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Your contemplative Enneagram journey of awakening
Welcome.
If you’re new to Evolving Enneagram, or curious about our contemplative approach to the Enneagram, this page will help you get oriented and take your next step.
Where Should I Begin?
Each path is sacred and uniquely your own. Wherever you find yourself, whether seeking personal guidance or longing for a shared journey, we trust you will find the support you need to take the next right step in this season of your life.
Personal or Professional Guidance
You may begin by working with one of our Contemplative Enneagram Guides in a private 1:1 session, or in a relational session for romantic or professional partners. These sessions offer individualized contemplative accompaniment, attuned to your lived experience. Whether you are navigating transition, relationship challenges, vocational discernment, or deeper questions of identity and faith, they create space for honest reflection, compassionate insight, and meaningful integration.
Shared Journey and Community
You may choose to begin in community through Evolving Conversations, a Contemplative Practices & the Enneagram (CPE) group, a Book Journey, or a retreat. Contemplative work deepens in shared space. Practicing alongside others invites courage and clarity as we walk the path together.
Deeper Formation and Training
If you feel called to sustained formation, explore Evolving Enneagram Spiritual Direction (EESD), a two-year journey of spiritual formation with an optional path to certification as a Contemplative Enneagram Practitioner (CEP). A Certified Enneagram Teacher Training is also in development. These pathways are for those who desire ongoing transformation, and for those drawn to embody and share contemplative Enneagram wisdom in the world.
Propose a Customized Journey
Our work is co-creative. It has been shaped by those who have journeyed with us over the years, whether for a brief but meaningful season or across the nine-plus years of our core community’s life together. Is there something you long to participate in that doesn’t yet exist, yet feels aligned with our purpose? A gathering, a cohort, a retreat, a book study, or a particular focus of practice? We welcome your vision. Share your proposal, and together we will prayerfully discern whether it aligns with our team’s call in this season.
The Heart of Our Work
For those who wish to go deeper into the contemplative Enneagram
What is the Enneagram?
The Enneagram is often introduced as a personality typing system, describing nine distinct patterns through which we perceive and engage the world. Yet it is far more than a personality framework. The Enneagram offers a precise and dynamic map for conscious awakening.
It reveals the habits of attention and the locus of identity that shape our relationships: to ourselves, to others, and to the God of our understanding. Rather than inviting us to label ourselves or others, the Enneagram serves as a companion on the wisdom path. It helps us gently and honestly recognize the patterns that both protect and limit us, so that we may transcend and include them.
In this way, the Enneagram can either reinforce our identification with personality or become a path toward the liberation of the soul.
What is Contemplation?
In our work, contemplation is a way of being: belonging to ourselves and inhabiting the world with grounded presence, open-heartedness, and clarity of mind.
It is not about striving, self-improvement, or spiritual performance. Contemplation is cultivated through slowing down, releasing preconceptions, and opening to what is most real. As we bring gentle, spacious awareness to body, heart, and mind, what once operated unconsciously comes into compassionate view.
Contemplation creates the inner space where the truth of our radiant being unfolds naturally.
What is the Contemplative Enneagram?
At Evolving Enneagram, contemplation and the Enneagram meet. The wisdom of the Enneagram and the spaciousness of contemplation are held together within a field of intention and compassionate relationship.
Through practices of silence, solitude, and stillness drawn from contemplative traditions around the world, we gradually loosen our attachment to self-protective agendas and rigid identities, without making any part of ourselves bad or wrong. We begin to see our habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving not as failures, but as strategies that once helped us survive. What we once clung to for safety can now be held with compassion.
Without contemplation, the Enneagram is merely a map.
Without the Enneagram, contemplation can become a way of spiritually bypassing our human experience.
With contemplation, the Enneagram becomes embodied, guiding us to live truthfully in the territory of our everyday lives.
This work is not about fixing, correcting, or improving ourselves. It is about releasing what obscures the goodness already here, and becoming more honest, more awake, and more free. What once felt rigid begins to soften. What once felt shameful can be held in love. What once felt separate begins to belong.
As we are transformed from the inside out, our lives begin to change, and so does the world around us.
This is a path of remembering.
A path of integration.
A path of coming home.
We are all just walking each other home.
— Ram Dass
Who We Are
Evolving Enneagram was founded in 2019 by Nhien Vuong, author of The Enneagram of the Soul, and is supported by devoted contemplative Enneagram guides and facilitators along with a generous community of founding and ongoing benefactors.
