Theatre of the Mind Podcast Episodes

Kelly Howell: Hi, everybody. Welcome to "Theatre of the Mind." I'm your host, Kelly Howell. Today's show is on something a bit different. We're going to explore the Enneagram as a map of the human soul. In a moment, we'll start the interview with Patricia Albere, who's the founder of the Enneagram Wisdom Center.


But first, I want to thank everyone for your feedback, emails, and posts. I was overwhelmed. It's so helpful to get suggestions and feedback. It really, really makes a huge difference for me to hear from you. When I got that review in iTunes calling this show an infomercial, it really stung. I don't make any money doing this show. I just love doing it. Because, it's truly a labor of love. And what touched me so deeply about the emails I received from so many of you, is that you know this. Thank you. Thank you. It means a lot to me.


This weekend, while Patricia and I were out hiking in the mountains, we talked a lot about collective intelligence, the idea of living, breathing knowledge. To me, that's what podcasting is all about. It is a form of collective intelligence. It's alive. It's alive with energy and ideas from everybody who participates.


And it's so easy to participate. You just shoot me an email, or you can call the phone number that I have if you want to be on the show. I can easily just drop that file right into the show. If you have something important t
o say: call. Keep your ideas coming. I love them. I love them. It's a wonderful way for us to interact, and do this thing together.


So, now let's go to the interview with Patricia Albere.
Kelly: Tell me about how you work with people with the Enneagram.
Patricia Albere: The Enneagram is a matrix. It's a matrix of knowledge about objective reality. So it gives you a depth of knowledge about almost every aspect of reality, but also of human growth. So, from somebody who's pathological to the highest states of consciousness, and the whole range in between.


The work that I do with people, since I'm focused on assisting people and going deeper, and becoming more selfaware, and going into deeper states of consciousness, and deeper states of integration and maturity so that they're less identified with an ego state, and they're more integrated. They have more of their soul, and they're more in contact with freer parts of themselves.


The Enneagram is amazing. I started to work with it about seven years ago, and I've been working with people for about 30 years. So, it was a new piece of knowledge along the way. When I started to study it I thought: "Oh my gosh! This is so good." [laughs]
Kelly: But how is it different? Because, when I first saw the Enneagram, I thought of it as a typology. It's kind of like a box that you put people in. You havehow many types are there?
Patricia: Nine.
Kelly: Nine types.
Patricia: Yes. Well, there are nine ways of perceiving reality.
Kelly: OK. And these are the views and the perceptions that people view the world through...
Patricia: Right.
Kelly: So, how do you use it as a tool for transformation?
Patricia: First of all, most typologies having not worked with one before, I wasn't particularly drawn to them, but when I experienced thisa lot of the ways the Enneagrams worked with is stupid, as far as I'm concerned. It reifies things. It has people not looking deeper. It's kind of like: "Well, I'm a one. I'm a perfectionist. You're a this, and my dad's a that. Well, that's all you can expect from somebody who's a five." It's just...
Kelly: Putting people in a box.
Patricia: It's superficial, and it's lazy, andactually, it's the kind of knowledge that, if you're not committed to some kind of depth with it, you're better of just not even learning anything. Absolutely. That's my perspective. I don't think it's useful at all, if you're not going to really be cognizant of the factit's like it was in the mystery schools. They didn't let people know this information for a reason. Because it is dangerous, in a way. It's not bad dangerous, like you're going to blow up the world or something. But it's very refined knowledge.
Kelly: Yeah. It hasn't been very available. I was reading it in that bookwhat's that book called?
Patricia: "The Enneagram of Passions and Virtues."
Kelly: Right. Oscar Echaza brought it here, and apparently he studied with the same Sufi sect that's now in Afghanistan, where Gurdjieff studied the Enneagram. It's all very mysterious exactly where it came from.
Patricia: Yeah. Right. It is. It comes from these various strains of people and knowledge, and people have added on to it because it's a living perspective. It's something that actually is there.


