Jorja White is a Birmingham-based coach and consultant. She is an Enneagram specialist, Level 1 trained practitioner of Internal Family Systems, and creator of Finding Rokovoko. She guides and empowers individuals, couples, and teams as they navigate, finding their way home to themselves and their true places and liberating themselves from unnecessary suffering so they can bring compassion and love to a world full of actual suffering.
What is the Enneagram?
The Enneagram is a holistic system that illuminates the nine different architectures of the human personality. It is a highly accurate descriptor of how individuals of each type think, feel, and behave as well as underlying drives and motivations for these patterns. The Enneagram does not limit or define us but shows us our way out of the constrictions or limitations presented to us by our unique type. It is through this understanding that people fundamentally change how they understand themselves and others, show compassion to themselves, communicate more effectively, become better listeners, and begin to align spiritually, intellectually, emotionally and somatically.
WHAT is IFS?
WHAT is IFS?
Internal Family Systems focuses on a client’s internal “parts” and “Self.” In IFS, the mind is considered to be naturally made up of multiple sub-personalities or families within each individual’s mental system. These sub-personalities take on different roles, such as an inner critic or inner child, and consist of wounded parts and painful feelings like anger and shame. IFS aims to help clients access Self to heal wounded parts and bring their minds into balance. IFS is an evidence-based practice that treats various issues.
Internal Family Systems is a non-pathologizing approach that emphasizes the natural multiplicity of the mind. The grounding assumption is that there are no bad parts, only parts forced into bad roles. When a client learns how to access Self, they can then heal their wounded parts. This brings the whole system into harmony and allows the person to become more Self-led. The natural side effect of this healing is a reduction in problematic or symptomatic behavior.
What does ROKOVOKO mean?
The quote, “it is not down in any map, true places never are,” is from Moby Dick and refers to Rokovoko. For Jorja, it articulates the simple truth of knowing the way home to our true self is an inward journey and is particular to each of us. The Enneagram aids the process, providing a starting point, knowledge that informs direction, and wisdom as to how to bring integration, but this is only the beginning. Beyond knowing, we need a guide, one who has experience navigating their own inner world and is skilled at using the tools to bring direction; one who is still plumbing the depths of their own self. Choosing to do the work necessary to bring healing and wholeness to ourselves is no easy task. Jorja brings decades of personal work, study, and unlearning from her voyages. Having a guide who is familiar with bringing love and compassion to every part of herself and empowering others to do the same is invaluable. Jorja believes we each can come home to ourselves, liberating ourselves from unnecessary suffering so that we might bring compassion and love to a world full of actual suffering.
WAYS TO NAVIGATE
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Informal Gatherings
Get your friends together for an informal Enneagram session - Let’s laugh and learn!
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Individuals + Couples
Develop self-awareness, self-compassion, and compassion for others.
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Business / Team
Build your team by understanding your people and how they can be their best.
The Enneagram represents a profound and powerful way to understand personality as it provides practical and immediate applications for personal development. As a trained Enneagram specialist and coach, Jorja guides you as you recognize patterns and develop greater awareness of how and why you think, feel and do the things you do. This awareness creates space for clarity, compassion, connection, and choice in the present moment.
The Enneagram has empowered me, and I believe it holds that same promise for those who choose to put its wisdom to work in their own lives. Doing the work has allowed me to see and begin to become free of patterns which keep me living in bondage to my ego, ever afraid of being my most authentic self. There is no magic potion or teaching that I can offer as each of us must struggle to find our own way, but my experience in using the Enneagram has captivated and freed me and left me longing to teach it to others.
Frederick Buechner writes, “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”
Learning to be present and observe myself with compassion as I work to understand and move away from long-held, often unconscious mental, emotional and physical circuits in my life has brought me great hope for change. I have only scratched the surface of these sacred teachings, but I long for this teaching to be my life's work in whatever capacity is offered. Life is grace, every moment, and I have only this present moment to live, just myself to change for the better.
Our true places can only be discovered as we choose to navigate our inner worlds, bringing truths to bear in our own hearts and lives. I believe our stories and our lives will transform and liberate us to be the healing presence our world so desperately needs.
I see life in the story. All of the themes, words, souls, and meanings are interconnected. This is how I see my story and how it collides with yours.
I remember my first reading this Jung quote, "Wholly unprepared, we embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world? No, thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” I was but 40 myself, and it resonated deeply as I fumbled my way into the "afternoon" of my life. I knew the truths and ideals I had relied upon to that point lacked veracity as the structures, internally and externally I had come to rely upon crumbled after years of working tirelessly to put just the right books on the shelves, say just the right words and believe the correct theology. While at the time, the temptation to despair owned the day, inside I knew this falling apart was a liberation.
My great quest for being good had brought me to this wreckage, surrounded by spiritual shrapnel and the blood and guts of decades of squashing my soul to make it fit into what I had been taught was a good and godly form. My expulsion from this form, as catastrophic as it was, rescued me. What to do next, where to go, what to believe and the myriad questions that filled my confident former self were daunting. It was a new beginning and now, some ten years later, well into this afternoon of mine, I am grateful for the voyage, wreckage, wounds, baggage and all, for it brought me to the most profound understanding of my life. The mystery was welcomed where certainty had reigned. I knew what I had known was not what would serve me moving forward and thus began what I now call, the discovery of my faith and myself. There have been many voices along the way, but it would be impossible for me to write with any brevity in explaining the profundity of the Enneagram and the wisdom it has brought to my life. Suffice it to say the transformation has changed the trajectory of my life. My understanding of myself, my feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, is ever evolving as I move towards my most authentic self and I am humbled by the work.