Dismantling Your Enneagram Type
Dismantling our Enneagram type is an exercise in futility.
The Enneagram has provided countless insights into our behaviors, fixations, and underlying motivations. It’s been a powerful tool for understanding ourselves, a guide for navigating the terrain of our ego. But here’s the truth: continuing to identify with any type, even in advanced self-work, reinforces the ego we’re trying to transcend.
We use the Enneagram to decode our patterns, to see ourselves more clearly, and to evolve. But at some point, the Enneagram stops serving as a map for growth and becomes the very trap that keeps us stuck. No matter how deeply we understand our type, continuing to identify with it keeps us tethered to the idea of a constructed self. In reality, the freedom we seek lies beyond any boundaries.
Spiritually speaking, everything that one wants, aspires to, and needs is ever-present, accessible here and now—for those with eyes to see.
Surya Das
It’s not a “what if”—it’s the situation we face. As long as we cling to our type, even in the name of self-improvement, we’re reinforcing the ego’s structure and missing the deeper truth of who we are.
The Enneagram as a Mental Trap
The Enneagram helps us spot our compulsions, but the more we use it to categorize and define ourselves, the more we risk becoming attached to that structure. “I’m a Type 4, and I’m working on embracing my creativity.” “I’m a Type 9, and I’m learning to assert myself.” We start to use the language of the Enneagram not just to understand ourselves but to explain away our behaviors.
Even in advanced personal or spiritual work, constant reference to our type can become a mental trap. By refining our type or “integrating” with other points, we subtly reinforce the idea that we are fixed and a certain kind of self. This keeps us operating within the ego’s framework, ensuring that we stay within the confines of what we’ve deemed “our type.”
Beyond the Type
In the Diamond Approach®, liberation is about dismantling the ego’s structures, not refining them. It invites us to step beyond the boundaries of our type and ask: Who am I beyond the confines of this Enneagram structure?
When we stop identifying with our personality and stop defending it, a miracle happens: our Essential nature spontaneously arises and transforms us.
Don Richard Riso & Russ Hudson
This is where open-ended inquiry comes in. The questions aren’t about understanding our type better but seeing through it all together. We need the courage to ask:
Who am I without the label of this type?
What is my experience when I stop identifying with my Enneagram fixations?
What lies beyond the need to categorize myself in any system?
This inquiry requires letting go of our need for certainty and tremendous courage to face the truth of who we are beyond the egoic patterns we’ve clung to for so long.
The Enneagram as a Spiritual Bypass
In spiritual circles, the Enneagram is often used as a tool for growth, but it’s easy to mistake intellectual understanding for true transformation. The more we focus on our type—on “fixing” or improving it—the more we risk using the Enneagram as a spiritual bypass.
Rather than facing the discomfort of not knowing, we rely on the Enneagram to give us answers. Instead of confronting the raw experience of self, we filter everything through the lens of our type. In this way, the Enneagram becomes a crutch—another layer of egoic defense that prevents us from encountering the deeper, existential truth of our being.
What Lies Beyond the Enneagram?
To move beyond the Enneagram, we must first recognize that the fixations of each type are just mental constructs. They’re not real—stories we’ve told ourselves to survive. Once the Enneagram has served its purpose, the deeper work is letting go of the need to use it. It’s about recognizing that no system can fully capture the fluid, dynamic reality of who we truly are.
The core truth that the Enneagram conveys to us is that we are much more than our personality. Beyond the limitations of our personalities, each of us exists as a vast, largely unrecognized quality of Being.
Sandra Maitri
When we stop identifying with our type, something profound begins to happen. The construct of the self starts to dissolve, and we experience ourselves more fluidly without the need to categorize or analyze. We become less interested in improving ourselves and more interested in experiencing the truth of our being as it unfolds moment by moment.
Dropping the Enneagram
In the advanced stages of spiritual work, letting go of the Enneagram becomes the final step. We stop trying to perfect our type, stop identifying with our type, and eventually stop using the system altogether. The Diamond Approach invites us to go deeper—to ask, “Why do I still need to define myself at all?”
