IN PERSON / ONLINE –

September 24-25:  Sitting in Liminal Space Together:  Facing the Uncertainty

A 2-day Enneagram gathering to work with our individual resistance to being in the uncertainty of these times. What happens when we don’t know what to do? … when we need to be still and listen? … either in our personal journey or as we are honest about the state of things. … our reaction is often related to the deep patterns of our type structure that wants to protect us from the stress of going here in 9 different ways.  (Online or in person, to be decided by interest and location people interested) I am leaning toward outside in person, so, if you are interested, let me know if you are able to be in person.

Followed by 4 monthly online evening times, for those who choose to continue deepening the trust through our experiences together and to continue opening to the resistances and the possibilities that are rising.  Let’s see what can we learn about how to be in this time/space creatively.

The Why:  Working with Our Resistance to Being in Liminal Space: Helped by the Enneagram

Liminal space is the space/time between what has been/what no longer works and what is emerging/what is to be.

The Enneagram gives us a way to grow into our true selves, to loosen the grip of our type structure and open into the gifts of living more from our Essence.  Often, this takes the form of seeing our personality in action.  As we do we can begin to dis-identify with it, to stop seeing it as the definitive expression of who we are.  This is usually accompanied by considerable anxiety.  “If we are not who we thought we were, then who are we?”  This is a liminal space.  It is a time between who we have been and who we are becoming.  It is a time within which the process unfolds, not by efforting, but by being with.  As we come to see our automatic responses without judgment, and hold them in our awareness, our type softens and we have more freedom to respond. Doing this together helps us build a trust that we are not alone in our messiness or in our desire to open into who we truly are. It helps us create, not experiences of trust, but also communities of trust.

This Enneagram journey is a personal journey.  It turns out that it is instructive on a larger scale. We are in a time where we increasingly see that the lives we have been living are no longer viable.  There are those whose response is to take us back to when the powers that be were unquestioned, were dominant, were clearly in charge of responding, of fixing.  But their solutions are being exposed, more and more, as serving the interests of the few as the wealth gap increases and as profit supersedes care for each other, fairness and, most important, love of one another and of the world herself in all her myriad forms of beauty and interdependence.

But for those of us who are willing to look and see what is starkly before us in terms of inequities, extreme polarization into we/they, climate degradation at a rate that will bring disaster to more and more beings and parts of the world, there is a sense that we need to leave behind the paradigm that has guided us so far in our lives.

And so, we enter a liminal time on a larger scale.  This is not an easy place to be.  As with our personal journey, it requires us to live in uncertainty without prematurely grasping at something to replace what has been.  As Bayo Akomolafe says “Times are urgent, we need to slow down.”  For most of us, our inclination is to act, to fix, to do something, but our actions usually arise from the very paradigm we live and think in that is turning out to be problematic.  If the paradigm is part of the problem, we need other ways.  And so we are called to sit in the uncomfortable place of “I don’t know.”  Increasingly, people are recognizing the importance of being with and listening and then allowing a knowing to emerge.

Over the last few years, the COVID years really, I have been in several groups where we are slowly looking at ourselves and the world we are participating in more honestly.  We have named where we find ourselves now as “the time between” and we are struggling to understand how to function here.  We have recognized that it is a collective task; we are in this together and need to do this together – facing the uncomfortable truths about ourselves and our way of life, being honest and vulnerable with each other, trusting that we are cared about, not judged, because we each have our version of what isn’t pretty.  And then, in this collective presencing, we can begin to sense into a new way of being with ourselves, with each other and potentially collectively – all arising slowly from within this liminal time between.

Offerings: I want to offer more people opportunities to live into these kind of spaces together. And in doing so, it feels so important to acknowledge that this is a challenging undertaking.  It is so important to start where we are, without judgment.  You may or may not feel you are in this liminal space, but may feel the uncertainty about the future.  It may concern you.  You may be intrigued by this, having a sense that there is something important here.  Or you may find yourself quite consciously living here, but feel alone in the questioning.

The thought of doing this in a group may unsettle you; it does most of us at first until there is trust that we can be vulnerable with each other.  Being vulnerable is key, but it is not easy and takes time to create spaces that can hold us, together, in deep care.

With all this in mind, I am offering a weekend workshop in which we will explore our responses to being in the time between, between what has been and what will be.  It means living into the “I don’t know.”   The Enneagram suggests that we have 9 different ways of avoiding this kind of uncertainty.  You don’t need to know the Enneagram to come, but it will be part of how some people may explore their resistance to being in this not knowing, liminal space.  Likely, we will be doing some somatic work to help us move through some of our resistance.

It also feels really important to continue meeting after the workshop, because once we have begun, it is hard to sustain on our own.  We are literally in this together, so let’s be together in this.

With that in mind, the weekend will be followed by 4 monthly online evening times, for those who choose to continue opening to the resistances and the possibilities that are arising.  Together, we can learn how to be in this time/space and create from there.

Weekend workshop – September 24-25 – $250 or, for a few people, pwyc (pay what you can)

Evenings – $50 each, with a commitment to come to all 4.

Register now.