Personality Portfolios

02/07/2025

How might your discipleship stance affect your prayer life? Prayer, for each of us, can devolve into simply asking God for favors. Jesus says “Ask and you shall receive. Knock and the door shall be opened.” (Matthew 7:7) And we cry, “Well I asked and…nada. And I knocked and…nada.” We forget (or perhaps have never heard) that the verbs “ask” and “knock” are continuous action verbs meaning “Keep on asking….keep on knocking”. Prayer you see, is a matter of continual engagement. It is the process of being worked by grace. This process is four fold in that it involves continual engagement of our somatic (body) energies, our responsive energies (heart & Note: I did say not reactional energies), as well as the energies of an open & curious mind (head) Through this continual engagement all three centers of intelligence (body, heart, head) come into a state of coherence and we see the fourth part of the process come online: we enter a state of surender. As my enneagram teachers Russ Hudson says, its “prayer as surrender and wish to be of service….the hearts longing. Prayer as letting the heart be worked (by grace).” And yet in the tight holding of our discipleship stance, prayer often becomes so not that. How might you hold more lightly the things, people or positions you are holding tightly? Try this practice: Find a quiet place to read Lamentations 3:1-20 Begin by taking 10 deep abdominal breaths. Read paying close attentionn to your body (the tightening of your jaw, etc Let yourself feel the pain of “teeth grinding on gravel” etc (don’t do it! Imagine it in the body 😀) Read a second time placing your hand over your heart. Let your heart feel into the persons despair, hurt and anger at God. Read a third time breathing deeply into your nasal cavity feeling your head center coming on line. Get curious and ponder what situation(s) might have led to this persons pain, despair and anger? How might anger expressed approximately lead to healing? What is the nature of suffering? Where is God in all of this? You may come up with other questions. Just get curious. Then read a fourth time but this time read through the 24th verse. As you get to verses 21-24 read them (21-24) over and over allowing yourself again to breathe deeply but this time sense yourself receiving (not taking) your breath. Surrender to it. Tis a gift. How might such surrenders to grace actually bring you the freedom you so long for, maybe not the answers you want, but the peace that you need? What’s in your portfolio?

09/05/2025

https://www.tixtree.com/e/an-evening-with-nadia-bolz-weber-in-charleston-b00600a7914a

03/05/2025

Discerning Your Personality Portfolio / Discipleship Stance

The nine Enneagram points illuminate nine distinct Personality Portfolio / Discipleship Stance options—characteristic ways of embodying and enacting Jesus' call to be and make disciples. Think of this Portfolio / Stance as your primary way of showcasing your God-given gifts and your go-to mental, emotional, and behavioral leaning as you live out that call. It’s an "energy" within / a facet of the mind of Christ (Philippians 2:5-8) that most strongly shapes how you present yourself and your approach to discipleship.
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While we have access to all nine, our upbringing and experiences often lead us to identify more strongly with one. This single Personality Portfolio / Discipleship Stance becomes our "default" way of following Jesus, influencing our thoughts, feelings, and actions in our discipleship journey. This core Enneagram style / Discipleship Stance can often reflect early responses to our environment and primary caregivers, in the sense we perceived something as lacking and falsely came to believe that if we just did this, that, or the other and/or did not do this, that or the other then what we perceived as missing would manifest.

Discerning your core Personality Portfolio / Discipleship Stance is a journey of self-discovery. I utilize the Wagner Enneagram Personality Styles Scale to help you understand your under or over-identification with each of the nine energies, which serves as a starting point for personal reflection and conversation. Ultimately, no external assessment defines who we are as disciples. Instead, the Enneagram invites us to recognize the unconscious patterns that characterize our habitual way of answering Jesus' call—the specific gifts and competencies within our portfolio we tend to utilize, and the particular "stance" or way we position ourselves as we hear and try to live out that call.

This discernment is an ongoing process, much like discipleship itself, requiring the cultivation of an "inner observer" to identify the recurring patterns in our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as we live out our faith. By asking, "Why am I thinking, feeling, or reacting this way in my walk with Christ?", we gain insight into our default Discipleship Stance and how we habitually present our gifts.

