A mirror in a harshly lit room can offer a stark reflection, while a softer light offers a different kind of truth. Both lights shine on the same being, but their difference is in their quality of showing.

*SoulCollage® card: Swimming outside of the frames*

Recently we had a Saturday SoulCollage® online gathering at The Soul Shed, and I want to spend a little bit of time talking here about why I find SoulCollage® and Enneagram pair in such gently helpful ways for anyone on an inner journey towards self-knowledge.

And by ‘being on an inner journey towards self-knowledge’, I am not being highfalutin here. I very likely mean you, if you are a human wanting to understand more about being alive in the world at this time, and feeling a need to have more agency and consciousness around the way you are playing your own part in life unfolding.

*SoulCollage card: The coming of Spring*

A Soul Shed approach to self-discovery using the Enneagram in tandem with SoulCollage®, centres on intuition, embodied connection, and personal evolution. It allows for an organic, non-linear process that honours your unique unfolding journey. In this process, the goal is underpinned by the archetypal patterns in the symbol, but its intention is not to impose a framework on your sense of identity, but rather to create a space for gentle invitation and discovery.

I’m calling this in inside-out approach. An outside-in approach to collage involves applying a predefined, external framework to the process, often starting with the goal of identifying a specific Enneagram type or aspect of self. There are enneagram practitioners who specialise in interpreting collages other people make, in order to determine their type, even down to subtype, trifix and wings. This method relies on the practitioner interpreting the imagery the human has made in relation to their understanding of the body of typology knowledge. The result often orients a person to a place on the enneagram map to explore. If you like the idea of being accurately typed, then this might be for you, and reading this, you might decide an outside in approach is more for you. Or that you need something of both. That’s personal clarity to find, which I deeply respect.

My own journey with the enneagram teachings has been working with teachers and facilitators who do not type students, but rather guide them to deepen their enquiry in a container of support and mutual journeying. This was very helpful to me, as I learnt to trust my own viewpoint and land deeper inside my own skin. However, learning about the enneagram map was also my orientation, and reading about the patterns was where I began - and so I offer a list of recommendations for further explorations at the end of this piece.

*A SoulCollage card always offers a new perspective….*

Temenos and Tenderness: The act of creating a collage is approached as an intimate, sacred practice—held in a spirit of creating a place of sanctuary where you invite transformation and integrity. This approach calls you to explore the Enneagram in a way that connects to your deep, often unspoken sense of self. The tenderness you bring to your process invites a gentle unfolding, where the boundaries between your external world and internal understanding blur a little. (A piece exploring ways of creating your own temenos here)

Heliotropic Happiness: The process is guided by light—both literally and figuratively. It is like a sunflower using the capacities of its organism to follow the path of the sun - you follow what resonates and draws you towards your sense of the good and the whole. This is Collage materials are chosen intuitively, with an awareness of their potential to connect to something greater than the intellect: the light of your own inner wisdom. This is not a shiny polarising kind of happiness. Darkness is known for its fecundity and composting capacities. A deep contentment often comes from this inclusion of all of who you are, within an orientation towards the light.

Ethos of Enquiry: The approach is one of curiosity—there is no rush to judgment or conclusions. Rather, you allow the unfolding, trusting that the Enneagram's patterns, as well as your personal experiences and emotional states, will reveal themselves in time.

Leadings and Languages: Each Soulcollage® you create is called a neter, and offers you a kind of soul retrieval. It knows a language of symbols, forgotten forms, and whispers that communicate with you. Each image, colour, and texture can signal something deeply resonant, a form of communication with your inner life, which includes your instinctual impulses, the movements of your heart, and your receptive and curious mind, that feels much more like a calling than an intellectual exercise.

Here is Seena Frost, who brought this way of collaging into the world, in her book ‘SoulCollage unfolding’ :

‘Collage is a metaphor for any discovering, gathering ad reweaving of energy bits already formed and present in the universe. A new and personal creation can be made from the ever-present divine chaos of images all around us. Just choose, assemble, name and then inhabit your SoulCollage® cards’

Intuition and Impulse: Outer impressions spark movements within, leading to decisions in the collage process: a sudden desire to place one image next to another, a deep pull toward a certain material, or a feeling of curiosity about a particular image. This creates a dynamic, responsive relationship with your process, where you follow what feels true in the moment.

Movements and Motivations: These inner stirrings offer a path to explore the underlying motivations behind your Enneagram type. They don’t always make logical sense, but through this process, you gain insight into your personal patterning—what drives your actions, emotions, and desires. The cards in your SoulCollage® deck that feel very close to your personality in action are known as ‘committee cards’. Outside of the collaging process you might find yourself having aha moments in your life, where you see yourself doing your patterns, and have more choice around them.

