To Think With Your Heart, To Feel With Your Head
This post centers around the enneagram. If you are unfamiliar with it, you can find out more by following the links at the end.
This is a story about the enneagram and me.
I empathize if you are rolling your eyes right now, I do. If you view the enneagram as just another personality test, it feels understandably obnoxious, perhaps a bit flat. I’ve taken many of these-I’m a green, beaver, INFJ according to a few of the most widely used personality tests. Also, if I were a Disney princess, I’d be Belle (thank you Buzzfeed). I want much more than this provincial life, but a winsome library might just convince me to move into a remote, isolated, architecturally complex castle in the woods, even if it is surrounded by unusually antagonisitc wolves. Wait, and there’s tea?! On second thought, I don’t require convincing. All of that sounds heavenly.
The enneagram is different; it encourages change, not of your foundational traits but change and growth in the way you can cultivate these traits to do kingdom work in the world. It isn’t just a list of observable behaviors. It asks you to consider your deepest motives and, indeed, most rooted fears.
This is where the story begins for me.
I’ve always been a girl caught between the elaborate world of logic and imagination in my mind and the passionate fury and feeling in my heart, but almost wholly disconnected from my body.
As a child, I would utterly lose time devouring library books with Mathilda in her room in the Wormwood home, wandering the desolate gardens of Misselthwaite Manor with Mary Lennox, or delighting in the frolicsome beauty of Prince Edward Island with Anne. Sigh…beauty.
I also knew that sometimes the chrysalis gingerly attached to the underside of the milkweed leaf would be eaten by a bird in the early dawn hour, and it didn’t make me sad. I was far too logical and pragmatic to anthropomorphize the chrysalis or the bird. It was simply a fact observed, and what did it mean but that all living things survive only until they don’t? Sigh…existentialism.
So, I would read and write and stare at the growing grass and name the trees in my yard and live in my head. I would sort my seashells by type, then childishly chastise my aunt for interfering with the tide pool’s ecosystem by stealing the hermit crab’s future condominium. I’d lie on the living room floor with a book, thirsty, hungry, arm going numb, lips chapped, and not notice what was happening in my body, ever.
Like Belle once said, “Papa, do you think I’m odd?”
I struggled to understand these disparate parts of myself: head, heart, gut. It seemed to me three vastly different worlds held in one body. What could the meaning possibly be? How could I ever possibly be known? As a student in college, with the internet a fresh and exciting place (wah, wah, waaaah), my roommates and I did what college aged people do-we tried to define ourselves, and personality tests seemed a mighty convenient way to do it.
Nothing ever seemed to fit just right. I always felt a little of this, and a little of that. Even the many faceted Myers-Briggs seemed only to describe, not to understand. Clearly, this personality test thing is just another set of boxes into which most of us do not neatly fit.
Despite there not being an easy answer, I did get a few things sorted. I met a boy with his own personality, got married, started a career, made a few humans, each with their own personalities.
At some point I realized, I could easily just stay where I am. After the unavoidable, rapid, intense growth and change of youth, there comes a point when the choice becomes your own: continue to grow, or stay where you are. My track is set, and the world can see that I’ve arrived. No one is going to make me challenge myself. If I want to grow, if I want to push forward in my kingdom life, I’m going to have to make an internal commitment.
In this moment the enneagram crosses my path. My husband and I begin to study it together. And I begin to understand myself in a way that not only makes me feel seen, but also challenges me to break the chains of self soothing habits I’ve depended on my whole life.
The brass pins in the cylinder aligned, and the lock clicked open. The unifying motive that resulted in my love of beauty and hunger for knowledge, the fears that gripped me and sent me spinning toward hedonism, the insecurities that told me if I wasn’t capable, things would surely implode, the voice of strength and confidence I projected when I operated from a generous spirit, even the way I struggle to identify my own physical needs-I flung the unbarred door wide and exposed my inner most rooms.
Identifying myself as a type 5 with a strong wing 4 was the skeleton key I needed to open many locked doors within myself. I’m driven by curiosity and knowledge and the feeling of being able, yet my emotions are fuel to my learning machine. I have the strong sense that my voice is unique, yet I struggle with the vulnerability needed to share it, fearing that it will not be treated as the precious gift I believe it to be. I often operate from a very sneaky form of scarcity-not monetary or means scarcity, but time and energy scarcity. I protect my time and energy with ferocity, often keeping private what could be used for a broader good. I mentally craft utopia, yet I am boundlessly cynical. I question everything. No, really…everything. I can be an iconoclast, a dissident kicking down walls that require kicking, but with my words and ideas, not my feet. Susan Sontag, Emily Dickinson, Georgia O’Keefe, and Margaret Atwood are my soul sisters, if I may be so bold. I am remote from my body, often feeling it is unimportant, yet I give in to the pursuit of hedonistic experience and fleeting pleasures when I’m at my worst. At my best, I am open to being surprised by humanity and her Creator, acknowledging that I may not have had it all figured out. At my best, I am bold and assertive, generous and expressive of my intricate internal life.
I feel with my head, and I think with my heart, and I protect myself from the world that just might need both these parts of me.
Here I am, acting on the call to share abundantly and delight in surprise.
For more information on the enneagram, please consider the following resources:
Have you done any enneagram study? I’d love to know if you have found it helpful!
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