The Enneagram Tapes

Rating:
Summary: Are you ready to give up everything you thought you were?
Review: Eli Jaxon Bear must be a truly enlightened individual. I had never heard of him before getting this tape series. I like to listen to tapes, my wife likes the enneagram, ..., so I gave it a try. My life will never be the same. Of this I am certain.

I had already explored much of the ground that this tape covers: spiritual awareness, emotional healing, personality types, etc, but all of the information that I had collected was just brain fodder. I felt knowledgeable, but definitely not enlightened. It almost seemed that my knowledge was more of a curse than a blessing, because I could see my failings without knowing how to escape them. My life was miserable and I made everyone around me miserable.

After listening to these tapes, I finally feel that I am able to put all the pieces together. Now I can see the purpose for and the cause of my suffering. I now have the courage to let myself sink into the suffering and the fear and the terror and the anger and the rage, and find my true beingness on the other side. I can now have compassion for others who are blind to their spiritual confusion because I see it as my own. I now feel the freedom to just be without needing to understand. These tapes are a blessing.

Eli has an approach unlike any other. His examples of the personality types are almost always hilarious. This is the most serious and at the same time the most light-hearted approach I have ever encountered. Examples of each type are given from the movies and well-known personalities. Eli seems extremely well-rounded in his knowledge of current pop culture.

On the other hand, they are not for everybody. If you want to just be happy and not look at your dark side, if you want to use enneagram as a parlor game to label yourself and others, if you are unwilling to totally give up any vestige of selfishness, then you should try the lighter versions of enneagram.

Rating:
Summary: Are you ready to give up everything you thought you were?
Review: Eli Jaxon Bear must be a truly enlightened individual. I had never heard of him before getting this tape series. I like to listen to tapes, my wife likes the enneagram, ..., so I gave it a try. My life will never be the same. Of this I am certain.

I had already explored much of the ground that this tape covers: spiritual awareness, emotional healing, personality types, etc, but all of the information that I had collected was just brain fodder. I felt knowledgeable, but definitely not enlightened. It almost seemed that my knowledge was more of a curse than a blessing, because I could see my failings without knowing how to escape them. My life was miserable and I made everyone around me miserable.

After listening to these tapes, I finally feel that I am able to put all the pieces together. Now I can see the purpose for and the cause of my suffering. I now have the courage to let myself sink into the suffering and the fear and the terror and the anger and the rage, and find my true beingness on the other side. I can now have compassion for others who are blind to their spiritual confusion because I see it as my own. I now feel the freedom to just be without needing to understand. These tapes are a blessing.

Eli has an approach unlike any other. His examples of the personality types are almost always hilarious. This is the most serious and at the same time the most light-hearted approach I have ever encountered. Examples of each type are given from the movies and well-known personalities. Eli seems extremely well-rounded in his knowledge of current pop culture.

On the other hand, they are not for everybody. If you want to just be happy and not look at your dark side, if you want to use enneagram as a parlor game to label yourself and others, if you are unwilling to totally give up any vestige of selfishness, then you should try the lighter versions of enneagram.

Rating:
Summary: Worth the bucks
Review: I bought the tapes for my husband, not intending to listen myself since I'd read 4 books on the subject and don't like audio. On the verge of reselling, I decided to check them out and was ENORMOUSLY glad I did.

Jaxon-Bear does a much better job than others (Riso/Hudson, Helen Palmer) of relating the types to one another. He also delivers the information with a GREAT sense of humor and "phrase bites" which make it easy to assimilate all 9 types. With the books, I had trouble trying to digest and remember all of it. Not so here.

For each type, he gives "extra" info like:
- movies, actors/roles, and historical persons that exemplify that type
- a country whose culture is that type
- physical features common in the type (although not for all)

As for overall format, he starts with an intro on one side of a tape and then launches into the types (one type per cassette side). Each type is presented in two parts: he first gives an explanation, then invites people of that type to share their personal experience of it. Some of the group participation is hilarious, some of it is painful. In any case, it is all illuminating and entertaining. The set ends with a conclusion tape of "sharing".

In my opinion this set is worth listening to no matter how much other info you have on the subject.