The Enneagram Holiday Edition

The Unfolding Enneagram

Instead of focusing on the particular Enneagram types I want to talk a little about the Lower Level of all of numbers. What happens when we are trapped in habitual patterns of thinking and even trauma that has never been dealt with?

Should we start with a song or two?

Oh the weather outside is frightful but ….that’s NOTHING compared to the STORM that’s happening inside!!

Or….Oh there’s no place like Home for the Holidays….WHERE EVERYONE IS ON EDGE!

I attended a class last week that was all about SURVIVING the Holidays with the Enneagram. Why do you think there’s so much focus on the potential disaster of family gatherings?

Raise your hand if you have family member that just has a way of hitting a nerve every time they open their mouth! Perhaps your father-in-law says, "I like what you’ve done with the house. Too bad you didn’t have time to do the yard.”

Or your sister says, "It’s probably good that you don’t worry about keeping the house clean with all of these children."

These are obviously not anywhere close to some of the things that can be said when people are carrying the pain of past experience that has, perhaps, affected the family on a much deeper level. But the concept is the same.

Eckhart Tolle refers to THE PAIN BODY which is an accumulation of EMOTIONAL PAIN in the mind and body.

For the sake of THIS conversation we’re going to focus on someone else’s pain body but this absolutely applies to all of us. But let’s assume YOU are fully conscious and operating at your highest level of healthy awareness. What happens when you encounter someone with an active Pain Body?

This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies one's body and mind. If you look on it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth. It’s the emotional pain-body. It has two modes of being: dormant and active. A pain-body may be dormant 90 percent of the time; in a deeply unhappy person, though, it may be active up to 100 percent of the time. Some people live almost entirely through their pain-body, while others may experience it only in certain situations, such as intimate relationships, or situations linked with past loss or abandonment, physical or emotional hurt, and so on. Anything can trigger it, particularly if it resonates with a pain pattern from your past.

This is why family gatherings are breeding grounds for pain body reactions.

But it only takes ONE PERSON being aware to stop a chain reaction. You, yourself, may feel the emotion of past hurt but in that moment of awareness you can decide to step away from the drama. Maybe you literally step away or simply DO NOT RESPOND.

The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it is fed. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness. So the pain-body, when it has taken over, will create a situation that reflects back its own energy frequency for it to feed on. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible.

Three words that will help when a Pain Body shows up.....Do Not Engage.

Resource: Eckhart Tolle