Effective discipleship involves coming to understand our own Personality Portfolio / Discipleship Stance — our characteristic way of being a disciple and showcasing our gifts —- in relationship to that of others, so that we come to see ALL are needed. No one stance has a better way to live out the call to discipleship than the others.

Growth comes from recognizing our own "triggers and tricks" within our stance as we strive to be more fully present to God, others, and ourselves in the way Christ calls us to.
Using the Enneagram to understand our Personality Portfolio / Discipleship Stance within a Christian context fosters deeper understanding in our faith communities. By recognizing the diverse ways individuals answer Jesus' call and showcase their gifts, we can take fewer things personally and become more responsive in our shared mission.

Through prayer and continued discernment, we become more aware of when and why we are more or less open to Christ's presence through our particular way of being and doing. Our core Discipleship Stance / Personality Portfolio, like our Enneagram style, is what often shows up when we are not fully conscious. The goal is not to eliminate our stance but to become more aware of its patterns. We can then set out as disciples in a more balanced way - leveraging those gifts we know while at the same tapping into those (within self and others) with which we are less familiar.
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The Enneagram symbol itself, with its representation of wholeness (i.e. the circle - the mind of / full presence of Christ), the Trinity (i.e. the triangle / Law of Three - see Cynthia Bourgeault's devotion at https://cac.org/the-law-of-three-2018-06-05/), and the dynamic journey of growth and struggle (i.e. the inner lines), serves as a visual reminder of the complexities and the grace-filled path of discipleship we are on, guided by the Holy Spirit towards deeper communion with Christ (2 Corinthians 5:18-20; Ephesians 2:8).

Creativity The Law of Three Tuesday, June 5, 2018 Today, Cynthia Bourgeault, a faculty member at the Center for Action and Contemplation, explores the

03/04/2025

I’ll admit this last of nine reflections was more challenging as SEVENS are usually seen as the libertine younger brother. But here goes.

The elder son within the story of the Prodigal Son (also known as the story of the forgiving Father) in Luke 15 seen from the perspective of enneagram SEVEN:

Persons who fixate at SEVEN can lose touch with what they know deep within them about God’s presence, that being that it is a light that NO darkness can ever overcome.

As they lose a sense of this, they begin to interpret (and sometimes live out) the words of Jesus in John 15:11 (“I have said these things to you, so that my joy may in you and that your joy may be complete.”) in ways that try to escape or deny the reality of darkness.

This defensive maneuver amounts to “spiritual bypass”. It fails to see that the only way out is through and that The Light of the Father’s love not only takes seriously the darkness, but carries us through it!

As one of my enneagram teachers Russ Hudson points out in his audio book “The Enneagram: Nine Gateways To Presence” (found at https://www.soundstrue.com/blogs/authors/russ-hudson):

“You don’t have to keep thinking positive thoughts to have this positivity. This positivity is what goes in (or comes out [my add] as in the case of the father coming out to the elder son) and heals your painful thoughts…It’s a positivity that is here to meet the difficulties that we might encounter…it is indestructible. If it’s afraid of the negativity it ain’t the real thing.”

At healthier levels SEVENS understand and live this out in amazing ways. But, in his anger and hurt, the elder brother likely can’t see the father’s presence in this way.

SEVENS can gloss over the pain and hurt of others the further they move down the levels of health, but woe to the one who receives their hurt or pain in the same way (see Levels of Health and the Leaden Rule in Riso-Hudson’s book The Wisdom of the Enneagram).

The elder son may be viewing his father in this way (i.e. as not taking his hurt seriously). He is certainly out of touch with the true nature of and possibilities contained within the light of his father’s love - a light and a love that again, not only takes his pain seriously but also will carry him through it.

Russ Hudson is one of the principal scholars on the Enneagram today. He is president of Enneagram Personality Types Inc., cofounder of The Enneagram Institute®, and coauthor (with Don Richard Riso) of several bestselling books, including The Wisdom of the Enneagram and Personality Types. He has als...