What’s more, the centers explain something about each of the nine Enneagram types by helping identify a person’s most accessible emotional response or reaction: anxiety or distress for the Head Center, fear or shame for the Heart Center, and frustration or anger for the Body Center.

Because of this profound capacity to understand others, it’s hard for them to take a position or hold an opinion, especially if it’s contrary to that of their partner or community.

This, I believe, is the true nature of conversion: it happens not in a single moment or pivotal event but in a lifelong series of minor deaths. It is what Jesus spoke plainly of: “If you wish to come after me, you must deny your very selves, take up the instrument of your own death and follow in my footsteps” (Matthew 16:24).

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

The Enneagram teaches us nine patterns of human character structure archetypes. These patterns fortify a kind of whole-person muscle memory (which includes the psychological or mental, emotional or spiritual, and somatic or physical) that shapes how we think, feel, and act.

The Frustration Group (the Harmony Triads’ Idealists), made up of Ones, Fours, and Sevens, experience constant angst about what could be. As little children they were frustrated they weren’t given enough of what they sensed they needed to self-realize.

How could I have seen such tremendous growth in my inner life only to turn around and fall flat on my face?

The Threes are the most estranged from their hearts (often manifested in their loneliness), the Sixes the most detached from their minds (which explains how irrational they can sometimes be), and the Nines the most disjointed from their bodies (experienced in the ways they calm down their external environments through the mellowing energy they

every experience we translate through our type consolidates its impression on us. It’s as if when we’re born, our soul lands on an arbitrary place on the circle of the Enneagram, and from that perspective of the world we develop attitudes we embrace as a way of framing context for every experience we’ll ever have.