WORKING
WITH
PEOPLE
Developmental Dynamics of Personality Formation
Graduate Training Course
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This 2-part course is offered for graduates of the Working with People: A Psychology of Awakening Training. In this advanced course you will learn about the Enneagram and the Body Types from a childhood developmental perspective. Understanding these two systems provides great insight into how and why we developed the personalities we are identified with and unconsciously defend. Being able to skilfully navigate with clients using this understanding is extremely helpful in therapeutic counselling. We will develop an informed perspective which is both compassionate and precise in supporting the shift from our personality to our Essential Nature.
Part One
Understanding the Enneagram - A Door to Freedom
In this 6-day Advanced Training, we will learn about the basic nine Enneagram types, experience how to locate, yet not limit ourselves among these types, and comprehend our personality and transform it, as a path to inner development and a doorway to our essential nature.
Especially if you work as a therapist and/or as a group-leader, it is very helpful and necessary to get to know and accept your own defence structure, as it will show you the most direct way towards healing your own inner deepest wounds. At the same time, recognizing your own defences and ego protections helps us how to relate with yourself and others.
This will give you an essential key for exploring and understanding your client’s basic woundedness that is often a consequence of collective and personal trauma. This needs to be understood and recognized so we can take a step towards healing. These early life traumas create, often unconsciously, great inner limitations. In order to survive, we build compensations that protect us in one way, yet also limit our ability to love and live a content and joyous life.
To understand this can be of great help when we are working with the client’s personality structure and thus might be able to find a way to heal and recognize this is as a door - to essence, to our essential nature.
The Enneagram first showed up in the beginning of the 19th century through an Armenian Master called George Gurdjieff, supposedly coming from an ancient Sufi Order in the East where he received these teachings. The Enneagram has been widely used by all kinds of people for deciphering the personality into nine different types. As this system is very old and intricate, it gives a deep insight into our personality structure. And at the same time, it illuminates basic aspects of essence within each of us. The more we consciously accept and slowly heal our deepest wounds and traumas and get to know our personality structure, the more it shows us a door to true freedom – by being able to grow and respond to life!
Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In the space there is the power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. - Victor Frankl
Part Two
Character Development and the Body Types
The system of the Character Types first emerged in the 1930’s in the work of Wilhelm Reich when he began to notice that people with certain behavioural patterns, life history, defence mechanisms and childhood traumas often had similar bodies in terms of the body’s shape, chronic tensions, energy levels, physical and emotional expression.
Over the last 80 years this approach has continued to evolve, becoming more and more sophisticated. It is at the centre of various systems of body work, emotional opening techniques and more recently, includes an understanding of how early life trauma patterns the automatic and vagal nervous systems.
We will study five different “body types” which will help bring awareness and relief to “locked-in” behaviour patterns, defences and identity. We will be introduced to breathing and emotional opening techniques which can greatly facilitate our in-depth counselling practice as well as enhance flow states which facilitate more resilient and relaxed versions of ourselves to emerge.
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If we observe ourselves truthfully and non-judgmentally, seeing the mechanisms of our personality in action, we can wake up, and our lives can be a miraculous unfolding of beauty and joy. - Don Richard Riso
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The course is currently closed for registrations.
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