Energy and Expression: As the collage evolves, you may encounter energy in many forms—emotional releases, sudden flashes of inspiration, or impulses to create. Trusting these sources of life force can lead you toward greater self-knowledge and understanding of the deep wellsprings of your own wisdom. Your collage may turn out to be your companion and ally to things you are experiencing in your larger life. The SoulCollage® process takes this journeying further still, offering you the opportunity to be in a deeper correspondence with your collage, to invite it to speak to you in its own language.

Here is Stephen Levine in ‘Poiesis: The language of psychology and the speech of the soul’:

[T]he stages of the therapeutic and creative process are essentially the same. Artists must go through a similar experience of breaking down the stabilised form which they face. Creation depends on destruction, a willingness to give up a previous pattern and the experiment with a new form. Letting go, the experience of emptiness and the emergence of the new characterise the creative as well as the therapeutic process.

Surprise and Serendipity: The process is often marked by moments of surprise—unexpected insights, seemingly random images coming together in meaningful ways, or materials surfacing that resonate deeply with your subconscious. These moments reveal the power of intuition and serendipity in your exploration.

Tri-fix and Terrain: Collage in this approach offers this gentle mirror to different aspects of the Enneagram, including your core type, subtypes, and trifix, through the visual language of your collage. Holding the map in the background of the process, means that this can happen more organically than it might in a typing session with an expert offering their insights. Your heart’s desires and forgotten longings may emerge, or a deeper awareness of how your body holds your life’s story.

Tri-fix combines your strategies of gut, heart and head into a three-part archetype which can be experienced as a kind of energetic domain. For more on this, you might like to follow the monthly Tree-types series here, which explores tri-fix through correspondences with tree-scapes and humans on a journey with the enneagram. Here is a link to the most recent post in this collection on my substack.

Openings and Orchestration: After a deep realization, there is space for a sense of integration to arise. This is where your collage becomes the artmaking of celebration—an outward expression of the inner transformation you’ve just undergone. As your understanding expands, your being reorganizes itself around these new insights, like a pearl forming in a shell. Keeping your collage somewhere in your living space where you can see it often, will allow it to take its place as a witness or ally!

Natural and Nurturing: This inside-out approach fosters a space of care and nurturing, where the creative process becomes an act of self-love and reflection. The act of creating a collage, without external pressure or expectation, invites a safe space for you to truly find new parts of yourself, and grow into your place in the world.

Empathy and Evolution: Each time you unearth a hidden part of yourself through the collage process, you experience an evolution of the soul. Losses can be grieved; memories can be retrieved in new ways. It is a return to a more aligned sense of self, where lost parts of you come home, and in doing so, you become more real, more integrated, and more in touch with a sense of having something that is essentially your own life force, in all its power and its subtlety, moving through you.

If all this is giving you an inner yes, let’s be in touch. The Soul Shed is for offering this kind of journeying into the world, online and in place. Please feel very welcome to message me, Samantha Taroni, at thesoulshed@yahoo.com to find the best fit for you.
This post was first published on my substack. Click to read more there, and click the second button to stay in touch with my offerings.

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Books I referenced here:

SoulCollage® Evolving by Seena Frost. Hanford Mead . 2010. - This book is simple to read, and profo und to digest. Reveals new things every time you look.

Poiesis. The language of Psychology and the speech of the soul by Stephen Levine. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. 1992

Recommendations:

Three enneagram teachers who empower and encourage exploration of type rather than centralising it.

Cicci Lyckow Backman (she writes on Substack at The Enneagram Way)

Ingrid Hurwitz at Takdir Transformations, an IEA certified school (with whom I trained as a trauma-informed enneagram coach)

Nancy Markow (she offers online events that are all by donation at Connecting you with yourself).

All are very easy to find with a quick online search.

Books about the Enneagram to learn about the patterns:

The Wisdom of the Enneagram by Riso and Hudson. Random House USA 1999. - A great place to start.

Understanding the Enneagram by Riso and Hudson. Harper Collins. 2023 - A deeper place to explore

The spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram by Sandra Maitri. Penguin Putnam Inc. 2001. - The title fits like a glove)

The Intelligent Enneagram by A. Blake. Shambhala. 1996. - This book explores widely and deeply and holds the process enneagram - the journey around the circle, in the frame. A very deep dive (I took 18 months in a study club with this book!)

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