Deep Living with the Enneagram: Recovering Your True Nature, Revised and Updated

Life coach Howe-Murphy expands on her 2013 book Deep Living in this engaging work by exploring the principles of the Enneagram, a method of personality typing grounded in the teachings of spiritualist George Gurdjieff. Howe-Murphy sorts the nine Enneagram types into three “social style clusters”—private and introspective; assured and confident; service-oriented and responsible—and goes deep into each type’s core belief, theme, behaviors, patterns, and practices to help readers “turn toward your true nature.” Personality and “mistaking your personality for who you are” forms the basis of her assessments, as do the “nine levels of expansiveness and constriction” within personalities. Her final chapters focus on what it means to change and how to do so based on one’s Enneagram type, advising readers to be curious, practice compassion, and “embrace radical honesty.” Most people, she writes, “have a deeply embedded—and erroneous—belief” that something in them must be fixed or improved, a belief that can be circumvented by “practicing presence,” defined as making “deeper contact” with one’s “open, expansive nature.” Howe-Murphy’s exhaustive, detailed work will appeal to spiritual readers looking to the Enneagram for “greater freedom, ease, and lightness.” (Self-published)