A Place to be Real Together

>> Neurons Nov 2017

For over 100 years science and religion have been focused on cranial tissue as the source of all knowledge, insight, intelligence and awareness - indeed of consciousness itself - ignoring what we already knew about the other two major centres of intelligence.

Exciting developments in neuroscience are now expanding our understandings of the enteric (gut) neurons and the neural networks of the heart and their integration with the brain inside the skull.

We are beginning to appreciate that in all forms of human experience it is the body (gut and heart) that ‘knows’ first, while the cranial brain is the last to know.

Karen Webb has been following these developments with a sense of delighted recognition, since the Enneagram tradition which she knows so well also brings a mature appreciation of the contributions of the Heart and Belly as well as the Head.

To benefit from this retreat you need some previous acquaintance with the Enneagram. (See Karen’s course here at Othona: Introduction to the Enneagram 16-19 March 2017)

The Enneagram – in common with other wisdom traditions - posits that the spiritual Gifts, our higher Essences, are truly aspects of the Divine, of one substance with the substance of God, microcosm in macrocosm.

As spiritual beings, it is through the three centres of intelligence (Head, Heart and Gut) that we embody and experience the Divine. So what is this bodily experience of God like? How do we live and express Faith, Hope and Love as embodied spiritual beings?

How can this creatively inform our everyday responses to life, and to God’s presence - as if we could even separate the two?! Early in our Christian history theologians established Dualism as a heresy – the separation of spirit and matter, mind and body. Then why is so much of our theology and behaviour still so dualistic in its assumptions?

Karen is author of Principles of the Enneagram, a regular course leader at Othona for almost 20 years, and probably the UK's foremost Enneagram teacher. (See also 16-19 March 2017.)
www.theenneagram.co.uk

<< back to event