Enneagram of the soul: Move past personality and into a Spirit-centered life with Aaron Manes

Photo taken by Aaron Manes of a “favorite tree” he discovered in Florida during a recent gathering with Brian McLaren. He joined McClaren and others in the Post Evangelical Collective for conversation around emerging faith spaces.

Aaron Manes is a trained spiritual director and enneagram coach who says he heard the phrase somatic enneagram for the first time about four years ago. He chuckles and remembers that more than ten years prior to that, he first became aware of the word enneagram in a bar while hanging with friends.

At first, he had a general understanding of the enneagram finding it to be a useful framework to use with those he was companioning in spiritual direction. Fast forward a few years, he felt an invitation to move past the introductory personality phase of this tool and into a more holistic awareness and application.

He felt there was more.

“As a five on the enneagram, I’m a head type,” says Manes. “I have a real sense of repressed emotions and often times I don’t have much of a sense of my own body. Coming across the idea of a somatic or more embodied experience of the enneagram felt like something that would be very difficult for me to do, which also felt like the reason I needed to do it.”

In Spring 2021, he began training with Marion Gilbert to become a certified somatic enneagram coach and now shares his knowledge with his directees as well as churches and community groups. On April 12 and 13, Manes will co-host a workshop in Richardson Enneagram of the Soul. The offering invites attendees to move beyond personality and into a life of greater authenticity, purpose, and soul.

Pictured: Manes surrounded by his cohort during his training with Gilbert in California.

Join us as we catch up with Manes to learn more about his work in this space!

Retreat House: The enneagram has become a popular tool and that is great. But we have talked in the past about how there is a tendency to get stuck in the personality typing phase of the enneagram. You’ve been working to move past some of this and invite others to more of what this framework offers. Could you provide some insight into what you mean by moving beyond personality?

Manes: Personality tests like Myers Briggs and Strengths Finders encourage people to learn about their strengths and then lean into them. Enneagram is a different type of tool. If you don’t go very deep with it, you’ll just use it as a personality test. But it is not an invitation to lean into your type. It is not that your type is bad. What the enneagram teaches about type is that it is our ego. My work with the enneagram has been through a somatic lens, or an embodied lens. I’ve learned that there are a lot of things going on in our bodies that end up pushing us into our personality type.

We mostly know that our type is in play before we can even speak. Our type or ego is really a defense system in keeping us alive.

Retreat House: Can you speak more to this defense mechanism and how it is connected to ego?

Manes: The enneagram teaches that when we are “in” our type, we are in full ego, which is a very protective space. For many of us adults, we eventually reach a place where we are frustrated with our typical patterns. We say things like “I don’t know what to do next.” The real spiritual and soulful move from here goes along with our enneagram types. Meaning, we have this opportunity to hold our types up to the light. And when you hold it up to the light, it casts a shadow. And that shadow becomes your inner work. This is the work of un-repressing the things you’ve repressed and where you are invited to bring all of yourself “online.” This is the work of the soul. This is the work of essence.

When we are able to say “I don’t know what this is, or I don’t know what to do next or I don’t know how it will turn out or how to control this, this is an invitation to a much larger reality. We are saying God must know something that I don’t. This is humbling and the beginning of our inner work.

Retreat House: What are some examples of life situations that get folks to this place?

Manes: Moving beyond personality for many of us requires a rock-bottom moment or frustrating or hurtful moment, or perhaps a loss - a loss of a job, partner, loved one - a loss of relationship. When things feel very unfair, these are often the moments where we say I don’t know what I could have done. But that’s our ego. When we can move beyond our ego, we can begin to have a bigger more collective view of the world. The work of the somatic enneagram is a place to begin to do that.

The enneagram tells us that we are all defending ourselves in nine different ways. These are the nine types. Our upcoming event Enneagram of the Soul will be about holding our numbers and the ways we defend ourselves “up to the light.” We will talk about considering all of repressed shadows with compassionate awe. We will talk about how to begin to see the awe. If we can name what we see, we can begin to experience it.

My co-host for Enneagram of the Soul is Rev. Nhien Vuong. She will talk quite a bit about how we can make this move to begin to position ourselves to notice the awe and then receive it. Receiving helps us to be more vulnerable and vulnerability helps us to be less defended. We don’t ever really get out of feeling the need to defend but we can begin to loosen it. When we can loosen it, then we can start to have a larger more spiritual experience of life.

Retreat House: What are some ways you will invite folks to “loosen” their feeling of needing to defend themselves from being “stuck” in their type?

Manes: The enneagram refers to the three centers of intelligence. There’s the body center, heart center, and head center. Eights, nines and ones live in the body center. Twos, fours and threes are in the heart center, and fives, sixes and sevens are in the head center.

Science has this language for them:

We know that when we are born the first part of our brain to come online is the base of our brains or the reptilian or lizard brain. This part of the body is about surviving. This is the body center of the enneagram.

About the age of four or five, we have a part of our brain that comes online called the limbic system. This is our emotional part. It allows you to differentiate yourself from others. It is connective and relational. It is what we refer to as the heart center of the enneagram.

Lastly, there is the frontal cortex or logic brain, and this comes online around the age of 24. It is a projecting part of the brain, giving us the ability to know things. This is what we call the head center of the enneagram.

In the somatic enneagram, we are teaching that you want to have access to all three of these centers that are connected to the three parts of your brain. And the process works by actually allowing people to face the things that they repress. We do that through breath practice and other experiential practices resulting in a calm nervous system. It might look like the ability to be more assertive or perhaps an ability to be with the things that you want to do that might be very difficult. At our event in April, we will consider and teach spiritual practices for all nine of the enneagram types.

Retreat House: All wonderful invitations. You talk about living a Spirit-centered life. Will you share how this specific work ties into that?

Manes: For much of our lives, we live relatively unconscious. This work invites you to wake up to who you are in a larger way. What if waking up to our personality means waking up to our identity in God? Keeping in mind that God is at work in our lives and work, we are more aware of that and we can experience awe. The major religions talk about this. Christians called it the Christ. When you begin your day with this type of posture and in this type of Spirit, you can reshape how you experience the world, yourself and others. We can’t ever really get fully awake in our type, because that is the condition of being human. But we can begin to hold it more loosely and giving us a more larger experience of life.

To listen to this full interview, you can visit our online platform Circle. If you’re not a subscriber of Circle and would like to become one, send us a note!

Aaron Manes is a trained spiritual director and somatic enneagram coach. He is also a partner of Retreat House Spirituality Center. To schedule a 1:1 session with him or to visit with him about speaking to groups, send him a note!

To register and purchase tickets for Enneagram of the Soul in April, visit the event website.

This interview was conducted and transcribed by Emily Turner Watson. She is a trained spiritual director, writer and partner of Retreat House. Connect with her!