Program Philosophy

Awakening and enlightenment is often understood as a solitary path, whereby we picture being in a cave somewhere in the mountains in India. This is not the case with our program. We see awakening as a relational process that happens in a community of others on the path – where we are being seen, challenged, witnessed, and supported as we go through our inquiry. In fact, being in relationship with others serves as a constant mirror to us as to where we are on our journey. This program is built on the principles of social learning where we grow and develop in and through relationships.

Margaret Wheatley said it best: “For as long as we’ve been around as humans, as wandering bands of nomads or cave dwellers, we have sat together and shared experiences. We’ve painted images on rock walls, recounted dreams and visions, told stories of the day, and generally felt comforted to be in the world together. When the world became fearsome, we came together. When the world called us to explore its edges, we journeyed together. Whatever we did, we did it together.“

With a diverse and mysterious history, the image of the Enneagram (ennea-nine, gram-image) dates back at least 3500 years and represents within it an entire universe of dynamic rhythms, patterns, and laws that can be applied to virtually any aspect of reality.

The Enneagram of Personality is a complex psychological map that points to nine distinct personality types often called “fixations” which, when properly understood, can illuminate a myriad of unconscious behaviours and motivations operating within us that are keeping us stuck in repeating patterns and habits. When we can see these fixations for what they are, we can begin to de-identify from these predictable, unhealthy patterns of personality and ultimately connect with something far more real, essential and expansive within us.

“The Enneagram model suggests that each individual views 360 degrees of reality through a narrow slice of perception based on early coping strategies that were used to adapt to the environment in childhood. These coping strategies grow into patterns of perceiving the world and shape what we pay attention to and what we don’t pay attention to.” – Beatrice Chestnut

In our program we will use the Enneagram’s core teachings of awareness and presence to uncover and return to our pure, natural, free, and shiny being.

Joseph Campbell’s lifetime study of the world’s mythologies brought us the distilled essence of the movement of all our lives through what he called The Hero’s Journey, the monomyth. This is the same story that we all know intuitively and love to watch again and again in our favourite Hollywood movies or read in our favourite books. We recognize it because we are all doing it. This process of transformation through challenge and adversity seems to be a universal template for our souls evolution.

Our soul is on a journey and there are stages that we must go through for our growth and evolution. The particular predictable stages along this cyclical journey also happen to correlate with the movement around the outside of the Enneagram. Starting and completing the journey at point 9, each point on the Enneagram correlates to a process along the Hero’s Journey and so it seems that our dominant type can also be understood as a kind of stuck-ness in a particular stage of the soul’s path.