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Listen to the audio description while you read this page about Type 7 — The Epicure:
more about the epicure
The Epicure is sensitive to how the world is limiting. They are frustrated with this, and try to keep as many options available as possible, to avoid limits or pain.
They are the ultimate pleasure seekers. They continually focus on pleasurable activities, and enjoy imagining all the many fascinating possibilities that could exist in the future. This becomes a major source of distraction, a diversion from deeper purposes and commitments.
An Epicure is a master at reframing negatives as positives. There is always a silver lining to every cloud. They are driven to focus on the lining, and avoid the cloud altogether. Trying to keep feeling happy, and trying to escape limits or pain, will actually lead to real losses in life. This will especially be true in relationships, and this will cause real pain.
In the ‘connection vs. space’ dance in relationships, an Epicure will usually be the one who feels trapped and will need more space. They will usually have problems with committing to a relationship.
Others will react to an Epicure’s avoidance of negative feelings. They may feel rejected or come to believe an Epicure really doesn’t care about them. In trying to avoid or escape pain, an Epicure will fail to learn the deeper lessons that pain teaches us, and they will repeat the same mistakes.
Personal growth for an Epicure is to realize what the hunger for options and escape of pain actually costs. Accept limits. Learn to stay with one thing and overcome the feeling of being trapped and needing to escape. Embrace the here and now, whether painful or pleasurable, stimulating or boring.
Lost essential quality: The full spectrum of possibilities experienced freely and deeply through sustained concentration.
Compensating belief: The world limits and frustrates people, and causes pain that one can escape from.
Attention/coping strategy: Planning for pleasurable, positive possibilities. Imagining and engaging in appealing activities and experiences. Focusing attention on multiple options and opportunities.
Trap: Keeping life up and idealized, believing one can avoid suffering.
Driving energy: Gluttony for interesting ideas and pleasurable experiences, now and in the future.
Avoidance: Frustrations, constraints, limits, getting enmeshed in suffering.
Strengths: Playful, optimistic, inventive, life-loving.
Paradox: Seeking the positives of life and avoiding the dark side is limiting. Trying to avoid pain creates pain.
Path of development:
- Realize it is limiting to seek only the positive
- Make and fulfill commitments
- Simplify, live in the present moment
- Learn to become more aware of others
- Allow pain and uncomfortable emotions
Ultimate task: Recognizing the escapism in the pursuit of experience and idealized future plans. Reclaiming and accepting all of life in the present moment: pain, fear and limits as well as pleasure, joy and options.
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
If the above personality type seems to fit you, we recommend you print out this page for easy reference. We also highly recommend that you listen to the audio description at the top of this page.