Maine Enneagram Center for Transformation and Well-Being Workshops
Opening to Heart Healing:
Navigating Consciously and Dancing with Your Inner Critic.
This workshop examines at depth the variety of ways one’s Inner Critic inhabits and disrupts your ability to be present and rest in the radiance of your True Self. The Workshop examines the awareness and potency of Inner Critic invasions of all three Centers, and provides numerous practices for disengaging from this hypnotic force. In addition, this workshop identifies more deeply the many influences that shape our inner roommate, the Gremlin/Inner Critic, including our Type Temperament, family, school, societal sources that we unconsciously were shaped by as kids.
Introduction to the Enneagram: Understanding the Nine Types
This course identifies the psychological and emotional structure of each Type, describes their path of integration and disintegration, and identifies the specific differences between Types. The Enneagram precisely shows how each Type has a unique journey to their transformation and alleviation of addiction behaviors and habits of suffering. Each struggles with a core misunderstanding that keeps them stuck in their attempts to change, in spite of vast knowledge and a willingness to change.Ultimately change requires a strong sense of “presence”, the capacity to see one’s mental and emotional habits with an objective and compassionate eye, and the ability to sense that what one seeks does not come through fixing or changing the personality. The Enneagram is the map to this deep presence.
The Enneagram of Transformation and Relapse Prevention:
An Introductory Course for Addiction, Mental Health, and Health Care Counselors.
This course proves an introduction to the Enneagram, the issues and gifts of the Nine Types, and the foundation for assisting the Nine Types in their quest for freedom from addictive suffering and emotional and addiction relapse. The Enneagram identifies the key emotional psychological fixation that keeps individuals stuck in repetitious suffering patterns, be it through their addictions to certain unwavering behaviors, or to addictive substances or habits. Understanding the Enneagram provides an individual with the needed compassion and insight necessary for transformation and liberation from these impervious habits.
Taking the Deep Dive in Addiction Recovery: The Enneagram path to Authentic Self.
“The Enneagram and Recovery” focuses on the type-specific challenges and path of recovery for each of the Nine Enneagram Personality Types. Each type has unique strengths and unique weakness, and specific challenges that must be understood and skillfully navigated to support ongoing recovery,spiritual growth and development. As many know from direct experience, many individuals relapse after early recovery (sober and clean 1-5 years), middle recovery (6-15 years) and ongoing recovery (16 years clean/sober and beyond). Many arrive at difficult stuck-points and experience unexpected loneliness, emptiness, meaninglessness and despair, in spite of experiencing numerous satisfying years on the recovery road. Unbeknownst to them, they are at a doorway of a pivotal and transformative opportunity. With the right Enneagram type-specific knowledge they could successfully navigate through these cyclic challenges to embrace deeper freedom, well-being, intimacy, and happiness.
This workshop is designed for therapists, social workers, mental health professionals, family members, and those traveling the road of addiction recovery to identify and successfully navigate the very predictable and often difficult, type-specific junctures, challenges and stuck-point dynamics each type will face in early, middle, and ongoing recovery (be it recovery from alcohol, drugs, food, sex, cigarettes).
Utilizing the Levels of Development and The Nine Stratum of the Excavation of the True Self, we will examine the often mysterious cycles and rhythms of true transformation, and the necessary growth cycles one must encounter (in which things get more difficult rather than easier for a period of time). As noted in The Wisdom of the Enneagram, “The process of growth entails an ongoing cycling among letting go of old blockages, opening up to new possibilities in ourselves, and then encountering deeper levels of blockage.” Participants will receive clarity, guidance, support, and understanding of the type-specific psychological and emotional challenges each Enneagram Type will navigate throughout the full scope of their recovery while embracing deeper experiences of joy, self-confidence and clarity.
Maine Enneagram Center for Transformation and Well-Being
Certification Program for Addiction Specialists, Therapists and Counselors
This intensive training goes into the heart and soul of each type so that each type is felt from the inside out. Understanding what drives the Type, the fears, concerns, emotional, mental and physical habits of the type (The Three Centers) clears a pathway for understanding what support the type in recovery from their particular addiction, and identifies the unconscious self-sabotage patterns (defenses built to protect one from feeling unloved) of each type, shedding light on what helps individuals navigate the difficulty challenges of addiction recovery. This intensive training will explore the fundamental relapse patterns captured in the passion and fixation of the types, the Wake-Up call, the chief delusion and distortion of each type, and the practices that illuminate these patterns.
Authorized Enneagram Workshops
Michael Naylor is an Authorized Enneagram Institute trainer. He teaches four Enneagram Institute Authorized Workshops:
The Wisdom of the Enneagram Workshop
Moving Beyond Personality
and Optional Introductory Talk on the Enneagram
Most of us encounter the Enneagram as a useful system of personality types. We find it fascinating to see ourselves and others through the insights that the Enneagram offers. But at a certain point, we begin to see that the characteristics described in Enneagram books reflect only part of the picture. At a deeper level, however, the Enneagram tells us about the relationship between our personality and our Essence, or spirit. This Workshop will focus on exercises to help us see through the veils of our personality structures to have a more direct experience of our Essence, our true spiritual nature. We will look at the personality types as nine distinct aspects of human nature that can be found in all of us regardless of our type. We will see how these different parts of ourselves manifest personally in our lives, and how, rightly understood they can lead us to deeper inner resources and lasting joy. This Workshop will feature exercises for each type, as well as music, meditations, and practices that will help bring our Centers of intelligence (Thinking, feeling, and Instinct) into greater alignment, thus opening us to the transformative action of Spirit. We will focus primarily on the spiritual gifts of each type. If you are interested in finding more effective ways of using the Enneagram in your spiritual practice, or if you are interested in exploring the underlying meaning and Wisdom of the Enneagram, this Workshop will be highly relevant to you.
