Community as Symphony
Understanding and Appreciating Types of Personalities
Practicing Community – Part Eight
While we love a great solo, the best music comes from an assembly of instruments playing together. There is just something to the joining of different sounds in resonance that creates something truly special. As is often said, the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts, and it is through playing together that we create beautiful music.
This is the symphony of community which is made up many different types of instruments, each playing with their particular pitch and tenor but into a harmonic wholeness that co-creates the collective song.
When seeking to play music together, it can be helpful to look at the parts more closely and understand what sort of music they play, how they best contribute to the whole, and where they might encounter sticky points or stretch beyond their range. This is understanding “types” in integral parlance—recognizing we have different base positions that are rooted in our fundamental orientations of personality. That’s not to say they are unchangeable or the ultimate foundation of our identity, but they often manifest through common cultural identities and archetypal patterns.
Of course, no person is a singular instrument or, to use another metaphor, one color. We are all a palette of many colors, mixed and blended with different strokes and highlighted in particular ways at specific times. This is an important disclaimer to any discussion of types, which can turn into stereotypes and boxes of over-simplification.
So, with that understanding and background, and recognizing that all of our constructs are helpful to a point and have their limitations, this week we’re going to use the system of the enneagram of personality to consider how our various types show up in community.
The Enneagram of Personality
If you’re not already familiar with the enneagram, it may be difficult to follow the rest of this writing, as I’ll be assuming a basic knowledge rather than trying to explain the fundamentals of it. Even if you aren’t familiar, you might still glean from what follows as it aligns pretty closely with our embodied practices. If you’d like to learn more, I recommend this written primer from the Center for Action and Contemplation, or for a more complete description, this set of videos from Richard Rohr.
I am not an expert on the enneagram, but have worked with it some for years and have found it personally very helpful for understanding myself and others. One thing that I like best about it is that it engages with our core motivations and values—looking deep into our compulsions and avoidances while also honoring that these ways of being we take to are really just the strategies and patterns we’ve employed in the search for love. To be loved and to try to love others.
The truly tragic thing is that when we overly cling to our strategies for love, we actually end up driving people away. We hold so much energy in our passions and defending them, because they become embedded in our identity structure. So much of transformative power of the enneagram is to unveil these structures in order to accept, be with, and relax the grip of their hold over our deeper and more integrated being.
I also very much appreciate that it is dynamic, including evolution and growth within its system and not a fixed classification. There are healthy and unhealthy expressions of each type, there are wings and arrows of integration and disintegration, and there are even 27 subtypes for those who want to get really in depth with it!
ICN member and WeSpacer Toni LaMotta will also have a course on the enneagram starting next week, which will have some focus on the particular application to our embodied centers in Whole-Body Mystical Awakening. You can learn more about this upcoming course here or at the bottom of this writing.
The Three Centers of The Enneagram in Community
The three primary centers of the enneagram are the head, heart, and gut/body. As you can see, these relate quite directly with our four centers of spiritual knowing—which is no coincidence. These embodied centers are based on the systems of many traditions throughout history, which have variance but often land on these main three. We distinguish the feet/somatic from the gut, while various teachers of the enneagram refer to this center using either or both.
Each center has three types within it, and each will show up in community with a predisposition to certain needs and desires, while also enacting their particular proclivities and (often) unconscious strategies for how to be in the group space. Again, these are deeply embedded strategies for entering into love, which have very often been conditioned from a very early age.
Painting in broad strokes, let’s consider some of the ways that the various types might show up in community, considering one gift, one challenge, and one invitation for each type.
(If you don’t know your type, you can take an online test here, though be advised that such tests are not always the best way to truly gauge your type, as our deeper ego structures are often in our shadow-zone of unawareness.)
The Heart Center Types in Community
Type twos are often the great helpers in community. They will do the work that needs to get done, especially when it’s in service to others. This is a gift, but can also create a challenge of resentment if they stay for too long in a more externalized heart. An invitation for healthy presence in community might be to let themselves have the space to be with and discover their own will and desires. They can also allow themselves to be more present with the freedom to be in the receptive heart, completing the healthy mutuality of the WeSpace with all hearts equal, giving and receiving.
For type threes, they often bring the gift of knowing exactly what needs to be done to improve the situation, to help the community thrive, and to make things more efficient. One challenge they often face in this is they suffer the drive of having to perform, which can create a personal façade or an incapacity to bring themselves fully to communal space without the need to do. An invitation for them is to let themselves be in community with what is, just existing in the truth and harmony of the weaknesses and strengths in themselves and in the community—in this authenticity they can let themselves be seen and appreciated for who they are, not just what they do.
Type fours bring a wonderful gift of sensitivity and deep perception. Their creativity in expression and awareness often lets them see what others cannot. And the challenge that can come with this is the feeling of separation—the uniqueness can lead them to feel simultaneously envious of and better than others in community. They can be overwhelmed by the power of these emotions (and more mixed in), swept away in melancholy and despair. The invitation is to equanimity, a resting in the mundane of the here and now—not what is missing. To dwell with the common origin that we all share rather than feeling alone in the particular embodiment of it.
