Donna Woodrow |
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Director / EPP Guide
My discovery of the Enneagram facilitated my own personal transformation through some pretty difficult challenges in life. After spending years extremely unaware of my addiction to personality and habituated behaviours, I awoke one day to find myself in a situation of domestic violence that I had been in for 5 years. I had severely compromised my physical safety and fallen asleep to who I had really aspired to be! The Enneagram showed me how I had come to find myself in my particular life-situation. This is where my own personal transformation and healing began.
As an Enneagram Type 9 I understand both the disaster and delight of my peacemaking abilities, and I recommit every day to getting present to reality as it is, not how I wish it would be. I am honoured to work with everyday hero’s - EPP Program Participants, Guides, Community Builders - who regularly show their courage and commitment to “doing the work” and healing lifetimes of trauma. I am looking forward to witnessing more transformational stories as we successfully program on home soil, in Australia. |
Tamara Davidson |
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President / EPP Guide
My formative years were spent apprenticing at the school of life, making as many mistakes and wrong decisions as I could to reach “expert level” of “what not to do”, with a major in “jack of all trades”. After a seven-year substance addiction, I assure you, I graduated with honours. Then after reading a book about the Enneagram at the age of 20 and discovering they’d dedicated an entire chapter to me, the type two; my thoughts, feelings and behaviours suddenly made perfect sense to me.
The realisation that I wasn’t who I thought I was, sparked in me a lifelong passion to understand and love our human condition. I wanted to deeply know myself and others and to free myself from my habituated and relentless patterns of thinking that were causing me and the people around me so much suffering. The Enneagram has been instrumental in my quest. 20 years later, and I’ve spent countless hours working with addicts inside and outside of prison and have over 15 years’ experience leading large organisations in my professional life. I currently own a successful Executive Coaching & Training business in partnership with my sister Donna Woodrow, which is one of the many blessings in my life. I’m so grateful to be standing on the shoulders of giants and to be contributing to the emergence and success of the Enneagram Prison Project here in Australia. |
Kyle Winter |
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Secretary
I grew up in Perth, Australia with a keen interest in science and mathematics. This led to a professional career as an engineer, through which I have honed my technical skills as well as other expertise such as business management, human relations, and sales. After moving to Brisbane, Australia, my attention turned to learning more about human behaviours and giving back to society. After building connections with like-minded individuals, I discovered the Enneagram and EPP.
As a Type 7, my objective in life is to bring happiness to those around me in whatever way possible. The Enneagram shows us that once we understand ourselves, we find that our happiness is something we are in control of. EPP uses this tool with incarcerated and vulnerable individuals, many of whom have given up on or denied themselves happiness throughout their life journeys. The goal is recognise what is right about us as we heal ourselves from the immense internal pain we carry through our lives. Being a part of EPP and sharing the ultimate happiness of a healed soul with the world is the perfect inspiration for me. I now dream of the people we will reach, the families we will heal, and the happiness we will share. |
Hilary Langford |
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Board Member / EPP Guide |
I ‘found’ the Enneagram after spending the first 20 years of my career addressing people issues in large organisations, including working with the human aspects of change, conflict management, leadership and team work etc. My first degree was in psychiatric social work. And I have always been fascinated by what makes people tick! However, the Enneagram proved to be a watershed. This new understanding, when I identified my Type pattern, resulted in huge changes in my professional and personal life!
The Enneagram provided so many answers to things that puzzled me about myself … even though I had worked with almost every model that tries to explain the human condition! It reached my very core, explaining why I did what I did, what gifts I brought to the world as a result, and how I, unintentionally, sabotaged myself in so many ways. There was nowhere for me to hide! I realised this was incredibly powerful knowledge. How wonderful if all people, who wanted to transform their lives, could have access to the Enneagram? Organisational leaders and teams can access personal development opportunities relatively easily. Yet people who are outside society’s mainstream, specially incarcerated people, have few opportunities for self-awareness and self-understanding. Hearing Susan Olesek speak about the Enneagram Prison Project inspired me to connect with EPP Australia, and train as an EPP Guide. This work, in Australian prisons, seems fundamentally important, especially as it hopes to reduce recidivism rates, and help people turn their lives around. As a result, I have now moved away from a successful consultancy practice. My EPP work is a fitting and meaningful last stage in my career and life. |
Alicia Cameron |
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EPP Community Builder
I found Enneagram while doing a course for personal development and fell in love with it as a tool for understanding human behaviour and for my own self inquiry. As a type 6 I was conscious of the beliefs, anxiety and lack of attunement that was driving my behaviour, the enneagram was such a powerful tool in my own self realisation journey and I love that I get to support others in their journey using this tool.
I have a passion for conscious business, self enquiry and mindfulness so when I learnt about the work of EPP Australia I couldn't wait to support the organisation in any way possible. |
Ludamila (Lu) Jin |
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EPP Community Builder
From as young as 4 to my early 30’s I would wonder what was wrong with me, why was I always getting punished (physically, emotionally and verbally), why did no one want to be around me, why was I always losing friends, why did no one understand me, why did no one see me….I was addicted to my personality and lived in a prison of my own making.
