awareness Archives - Claudia Dommaschk, MFT

The Enneagram describes nine different ways of relating to the world, one of which you made unconsciously your own. Some psychologists refer to this as identity or the “once and for all” solution to a limitation in the environment early on or to protect a specific aspect of the self that felt threatened as our personality was developing. The purpose of discovering your type is not simply to know how to better describe yourself but to transform how you relate to both yourself and the world around you so that you may live more freely as the person you were meant to be.

Personality consists of three basic components:

1) Content: the unique traits of the personality that can be described; it is what we are mostly aware of because it is what is obvious and observable. For example, tense/relaxed, optimistic/pessimistic, action-oriented/thinking-oriented.

2) Structure: makes the content show up the way it does. Each personality has its way of paying attention to what happens; it is usually unconscious but the mediating factor in what is important to us in any given moment or situation.

3) Pure Awareness: “Me” or ego is the accumulation of all of one’s psychological content along with the structures that give rise to it. Beyond ego is “I” or pure awareness. Awareness is said to be formless because it has no content and no structure. It is also said to be “Presence” – presence to oneself without which nothing else can be present.

Each Enneagram type is trying to actualize a basic desire while avoiding a basic fear and has adopted a strategy for doing so. And though it seemed to offer the best hope for completion early on, its solution is limited because it is based on the assumption that one can only be happy once the basic demand it met. But this rarely happens in life. Frustration sets in and we are, in essence, postponing our happiness when, in fact, true happiness can only be met when we transcend our characteristic strategy and allow our authentic self to emerge. The Enneagram offers direction finders for our liberation. And bringing awareness to our strategy through Gestalt Therapy’s emphasis on the awareness continuum, automatically begins the process of thinning it out.

Recommended reading: Roaming free Inside the Cage, by William Schafer, 2009

I got the impression that a friend of mine was struggling to understand why we embark on this courageous and sometimes arduous journey in the name of freedom. The following was my response to him:

As you relax your ego (or identify less with your personality structure), you move closer to your Authentic Self or Pure Awareness. This is Presence, Eckhart Tolle suggests, or God-consciousness. In other words, the way I explain this to people is that your personality structure is like a musical instrument with Presence or Atem (in German: breath) moving through it to create a unique sound which is you as you commonly know yourself to be.
We can get seduced into believing that we are only the music (and many wars have been fought defending this illusion) when in reality we are much more: at our deepest, we are the breath (consciousness) that moves through the instrument (our personality) to make music (the content of our lives). As I understand, that’s what Tolle is trying to convey. He urges us to cultivate a practice: meditation, yoga, prayer, awareness, etc, that will help us know who we really are since he believes (and I agree) that so much of our suffering is created when we hang on to our egoic mind sets.

In my work with people I use the Enneagram (an ancient system) to help me identify nine distinct patterns of being or personality structures. These structures are based on three existential fears: autonomy, security, and self-worth. I find that each of us is fixated on one of these areas and by working through the current manifestation of our core fear to completion (a very GT notion), we become a little less identified with our personality and more with Presence and this can be very liberating….this is how the personal (psychotherapy) moves into the transpersonal (spiritual).

Tag: awareness

What is the Enneagram?

Brief Description of Our Aim