When I was studying it, what was coolit's kind of like music. When you get it, and get through the: "What is this note, and blah, blah, blah?" and you get plugged into the world of music. It's a language. It's a world. It does exist. And when you learn enough to plug into it, you see the harmonies. You see the ways that it all works, because it's alive, and it's an isness, it's something that actually is there for the people that know how to attune to harmony and sound and vibration. A lot of us don't have that.
Kelly: So, it's a living knowledge.
Patricia: It's a living knowledge that people keep bumping into, and discovering more pieces to it as their awareness is attuned to it. Like music, and like mathematics. People learn a certain amount of mathematics. Some people never get past that, but some people just have it. They have that "thing" that allows them to connect to the mathematical world, and then they're given insights and knowledge, and they see the different ratios to things, and it opens up the world. It's like the divine knowledge starts to reveal itself.


The Enneagram is that. And that's what was compelling; not to learn MyersBriggs or something. That was invented by people on an ordinary state of consciousness. It was done by psychologists, and people doing studies...
Kelly: A psychology test, right...
Patricia: It's very useful, but it's not like attuning to something that's already there in the ether. The part that I think is compelling is not all the detailed information. I mean, you can have a lot of fun with that. You see things, and you meet somebody, you can get what's happening, and in certain ways it's revealing. But the more I studied it, the more I felt my own consciousness and my awareness was being opened by the knowledge itself. So I could more taste my ego. I could taste all of the different types within my own ego, because it was so vivid...
Kelly: Like a hologram of some kind.
Patricia: Yes, OK. It makes it more like the ego is so what we identify with. We are just looking out of our eyeballs and we are identified. The Enneagram is kind of like of if you put your hands over your eyes... So it is kind of like you start to pull away, like your skin is coming off, and you start going, "Oh my God, what is that?"


It is things that you are so close to that you just think it's you. You can't even become selfaware because it's just how you are aware.
Kelly: Can you give me some kind of example?
Patricia: I will give one example just from my own life. When I found out I am a Seven which is called an enthusiast in certain they had different names for me
Kelly: I am a Four!
Patricia: You are a Four? You are the achiever, actually. But the enthusiast like I have always been enthusiastic. I have always had a lot of energy and excitement for different things. I just thought that was the way I was. There always been also a certain kind of how to express it, it is like the spilling of a, "oo, oo, oo" like if I go to a bookstore, and I want that book, and I want this book and I can't wait to read it. It is almost like I want to take all the books and eat them all.
Kelly: Eat them all at once. [laughter]
Patricia: You know, I do! I don't even want to read them. I want to have them along side of me simultaneously, instantly, completely. Like there is this drive, this push, which feels exciting and normal to me. When I realized that the enthusiasm, the passion, the emotional atmosphere that flavors the Seven, in a distorted way, which makes me distorted. Kind of, I am skewed in a certain direction, instead of being the totality, instead of having all things available to me, I am kind of like thrown a certain way. And my thrownness has to do with this thing and they call it gluttony.


I am thin, right. When I say gluttony, most people will go, "What?" They will think food. It's not food. But it is a lot of other things. I just go, "oo, oo, oo." I met this one Seven that was so hysterical. We had lunch and he said to me, "You know I am so excited about so many things. I have to stay up all night, one night a week, in order to get it all in."


Now some people think, "Wow, I would love to be like that!" Because they have some other skewed way of being. Their melancholy, or they have a sort of they are lazier, they have sloth going on. But it doesn't matter; it is automatic. It is like I cannot be that way when my ego is operating. Sobriety is the other side, which looks to a Seven who is being very much their ego. Why would I want to be sober? Why would I want that?
Kelly: OK. Now when you go into a bookstore, you still get excited...
Patricia: I still get excited, yes.
Kelly: But you don't necessarily buy everything.
Patricia: No. It is not only that. It is not like I am really good at like I shouldn't be that way. I am not. I don't do that. But I feel the depth and the peace and there is something very beautiful about feeling sober. It's different. Sober in my consciousness, it's more content. Like there is no contentment in gluttony. It is always like, "oo, oo, oo." There is always like the next thing and the next thing. There isn't any rest. There isn't any sense of contentment and satisfaction and a kind of nourishing, "aah." There is none of that.


I never realized I never thought about it. It was so not even in my consciousness. Now I appreciate the peace and sense of sweetness of being able to just appreciate what is there and what I am experiencing at the moment.