Then I started to discover several valuable resources – the Enneagram being one of them. Through the lens of the Enneagram I was able to go inwards and learn to give me the unconditional love that I needed. Being lovingly kind to myself first and foremost has allowed others to be kind to me in return. The wisdom had always been lying internally within. Joining the Enneagram Prison Project, I knew this is the community where I belong. It is filled with love, compassion & transparency. The courses have allowed me to go deeper into my personality type 2 and provide more healing for myself. I have also been blessed with working with a wonderful team where we do the work together to help heal the incarcerated population. No one was born a criminal and I feel it is my calling to lend a hand and help the incarcerated walk the path to freedom. On the side I am a Life & Wellbeing coach and Energy Healer, where I lead my clients into a journey of success and personal evolution. |
Dominic Ng |
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EPP Community Builder
Up until my mid-20s, I spent my life sleep-walking. Pursuing self-improvement, material success and the admiration of others seemed to make sense as a way of life. Fortunately, somewhere along the path of self-improvement I discovered the Enneagram amongst other useful tools for generating insight and self-awareness. Through occasional access to altered states of consciousness, I gained the felt sense of an interconnectedness and unity with a greater existence - a sense of life beyond the time and space of the egoic experience. It was from some of these experiences that I began to truly embody a 'letting go' of patterns of self-interest and self-importance. From there I was moved to sincerely engage in philanthropy with care and compassion more in the foreground than in seeking validation.
Whilst I have no personal connection with the incarcerated population, I have long felt that our current societal policies, systems and structures have stigmatised and perpetuated a cycle of trauma, neglect and isolation within certain population groups, including those with justice system involvement. Becoming involved with EPP Australia and undertaking the journey to becoming an EPP guide made sense to me, as I am moved to hold space and engage in conversations where we can openly and collaboratively explore, integrate and heal from difficult experiences, traumas and emotions. My hope for anyone engaging in EPP programs is that they will have a felt sense of being understood, honoured and loved as they are, and reconnect with who they are beyond their Enneagram personality type. |
Beth Russell |
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EPP Community Builder
I'm a Beth, but I really identify with my middle name: Joy.
Joy and possibility form the lens through which I see the world. My Enneagram 7-ness gives me a wanderlust to explore new places, people and ideas. I have loved adventure, infinite horizons and connecting with the divine through nature since my early years growing up in Nepal where my parents were working. My spirit animal would be the meerkat: always seeming busy and trying to climb to the highest vantage point I can find! I have lived in Sydney most of my life and I am currently working as a physiotherapist in short-term rural contracts to see more of the country and meet interesting people along the way. EPP was recommended to me because it combines two of my passions: the Enneagram and writing letters to inmates. But journeying through their courses has proven to be far more enriching than I anticipated. Conservative religion and dedicated self-help didn’t get me out from behind the prison bars I had myself ‘safely’ locked behind, but EPP’s approach has begun that paradigm shift. Now I am all about enabling everyone to access it! |
Natasha Ginnivan |
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EPP Advisor / Psychology Research Fellow
I grew up on and off in Canberra. As a child, I travelled and lived in different countries because my parents were diplomats. Being a naturally ‘creative person’, my first job was working as a designer, after completing fashion studies in the early-mid 90s. Later, I returned to university in my thirties to pursue a degree in psychology. I undertook post-graduate studies and later received PhD in Psychology. My research was on self-perceptions of ageing. This work led me to also investigate the ageing prisoner population and how the system of health care could be improved for vulnerable and ageing prisoners.
As an Enneagram type 4, I tend to seek out deeper experiences, and have a desire for finding ways to communicate about and understand people’s subjective experiences. I have a keen interest in ‘inner work’ and studied the Enneagram. I attended training with Don Riso and Russ Hudson (The Enneagram Institute), undertaking several training programs in the early-mid 2000s. Today, I continue researching ways for the enablement and support of mental health of older and vulnerable prisoners and combine my knowledge of self-perceptions of ageing with my interest in transformational work by writing informally in a blog mobilisingwisdom.com. Through my prisoner research and interest in self-transformation, I am pleased to have become a part of the EPP community of guides, advisors and volunteers bringing tools for self-awareness to the incarcerated. |
Tracy Baker-Lawrence |
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EPP Advisor / Psychologist
I have always cared deeply about the importance of connection, understanding and compassion. After reading about unconditional positive regard, empathy and being your true self (by Carl Rogers), I was so moved I knew that I needed to become a therapist. When I came across the Enneagram 20 yrs ago, I recognised it was the most sophisticated, comprehensive explanation of people’s inner worlds – that there was an internal architecture to each of us - our hardwiring, beliefs, needs, triggers and reactivities - that made complete sense. I was certified in the Enneagram in 2013 and the more I trained in it, used it in my clinical work, and taught it, the more grateful I felt knowing I had been handed a key to help create a more compassionate world.
I then founded The Insight Agency after developing a method to help partners discover their unique Couple D.N.A to understand how their personality patterns intersect and how they can use their blind spots and gifts to grow each other and transform their relationship. We teach what we most need to learn. As a 1-1 Type 3 I easily saw the best in people and wanted them to see it and feel it. My journey however was in recognising how much I sought outside of myself for evidence of my own value. It was only recently through undertaking Susan Olesek’s compassionate EPP training that I was finally able to connect with the gift inside me – to give to myself the compassion and love I strived so hard to give to others and create in other’s relationships. EPP has found a path that can truly take us home to ourselves. That’s no easy feat for humans to achieve but EPP does just that. Thank you Susan from the bottom of my heart for your love and vision. |