Enneagram Relationships Workshop
Intimate and Professional
Relationships are one of the most rewarding—as well as the most frustrating aspects of our existence. Whether in intimate or work settings, the quality of our relationships has an enormous impact on the quality of our lives, on our self-esteem, and on our careers. Yet, we often find the behavior of others baffling—even if we have known them intimately for many years. Often, the very things that we do not understand in others are the greatest sources of problems and conflicts in our relationships. Clearly, the better we know ourselves and the people in our lives, the more harmonious and satisfying our relationships will be.
The Enneagram can help us tremendously in understanding our relationships. It is a remarkable system of nine basic personality types that sheds light on the most important psychological dynamics in our personality, as well as on the deeper spiritual yearnings of our soul. Each type has its own set of strengths, vulnerabilities, and perceptions of the world. The Enneagram can help us to realize who we are and what our greatest potentials might be, as well as to make sense of the sometimes confusing behavior of others.
Participants will be guided to use the Enneagram as a profound and immensely practical way to understand their relationships with others, both intimate and professional. Particular dynamics between the different types, effective methods for communicating with each type, and the ways in which the three Instinctual Variants (Subtypes) affect our main motivations in relationships will be covered.
The Three Instincts (Subtypes) Workshop
Using the Enneagram to Create Balance
in your Life and Harmony in your Relationships
Our instinctual nature, while extremely powerful in our decision-making processes, lifestyle choices, and orientation to day-to-day reality, is often given little emphasis in many spiritual paths, and the Instincts are often treated as an inherent problem—a distortion to be eliminated. This is understandable since this part of our nature is usually little interested in our spiritual or psychological development. Yet, without a clear and viable relationship with this aspect of our souls, it is extremely difficult to maintain an integrated approach to our path.
The Enneagram deals very directly with this aspect of the Self through teachings about the Three Instincts—Self-Preservation, Sexual (Attraction), and Social (Adaptation). Seminal ideas about the three Instincts go back at least as far as Gurdjieff’s teachings about the Centers and have equivalents in other spiritual traditions. In recent years, many Enneagram students have discovered the explanatory power of seeing how their instinctual bias operates in combination with their dominant Enneagram type. Learning how their type plays itself out through one of these Instincts can be as exciting as when we first learn about the Enneagram.
In this Workshop, we will first clarify and deepen our understanding of the Instincts, seeing them at work in our personal experience. We will also examine how our particular instinctual “stack”—the way we prioritize our basic human needs and values—is the pattern that most keeps us locked in the repetitive habits of our personality. (One of the quickest ways to unlock the Passion and Fixation of our type is to understand and work on the imbalance in our Instincts.) Recognizing the way we give energy to certain needs while neglecting others brings balance and helps us integrate the deeper experiences of Essence and Being that we may have had. Without such Inner Work, even profound experiences of Spirit and Oneness cannot affect our lives the way they could.
The Workshop will employ personal teaching by Russ Hudson, experiential dyads and triads, meditation, movement work, and music to help participants recognize the ways that these patterns express themselves in their lives. We will also explore concrete ways in which to bring greater balance in our approach to our instinctual life. Our approach is relaxed and conversational, with an emphasis on the development of our capacity to remain in Presence.
The Journey of Growth Workshop
The Journeys of Growth explores how the Levels of Development provide a vertical dimension to the personality types, making clear the “inner logic” of each type and revealing how the various traits and motivations that comprise each type form an interrelated whole. At their most profound, the Levels are the measure of each person’s degree of fixation within his or her own type, that is, the degree with which they are able to be Present vs. being swept away by past conditioning, reactivity, and defenses. Working with the Levels not only provides recognition for where we are in our journey of growth, but also guides us toward greater health and transformation.
The Levels were discovered by Don Riso in 1977 and subsequently further developed with Russ Hudson. The Levels provide a way of tracking each type’s movement along a continuum toward more freedom, consciousness, expansiveness, and Being in the higher Levels—or toward more reactivity, mechanicality, and self-destructiveness in the lower ones. By introducing this “vertical axis” to the types, the Levels explain some of the most important things that we find in human nature—fluidity and change, resistance and conflict, freedom and compulsion—among many human qualities.
In this Workshop, we will teach the meaning of all nine Levels, and how people “move” from one Level to another, along with other complex movements predicted by the Enneagram. We will also see some of the main characteristics of each type along the nine Levels. Exercises, music, and meditation will be used as a way of grounding the information in our personal experience and to deepen our understanding. This Workshop is particularly valuable for more advanced students, including therapists and those who wish to make practical applications of the Enneagram.
The Levels of Development innovation is the only Enneagram work to be specifically endorsed by Ken Wilber, who has stated that only with this vertical dimension taken into account, does the Enneagram system move toward being a complete psychology. Don Riso and Russ Hudson are the only Enneagram authors to write and teach about the Levels, thus giving their work an extraordinary explanatory power and making a wide range of practical applications possible.
