Foundations

From knowing your type to knowing the system.

Most people meet the Enneagram through a number, taking a test and reading the description that comes back, and some of it lands hard enough that the whole thing can seem more or less settled. For a while it often is. Foundations is built for what comes after that, for the point at which the description stops accounting for the parts of you it was supposed to account for. What you tend to want then is the system underneath the nine summaries, and that is what this course lays down.

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Who this is for

For the point where a type description stops being enough.

Foundations is a course rather than a credential, self-paced throughout, and it is the entry point to the path we teach. People arrive at it from several directions, though the ones it tends to fit recognize themselves somewhere in these three.

The longtime reader

You have known your type for a while, possibly for years, and you have read most of what the popular books make available. What you want now is the structure, the centers and the instincts and the way a type moves under pressure. The summaries are useful enough at the start; they tend to stop telling you anything you did not already know.

The coach or therapist

You work with people already, as a coach or a therapist or in some role where understanding someone quickly matters. What you want is a framework with enough architecture behind it to be useful inside a session, rather than a set of labels to hand across the desk, which rarely survives contact with an actual client.

The one weighing the certification

You are considering the certification and are not certain you are ready for sixty hours and a credential. Foundations is the same lineage taught at a lighter weight, and the certification carries this material inside it, so little of what you learn here is likely to be wasted if you decide to go on.

None of these is a prerequisite for the others, and the course does not assume you arrive knowing much more than your own number, which is more often than not all anyone arrives with.

Inside Foundations

Twenty-five hours, sequenced so each part holds the next.

Eight modules, roughly twenty-five hours, sequenced in the order the material seems to require rather than the order it is usually presented in. The nine types get a full pass early and a second, deeper pass later. That doubling is deliberate. On the first pass you are learning what the types are, while on the second you are learning what sits underneath them.

Introduction to the Enneagram

Eleven lessons that walk the whole system once through, the history, the overview, and then each of the nine types inside its own center. You come out of it with the map in hand, or with enough of one to work from, before we start taking it apart.

Understanding the system

The history as Oscar Ichazo conceived it, the difference between motivation and behavior, and the structural logic that makes the Enneagram a dynamic system rather than nine descriptions arranged in a circle.

Deeper into the centers

A second pass, organized by the three centers of intelligence, where each type is taken further into its fixation and its passion and the particular way it tends to hold attention.

Correcting type misconceptions

What the popular descriptions get wrong, type by type, set against what our own IRB-approved lexical analysis study found had been missed. This tends to be the part of the course that unsettles what people thought they already knew about their own type.

Introduction to the instinctual types

Self-preservation, social, and sexual, the three instincts that sit underneath type and account for a good deal of the variation between two people who share a number and perhaps little else.

Introduction to trifix

Trifix is the use of one type in each center rather than a single type overall, and because every trifix contains exactly one gut type, the module runs through Eight, Nine, and One, which covers all twenty-seven combinations without leaving gaps, though the archetypes themselves are taken up in depth only in the certification.

Working with the shadow

The material a type is organized to keep out of view, and what it tends to cost to keep it there, which is where the Enneagram stops being descriptive and starts asking something of you.

Resources

The Lexical Analysis Research Report and the Essential Enneagram Reference Guide, kept inside the course to return to while the system is still settling into place.

Where this sits

The ground floor of one path, rather than a sampler.

There is one path with three tiers, and Foundations is the ground floor of it rather than a sampler of what comes later, which means that the structure laid down here, the centers and the lines and the instincts and the twenty-seven trifix combinations, is the same structure the certification builds its typing method on top of, so that most people who begin here find it is all they need, while the ones who do not find that the next tier assumes nothing beyond what this course has given them.

See the full path

Price

One price, paid once.

Enneagram Foundations

$497

One time, self-paced

Four hundred ninety-seven dollars, paid once, self-paced throughout, and yours to work through at whatever pace the material asks of you (which is rarely the pace anyone plans on) rather than on a schedule we have set for you.

Begin Foundations

If you already know you want the credential, the certification folds this material in and is priced as one program. See the certification.

Begin

When the description stops being enough.

Foundations is where the Enneagram stops being nine summaries you recognize and becomes a structure you can actually work inside, which takes longer than a test result and tends to be worth the difference.