The Head Center Types in Community
At their best, fives will bring into community a wealth of knowledge distilled into wisdom, offering clarity and stability to others. The challenge they can face is to over-rely on knowledge and get lost in abstraction, to find themselves detached from what really is present and remain in the separate and seemingly safe mental space. So their invitation is to step into embodied interconnection and enact their manifestation of presence in the midst of community, not just their ideas.
Type sixes bring loyalty and faithful companionship into community. Their challenge comes in fear, which often manifests in over-reliance on a selected authority and personal timidity, stemming from a sense of lack of inner strength. They will often seek to find their security in the stability of an established community or tradition. So their invitation is to come into the deep strength of the ground of their soul, finding safety and courage from their fundamental faith in the divine source as their inner foundation of their own soul, always present right here and right now. From this strength, they can be healthy in community, owning their place.
For the sevens, they bring lots of joy and liveliness to community. Their curious and positive presence invites smiles and warmth. The challenge they usually have then is to accept when pain is present or simply be with the sober—not necessarily somber—reality of the present moment. They often disassociate through planning the next thing or seeking the next happiness, so their invitation is to be present and awake in whatever is there, which might be alone or in community. Not needing the next party, they find a freedom in the holy work of the present moment whatever it is bringing.
The Gut/Body Center Types in Community
The eights are often known as challengers, and they bring the gift of confidence and willingness to stir the pot and fight for what is right. As is apparent to every eight, the challenge for a challenger is over-challenging! In community they can be overly confrontational, feeling a need to control through strength, often with the energy of protecting others or themselves. Their invitation might be to embrace vulnerability and sincere presence, releasing the battle of duality and resting in the innocence of our indivisible and multidimensional unity. There is nothing to defend and all manner of things shall be well, even in messy community.
Type nines are the peaceable and pleasant presences, bringing the gift of harmony. They can often serve community by being excellent mediators, as they truly understand and can empathize with the various sides and perspectives of most any issue. So one of their challenges is to claim their own desires, thoughts, and feelings. They can get stuck in inaction and disembodiment, self-forgetting and feeling lost or unseen in community. Their invitation may be to claim their place and own their desires. To take up space and be present in the body of community, in the wonder and delight of embodying love. To bring forth beauty from within through holistic presence and manifest action.
From type ones, communities often receive the gift of order and the energy of improvement, seeking to make things better and enable further growth and evolution. Their challenge then is often finding themselves aligned with this need to fix, correct, and perfect. This creates a very critical internal voice, which is most harsh on oneself but also “shoulds” onto others. Their subverted anger manifests as resentment, which silently (or not so silently) can become the big brother in community, always watching for mistakes to correct out there in an attempt to eradicate various forms of “uncleanliness.” Their invitation is to drop the inner yardstick that is constantly measuring and release attempting to conform everything to their reality, their sole correct way to be. They might, more and more, let themselves accept the fundamental “ok-ness” of reality and embrace the serenity beyond judgment, coming into the joy and brilliance of inherent and unalterable perfection—everything in its right place just as it is.
Coming Together in the Ensemble
“When the personality comes to serve the energy of the soul, that is authentic empowerment.”
—Gary Zukav
We bring the energy and posture of our types into any community of which we become a part. We don’t need to feel shame about this, but can recognize both the gift and the limitations that we have because of who we are at this point in our lives. Yes, we carry the other types within us as well and are not solely limited to one identification. And, no one person can embody it all and be perfect. To seek to do so is a trap of individualism and a malpractice of community. We need each other, and that’s ok.
The goal is not to transcend our type or feel that we are “beyond” our personality, but to hold in a healthy way the understanding of our underlying patterns and natural movements. We all need an instrument to play, or perhaps, our own voice to sing with.
At the risk of stretching the musical metaphor too far, we’ve found that communities operate best when they are trying to play the same music, especially in the first stages of a group (which we’ll explore more in a later part of this series). The different parts will have different sheet music, but it will all be in service to the same tune. This is why, for instance, in our WeSpace groups we engage with the same practice over an extended period of time—to really learn it and feel into its harmonic rhythms together.
Even when we try different forms of music or introduce improvisations, we need to be playing in the same key. These are the underlying values and shared intentions we bring to community, the mutual commonality from which we are playing into.
The music metaphor also highlights something that I have found resonant more of late. And that is the language of “playing” together. I have never felt entirely aligned with the wording of “spiritual practice.” For practice implies that it is not the real thing and we are just preparing for the actual game.
What if our communal spaces of spirituality felt more like playing beautiful music together?
Yes, we may still come together to practice our pieces, but then let’s also enter into the beautiful space of playing the music. In the intimate flow of spiritual play that is our mystical being singing with beauty and harmony together.
We’ll explore this more in the next part as we consider spiritual intimacy in the context of community—after we take a break from this series for a few weeks.
Practicing Community:
Share your enneagram type and how you have learned to show up well in community, what challenges you’ve faced in that area, and what wisdom you can offer to others like you. What are your gifts, challenges, and invitations now?
In your WeSpace group or intimate spiritual community, share in a practice of being with one another in the unique beauty of each of our types, offering to one another what you love and appreciate about how they inhabit their type.
If you haven’t before, set the intention to learn more about yourself through the enneagram system or another method of self-understanding. Choose to do this not to reinforce your ego patterns, but to know yourself better and to find greater freedom in how you can show up with others in loving community.