Welcome to this blog! As you will notice, it’s not only, or even mostly, specifically about the Enneagram, but rather on inner growth in general. However, since what I am exploring is the Enneagram, the centres and the instincts (among other things), I assume that most of you know about these things. But if you don’t, there will be plenty here for you anyway 🧡
Cicci Lyckow Bäckman
The one who blogs 😉Latest posts
Finding your type — the forgotten art of letting things take their time
Let’s say you’re a freshly appointed Chief of Operations at a company that you haven’t previously worked at. If you’re at all sensible about it, you don’t start your first week by imposing a new regimen. Instead, you want to get to know the company, its processes, and its staff. Only then can you decide whether you want to make changes and if so, how. It’s not that you need to work at the company for years and years, necessarily. But you need to get your bearings. Same thing if you decide you want to learn to be a art…
Continue Reading Finding your type — the forgotten art of letting things take their time
When the need for love is the strongest
When I was a teenager, my mother — an enthusiastic Catholic who also happened to enjoy gifting her children with literature — gave me a book by Thomas Merton. I don’t remember the title of the book, or even what it was about. But one sentence had such a deep impact on me that I remember it to this day. The book was a Swedish translation, so I hope mr Merton will forgive my possibly inadequate counter-translation. It went something like: We reject love because it somehow, in our own obdurate imagination, implies some vague form of humiliation. That man…
The flip side of control and initiative
As an Enneagram Eight, most would agree that one of the good things is that you get things done. There’s the feeling that you are the doer, for better or worse, and whatever you decide will affect everything else. This light (or sometimes, not so light) hubris does come with perks, of course. I seldom get bogged down for long about How Stuff Is, but rather, something within me finds a way to make it feel like I chose this, grabbing the initiative back from fate, as it were; refusing to be on the receiving end of what happens and…
“Rainbow typing” — a note on Enneatourism
Sometimes, the introductory level of Enneagram knowledge is as far as it goes. Ones are rigid perfectionists, Threes workaholics who’ll sell out for success, Sixes anxious scaredy cats, Eights steamrollers with inch-thick skin — and so on and so forth. That, however, gets old quite quickly (and is not very useful for deepening personal growth). But then, in reaction to this, something interesting happens. We are told we are ALL types. People get their tritype diagnosed, complete with wings for each type, which, combined with relevant lines, basically covers the whole Enneagram. Which is of course equally useless. So, how…