As a spiritual tool, the Enneagram is a way to provide a means to our spiritual ends (purpose, goals). About this event All of the Enneagram material relates to our openness to, connectedness with, and availability to God. “How can I be of service to the best of my ability if my egoic patterns keep grabbing the steering wheel back out of God’s hands? How can I catch my ego patterns trying to sneak in and play God? How do I see my own patterns more clearly with all the Love God would show me?" Four part series: Deeper into the Enneagram The Enneagram is a spiritual tool. It’s a map of human nature and how our human or egoic limitations interfere with our connection to God. As a spiritual tool, the Enneagram provides us a means to our spiritual ends (purpose, goals). The Enneagram can provide a means for us to live into the vision that is true to our deepest heart if we learn it, and learn how to use it. It can be confusing to us when we know a lot things about our inner life but we don’t have enough direct experience with what that knowledge points us to. Likewise, it can be confusing when we have deep inner experiences but don’t know a lot about their structure and how they work. In this series, we will take a look at the ego and how it works, not as an adversary or enemy but as a blindly automatic and powerful interference between our true hearts and God. We will look at how the egoic mechanisms that have developed into our personality types were initially intended to save and protect us, but became distortions of that original intent. Those ego distortions become an interference with our direct experience of what actually can save and protect us. Understanding the structure of the ego and its relationship to our spiritual journey is key. If we want to transcend how the ego’s habits, strategies, fixations, and other interferences block us from our true heart, and from greater closeness to God, it’s helpful to have a non-pathologizing definition of what the ego is, how it works, and the mechanisms that keep it in place. We want to understand the ego as it relates to our spiritual path. The Enneagram provides a means to do exactly that. In these four classes, we will look further into the different layers of the Enneagram as a map of our many-layered human nature, and how that relates to our spiritual journey. October 28: Psychic Boundaries and Hornevian Groups. In this class, we will look at the psychic structure for each type — how each type holds their sense of self, and how that sense of self relates to the world. We will also look at the style in which each type tries to get their needs met. November 4: Levels of Development, Dominant Affect and Object Relations, and the Harmonic Groups. In this class we will look at nine Levels of Development, the nine basic relationships we can have with our parents/guardians/caregivers as children and what that means to personality type, as well as how each type deals with set-backs, conflict, and obstacles, and how we can bring balance to our particular style. November 11: The Inner Lines of the Enneagram. In this class we will look at specific ingredients for Growth and Integration for each of the nine types, as well as shadow work and what happens to each type under stress. November 18: The Instinctual Variants. This is a layer of the Enneagram which is vast enough to be studied and worked with as a typology of its own, so this class will be an overview, but there is powerful work that can be done with this layer of Enneagram information. Our Facilitator:Maggie Simpson-Crabaugh is an Insight Approach Certified Enneagram teacher. She received her certification with High Honors from the Enneagram Institute in New York in January, 2020. After twelve years of studying the Enneagram on her own through books and audio material, Maggie began her formal studies at the Enneagram Institute in 2012 under its co-founder (her primary teacher), Russ Hudson. Russ Hudson passionately emphasizes the spiritual work and purpose of the Enneagram in his teaching and writing. He is also one of the top teachers and developers of the Enneagram personality typology in the world today, while his books are widely considered to be groundbreaking contributions in the field of Enneagram studies. Maggie’s personal interest and purpose in learning and teaching the Enneagram is compassionate personal and interpersonal healing through psychological understanding and spiritual growth. The Enneagram is not a spiritual path in itself. It is a phenomenal tool for supporting, informing, augmenting, even co-guiding our spiritual journeys in whatever religious or wisdom tradition we follow and practice. The Enneagram is meant to be a compassionate tool (or map) for deep psychological insight as that relates to the spiritual journey and our unfoldment. “I love it because it is brilliant, non-pathologizing, compassionate, and the learning, like all spiritual learning, goes endlessly deeper, wider, and higher if I keep using it.” Prior to discovering and pursuing certification in the Enneagram, Maggie was a performing singer/songwriter/storyteller for twenty years. She taught a unique “performance and freedom-of-expression" class to singer/songwriters and performing poets for ten years at Planet Bluegrass’s Rocky Mountain Song School in Lyons CO., as well as a free-form, exploratory, expressive dance class called “The Movement Gallery” drawing from her four years of training at Boston University’s professional theater training program.