Seven's are always going on to the next thing. They are always planning and cooking, and what's next? Like they are having dessert and they are thinking what they are going to do later.
Kelly: So I am understanding you a little bit better. It is more a path of selfawareness. When you are working with people, with the Enneagram, you are helping them become more aware of themselves.
Patricia: Yes. It is not a path, it is a matrix of knowledge. You have to remember, it is like, the path is meditation. The path is using phenomenological techniques and ways of working. The Enneagram knowledge, which is very vast, can be used to serve your purposes to become more integrated spiritually. Which is what most people that are doing, spiritual work, that's what they are trying to do. Trying to become less identified with their egos and heal and dissolve the various patterns and occlusions and things that get in the way. So that you are freer and that you are more in touch with the depth of who you are.


So that's the point. The techniques that one uses, if you are doing phenomenological work, if you are doing broth work, if you are having people do increate talking. You can use any technique. That's what you do, if you are working with people. You use various techniques, right. The Enneagram is this matrix of knowledge that informs what you are doing. It isn't It shows you where to look, where to go. Like I have done weekends where we have just looked at defense mechanisms. Each type has a particular defense mechanisms.
Kelly: Interesting!
Patricia: So, that's useful, if you know what I mean. So not only are you noticing and tasting and discovering and looking at where it is coming from, so it is like your particular defense mechanisms. But you can clue in very precisely, exactly, what each person's type is. For the Seven it is rationalization. They are brilliant rationalizers. It is like the Mark Twain the guy who was painting the fence. Tom Sawyer was a Seven.
Kelly: OK. Getting it.
Patricia: You can talk people into it. You can be creating a reality and sell people on it. So that doesn't even look like a defense mechanism if you are a Seven. That just looks like, life. It works!
Kelly: So how is it a defense mechanism?
Patricia: Because it is a defense. It is a way of keeping people away, making things happen the way you want to.
Kelly: Oh, controlling things.
Patricia: Controlling things, not wanting to actually relax and be present. Seven's don't trust life. All egos don't trust life differently. Everyone is trying to control it one way or the other. So it is very powerful if you have that matrix, but then, you have to work with the defense mechanisms in whatever way you are going to work with them.


It clues you. It is just like a map. It is a map of the soul. A map of reality. If I know I am in California, that's really different than being in Wisconsin. So at least I know where I am looking and what the weather's going to be like and where the roads are...
Kelly: Right. It really is a map.
Patricia: It's huge.
Kelly: It's giving direction in your own particular state, the state you live in.
Patricia: Your world. You can shortcut an unbelievable amount of time and energy. Spiritual paths attract people because of the type they are. People do a path that fits with their personality.
Kelly: OK. Example.
Patricia: Example. The Nine is called the peacemaker. Their tendency is to want to have no conflict and not be bothered. They're in a space suit where they're comfy and cozy. They don't want to deal with what they don't want to deal with.


They're often soft and round and have a quality of easygoingness. But they can be pretty disassociative too, depending on if they're healthy or not. For a Nine, a peacemaker, to do a lot of transcendental meditation is like heaven for them.


They're happy to go out of their body up into where it's all love and peace. They don't have to deal with life and relationships and be engaged in life, which is the thing that they're avoiding like the plague. That's bad for them. Not good, not good.
Kelly: Wow. Interesting.
Patricia: Or a Five. A Five is th
e observer: a Ken Wilber or Einstein type.
Kelly: You have to do the Three.
Patricia: I'll have to do the Three. Oh, the Three is easy.
Kelly: What's the Three?
Patricia: The Three, which is your particular type, is the achiever. It's this country, the United States of America is a Three country. We want to be the best. The Olympics is a Three thing. We want to go for the gold.
Kelly: Succeed.
Patricia: Succeed and be inspiring. It's also an image type. It wants to be seen as the best and wants to be wanted because we're worthwhile, valuable and onthemoney. They're burning the candle at 26 ends at once. Who would want to do the Olympics?


I mean a lot of people would not want to spend their whole lives, for years, to win one moment and be the best in the planet.
Kelly: I don't think that Bode Miller wanted to do the Olympics.
Patricia: Three's love it.


[laughing]
Patricia: Three's say, "Let me do that. This is what I want to do." You have Tony Robbins, a Three. Warner Earhart, a Three. It's all about that: being the best, being focused, being really effective and efficient. Warner used to say that he wanted to have written on his tombstone, "Burnt out."


