- Home
- Preface
- Introduction
- Three Zones and Nine Sectors
- Three resources *
- Meeting the world
- Nine strategies *
- Nine types
- Gut types
- EIGHT *
- NINE *
- ONE *
- Gut types review
- Corruption and redemption
- Heart types
- TWO *
- THREE *
- FOUR *
- Heart types review
- Symmetry of the board
- Head types
- FIVE *
- SIX *
- SEVEN *
- Head types review
- All nine sectors
- Discerning home base part 1
- Gifts and temptations
- Developing all three resources
- Taking the advice of the opposites
- The path to redemption part 1
- Celebrating all of who we are
- Neurology
- Wings and Moves and other functions
- Biblical Journeys
- Prayer
- The Enneagram
- From the Enneagram to the Strategy Board
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Heart types – introduction
So far we have encountered the gut types, who engage with the present directly as they find it – indeed, they feel very much a part of it.
Heart types, in contrast, work with a clear distinction between the self and the outside world. For heart types, life is lived very consciously leaning across a boundary between what is within – the ‘self’ – and what is outside – everything and everybody else. There is a longing to reach out across that boundary, to influence, to engage – and a clear, almost calculated awareness that that is what is being done.
Inevitably, the heart types assume – wrongly – that everyone else engages with the world in the same way, self-consciously leaning across a boundary between what is within and what is outside.
As they reach out across that boundary, the goal of all three heart types is to stir up love.
In its redeemed form, this goal is a truly beautiful and selfless thing – to stir up love all around, for its own sake and for the sake of all created things: this is the gift of the heart. If some particular person chooses not to be stirred up, the redeemed heart type just shrugs and moves on, allowing that person their own space and time, their own pilgrimage, to find their ability to love.
Wholly corrupted, made selfish and self-directed, the heart type begins to demand love – as if such a thing were possible. It can become a desperate imposition on others around.
It is a healthy heart, with a sense of its own identity, which can be truly generous to others – rather than dependent and demanding. To keep a healthy heart, it is good for heart types to invest at least some resources in nurturing, strengthening, and cherishing the heart of the self – rather than investing everything they have in the intricate details of their relationships with others. Either way, for the heart types, it is always about reaching out to the world from the inner life of the heart – the inner life of emotions and memories, of images and visions and dreams.