Enneatype 9 is often described as "going with the flow", "not rocking the boat", "going along to get along." It's said that when pushed too far they can become stubborn and "dig their heels in." What could possibly underlie this sort of behavior?

The path for development of Enneatype 9 often alludes to finding their individual self and personal agenda independent of others. Basically, stop pursuing this focus on merging with others. I wonder if sometimes the Enneagram is telling left-handed people to become right-handed or in this case right-brained people to become left-brained.

Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist (neuroanatomist), describes her experience of a left-brain stroke in her book My Stroke of Insight. Because of the damage to her left-brain, her sense of reality gets filtered almost exclusively through her right brain. The experience reminds me of the Enneatype 9 desire to merge the self while the rest of the world is trying to make them do the opposite.

Honestly, there were certain aspects of my new existence that I preferred over the way I had been before. I was not willing to compromise my new insights in the name of recovery. I liked knowing I was a fluid. I loved knowing my spirit was at one with the universe and in the flow with everything around me. I found it fascinating to be so tuned in to energy dynamics and body language. But most of all, I loved the feeling of deep inner peace that flooded the core of my very being.

I yearned to be in a place where people were calm and valued my experience of inner peace. Because of my heightened empathy, I found that I was overly sensitive to feeling other people's stress. If recovery meant that I had to feel like they felt all the time, I wasn't interested.

This second quote points to the perspective type 9 may have of a world full of personal agendas, people running around busily trying to accomplish those agendas, while type 9 sits back and wonders "why go through all that?" and "where's their agenda taking them?" Type 9 might think "I'll go along with your agenda until I come up with one of my own, but really what good is all this stress about personal agenda - what a waste of energy."