The Enneagram was a helpful tool for self-understanding, but once we’ve seen through our fixations, the ultimate work is to drop the tool entirely. True liberation doesn’t come from becoming a better version of our type. It comes from dissolving the idea of type altogether and living in the freedom of not knowing, not needing to define, not being tethered to any system.
Practical Steps for Letting Go
The process of letting go begins with inquiry. We don’t need to abandon the Enneagram all at once, but we must shift from asking, “How do I improve within my type?” to “What is my experience beyond this type?”
Instead of looking for answers, we cultivate a state of open-ended inquiry, sitting with the questions themselves. What if I stopped calling myself a Type 3? What if I stopped using the Enneagram as my lens to understand every behavior? What if there’s nothing to “fix” at all?
There’s a part of every living thing that wants to become itself… a damaged human being into a whole one. That is spirituality.
Ellen Bass
This process is uncomfortable at first. The ego doesn’t like not knowing. But in the Diamond Approach, inquiry is not about finding answers—it’s about living in the openness of the question itself. In doing so, we slowly disidentify from the stories, patterns, and fixations that once held us captive.
The Freedom of Letting Go
When we stop identifying with our type, we experience a new kind of freedom that doesn’t rely on understanding or categorizing ourselves. We no longer look at the world through the filter of the Enneagram. We begin to live more fluidly, allowing our true nature to emerge without the need to analyze or define it.
This is the real liberation. Not becoming a more refined version of our type, but letting go of the idea of type entirely. The Enneagram, once useful, is now outgrown. It’s no longer about understanding ourselves but about experiencing the truth of our being, unencumbered by any mental construct.
Freedom is the freedom from the self. Freedom is the capacity to not be caught by whatever arises in your experience. It is the ability to remain open, to remain free, and to have all kinds of experiences without any particular identity becoming rigid.
A. H. Almaas
The Enneagram showed us where we were stuck, but now it’s time to step beyond it. The real question isn’t, “What type am I?” but, “Why do I need to define myself?”
When we embrace this shift, the Enneagram becomes not just a tool for understanding the self, but the key to transcending it entirely. In this transcendence, we discover what we’ve been searching for all along true freedom.
I love this article, thank you for posting it. There’s a lot of value I draw from it for me personally.
That said, I get curious if there’s a balance-point between, on the one hand, ceasing to define ourselves with the Enneagram system and releasing the ways we subtly reinforce a fixed sense of self, as you say, particularly by conceptualizing of ourselves in terms of the Enneagram, and on the other hand, the observation or knowledge that even the most unfixated, ‘enlightened’ human beings that walk the Earth are still observed to express themselves in terms of their core Enneagram point.
The Diamond Approach, for example, can be overall understood as being with a Type 5 style of openly investigating, matching with Almaas’s own type. Gurdjieff’s brand of inner work overall has a Type 8 style, matching with his own type. Adyashanti has Type 1, and his teaching reflects the 1 energy’s orientation to reality.
So even the most unfixated and enlightened — even if they have learned to disidentify from their core egoic structure and embrace the energies of the other points — still express themselves in terms of their original, core point. We can see this by analyzing their spiritual teachings.
In that sense there’s no “escaping” the Enneagram, ever.
The ego structure gets refined and lightened and transformed, but the sort of skeletal version of it seems to always remain in tact.
In light of that observation, we can consider that even if we “stop using the system altogether,” the patterns described by the Enneagram typology will still define us in some ways — always to some degree. Although it doesn’t seem to be as freedom-enabling to admit this, I think it’s honest.
I’m inquiring “out loud” and welcome a response.
