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Enneagrams

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I love Meg.  She and I don't do particularly well in person, but we are seriously the best of friends on the phone.  To be fair, she's a total extrovert, and while I think our relationship is unique, I think she has several relationships like mine with other people.  *deep breath* I'm not threatened by that, or jealous.  I reach out to a lot of people over the course of living, hoping that some lasting relationship will form, but I never could've known what my reaching out to Meg would become.

The other day she asked me about my "enneagram".  My what?  Did I get my annual mammogram?  Did I eat my Golden Grahams?  No, my enneagram number.  I had never heard of it.  I asked her if it was the Myers-Briggs test, and she told me it was so much more.  In fact, she had a lot to say about it, most of which I couldn't comprehend.  So in true Meg form (turns out, she's an 8 who "persuades others to follow her into all kinds of endeavors"), she sent me a bunch of links to podcasts and articles to learn all about it.

24 hours in, and I must admit that it's pretty cool.  From what the experts say, discovering your enneagram is a life-long process, but really it's a life long process to take what you learn and make your life better from it.  So instead of just being defined as something, the definition becomes the jumping off point to figuring out yourself and your relationships with others.  It's been really fascinating.


For the record, I'm a FOUR--like, I couldn't be more of a four if I tried--but I have a little bit of FIVE in me.  And one of the things I love about the "types" link below is that there is information about how you work with other numbers.  So say if I know that someone with whom I live is a SEVEN (with some hints of EIGHT, but really, the SEVEN is pretty dang obvious), I can get information about how the two of us interact, what things to watch out for, and what will be really great.  It's almost like someone has been recording our actions for the past 30 years and wrote exactly what is happening!

I'm hoping that John and the kids will jump into this pool with me as well.  It feels like it could go a bit hokey at times, being seen as something "spiritual", but I'm going to take what I can from it and see where it goes!

Enneagram Types

Enneagram Podcast Primer


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