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The Somatic Enneagram
and the Body
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The Enneagram is more than a personality tool, it’s a timeless map of human development, rooted in ancient wisdom traditions and still evolving today. While many people know the Enneagram for its nine "types," a deeper understanding reveals it as a guide for spiritual awakening, healing, and transformation.
This article explores a somatic approach to the Enneagram, showing how the wisdom of the body can reconnect us to our wholeness and help us awaken from patterns of self-forgetting.
What is the Enneagram?
The Enneagram is a symbolic system designed to help us understand how human beings grow, change, and awaken. At its heart, it reveals how we fall into self-forgetting—a kind of spiritual sleep—and offers us a path of self-remembering that awakens us to the fullness of who we truly are.
The Enneagram symbol itself offers a map for this journey of renewal.
The Three Laws Within the Enneagram Symbol
The Enneagram diagram is not arbitrary. It contains three ancient principles that describe how life and transformation unfold, including:
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The Law of One (the Circle): Represents wholeness and unity.
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The Law of Three (the Triangle): Represents the three creative forces: Affirming, Denying, and Reconciling.
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The Law of Seven (the Hexagram): Represents the movement of change in seven stages.
Around the circle are nine points, symbolizing nine primary patterns of human essence and conditioning. These nine types help us recognize the ways we both forget ourselves and return to presence.
The Enneagram’s Centers of Intelligence
Modern Enneagram teaching often emphasizes three centers of intelligence:
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Head (Mental Center) – focused on thinking, clarity, and meaning
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Heart (Emotional Center) – focused on feelings, relationships, and empathy
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Body (Somatic Center) – focused on instinct, presence, and grounded action
While the mental and emotional centers are well described in traditional Enneagram work, the somatic (body) center is often reduced to subtypes and adaptive strategies for survival. What’s frequently missing is a deeper exploration of the underlying somatic patterns that drive type-based behaviors.
Why the Somatic Enneagram Matters
At the root of our personality structure are reflexive, unconscious body responses:
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Movements toward attraction (seeking what feels safe or rewarding)
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Movements away from aversion (avoiding what feels threatening)
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States of rest, repair, and integration (the body’s natural rhythm of restoration)
By including the Body center as a true center of intelligence, the Enneagram gives us access to the core wound of human experience: the perception of separation from essence. This split into attraction versus aversion creates duality, survival strategies, and ultimately, suffering.
A somatic approach reveals how these conditioned patterns live in the nervous system—and how they can be unwound.
Awakening Through the Somatic Enneagram
The conditioned self operates with only a partial view of reality. But the Enneagram is designed to take us deep inside ourselves, showing us what happens within so that we can...
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recognize unconscious patterns.
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reconnect with our essence and belonging.
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see reality more clearly, beyond conditioning.
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embrace our wholeness—body, heart, and mind.
Through somatic awareness, the Enneagram becomes not just a theory but a lived, embodied experience of transformation.
The Promise of a Somatic Approach to the Enneagram
The Somatic Enneagram reminds us that awakening is not just about changing our thoughts or feelings—it is about embodying presence. By engaging the wisdom of the body, we move beyond survival strategies into integration, connection, and wholeness.
Ultimately, the Enneagram offers a profound truth: we all belong, we are all interconnected, and our lives hold intrinsic value.
