The Journey of Growth Workshop: November 2-3, 2024 VIRTUAL

The Journey of Growth (Levels) Workshop

Instructors: Lisa Bueche and Connie Frecker

Note this workshop has a limited number of participants to allow for an intimate live online weekend, and registration may close a few weeks before the workshop. We do not record any portions of the workshop.

As with all our workshops, we strive to create an ethos of welcome. In believing everyone has essential value, we are committed to being radically hospitable to people of all races, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and spiritual perspectives.

This workshop has more exercises and requires more familiarity with the Enneagram than our other workshops. Knowledge and understanding of the lines connecting the types is valuable, as we will see how accessing both the shadow and the gifts of both arrow points along the lines is important to the journey.

We will also harness our understanding of the Levels of Development, which provide a vertical dimension to the personality types and make clear the “inner logic” of each type. This will reveal how the various type traits and motivations, as well as the movement along with the arrows, form an interrelated whole. 

These complex inter-relationships weave a subtle and profound web of interconnections between the types, guiding us for our inner growth. At their most profound, the Levels measure each person’s degree of fixation within his or her own type. That is the degree to which they can be present versus being swept away by past conditioning, reactivity, and defenses. Working with the Levels and internal dynamism of the Enneagram provides recognition for where we are in the journey of growth and guides us towards 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 towards more reactivity, mechanicality, and self-destruction in the lower Levels. 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 explore how people “move” from one level to another, along with other complexes’ “horizontal” movements predicted by the Enneagram. We also see how the main characteristics of each type are related to the degree of contact with Essence, as seen in the Levels. 

Exercise, music, and meditation are used as a way of grounding the information in our personal experience and deepening our understanding. This workshop is particularly valuable for those who wish to have more clarity and insight for using the Enneagram in personal growth. 

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.