, is a feeling of gloom that is not altogether unpleasant because it seems, somehow, soulful and meaningful. Each color of the universe is expressed as a shade of gray. All notes are blue; bent and unexpected. Ordinary objects arrange themselves as sad poetry. A single tear may roll down my cheek. And so forth. It is a state of mind both nuanced and sappy. When I am in such a state, I feel exempted from the flow of the world in all sorts of good ways and silly ways. Melancholy is my binky. In the Buddhist tradition I was trained in, this binky is called a cocoon. If you are a One, your binky is resentment. If you are a Two, it is flattery, and so on. It is the mood or action we default to when we are angry, disappointed, hurt, or, sometimes, just bored.

It turns out that this is great news. Your fixation/block is like a bird that lands on your seafaring vessel to indicate you are not far from the shore. When you notice you are fixated, rather than “believing” it (although it is completely true), you could interpret it as a trumpet riff beckoning you home, home to whatever is beyond your block but would not be accessible without it. 

I once read about a book called Ego Is the Enemy. It might have been better named Thinking Ego Is the Enemy Is the Enemy. No disrespect meant for that book, which I have not read, or the author who, I’m sure, offered something quite useful. I’m just saying to love yourself, including your impenetrable ego and indestructible buddhanature, your brilliance and your messiness, is the foundation of ethical conduct. Weirdly, the block is the way.

Ennea-samadhi

Ennea-samadhi could be imagined as a video camera with a lens that does not record. Everything is framed but nothing is actually imprinted. The images are not edited or photoshopped by your imaginings. Rather, they simply are . . . until they are not. 

Once I was talking to a friend about his most recent relationship. Another fiasco. As he described the breakup and who said and did what, I noticed that the current partner sounded exactly—and I mean exactly—like all the previous partners. In my friend’s recap of their most recent conversation, his current ex used all the same phrases to explain herself as had the previous exes, had remarkably similar communication issues, and had the same exact tone of voice as previous girlfriends when reporting her complaints. How could this be? I wondered. Is he going out with the same person over and over? It sure sounded that way. Well, no. And yes. On one level, each girlfriend seemed to indeed be a discrete human being named Michele or Tamara or Camille. But viewed through the lens of my friend’s projections, they all turned into the same person. 

I’m not questioning my friend’s honesty. I also do what he does. We all do. It’s as if we have a lens lodged in our foreheads and a movie playing between our ears, one scripted by our whole lives up to this moment. Wherever we look, our movie projects itself and instead of seeing what’s there (or hearing or otherwise perceiving), we watch the movie over again. Samadhi is not, as far as I understand it, about replacing a bad, broken movie with a good, wholesome one. It is about turning the projector off. Completely. 

Samadhi, in the words of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, means, “You are able to work properly in your world and in your particular state of being. You develop good control over your mind, your mental events, and over the products of those mental events.” In other words, you see the tricks your mind plays on you and you don’t mistake them for reality. 

What is “wrong” with us is also what points us in the direction of liberation from it.

Among the many great gifts of the enneagram is that it creates space to see others apart from our projections. We all come fully equipped with a playlist of projections to explain everything and everyone. Samadhi begins with realizing that our projections stem from our inner movie and not from reality. This helps us to become more compassionate and patient toward ourselves. 

But the real gift is in increased compassion and patience for others. When others cannot accurately sense my splendidly nuanced presence or question why I need rucksacks full of snacks wherever I go, it’s not because they’re insensitive brutes who want me to starve (probably). It’s because I’m a self-preservation Four. When my husband insists on figuring out why something went wrong (where I would focus on just repairing it), I can see this as an expression of fear rather than wondering, What difference does it make, let’s just fix it. For a One, to make a mistake is a big problem because it indicates a glitch in the matrix. Meanwhile, for the rest of us, we just assume that mistakes will happen and though some may be egregious, the first step is to mend, not trace. To know that, just like me, he operates from a playlist of projections that probably don’t have anything to do with me, I can exhale. I see him for who he is, not for who he is in my mind. I’m not saying that this means I have accomplished samadhi. I most certainly have not. But there is something about the space beyond projections that is the doorway. The enneagram introduces you to your wiring and enables you to see how others are wired. Interactions become, at once, more intimate and less personal while your ability to rest within each interaction deepens into the realm of samadhi . . .

Enna-prajna

. . . which beautifully brings us to ennea-prajna. As you may recall, prajna (or wisdom) is depicted as a double-edged sword, one that slices on the way down and on the way up. In the Buddhist view, this means that the sword cuts both the delusion of duality (okay, fine) and the delusion that there is anyone there to experience it. I CANNOT EXPLAIN THIS BECAUSE I DON’T UNDERSTAND IT. Sorry. As an unenlightened being, though, I can begin with cutting through the deluded view that I am accurate in my interpretations of others’ behavior and that my mechanism for interpretation is flawed, i.e., colored by the blinders of type. Bringing the sword down, I release you from my projections and bringing it up, I cut through those projections altogether. 

I hope this broad exploration of the enneagram has been useful, inspiring, and exciting. It is an astonishingly rich, accurate, and, perhaps above all, nuanced system. Unlike other systems of typology, it does not seek to categorize but to liberate and, in so doing, brings an ever-deepening capacity to love yourself, others, and all beings.

♦

Excerpted from The Buddhist Enneagram: Nine Paths to Create a Deeper Relationship with Yourself and Others © 2026 by Susan Piver. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com