Underneath Your Personality: Discover Greater Well-Being Through Deep Living With the Enneagram

To authentically live from this place is not easy. It requires much of us in areas we’ve learned to ignore. This work of excavation requires seven steps.

At the personality level (4), we have our coping mechanisms, our defenses, and our ways of getting by in the world. From this level, I might decide that there must be something more to life than I am getting, and that I want something more than life is offering.

Each time we meet and embrace a hidden part of ourselves— something that was rejected in childhood as unacceptable or bad—we create more inner unity. We become more alive by awakening from our numbness and self-rejection.

Doing this allows rigid-patterned people to face their fear that they’re not real,17 to find out that they are real, and then to develop an authentic sense of self.