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 Overview
Listen to panel interviews
 See videos of the nine Enneagram types
Overview of the Narrative Tradition
The Narrative Tradition is an extraordinary teaching method that offers a unique and personally transformative experience of the Enneagram.
By listening to representatives of each Enneagram type share their personal stories and reveal their particular inner worlds and realities, you can discover how to recognize personality differences from direct experience, rather than simply learning about the Enneagram from a particular “authority.”
The Narrative Tradition promotes an open exploration of each personality type. In our view, there is no better way to explore, learn and teach than through this interactive method of panel interviews. Through a sophisticated inquiry method, the Narrative Tradition demonstrates the types, their struggles, dilemmas, strengths and separate paths of development. The types continuously teach us about themselves at ever deepening levels of awareness, and we learn from exploring with them.
Ultimately, the Enneagram is an “inside job” of determining your type and coming to know and understand your own focus of attention, core beliefs, coping strategies and path of development. The value of the Enneagram does not come mainly from identifying your type based on external behaviors, but mainly from understanding how behavioral patterns relate to each type’s focus of attention, motivation and personal experience. The active role each participant plays in noticing his or her own patterns helps create conscious awareness, which leads to conscious conduct.
The Narrative Tradition recognizes that implicit non-cognitive learning is at the heart of what we know about the world of relationships and meaning. We cannot fully understand the motivations, inner maps and integration of the psychological and transpersonal worlds without direct personal experience.
The panel interviews bring the Enneagram alive through meaningful conversation and insights. They are set within a rich context of self-observation practices, practical exercises for each type, directed meditations, movement exercises and facilitated interactions between the types.
Helen Palmer and David Daniels, M.D., founded the Trifold School’s Enneagram Professional Training Program (EPTP) in 1988. The foundational course, our premier offering, is the Enneagram Intensive™, which is also the first section of the EPTP.
Self-discovery and self-expression are fundamental aspects in each participant’s path of development. The intelligent expression of body, heart and mind can best be grasped by direct energetic experience involving interactions and practices. The Narrative Tradition’s method of inquiry is further enhanced through explicit cognitive learning and written materials, both of which heighten clarity, facilitate discussion and are an important part of our trainings.
Acceptance and understanding often come from appreciating what something is not. Our teachings in the Narrative Tradition are not about history per se, although each type has its own history. The teachings do not refer to ancient roots or transmission, and there is no spiritual leader, oracle of knowledge or specific lineage attached to these teachings other than the grassroots philosophy of self-discovery.
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Panel interviews conducted by David Daniels on VoiceAmerica™ Internet Radio
“Empower Your Life with the Enneagram,” an 11-part series that aired on VoiceAmerica™ Internet radio during 2005, demonstrates our teachings in the Narrative Tradition. The audio programs address understanding and appreciating each of the types, the role of the Enneagram in building healthy relationships, the three instinctual subtypes, the Enneagram and spiritual life, and more. Each of the programs on the nine types presents the Narrative Tradition of panels of the types speaking for themselves. These panels powerfully demonstrate each type’s basic structure, relationship themes and path of development.
David Daniels, M.D., introduces each program and then facilitates panels of the types speaking for themselves.
Listen to a panel of Type Ones:
Listen now to a panel of Enneagram Type Ones: Understanding and appreciating the lives of Perfectionists, Type 1 on the Enneagram (aired July 12, 2005)
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View videos of the nine types speaking for themselves: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
The Trifold School
Enneagram Teacher Certification Program
Enneagram Teachers in the Narrative Tradition
Enneagram books, tapes and DVDs
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