What Are Virtues & Passions?
In the next posts, we’ll explore each Enneagram type one by one—looking at how its core passion subtly drives behavior, and how its corresponding virtue offers a path back to presence, clarity, and essence. Think of this as the map. What follows will be a closer look at the terrain. So let’s dive in!
The Passion
The passion associated with your Enneagram number is the ABSOLUTE CORE of your type structure. The backbone. The consistent and driving emotional energy that silently shapes your behavior. When you find yourself “on automatic,” acting with little conscious awareness, the passion of your type is running the show.
Each passion filters reality through a specific emotional bias, like a tinted lens that colors everything we see. It doesn’t just distort how we interpret our experiences—it also limits what we’re able to notice in the first place. We begin to unconsciously seek out experiences that validate our emotional worldview, reinforcing the very pattern that keeps us stuck.
The Virtue
Alternatively, the virtue of your Enneagram type doesn’t really describe a part of your personality structure at all. It describes qualities of your Essence, or True Nature—everything that you are beyond the confines of your conditioned personality. Following the passion leads us away from the core of our being. The virtue describes how to find our way back.
How do you use THEM?
Regardless of your Enneagram number, you’ll find the passion of your type has an ironic way of “tripping over its own toes.” It urges you to strive fiercely toward some vague-but-deep existential need, and the very fierceness of your striving causes you to overshoot the mark—sabotaging your own aims.
It’s like trying to fall asleep by concentrating really hard on falling asleep. The more effort you bring to the task, the more elusive it becomes. But when you surrender the striving—even for a breath—that’s when rest can finally arrive. The same is true for the virtue: it comes not through pushing, but through presence.
Living through the passion is a constant tussle with your type. There is only one way to get what the passion is driving after. And that’s to let go of the passion itself. Paradox? Absolutely. But the truth is, the problems of your conditioned personality cannot be solved by your conditioned personality—this would be like a toddler attempting to teach itself discipline.
Virtues can’t be forced or fabricated. They arise not because we achieve something, but because we stop interfering. Like the sun behind the clouds, the virtue isn’t gone—it’s just waiting for space to shine through. When the personality is quiet enough, even for a moment, the virtue reveals itself as a felt sense of homecoming.
The virtue that corresponds with your type is always present. During moments of free-flowing present awareness, we can feel the essential parts of ourselves that are described under this term of “virtue.” Those parts of us can’t be harmed, destroyed, or removed. But they can be obscured, or covered over—and that’s exactly what the passion of your type represents. It represents the fundamental way in which your personality distorts reality and causes you to lose touch with your true self.
So rather than asking, “What’s my passion and how do I fix it?”—try sitting with the question, “Where might I be striving hardest… and what’s the quiet truth beneath that effort?” You might find that your virtue has been there all along, whispering beneath the noise.
The following series of blog posts will break down the passions and virtues of all 9 Enneagram types. They are very much the “load bearing supports” that hold up the structure of these types. Hearing our own passion described in detail often feels like we’re being called out in a very direct way. It’s truth-telling time, and it might get sticky!