Spiritual Antidotes for the Types

Two-day workshop with Helen Palmer

Date and location to be announced

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

Background

On basic panels we hear how focus of attention organizes the worldview of type: Fives see an intruding world; Sevens see a world of many options; Fours live in a world where other people appear to have more, and so on. Rather than being present to life as it is, each type’s point of view constantly recreates itself through placements of attention that foreground certain focal objects, while backgrounding others.

The habitual way that people pay attention to their world creates a subjective reality, or conditioned awareness, sometimes called a veil of illusion. Conditioned awareness significantly alters being present to things as they actually occur. Enneatype Fives, for instance, don’t walk around looking for intrusions, they simply live in an intruding world. Their awareness mechanically registers potentially intruding events, whereas Eights might not notice those same events, automatically denying their impact.

About the class

The Enneagram triads are by far the most sophisticated description of conditioned awareness in contemporary spiritual literature. The feeling triad (Types Two–Three–Four) moves toward life, desiring identity in the eyes of others. Their condition is to register approval and suffer from its absence. Aversion is typical of the mental triad (Five–Six–Seven) who moves away from a hazardous world. The body-based triad (Eight–Nine–One) maintains a holding pattern of not knowing – the denial of Eight, self-forgetting of Nine, and Ones who judge life as it is. Desire, aversion and self-forgetting each respond to specific meditation practices that spring the box of conditioned awareness.

This workshop bridges the psychology of type with the practices of spiritual freedom. You will accomplish a deep inquiry into the structure of your own consciousness through dyad exercises, breakout groups according to type and short triad panels. The intention of this inquiry is to deconstruct the system of habit and false beliefs that constantly recreate your type’s placement of attention, but the heart of the material lies in 20–minute periods of inner training with the spiritual antidotes. These attention practices give you a structure for shifting desire to non-attachment, aversion to receptive awareness and self-forgetting to being present and awake.

Psychological-Spiritual Curriculum overview

Other topics:

Type and False Identity
Projection
Presence and Self-Forgetting
Virtues of the Heart
Retrieving the Holy Ideas
A Spiritual Strategy for People in Relationships
Type and Intuition
Integrative Practicum for Counselors, Spiritual Directors and People Working with Others
How Subtype Shapes Relationships

Trifold School current offerings

San Francisco Bay Area workshops and classes