Pt. 1: Nothing to Defend
“Nothing to defend, nothing to promote and nothing to fear” - Don Riso
WILL
The Instinctual or Belly Center of the Enneagram is home to Types Eight, Nine and One. These types are sensitive to issues of will and autonomy, as is the belly center in all of us. We each have an Instinctual Center of Intelligence and can relate to how life can be experienced as a desire for autonomy and a contest of wills. We like to control our world and set boundaries. Sensing the energy and power of the instinctual intelligence located in our bellies, and remembering times we made “gut” decisions, we can appreciate the necessity and gift of this energy. Anger, which underlies the Instinctual types, is closely related to our life force and vitality. One way to understand the three Instinctual types is to see how the personality tries to get its need for autonomy met. (Note: The types are described in this blog at their average level of health.)
Type Eight: The Challenger (Assertive) is ramping up, pushing their will, feeling strong instinctive energy, living with vitality but overdoing the forcefulness.
Type Nine: The Peacemaker (Withdrawn) is dampening their will and instinctive energy to feel undisturbed by conflict and life generally, living with suppressed vitality and fogginess.
Type One: The Reformer (Dutiful) is controlling their will and instinctive energy to be good and do the right thing, living with rigidity and critical judgement directed both internally and externally.
We all have personal will and a need to control our world, and we all experience times of being aggressive, resigned, and critical. These strategies are not real solutions to the challenge of living gracefully. We can work with our anger and our boundaries--softening, channeling, and freeing our vital energy. But ultimately, we face the question of surrender. When we surrender, we accept the limits of our understanding and therefore the limits of the value of our personal will.
The first three steps of the Twelve-Step program tell us that recovery begins with recognizing our powerlessness, acknowledging a Higher Power, and turning our will over to the care of the God of our understanding. When we align our will with the will of the universe, we heal the struggles we have had through the lens of our own will.
