August 2014

Dear community:

I would never have imagined in 2001 when the Enneagram came across my life that it would be my turn to lead the Argentine IEA. My story with the Enneagram started by the impact produced when a friend of mine gave me a description of myself which I had never heard before. I couldn`t help getting in touch with this new knowledge and since then it has not stopped surprising me and attracting me. From the very first courses and workshops, which I approached in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I tested, checked, and tried the Enneagram system in my consulting room and contacted myself with the Enneagram Institute (2003) to receive all the empirical validation done up to then about the Enneatypes.

I began to receive very valuable information that would provide me assurance about this new discipline. It was very important for me to be able to intersect all my philosophical and psychological formation with the Enneagram in order to develop a solid platform of knowledge that would help me to enlarge my perspective on human condition and its transformation, by diminishing pathology or promoting growth.  The Enneagram appeared as a very promising way to that effect. In that remarkable desire for knowledge, I registered myself in March 2008 in IEA international as a professional member to receive Monthly Enneagram, and up to date, with the global community that followed another path and was not in Argentina. By then I participated in groups Enneagram 2001 leaded by Fercho Uribe. Fortunately in August 2008 I received a contact from Oscar Ayala asking me if I wanted to lead the IEA in Argentina. In this interchange, he told me to contact Aniceto Sanabria who was also involved in the subject and so, a net of enthusiasts started who ended joining in a bar in August 2008 in order to start our Argentine IEA.  With Aniceto as president, since then we began the whole day presentations and the monthly meeting as an Institution. I was already leading workshops of personal growth with the Enneagram since 2006. I started to develop the contributions to the system that I ended presenting in the International Conferences the USA, Chile and Europe in non interrupted way. At the same time Cecilia Zanoni started to represent Argentina in the Affiliates meetings since 2009 nonstop up to now in the USA Conferences. Since 2012 to 2014 I integrated the formula with Cecilia as president and myself as vice-president. In 2010 and 2011 I participated with Cecilia in the USA Conferences. Since 2012 I began participating in the European Conferences. At first invited at the Conference in Madrid as a presenter, by my dear friend Isa Salama and later I attended the Conference in Paris where I met wonderful new European friends who I met again this year in Lisbon where participated once more as a presenter since 2010 in IEA international Conferences.

As Argentina is the end of the world, I always felt very important to underline that I attended the Conferences not only to present my work but that I also came from Argentina, very far away, to the great surprise of many Europeans that such a long distance to travel for a Conference was very unusual. I have not enough words to express how much this Enneagram Community has nurtured me, locally and globally during these years. And if I tell the story of my journey of the Enneagram and the IAE it is because I consider that the solid ways are made of passion, presence, dedication, and perseverance. I am honored to lead the Argentine IAE this two following years and very happy that Claudia Campos is part of the formula. And if it is true than during different periods some of us are more visible than others, what is certain is that we are a very solid and committed group and that we all work together for the IEA and we feel very proud that our enthusiasm and dedication is expanding to other provinces in our country where the “Monthly talk meeting” is repeated and where more people keep adding to this path that the Enneagram designs us. And finally, if I would have to express “what the Enneagram is for me” I would not be able to say it better than as I did in Madrid when Isa Salama asked me, for the Madrid Conference and that it published in “Sintoniza” and later in “NINE Points”. As, under a state of deep inspiration, it was the way I could express it, now I publish it again since I could not change a single Word of what I then said.

The Enneagram is a path that once it opens its door to you, it will never close back again. But its opening is an opening with pause, to the beat of an awakening that unveils fine layers of conscience. It is quickly learned, but it decants slowly. Its mystery is its strength. Not because it cannot be explained, but because, not only is it not exhausted, it also summons; that is why it makes you feel so passionate about it. Its reason is its symbol, which as a geometric design distributes knowledge in fixed places as well as in circuits that flow. It’s a map; it’s a compass both on its surface as in its depths. Its passion is what it generates in people, because of its power to summon. Both as a system of self-knowledge and personal, organizational and spiritual transformation, as much as it does, due to its power to join, to bind, to share, to create, to enjoy, to globalize and to transcend. What is fantastic is not only the way we move in it, as a roadmap, but the way we move because of it, from different places in the world to share a common language, an anti-Babel language, since it transcends cultures, languages and ethnic groups, but respecting, at the same time, identities and idiosyncrasies.  Its course shelters and expels. It shelters because you find yourself deeply described. It expels because at the same time you find yourself deeply proscribed. To find yourself, sheltered. It is a way to explain how story molds its effects and perpetuates its answers. An identity forged of repetitions that assure the familiarity with the step that follows. To find the Enneatype is to confirm a story of motivation and resolution. It’s to know that you are what you are. That is all.  Is that all? The Enneatype is the starting point and not the arrival. To find yourself, at the same time, expelled. More precisely, it is to discover how you have been expelled from your entire self to embody only a partial part. The challenge is the search. The challenge is to integrate what has been postponed, blinded, forgotten, what has not yet been embodied. The challenge is to find in this diamond of nine facets, from which of them we will refract the best light. There, we will find our true nature and the treasure to deliver to the world. The Enneagram teaches us to look inside, to look back, to look around, to look forward, to look up and to look beyond. As we look inside and back, the Enneagram teaches us to assume what we find in us, present and past. As we look around, the Enneagram teaches us that others also have an inside, and an outside, but by another path. It teaches us to recognize similarities and to polish differences, be they individual or cultural. It teaches us that in this world we all fit and learn from each other. It teaches us to discover ourselves but at the same time to understand, accept and value that other person that perhaps is placed in the most rejected point inside ourselves. The Enneagram integrates without diluting and separates without exiling. As we look forward and up, the Enneagram defies the inertia of an ineffective and faded obsolescence that stops our evolution as individuals and as societies. It teaches us to unfold our best potential as individuals and as groups. It teaches us to multiply synergies in our system of relationships, be they private or public.

Finally, the Enneagram teaches us to look beyond ourselves, leads us away from our own environment and beyond the stretch of history from which we are protagonists. It makes us look for the best of ourselves and makes us able to give it to the world and leave it as a legacy to those who follow us.

It makes us also feel part of a whole, beyond of what that may mean for each one. And this is its spiritual aspect. That which transcends us, the scope of which will be the measure of how each one may mean it. That is why the Enneagram, is respectful of how this sense of transcendence unveils to each one without imposing any creeds or beliefs. The Enneagram is a path, which, once it opens its door to you, will never close back again; each one is summoned to cover its way from its own resonance. My Professional training has required me first to understand it, then to test it on myself and on others and finally to generate contributions.  However, my resonance with the system exceeds the responsibilities of an ethical practice of the system, which, as a health professional, I take for granted. I use different practices to promote mental health, but not all of them as a system, produce in me so much enthusiasm. Actually, what I enjoy most of the Enneagram are its effects, in myself, in my patients, in my students, and in the Enneagram community which I feel part of. Definitely, if I had to give a reason why the Enneagram keeps me so enthusiastic on its way, I must confess (and that is what I like most) that I still do not know it completely, because “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” Blaise Pascal.

Viviana Trucco, President IEA Argentina 2014