He wants to be used up when he dies. You would if you're a Three. Not a Nine. A Nine would want to be peaceful, calm and go out in a pleasant way.
Kelly: For a Three, is it better not to do so much?
Patricia: Yes, and you would never send a Three to go work with Tony Robbins. I mean there's nothing about that that is useful for a Three because they're already wired that way.
Kelly: Right.
Patricia: Seven, Rashnesh Osho. Everybody's dancing around. Ramdas was a Seven and so was Timothy Leary. They're trying to experience things like ecstasy and creating utopian civilizations.


[laughing]
Patricia: Trying to find God through incredible psychedelics. Sevens love that.
Kelly: So if you're a Seven following that kind of path, it's not a good thing.
Patricia: No.
Kelly: OK, so for a Three, following a more transcendental meditation path or an inner...
Patricia: Absolutely.
Kelly: See, I think that's why I'm here in Santa Fe. I love the peace and the quiet. I need that.


Woman 1. Absolutely, yes. I mean being in L.A., which is a Three city in a Three country, would be poison for you.
Kelly: Yes, I can't handle it.
Patricia: It's totally about image there. Everybody's fabulous, everybody's the best at...
Kelly: Everything.
Patricia: Or they're trying to be. Actually the Enneagram has an even more precise knowledge. As a Three, you're trying to integrate certain things, the high end of the Nine is what you're trying to integrate: peacefullness, calm, trusting life and relaxing.


The Three feels like, "If I don't make it happen it's not going to happen." Excuse me. You're like Atlas with the world on your shoulders and you're running around.
Kelly: Remember, I used to be like that.
Patricia: Absolutely.


[laughing]
Patricia: Three's get a lot done. They're brilliant, amazing and inspiring, but they're exhausted.
Kelly: You just gave a great example of how to work with the Enneagram with a particular spiritual path. It's a map. If you know the map and what state you're in then you can know what paths are good.
Patricia: Let me give you one of the pieces to complete the thing. As a Three, you're integrating the highest end of Nine. It's like aspiring to be the Dali Lama, who is like an enlightened Nine. But you are also connected to six. Part of the Three is very much about being the best themselves.


They are highly developed personally. They're also supposed to lean into the six. The sixes are more orientated around groups. They're often like the firefighters that went in for 9/11. They're courageous and part of a group that makes something happen in a real way.


For the Three, they're supposed to also be surrendering some of their personal thing to be part of a team. It would be like if you were the best basketball player and always the star, but using your energy towards the team being successful.
Kelly: Right.
Patricia: And that would even ground you further. Everything is connected. There are so many ways that, when you start to learn it, the knowledge teaches you because there are all these connections between all the different points. It's fascinating and illuminating.
Kelly: It is fascinating.
Patricia: Because then you're not wandering around wondering if you're going in the right direction. You say, "Yes, I am feeling more drawn to empowering the people around me. I want to be part of a team and do something collectively."
Kelly: Right. So you can look at the Enneagram and say, "Oh, this is part of my development."
Patricia: Yes, that's a good thing. Someone else, like the Nine, should be more personally the star. It's a totally different developmental achievement.
Kelly: Right. Interesting.
Patricia: So it's very beautiful because it's very precise and attuned to the individual if it's used correctly. It's very beautiful because we aren't all in the same process.
Kelly: Set in stone. See that's the thing. My initial reaction to the Enneagram was, "Oh this is really interesting." But then I read it and thought this is fundamental astrology signs or something.
Patricia: Like you read in the newspaper.
Kelly: Right.
Patricia: That's what I'm saying. The only way I've taught it and from a lot of the people that I've learned it from, they teach it in Five days and then it's over. I've worked with people and, in my experience, if you don't work with people over time, you aren't accomplishing a lot. People need support and guidance and integration. An opportunity to kind of like, work it through, find their own way.


I developed a fiveyear program that takes people deeper and deeper. Then they get to work with a group of people. So you also get to know that, like if you are a Three, and I am Seven, and your husband is a Nine, and somebody else is something. We are working over a couple of years together and it is more open and intimate and real work is happening.


