Tips on presence?

I've started receiving daily Enneathoughts from the Enneagram Institute. Some of them are pretty cool! They give pointers to exploring that I habitually do to distract myself from being simply present in my life - and therefore a potential route out.

But, if you don't know what the Enneagram is, this isn't going to mean much.

Briefly, the Enneagram is an ancient symbol which describes, within the three shapes it is made up from, the notions of a) unity, b) what makes up life, and c) how life flows. In the last century it has been developed and applied to psychology by various teachers (notably Don Riso and Russ Hudson from the EI) to describe nine personality types.

The reason I like the Enneagram (and have mentioned it to several of my clients) is that it is taught not as a way of enabling me to say "Oh, do I'm a [particular type] ... that's why I do X and Y and Z, and that's the end of it; I'm stuck!" No, the Enneagram is taught based on the understanding that we are not our personality types. We are something more fundamental than that - Essence, Presence, Consciousness, our Essential or Authentic Self - call it what you will. Our Enneagram type masks our real self. Our type description shows us all the ways in which our ego routinely operates to take us away from presence - from reality. How we mis-interpret situations, how we over (or under) react, how we view the world, how we avoid intimacy and connection.

So ... if this appeals, I suggest you go explore the Enneagram Institute web site, read some of the type descriptions and/or do their on-line type-identification questionnaires.