The Protective Padre: Gift Four of the Enneagram

If you are unfamiliar with the Enneagram, you might want to start here with the Introduction to the Series.

A Room of One’s Own: Gift of the Emperor!

Hi. This is Anna. Welcome to the fourth video in this series “The Enneagram and the Major Arcana.” If you are just joining me for the first time in this video there are three other videos in which we cover the first three gifts of the Enneagram, as well as an introduction to the Enneagram if you’re not familiar with that system. Today we are working on the fourth gift of the Enneagram, the gift of Originality.

People with the gift of Originality have a different, outsider perspective on the world.  They have a unique voice and so their work involves figuring out a way to express their uniqueness in the world. The distortion of the gift happens when a person with the gift of Originality is afraid that they’re going to end up losing their uniqueness and becoming ordinary. Because of this fear they create more distance than is necessary between themselves and others. They often buy into the idea that nobody understands, and nobody could ever understand them. They are so different, so unique, such an oddball, that they will always have to be alone and live the rest of their lives as isolated artists. But when you are operating under that kind of despair and separation you actually don’t have enough interaction with the world to have the impact you’re supposed to have.

The Protective Padre Solution

The fourth card in the Major Arcana is the Emperor. The Emperor is father energy, the energy which establishes and protects a household. When the father energy is intact he creates a container in which the children are safe to play to create to experiment and to grow protected from the outside world. That means the creative energies that are coming up in us have plenty of room to figure out what they want to do before they are exposed too quickly to the world outside.  We have plenty of room to be ourselves and to grow strong in that before we are facing the expectations and criticisms of others. As we work with the Enneagram through the trajectory of the Major Arcana we understand that all of us have to accomplish all these steps. Therefore, even if you don’t identify yourself with the gift of Originality, you must still engage the creative process. Creative does not mean talented. It means that you are on this planet to create something, to make something new.

Every one of us has a particular mission that we agreed to when we came here, a particular calling to create something special. For us to accomplish this unique mission – to grow it and strengthen it and to understand it – we have to have, as Virginia Woolf would say, a room of our own. That’s what the Emperor provides.

Not Sure What Your Unique Work Is? Time to Figure Out!

If we have a confusion about what we are called to do – our unique voice, our unique work –  it is likely because we never had sufficient Emperor energy in our lives. Perhaps others did not provide it for us when we were children. Or perhaps we did not provide it for ourselves. Perhaps we understood ourselves early on as responsible to other people’s expectations and ideas, and did not spend enough time nurturing and protecting our unique experience in the world.

If you find that’s true for you, it is so important that you go back in the trajectory and you pick up some Emperor energy. It is unacceptable for you to fail to bring your truest, most unique self to the world. That means you need to create your own structure where you can play and experiment and investigate your soul-depth. So, when you leave the household and enter the world, you feel confident and anchored in the work that’s yours.  The Emperor is a really important energy that is often overlooked. Let’s not overlook it as we march through our human journey.