I am really getting a sense of what your world is like. That's...
Kelly: So tell me about your fiveyear program. What is it? It is a training program?
Patricia: It is a training program for people that, either pursue or want to do the work. They want to have their own growth and development. It starts there. But it is also very powerful for people that work with people in any which way. Whether it is in business, or their therapist. So the fiveyear program takes the work from the initial introduction to the different points of view, the nine different types. Then the inner connections, we work with that, so that people start to see that as a living movement.
Kelly: So this is kind of also like a compass?
Patricia: Absolutely. Yes. So you learn that in the beginning and some of how the whole dance works and you also work... I always work with people that... You can find yourself in all of it. You have a set point. But you can find your Seven, your Four, or Five. You are going to find all of it in yourself, and also as an American, we are very flavored by Three. If you lived in another country, if you lived in Brazil, you would be more flavored by Seven as a culture. So we have a cultural influence. Your parents matter a lot.


But we also then begin to work with different aspects, like the defense mechanisms. We start to look at your soul child. There is a whole piece of work on that, that's amazing. It is amazing. As a Seven, my soul child, one of the places I integrate is Five. And Five is Seven's are really out there and bubbly. They are like the Energizer bunnies and cheerleaders. A Five is like the opposite. They are the observer, they are more nerdy. They can be more like, they just want to be quiet, have everybody leave them alone. Go deeply into something.


What you find out when you do the soul child work, which is so amazing, is that... What I realize is that, the soul child, the Five in me wasn't supported. The Seven is actually compensatory. When I remember as a kid being obsessed with my mother taking me to the library. I would get all these books and I would invent doing reports on things. I did a whole report on California when I was about eight for no reason, whatsoever.


I was obsessed. I was like cutting out magazine articles. I wrote this 30 page report on California, like a nerd. Like a sort of this very sweet kind of nerdy kid. Basically no one who wanted to be brilliant and go deeply into things and be quiet and really observe things very specifically. There was a very sensitive part of me, like highly sensitive. No one really gave that a lot of attention.
Kelly: Interesting.
Patricia: So then I became more outgoing and funny.
Kelly: So you have people identify that part of themselves that never really got acknowledged as a child.
Patricia: It's core. It's a core structure in the soul, where a lot of your essences are held, actually your liveness and the gifts that that part had to give, my doubts, my sensitivity. So it is not like inner child work. It is not about that. It is about the recovery of those essential qualities that are really at the heart of your self. It is like deeper than what most people say. Which is very sweet.


Did I mean like people see the Three in you. You are very creative and powerful and good at everything. But the soul child is actually the Six, which is courageous and actually does want to be connected to all the other people. It is like a different part of the person that often no one sees.
Kelly: It is very interesting.
Patricia: It is very sweet. So we do that. So in the first year I work on all those different levels. Then we move in to, we do the passions and the virtues. Then we do the holy ideas, which are the highest levels of reality on the soul. The highest perspectives of reality, holy truth. The holy ambitions. The various barriers and the things that help all these things.
Kelly: Sounds like a mystery school.
Patricia: Yes it is. When you have people over time that are committed, it is very powerful and it is beautiful. But now everybody wants to do that. A lot of people want a quick fix solution. But the Enneagrams shouldn't... It is one of those things like the less you want to use it in the way that respects the power of the knowledge. You are better off doing a million other things.
Kelly: How can people get in touch with you?
Patricia: I have a website, integralEnneagram.com. I have a 1800, 18779631245, so you can call me in. There is other work that I am doing that is not posted on the website. We had a couple of glitches. So if they want to know more about what I am doing, they should just give me a call.
Kelly: That was Patricia Albere, founder of the Enneagram Wisdom Center. On the links we will leave notes where to find her. Next week we've got Michael Gill coming back to give us a class on mind mapping. This was a suggestion of one of our listeners.


I spoke earlier about collective intelligence and how easy it is to participate. So you know the Theatre of the Mind collective intelligence suggestion box is now open. Another way you can participate is, I have a phone number that you can call if you would like to be on the show. If you have something important to share, you can leave a message and I can put it on the show. So those are a few ways we can begin exploring collective intelligence together.


And thank you Matthew for reminding me that the butterfly effect is now in motion.


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