The Basic Proposition

You lost sight of the fundamental principle that life is a full spectrum of possibilities to be experienced freely and with sustained concentration, and came to believe instead that the world limits you, frustrates you and causes you pain. You learned to assure a good life and protect yourself from limitations, frustration and pain by imagining options, opportunities and adventures. At the same time, you became a glutton for positive possibilities and pleasures. Your attention naturally goes to options and keeping life up.

The central issue for healing

The central issue for healing for Epicures may be more difficult to grasp than for any other type, because you are asked to welcome in all of life as it exists in the present moment – fear, pain, suffering, boredom and limitation, as well as pleasure, joy, excitement and options. In the process, you must reduce excess, delay gratification, and take only what really is needed.

Epicures also must ask themselves to empathize with the entire spectrum of experience in others and to care about the well-being of others as they would their own. Yet for playful, adventuresome, future-oriented Epicures, who habitually direct their outward-moving energy toward positive alternatives and possibilities, this task of deepening, simplifying life and steadying their attention in the “here and now” is just what is needed for wholeness.

Six healing and growth commitments for Type Sevens:

• Reduce excess stimulation and mental futurizing
• Ground in the present
• Accept pain and suffering as part of your wholeness
• Make and keep commitments and agreements with self and others
• Pay attention to others’ desires and well-being in equal proportion to your own
• Trust that the full spectrum of life and your deeper purpose includes the “darker side” of life – its pain, loss, suffering and limitations

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Key themes of all types: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

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Read more about key themes of the types in The Essential Enneagram by David Daniels, M.D.

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