Enneagram Type and Strategies for Healing

Please see current schedule for other Enneagram workshops in the Narrative Tradition.

This workshop begins a new teaching cycle focused on “chair work” – a curriculum that integrates Enneagram typology with contemplative method. The curriculum is non-denominational and does not train you to be a professional counselor, a spiritual director or an Enneagram therapist. It will, however, demonstrate how the suffering of type is relaxed and understood by joining self-observation protocols with contemplative method.

Our spiritual materials and core contemplative practice follow the way of negation illustrated by John of the Cross, and the affirmative way of Teresa of Avila, who in their lifetimes were spiritual companions on the path to unity. The Two Vias are bodies of inner practice that relax the type’s resistance to spiritual receptivity. A newly developed folio of psychological readings locates the diagram’s matrix of wings, lines and arrows in a cohesive theoretical framework through the lens of developmental psychologist Margaret Mahler, D.W. Winnicott’s perspective on childhood imagination and transitional objects, and Ken Wilber’s integrative model of consciousness.

The highlights of this workshop are the role-plays and demonstrations of what chair work looks like for each type. You will create a folio of self-observation practices and homework to debrief protocols according to type. There also are short lectures on the psychodynamic structure of type, a series of dyad exercises on key questions of integration, and two contemplative practice sessions. Please expect an evening session, which allows time for chair work with all nine profiles.

The integration theme

Roughly half of our students are drawn to the Enneagram because they recognize their own recurring patterns. They generally work with a therapist and begin a spiritual practice to heal emotional pain. The other half are established meditators, whose inner practice becomes temporarily unseated as their type issues emerge. And for obvious reasons, both groups embrace the theme of integrating two inherently separate states of mind to heal the whole person.

From the personality perspective, it is patently clear that we are separate from the world around us. The I–It state of mind is dualistic, a world in which thoughts, feelings and sensations structure our identity. Yet contemplation is organized to relax personal identity, freeing awareness to unite with contemplative objects instead of being separate from them. Nothing changes during moments of spiritual unity except our inner state. The outer situation stays exactly the same, but the cognitive state of mind is inwardly surrendered to receive reality as it actually is.

The key word is “receive” because the type structure automatically resists receptivity. Yet whether we know it or not, we are each seeking the qualities of unity that heal our suffering. Sixes for example seek courage and faith as antidotes to fear and doubt. From a spiritual perspective, they are on a journey to retrieve the qualities that make them whole. The virtues and holy ideas of the Enneagram are qualities of spirit that cannot be earned by psychological effort or won by force of will. They are freely given as aspects of unity that can only be received by becoming inseparably one with them in contemplation.

The spiritual qualities described by the Enneagram should not be confused with mature personality traits that we see in high-functioning people. The qualities are facets of unity itself, and their recovery requires astute psychodynamic understanding of our barriers to receptivity, integrated with contemplative practice to relax the type’s resistance.

Context for this teaching cycle

The integration topic began with a single class at John F. Kennedy University’s School of Consciousness Studies, a pioneer organization in what has become a respected field of inquiry. During the nine years of its evolution in the 1980s, The Enneagram: Diagnosis, Assessment and Treatment blossomed into a three-quarters-long required curriculum for the California State Board licensing exam in three different clinical specialties. The JFK course also refined the panel method, which encourages high-functioning speakers to describe both their pathology and the different healing effects of clinical and spiritual interventions according to type.

The panel method was wildly successful for the simple reason that students wanted to interact with people like their future clients instead of relying on disembodied psychology texts. Panels were an ideal setting for high-functioning people to describe their change of state when they suffered, set alongside their inner experience of the different qualities of spirit, known as the virtues and holy ideas in the Enneagram. It was self-observation at its best. The types spoke about what brought them into therapy, their transference issues with counselors, obstacles to contemplation and revealingly – the precise psychological and spiritual interventions that do and don’t work for their type.

Psychological-Spiritual Curriculum overview

Other topics:

Type and False Identity
Projection
Presence and Self-Forgetting
Spiritual Antidotes for the Types
Virtues of the Heart
Retrieving the Holy Ideas
A Spiritual Strategy for People in Relationships
Type and Intuition
How Subtype Shapes Relationships

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