Journey of Growth:
Working with the Dynamism and Levels of the Enneagram

This workshop 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.