The Enneagram Was Never Meant to Be a Personality Party Trick
How a map for liberation got turned into another ego costume
Somewhere between the monastery and the Instagram carousel, the Enneagram lost its soul. What began as a symbol of divine process and awakening has been rebranded as a personality sorting hat. Now we meet people who say, “I’m a Two, so I can’t help but overgive,” or “I’m an Eight, deal with it.” What was once a mirror for self-observation has become a hall pass for bad behavior.
The Enneagram was never meant to tell you who you are. It was meant to show you how you’re trapped.
A Symbol of Process, Not Identity
In the early Gurdjieff work, the Enneagram wasn’t about types at all. It was a diagram of movement, a visual representation of energy’s flow between order, chaos, and harmony. You learned it by dancing it, not taking a quiz. The nine points illustrated the rhythm of transformation—the sacred law of three (affirming, denying, reconciling) moving through the law of seven (the arc of completion and return).
In that lineage, to “know your type” would have made no sense. The point was to observe how you constantly fell asleep to yourself, not to build a brand around it.
Later, when figures like Óscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo developed the system into a psychology of fixation, the tool gained clarity and accessibility. It helped people name the grooves where their personality tends to repeat. But even then, the purpose was inner work, not social media memes. Typing was meant to locate your blind spot so that awareness could move in and free it.
From Liberation to Label
Cynthia Bourgeault calls out how quickly the Western ego turns tools for transcendence into mirrors for vanity. The Enneagram became a new way to curate identity. People stopped working on their patterns and started marketing them.
Instead of “I’m noticing my tendency toward envy and self-comparison,” it became “I’m a Four, so I feel things deeply.”
Instead of “My drive to perfect everything hides my fear of inadequacy,” it became “I’m a One, that’s just how I am.”
The language of self-observation morphed into self-justification. In spiritual terms, that’s a downgrade from revelation to regression.
The Ego’s Talent for Hijacking Anything
The personality loves nothing more than being studied. Give the ego a map of itself and it will start building vacation homes on every coordinate. The Enneagram, which was meant to humble us, became the perfect ego project. We turned our weaknesses into personal brands. We collected insights like trading cards.
Bourgeault points out that this is exactly what happens when we mistake knowledge for presence. The head understands the structure of the trap but still lives inside it. We can name our type, explain our patterns, and still remain completely unconscious.
As she puts it, “The outer self will always claim the insight as a possession unless awareness is simultaneously grounded in the deeper field of being.”
In other words, the ego doesn’t care whether it’s miserable or mystical, as long as it’s the center of the story.
The Missing Ingredient: Presence
The original intent of the Enneagram was to help us see our personality as machinery. By observing its automatic reactions, we could shift from identification to awareness. But without presence, the system just creates new loops. You analyze your habits, label your emotions, and rehearse your backstory with exquisite self-awareness—while staying stuck exactly where you were.
Presence doesn’t analyze the pattern. It sees it. It holds it without judgment until it dissolves.
That’s why Bourgeault places this discussion within the larger framework of “Balancing the Outer and Inner.” The Enneagram is useful only when your attention can move freely between the personality and the deeper field of being. Without that inner witness, you end up like someone diagnosing a dream while still asleep.
The Spiritual Cost of Turning Mysticism into Content
Our culture has a talent for taking sacred technology and flattening it into entertainment. Meditation becomes “mindfulness minutes.” The tarot becomes lifestyle branding. The Enneagram becomes a quiz on your dating app.
The tragedy isn’t the simplification itself. It’s that people stop there. We settle for a clever explanation instead of actual transformation. The ancient teachers warned that any map of the psyche, no matter how profound, becomes dangerous when mistaken for the territory.
A diagram of awakening cannot awaken you. It can only remind you that you’re asleep.
The Return to Right Use
So what does a mature use of the Enneagram look like?
It looks like humility. You use the map to recognize when you’ve drifted into habit, when the automatic self has taken the wheel again. You use it to soften, not harden, your sense of who you are. You catch yourself saying, “That’s just how I am,” and realize that’s exactly where the work begins.
In that sense, the Enneagram is not a personality system at all. It’s an ego detector. A reminder that the traits you most proudly defend are often the very structures keeping you from your own freedom.
Bourgeault’s challenge to her students is simple: let the insights lead you inward, not outward. Each fixation, once seen through the lens of presence, becomes an entry point into Real I—the divine center that is not bound by personality at all.
Virgin Monk Boy’s Take
The modern obsession with typing ourselves is spiritual cosplay. “Hi, I’m a Four, and I’m here to romanticize my trauma instead of releasing it.” “I’m a Nine, so I’m at peace with being asleep.”
If you need a label, here’s one: human, trying to wake up.
The real work begins when you stop curating your dysfunction and start watching it. When you stop making excuses for your pattern and start making space for awareness.
The Enneagram was never meant to make you interesting. It was meant to make you free.
Blessed are the ones who stop introducing themselves by their defenses.
If this reflection made you smile and wince at the same time:
It draws from Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within by Cynthia Bourgeault, based on Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness and the Essential Self.
Both remind us that every real teaching eventually asks for the same thing: less performance, more presence.
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I can be hypnotized for hours reading, exploring & gabbing about my double whammy Pisces with Sun AND rising sign in Pisces with moon in Leo but I cannot remember a a single thing about the Enneagram. I keep searching my memory cause I knew I HAD to have explored it sometime, somewhere…and then I released I was confusing it with Myers-Briggs. Which I honestly don’t remember much about either. Not to denigrate either one but i think my Pisces personality & trying to figure out how to deal with that might be enuf.
Both the article & comments are definitely intriguing - thanx, everyone - & I’m sure I’d be fascinated by it (maybe TOO fascinated by it….& since I just got Helminski’s “Living Presence” from Amazon today & am already reading/listening to 2 other books, i should probably stop there. Putting another thing on my “to do” list that will easily by pass dusting & cleaning the bathroom is more than enuf lol
I was introduced to the Eneagram and other such things in seminary back in the 1980's. I found them all so labeling, in a highly negative way, and pretty much refused to use them or tell people my types.(I also don't tell people my "Sun sign" or "Color Me Beautiful" season, either.)
I was required to put my Eneagram and Myers-Briggs types on my internship applications by the seminary's internship director. I refused. My reasoning? I was being true to type with whatever my Eneagram numbers were. He had to allow it.
I find these things just more limits by the patriarchy. When there's one of these models developed by a woman, let me know. I might be interested.