“Types” are fascinating to me–it seems clear that people are born with personalities and traits that come with them…from where? The other night I watched the Haynesville documentary featuring a natural born leader; it’s an amazing story about a single mom in Louisiana who takes on Exxon, but it’s also a study in what a true leader is like. (It’s re- broadcast Sunday November 28th, 8 pm Mountain Time on CNBC). Marvelous in a more horrifying way, are cautionary tales of famous people known for their outsized talents, yet their lives become warnings to the rest of us, that no amount of being propped up can save someone from themselves.
There are many systems to explain the variety of people on the planet: astrology is probably the best known–and then a society can focus in a fad-like way on a particular character that reflects it, currently The Narcissist. A fairly new yet already classic system of divining what type of personality type you are is the Enneagram. The purpose of the system is to help people understand themselves, work with who they are, recognize if they are evolving or devolving, and what to do to keep on going up instead of down. Today I ran into an Enneagram practitioner in training who quickly pegged me as a “four” (There are nine of them.)
I went home and sure enough, logging on to the Enneagram site I could identify with everything I read about my type…where I go when I’m low, how I am when I’m up; how to counteract undermining tendencies, and how to grow into the highest expressions of myself. What’s neat is that it is immediately useful, and if any of you are stymied by your own behavior, you should look up what type you are and see what the Enneagram’s analysis has to say: http://www.enneagraminstitute.com.

Elissa Heyman, Psychic Counseling and Healing, in person/by phone, Visa/MC, Santa Fe, NM elissa@elissaheyman.com, 505-982-3294, www.elissaheyman.com