Healing Waters: The Enneagram, 5Rhythms® & the Art of Human Diplomacy

It takes discipline to be a free spirit. — Gabrielle Roth

What if peace begins not with agreement, but with our capacity to remain human, alive, and connected in the presence of difference?

This five-day retreat invites you into a joyful, energizing, and deeply experiential exploration of how we move — within ourselves, toward one another, and as part of the larger human systems we share. Weaving together 5Rhythms® Movement, the Enneagram, relational practice, and human diplomacy, Dr. Deborah Egerton and Douglas Drummond will create a dynamic space to move, reflect, connect, play, and restore — building greater capacity for love, belonging, resilience, and peacemaking.

The Enneagram offers a map for recognizing the patterns through which we protect, connect, belong, and make meaning. 5Rhythms brings those patterns into the living body, where they can be felt, expressed, softened, challenged, and moved. Drawing from Dr. Egerton’s work with race, belonging, inclusion, and the dismantling of othering, and Douglas’s work in mediation, reconciliation, and restorative systems, we will explore what helps us stay connected when our identities, histories, and perspectives are not the same.

A central inquiry will be how we move from tolerance toward acceptance and belonging. Belonging asks us to see one another more fully and make room for difference without requiring sameness. Love becomes a practice of courage, truth, compassion, boundaries, and repair. Peace becomes something we cultivate through presence and relationship. And joy becomes an essential resource — a way of restoring energy, expanding possibility, and remembering the aliveness that makes connection worth fighting for.

Through a trauma-informed approach grounded in choice, consent, pacing, agency, and relational safety, participants will:

• Explore Enneagram patterns of personality, protection, identity, and belonging.
• Move through 5Rhythms practices supported by music, rhythm, and embodied inquiry.
• Practice human diplomacy through dialogue, witnessing, and relational exercises across difference.
• Explore love as a courageous relational practice that can hold truth, compassion, accountability, and repair.
• Actively cultivate joy, play, creativity, and collective energy as resources for resilience, connection, and renewal.

Expect movement, music, insight, honest conversation, laughter, depth, and moments of surprise. This is not only a space to understand ourselves more clearly, but to feel more resourced, more connected, and more alive.

Together, we will explore what becomes possible when we remain fully ourselves while learning to move with one another — with greater courage, curiosity, joy, belonging, and love.

Recommended reading: Know Justice Know Peace, by Dr Deborah Egerton; Enneagram Made Easy, by Dr Deborah Egerton; Sweat Your Prayers, by Gabrielle Roth