 This past month has been a really memorable one. I have been teaching with the Enneagram Prison Project (EPP), for their Enneagram Teachers Training-for-Prison Program in April, and most recently, at Elmwood Correctional Facility in Santa Clara County with Suzanne Dion, an excellent and openhearted certified Enneagram teacher who is also on the founding board of EPP.
We have a group of 19 women. All but two of them have children. One of them, in fact, was born at Elmwood Correctional some 20 years ago, and another had her son in jail, at Elmwood as well, some nine years ago.
 Ninety-percent, yes, 90%, of the "inmates" are there for drug-related offenses, either because of selling and/or using illegal drugs. As I've been observing, it's my opinion that these women suffer great distress around loss of connection, aloneness, and the longing for a better life. In human beings, the power of connection and bonding is so great that when it is damaged, lost, or ruptured, particularly early on in our developmental childhood, enormous distress and emotional pain occurs.
We are right now in the middle of an EPP 8-week program at Elmwood, bringing EPP's "Intro to the Enneagram" curriculum, and doing so with an additional emphasis on how to better deal with the distress, guilt, pain, sadness and shame associated with the "loss of connection/bonding," which in my study, is what drives each of them to seek temporary relief by using drugs.
Our weekly class focuses on helping them work with the "5As" of the Universal Growth Process,
their somatic reactivity, techniques to center and calm themselves, and how to develop their capacity to access their own inner resources to self-soothe, resources that are inherent to our essence, but that which we can lose contact with. Gaining the capacity to access these interior resources is part of freeing them from the distress associated with the original loss of bonding, connection, or love - that which sits somewhere in their past.
By reading my latest blog post, you will find an extensive article on the work of EPP Founder Susan Olesek, and her incredible application of the "5As" of the Universal Growth Process. Susan's been bringing the Enneagram to those imprisoned for some time now, and with tremendous results.
 Just visit my latest blog and absorb what she's been up to. You can read more about the work of EPP by visiting their website: www.enneagramprisonproject.org
Share your thoughts, as I would love to hear your comments on the application of the 5As, on working with addiction, and on the paradigm movement of bringing the Enneagram to those incarcerated. Click here to join this important conversation.
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I have so much gratitude for those of you who have been following my website and for signing up for the Weekly Reflections, which are based on each Enneagram type, for each week through each season of the year. We now have over 1600 folks signed up, from both Northern and Southern Hemispheres!
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