When holistic health practitioner Candice Thomas was training to become an acupuncturist, she stumbled across a theory: Mental and emotional health is directly tied to physical health.
“The mental and emotional create our health picture,” she said.
In practice, she “quickly saw there are patterns of health outcome by personality type.” Enter the Enneagram, a personality assessment tool.
Established in the 1950s, Enneagrams became popular in the 1980s and their popularity has continued to grow. Thomas has based much of her practice on divining potential — and very real — life and health problems.
Thomas said she believes this is one way of living a happier life. So, she released the book “Your Vitality Personality: Decode the Real You and Hack Into Happiness.” In it, Thomas discusses the nine personality types and how they color our lives.
“We don’t realize we’re holding a specific world view, but it is coloring our priorities, our choices, the mental loops which create emotional patterns that we’re in over and over again,” she said.
“This creates specific patterns in the body. There are other practitioners who are finding the same thing.”
In fact, Thomas said, different emotions lodge or create issues throughout the body, which leads back to personality types.
“We have a certain pattern of emotions because of patterns of thought that our personality type is creating,” she said.
One way of looking at the Enneagram of a personality is to see it as a square, what Thomas called a mandala. The shadow side is on the bottom half: “The parts of yourself that you don’t really know are there, but they’re drivers.”
The upper half of the circle represents the higher self.
She said it’s simple to determine the personality someone might possess. On Thomas’ website, she has a link to a quiz with more than 50 questions. Results are immediate.
The types include:
• the architect / the judge
• the altruist / the victim
• the luminary / the pretender
• the creative / the diva
• the sage / the miser
• the guardian / the alarmist
• the uplifter / the hedonist
• the leader / the bully
• the healer / the submissive
There are also sub-categories as well as other personality markers to consider.
Thomas said she penned the book because, on her inner journey, she found material describing personality types but failed to explain what to do with the information.
“It did seem like no matter what you read or you tried, it was like, ‘You’re wired this way. Good luck with that. Bye,’” she said.
Her system “shows you that the shadow side is the part getting you in trouble.” She identifies specific elements to look for “because this is at the heart of all the sabotage.” Then, she offers ways to change the belief to the upper, positive part of the mandala.
“Ultimately, people need to learn how to feel their feelings,” she said. “I have created a few techniques that I teach that help you integrate your feelings, help you heal old wounds.”
After more than 14 years of working with the Enneagram, Thomas has seen remarkable improvements in her patients. She thinks about two marriages that were on the brink of divorce.
“The two case studies that surprised me the most were two marriages that completely turned around,” she said. “Both of my patients were on the track toward divorce. Over the years, I was listening to it devolve and how they came to the point where they were thinking of separating and getting lawyers. Then they started doing their own inner work and asking how to talk about (issues) with their partner, how to look at things from a different perspective.”
Both of those marriages are now happy and strong, Thomas added.
For Thomas, the inner work aided by the Enneagram helped her accept herself and see beyond her weight struggles. For those who struggle with their weight and self-acceptance, this is major.
“It wasn’t only that my weight was going up and down, but it was that I finally got to the place where I said, ‘I don’t know how to love myself,’” she recounted. “I don’t know how to feel love for myself while I hate how I look and I hate how I’m behaving.”
She did two things for herself: find a way that was pleasurable to her (intermittent fasting), and learn to love herself.
“What I realized is that, when I looked at myself, I would say to myself, ‘You have a loveable body,’” she said. “It’s not about beautiful. It’s not about sexy. It’s not about what other people think. I want to feel love for myself… Really learning how to love yourself no matter what is a game changer.”
Thomas wants this for everyone.
“These are cool methods that come from really unusual sources but that I have been teaching in my practice that have been transformational,” she said. “I’m really excited for people to have access to these tools.”