Paul
Hi Paul
What we witness in people who have transformed the personality, ego-death, whatever you want to call it – is not the Enneagram of personality Types at work that is dependent on the constructed self with its history driving things. What you see, if you can see it, is a person responding from essence, not personality. However, the skills and talents as well as tastes and preferences are still there. If you received a PhD id biology, or framed houses for twenty years before enlightenment – you still know how to dissect a frog or hammer a nail. Same is true for your preferred or default environment. If you developed as a type 5 you will have a preference for an environment that supported you during your development. Yowhere you feel best.u’ll be more flexible, but you’ll still gravitate to
Hey there,
Thanks for your response. Yes I can see it – people “responding from Essence,” such as Almaas for example. But I think there’s probably more to it than just residual preferences. What if we look at the fixations as not just psychological structures conspiring with delusion, but also as each expressing a dimension or facet of the truth of reality? There are (in a manner of speaking) two sides to each, the delusion and the truth. Almaas writes of how each of the nine points can illuminate an angle on non-dual reality (in Facets of Unity), and how each point is associated with an essential aspect of true nature (in Keys to the Enneagram). Both of those dimensions can be seen as truth or reality.
What I observe is that spiritual teachings, such as the DA — but also the others I mentioned, and ultimately all teachings — will highlight and sort of formulate themselves around certain aspects of truth, which are generally congruent with the core Enneagram point of the teacher. I think there’s more to highlighting an aspect of truth in this way than just the preference of the teacher; it both points to how the ego structure, albeit refined or purified, still remains as a filter in that individual (the teacher), and how the Enneagram retains its ‘predictive power’ even when individuals have transcended or gotten free from their fixation. Even in a “liberated” state, they still express themselves in ways (e.g. create teachings which highlight certain aspects) that can be accurately predicted by the Enneagram.
Would you identify that tendency to highlight certain aspects of truth as “preference” for aspects of truth? In that vein, I am concerned that calling that tendency mere preference obscures the enduring truth of the Enneagram, which applies to aspiring students & liberated teachers alike.
Hey John,
After much pondering on this I think I can be more clear by saying that I’m trying to make a point about the soul. Specifically the soul.
Almaas, for example, sees his soul’s destiny and purpose being expressed through the creation of The Diamond Approach. When we look at the DA, we see it’s very connected to the essential aspect of Type 5, the Diamond Guidance. So the expression of his soul’s purpose is in some significant way connected to Enneagram point Five. Granted, this is not the level of fixation but of the essential aspect.
We observe the same pattern in other teachers/teachings. Almaas writes, “Whichever aspects of Essence are emphasized by a given method depends on the experience and character of the teacher or the originator of the method” (Diamond Heart: Elements of the Real in Man, p. 41-42).
And the point I’m trying to make is that the aspect of Essence that a teacher emphasizes is not only predicted by the Enneagram, but since that teaching is an expression of their soul’s destiny, we can say there’s some meaningful correlation between that person’s point of fixation and their soul’s destiny or soul’s purpose. Their soul’s purpose is not expressive of the negative or limiting patterns of their Enneagram point but the “highest potential” of that energy (e.g., the highest potential of Five).
I raise the question that, if we abandon the Enneagram, how could we ever make that illuminating observation?
Hi Paul,
I agree with you! It has been my experience with the many different enneagram teachers I have had over the years, that the teachings reflects their type. Russ Hudson teaches in SO 5 style. Beatrice chestnut in a SP 2 fashion, Krishnamuti’s teaching definitely has a CP Six energy. I can sense the type structure of my DH teachers. Our type, our temperament is always there, no matter how awake you are.
I do agree with the author too, that getting too blindly stuck in the Enneagram makes one feel like an overcooked egg, just too hard.
Hi Mertje – Indeed, If you are a pianist with a PhD in biology, those talents don’t evaporate with realization.
Hey Mertje,
That is fascinating. Is it possible to connect with you through social media or some other platform? I can’t even recall having met another person who has seen this pattern of “teachings reflecting the teacher’s type.” I’ve been writing an article series about it on Medium, trying to communicate it to others (and the implications). That said, I’d love to connect if you’re open to connecting as well.
I did resonate with what John wrote in this one, as well as in the follow-up article “The Treasure Map and the Shovel” (thanks John!). Paradoxically, though the Enneagram has been a source of incredible illumination for me, the SP 4 patterning in me that avoids a feeling lostness and holds onto a sense of safety by finding orientation in reality through mental reference points, has become attached to the Enneagram as kind of “the ultimate system of reference points.” I became attached to the tool that’s meant to free us of attachments to psychological structures — how ironic.