Enneagram – Integration to Grow Your Soul

Dive into the Enneagram – an ancient wisdom tool for self-discovery and soul growth. This workshop introduces nine personality styles and complementary spiritual practices for a life-long journey toward integration of mind, body, and emotions. Listen within; listen to others’ varied perceptions; listen to grow in the Life.

Workshop Description

How do we learn to listen to ourselves for fullness of Life? Enneagram wisdom offers practical, nuanced insights for diverse ways of experiencing the world. Combined with contemplative practices, Enneagram can help free your best qualities and allow you to bring the wholeness of your gifts into action. Each day of this workshop will include worship, teaching, experiential practices, quiet time, small group sharing, and whole group reflection. Sessions will offer something for Enneagram newbies, dabblers, and experienced practitioners seeking spiritual growth.

Participants will:

• Self-identify characteristics of your personality—strengths, challenges, and intentions. Even if you don’t pin down your Enneagram type, the exploration can be very meaningful.
• Stretch with prayer tools to help integrate thinking, doing, and feeling in the Spirit
• Listen and encourage others in self-discovery and soul growth using contemplative group processes

Sessions will build on material offered in previous days:

1. Coming Home: Begin with what you already know about your best qualities, your authentic nature, True Self, or self in God. Enneagram wisdom calls it “Essence,” and it points a unique direction Home for diverse personality types. Our approach to soul growth and the Enneagram starts with a hopeful vision of what is possible.
2. Kinds of Intelligence: This session will introduce the nine Enneagram personality Types through their strengths in doing, thinking, or feeling (Centers of Intelligence). We’ll reflect on related patterns in our own prayer and spiritual practices, learn from others with differing approaches, and engage spiritual hospitality for the wholeness of our body, mind, and emotions.
3. Growth through Stress: What happens when we’re not at our best? Our strengths can become unhealthy personality traps (Enneagram “Passions”). We’ll note red flags for each Type, Enneagram “Stress Numbers,” and map the Enneagram’s natural resources to keep growing through challenging times. Participants will a choose and try a prayer or spiritual practice to support non-judgmental self-awareness and “manage” the dominant center of intelligence.
4. In Weakness is Strength: The soul flourishes when we engage our least used and weakest capacity for doing, thinking or feeling. Enneagram “Stances” describe “repressed” centers of intelligence for each Type. We’ll review prayer or spiritual practices to “bring up” the weaker capacity, and explore implications for growing a more trusting relationship with the Divine.
5. Wholeness and The Holy: In our closing session, we’ll introduce unique “paths of integration” for each Type (Security Numbers). Semi-programmed worship will invite participants to receive soul messages for healing and wholeness.

If you’re curious, or wish to prepare a bit, you could read reflections posts on my blog: Enneagram: Not a Test; Enneagram: Helpful Quaker Baggage, Parts 1 & 2; Enneagram: Coming Home. You could explore free podcasts by Enneagram master teacher, Suzanne Stabile: The Enneagram Journey. Suzanne’s applied wisdom and diverse guest perspectives bring the Enneagram to life. Online Enneagram tests are wrong more than half the time, so I won’t recommend any of them! The best way to recognize your core Enneagram “type” is through stories like the ones Suzanne’s and her guests’ offer: 

• Podcast on Enneagram and Spiritual Practice/Prayer, #62, 2019:  https://www.theenneagramjourney.org/podcast/2019/episode62

Recommended books from Suzanne Stabile, very approachable and useful:

• The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery
• The Journey Toward Wholeness: Enneagram Wisdom for Stress, Balance, and Transformation 

Leader Experience

I am an educator, retreat leader, and spiritual director/companion. One of my first ministry leadership experiences was as workshop facilitator with FGC Gathering in Tacoma, WA in 2006. Since then, I founded and facilitate Way of the Spirit—a program for prayer and learning from the wisdom of the Quaker tradition. For most of the past ten years, I’ve facilitated five or six residential retreats per year. I also served eight years as adjunct faculty in Seattle University’s multi-denominational School of Theology and Ministry, guiding graduate students into offering their own spiritual retreats. In the summers of 2021 and 2022, I was guest faculty for weeklong sessions at Holden Village ecumenical retreat center in the North Cascades Mountains. In my Quaker meetings in Alaska and Washington State, I’ve clerked education, nominating, and ministry and counsel committees. My leadership aims to be gentle, hospitable, collaborative, and guided by the Spirit. In retreats or workshops, I seek to encourage personal reflection, inner awareness, and deep respect for diverse experiences of the Divine.