Take A Plane to the Future

I boarded the plane for New York, clutching my copy of J. G. Bennet’s obscure book “Enneagram Studies”. 

Many people are aware of the 9 Enneatype Personalities – I have studied and taught this to actors – but few know that the enneagram symbol is also an elegant way to summarise Alexander’s Discovery.

Or at least, that’s what Bennett promised in his forward.

Bennett was a student of the esoteric and slightly criminal Gurdjieff – a mysterious master who was reputed to have spent decades of his life studying with some of the greatest teachers living on the planet. In this book, Bennett described the symbol of the Enneagram as a way to represent energetic systems.

Anything which arises, abides, then disintegrates, can be mapped onto the symbol. The book gives several examples: cooking a meal, marketing a Product and several other chapters illustrating how it works.

Bennett claimed that if you cannot map a process onto the Enneagram, it shows you do not understand it fully. 

This I found to be true. 

But first – I had to test myself. 

I have a 5-hour flight ahead of me, and – if I was to believe Bennett’s words – then Alexander’s Discovery process should be easily represented by this symbol. Alexander spent a lot of time describing his story in his 3rd book, “Use of the Self”. FM was writing the chapter “Evolution of a Technique” while my teacher Marjorie Barstow (1899~1995) was in London training to be a teacher. She told us that FM would often come into training class and read passages that he had written for comment. Marj herself used to read and reread this chapter for the rest of her life. I have read it over a 100 times.

It was this chapter that I wanted to map on to the Enneagram, and I did.

For 5 hours, I feverishly made notes, crossed things out, rethought the meaning of Alexander’s writing and finally produced my first draft of the Compass as I was landing at Newark International Airport for a workshop in New York.

I had some heavy hitters lined up to attend my “Alexander & Emotions” workshop. I decided to debut my first draft of what I today call “The Compass”, and I was terrified. 

When everyone arrived - and I started to deliver – it did not go well!

I was in trouble with a savvy and impatient group of intellectual New Yorkers

***

I have been teaching The Compass ever since - I even have an unpublished book written about it. The ThinkingBody courses I created were designed around Alexander’s story as it is mapped onto the Compass.

You can see the symbol and learn more about it by clicking on the link below:

https://bodychance.mykajabi.com/store/TGFBWut4