WHO WE TRULY ARE: AN INVITATION TO CONTINUE THE JOURNEY INTO THE ENNEAGRAM WISDOM
“There is a great gulf between the way my ego (false, adaptive self) wants to identify me, with its protective masks and self-serving fictions, and my true self. It takes time and hard experience to sense the difference between the two – to sense that running beneath the surface of the experience I call life, there is a deeper and truer life waiting to be acknowledged.” ~ Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
Do you sense a deeper, truer life waiting to be acknowledged in you?
Are you aware of the protective masks and self-serving fictions that are sabotaging your experience of the “truest” you – and sabotaging your relationships then in turn?
Is there weariness and unrest that longs for peace and stability in the confidence that you indeed know who you are and live from that authentic space?
I first read Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak on a plane to my initial weekend session with my Enneagram Cohort studying under Suzanne Stabile. As a self-identified 3, Palmer was assigned reading for us “3s” in preparation for the cohort. I am reading this work again right now. It is always so interesting to me to see what I underlined, highlighted, and noted in a first reading of a book that then, when I come back to it years later, I underline, highlight, and note differently!
This experience of re-reading Let Your Life Speak is no different. What is standing out to me, however, is my reading of all his language of true self, false self, ego, and receiving the “gift of being oneself” (to grab the phrase of another excellent book, The Gift of Being Yourself by David Benner). I highlighted some of these phrases years ago, but this time, their meaning is different… deeper… accentuated in different ways.
Why? I think it is because these past few years of soul work and soul care have taken this journey so much deeper as I have consented to God’s continuing guidance on the path and submitted to “doing the work” of growing my soul. Not perfectly, but intentionally.
And what am I finding? That indeed there is a deeper and truer life waiting to be acknolwdged. That indeed there is a deeper and truer self waiting to be unlocked. That indeed there is a deeper and more authentic “me” underneath the surface and behind the masks who wants to be free to be! That “me” of my true self wants to be free to be because the false self, ego, adaptive me is tired! Exhausted by the efforts to always be successful for anyone and everyone as a 3, thinking deceptively that such success with others will resolve my feelings of shame and fulfill my longing for affection and esteem.
The authentic “me” of my true self can’t be wounded. The authentic “me” of my true self is fulfilled in affection and esteem. The authentic “me” of my true self has no need for success in the eyes of others. The authentic “me” of my true self is the me that is able to rest in the reality of peace within a frenzied, fractured world.
Note I said that all of this experience is what “I am finding.” I have not “found it” in completion. In fact, the more I experience it, the more I recognize my lack of experiencing it. The more I have moments moving toward my true self, the more I am aware of how often I am in unhealth dropping into excess of my personality, growing my personality rather than growing my soul!
But what joy and again, peace, when I am intentional to grow my soul, to awaken to the deeper, truer life waiting to be acknowledged. Joy and peace in myself, within me, which of course means joy and peace in my relationships with others – Betsie, my wife, can attest to that! ☺ And joy and peace, in my case as a Christian, in my relationship with the Divine, God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.
So as I re-read Palmer, I am invited to dig even deeper to grow my soul so that this deeper and truer life might be acknowledged and set free from the masks of my false self ego. Actually, not just invited, but inspired.
And thus, that means continuing to deepen in my Contemplative Christian Faith, including doing “the Work” of the Enneagram: engaging the Enneagram wisdom and using its wisdom to drop the “masks and self-serving fictions,” to integrate this wisdom about myself in all its simplicity and complexity that I might have more and more moments of catching my false self “on the run,” as Richard Rohr describes it – more and more moments of movement toward my true self in Christ, as I understand it through my relationship with God, that the essence of who I really am might be experienced.
May I invite you to the same journey? To the same work – to similar integration, regardless of your faith or religious tradition?
Indeed the Enneagram is wonderful information and insight about ourselves and others that practically, as a “typology” / “personality profiling system” (as many call it), enhances how we live in our worlds and enhances the relationships and interactions we have. And I certainly invite you to continue your journey along those lines with us in this new year – that you might experience more understanding and compassion for yourself and for others.
But the Enneagram is so much more than a typology or personality profiling system. It is wisdom – one of many in this world – about who we are as humans to help unlock and free our true self to be a blessing in this world. To lose the masks and fictitious stories we write about ourselves and embrace the wonderfully good and beautiful essence of who we are! A journey toward peace and rest, where our deepest needs are met and the exhausting effort-filled pretense of our false self can be released.
Join us as we continue to walk our own journeys toward this “deeper and truer life waiting to be acknowledged.”
