Pt. 2: Nothing to Promote
“Nothing to defend, nothing to promote and nothing to fear” - Don Riso
WORTH
The Feeling or Heart Center of the Enneagram is home to Types Two, Three and Four. These types are sensitive to issues of personal worth or value, as is the Heart Center in all of us. We each have a Feeling Center of Intelligence and can relate to how life can be experienced through our feelings. We want our worth to be seen by others. Sensing the love in our hearts, our vulnerability to rejection, and how much we need to be seen and liked by others, we can appreciate the tenderness and gifts of our hearts. Shame, which underlies the Heart types, is related to feeling unworthy and having to earn our value.
One way to understand the three Heart types is to see how the personality tries to get the need to be seen and valued by others met.
Type Two: The Helper (Dutiful) is giving, helping, and caring for others, wanting to feel close and be liked, living with little self-care.
Type Three: The Achiever (Assertive) is competing and working hard, wanting to be successful and admired by others, believing they must earn love.
Type Four: The Individualist (Withdrawn) is in search of identity and wants to be seen as unique or special, living with melancholy feelings and a sense of not belonging.
We all have a need to be seen and loved and we all experience trying to please people, impress others, and manage our image. These strategies are not real solutions to the challenge of living in loving relationship with ourselves and with others. We can work with our co-dependence, workaholism, and self-absorption, bringing compassion to our relationship with ourselves and others.
But ultimately, we need to realize that our worth does not depend on what we do or how we are seen by others. Returning to the authenticity of our true nature, we know our worth for simply being. We know there is nothing required of us to swim in the ocean of abiding love. It is simply the nature of the universe.
