The Sacred Enneagram: Finding Your Unique Path to Spiritual Growth

It’s recommended that you practice Centering Prayer twice a day for twenty minutes each time. It’s also recommended that you practice Centering Prayer for six months before giving up or determining it’s not for you—it often can take that long (actually much longer for many of us) for the fruit of this prayer to blossom.

Actively participating in intentional stillness will bring the Nine’s practice an alertness that animates their own inner energies.

self-protection. But withdrawing isn’t enough; they need to engage the stillness, learning how to show up when they’d rather check out.

The contemplative lifestyle reveals its power by way of the fruit it produces. Contemplative practices and disciplines affect every part of us and our relationships. As my wife Phileena always says, “To the extent we are transformed, the world is transformed.”

But what happens when gut people simply stop? Who are they without the good they do? When an instinctive type is forced to stop, they realize how overidentified they are with their drive to do. They are not free.

Real transformation takes place when we pair the self-awareness that the Enneagram stimulates with the silence of contemplative practice. Then our unique path to spiritual growth emerges, and we will never be the same.

Learning to develop compassion for oneself is crucial for Ones who live in their bodies as a prison of unattainable perfection, a place of perpetual disappointment as a result of their unrealistic expectations.

but often our work was a poor attempt to serve or please God rather than to display the natural fruit of God’s love in us.

We need practices that open us to this grace, this work of God. God is love, and therefore God can be trusted. In silence, God will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. So why are we afraid? Just be. Let go. Give in to the silence. Release the lies, the addictions, the temptations that keep you masked in your illusions.