“The insincts” are somewhat of a hot topic in the Enneagram world — but there are a few different takes on them, which often gets confusing. Cicci has taken a special interest with these biological drives and studied them for many years with Russ Hudson and within herself in inner work. Now, she offers individual sessions for exploring your instinctual preferences.
The instincts and our innate preferences are not a typing system, where the goal is to find your order of priority and classify yourself as to what kind of person that makes you. Sure, understanding these preferences explains some things and sheds light on our inner processes, but the point is then to use these insights for increased self-awareness and growth.
Want to book this session? At present, I haven’t got an online booking system, so how it works is you drop me a message with some information about yourself. Be sure to include your time-zone and what parts of the week/day you are generally available, and ‘ll come up with a couple of suggestions. Once we agree on a date and time, I’ll send you a link where you confirm your booking by paying the fee (currently €95). Read on to see what the session entails.
Isolating the biological drives
One thing to observe about this session is that it is about instinctual preferences as they stand aside from type. A common reason for confusion is usually the attempt to understand instinctual preferences within the Enneagram type, which is going about it backwards, as the instincts in themselves is not a function of our personality. It’s true that we can put the two together to gain a lot of insight into ourselves, but this can only be done productively once we understand both our personality type and our instinctual preferences, separately. This session is for the instincts bit of that, and whether you are sure about your Enneagram type or not does not matter.
Looking at the instinctual zones
Another that tends to get a bit boxy and clumsy in instincts work is that trying to ascertain a stack of the three — self-preservation, sexual and social adaptation — can be difficult. This is because a) we do in fact have and use all of them, and b) each of the three instincts come out in a number of separate ways, which at first glance can seem almost opposed to one another. To clarify aspects around this, Russ Hudson devised three “zones”, or area of focus, for each drive, and when we start discerning those, our understanding of both the drives and ourselves gets both clearer and more useful.
Preparations and structure of the session
For this individual session to be the most beneficial to you, it’s recommended that you have read Aspects of you, have taken part in Cicci’s teacnings about the instincts, or both. When you sign up for the session, the first thing that will happen is that you get sent a test and an interview sheet which you fill out and send back a minimum of five days before your booked session, so that Cicci has time to process your responses and prepare for your session. The session itself then takes 60—90 minutes, during which you go through your instinctual profile together. Cicci will also give you helpful hints about how you can incorporate your insights about the instincts into your inner work, and after the session you get a follow-up pdf (usually 3-5 pages) where your instinctual test-scores as well as the pointers for inner work are summarized.
If you would like to book this session, please drop me a message with some information about yourself. Be sure to include your time-zone and what parts of the week/day you are generally available, and I‘ll come up with a couple of suggestions. Once you agree on a date and time, you will receive a link where you confirm your booking by paying the fee (currently €95).