By Abi Robins
I was raised as a little girl in the Midwest, but I never quite fit the mold. I found myself adventuring through the woods and spending hours in the Walmart toy aisles, fawning over the hot wheels, Star Wars, and Legos, all the while knowing I was “behind enemy lines.” I prepared back stories about shopping for a brother or a classmate’s birthday, knowing full well the truth would be unacceptable. Self-awareness came early for me, as it does for most of us in the queer community. It’s not just a nice quality to have, it’s a survival skill.
Queer people develop self-awareness early in life, and often with much more tenacity than their cis hetero counterparts. We somehow instinctively know that we don’t fit in with many of the people around us. Our survival (often literally) depends on our ability to figure out why that is and either correct it, or keep it under wraps. We train ourselves early to watch our body language, our vocal inflection, who we’re making eye contact with and for how long, so much so it’s like second nature. This skill, or even super power, however, goes widely untapped in our community.
The Enneagram and Self-Awareness
Abi Robins
Developing this skill not only helped me feel safe in the toy aisles as a kid, it also set me up to excel in my exploration and teaching of the Enneagram. The Enneagram is a tool that both requires and strengthens self-awareness. An intricate map of human personality, it dives deeper than your average personality typing system into our very core motivations. The Enneagram outlines our habitual, patterned behaviors in service of our unique motivations, and shows us a path to living as the best versions of ourselves. At the core and very beginning of all of this work, though, is our ability to self-observe. Without a certain level of self-awareness, you won’t be able to get your foot in the door.
It’s puzzling to me, then, to see how few queer spiritual and self-awareness gurus there are out there. And this is especially true in the Enneagram community. As a system, the Enneagram’s greatest strength is that it shows that not everyone sees and experiences the world the way we do. This is incredibly exciting, but it rings disingenuous when the community that surrounds it is so staggeringly homogenous. It’s a tool that, at its heart, creates space and compassion across perspectives and fosters healthy diversity, so the fact that it’s almost exclusively taught and used by straight, white, cisgender people is downright infuriating.
It’s time we queered the Enneagram.
We Need It, and They Need Us
By marginalizing the queer experience, dominant culture has deprived people living under the LGBTQIA umbrella of the basic psychological, spiritual, and material tools necessary to navigate the world successfully. Thus you see generations of people who have an innate gift for self-awareness developing unhealthy coping mechanism because of the lack of support provided by the world we could so easily be enriching. The Enneagram can help us make sense of ourselves and the way we experience the world, as well as to build healthy and fulfilling relationships. Our community needs the Enneagram. Beyond that, though, the Enneagram community needs us.
The Enneagram as a system is capable of deeply shifting culture and has the potential to change the way we experience our world both personally and collectively. If left only in the hands of those who have little stake in questioning the tenets of dominant culture, it will quickly devolve into nothing more than a psychological party trick.
However, when the Enneagram community actively embraces and lifts up the voices and experiences of the queer community, they open themselves to both a deeper and more nuanced understanding of themselves, as well as the system itself. No one will become curious about their assumptions and biases until they’re challenged, and our experiences offer the mainstream Enneagram community the opportunity to see themselves and their types with even more clarity.
What To Do About It
One of the fastest and most effective ways to queer the Enneagram is for you, a queer person, to involve yourself in the work. Learn your type and use the system to make more sense of your personal journey. Have your partner(s) type themselves too, and start building healthier relationships. The more queer people using this system, the better! As you deepen your personal understanding and expand your self-awareness, your experience will help to enlighten others on their paths as well.
This queering is currently the main focus of my work within the Enneagram community. This work includes my teaching and client work, as I’m one of very few queer teachers and, as far as I know, the only non–binary Enneagram teacher currently practicing. I’m also working to facilitate community through my social media outlets, and advocate for more queer voices in the Enneagram community through a presentation I’ll be giving at this year’s International Enneagram Association’s Global Conference.
If you’d like to better understand yourself and those around you, the Enneagram is quite possibly the best tool available and your queer experience will make it even more valuable.
Learn more about queering the Enneagram at consciousenneagram.com. Keep up with Abi Robins’ work on Facebook and Instagram.
Abi Robins (they/them) is a trained Enneagram Teacher who studied with Helen Palmer, Marion Gilbert, Peter O’Hanrahan and others through The Narrative Enneagram in Menlo Park, CA. Robins is also a CIAYT Yoga Therapist (intern) with the International Association of Yoga Therapists and studied at Yoga Yoga in Austin, TX.
Abi’s teaching combines the deep and transformative insight of the Enneagram with the holistic and down to earth practices of Yoga Therapy. Robins seeks to share these two powerful systems to help people better understand themselves and those around them and live more fulfilling and meaningful lives.
As a queer, non-binary Enneagram teacher and Yoga Therapist, Robins is also working tirelessly to bring quality teaching in both areas to the queer community. Abi seeks to empower sexual and gender minorities with self-understanding, self-compassion and embodied practices to heal from the trauma inherent in existing on the margins. Robins also hopes to educate other Yoga and Enneagram teachers on how to best serve the queer community through their own teaching.
