The Enneagram in Life and Work with Helen Palmer

Program Description

“What stands between me and God?” This is the provocative question to which the Enneagram system offers a sophisticated answer. There are nine basic personality types, explains Helen Palmer, a foremost authority on the Enneagram. Each type has its own “emotional survival strategy” developed to help us cope in life-but this strategy can also be an obstacle to achieving our fullest spiritual unfoldment. The Enneagram system allows us to recognize our personality structure and our spiritual barriers, and to transform them into a path to virtue. “If I change the structure,” says Palmer, “all of the different categories of my life will change accordingly.”

Palmer is head of the Center for Enneagram Studies and Teaching, and author of The Enneagram Advantage: Putting the Nine Personality Types to Work in the Office (Harmony 1998), The Enneagram in Love and Work and the editor of Inner Knowing (Tarcher 1998).

Topics Explored in this Dialogue:

• What the Enneagram is, and how to use it in everyday situations
• Finding spiritual medicine for your major vice
• Why the human condition is represented in the number nine
• Applying the Enneagram in the business world
• The Enneagramís roots in Pythagorean practices
• The Jesuit connection-how the Enneagram gained popularity
• How to understand that incomprehensible co-worker
• Why some people don’t learn

Program Number: 2744              Host: Michael Toms            Interview Date: 9/25/1998