An Atelier of Transformation and Presence
A school of transformation and psychospiritual growth, and a coaching practice that draws on the Enneagram, Jungian archetypes, micro-expression typing, and contemplative presence.
Find your way in
Currently
A small number of live offerings, taught in real time and rarely repeated in the same form.
In collaboration with Zykr
The first public teaching of the framework that maps your dominant instinct onto the visual world it quietly prefers, three registers crossing four seasons into twelve aesthetic profiles, drawn from IRB-approved research at the University of Oklahoma.
Read more and reserve
With Sterlin and Aaron
Three Sunday sessions on how each type listens, what quietly sets them off, and how to come back from conflict with the people you actually live alongside, taken one center of intelligence at a time.
Read more and reserveFour ways in
Wherever you are with this work, there is a door that fits.
i.
You want to understand the system from the inside, with real rigor rather than surface labels, beginning with the foundations and continuing as far as a teaching credential if the work takes you there.
Study the Enneagramii.
You are less interested in studying the map than in being changed by the territory, and you would rather have someone alongside you for that, through coaching or a small mentoring cohort.
Coaching & mentorshipiii.
You want to understand the person you love through the pattern running underneath their reactions, and to be met the same way in return.
The relationships workiv.
You are drawn to one particular thread, neurodivergence or another single question, and you want to follow it on its own without committing to a whole path yet.
Explore the coursesThe Founders
Empathy Architects is the work of two people who have spent years inside this material, and inside each other's thinking.
Co-Founder · Creative Director
Sterlin is an Associate Professor of Human Relations at the University of Oklahoma, a certified Enneagram teacher, and a certified teacher of presence through the Eckhart Tolle School of Awakening. He is the author of The Narcissist in You and Everyone Else and Center of the Universe, with a third book, Fractals of Mind, on the way. He holds a PhD in intercultural communication and a master's in counseling, and he founded the brand identity studio Zykr alongside this work.
Co-Founder · Master Coach
Aaron holds dual master's degrees from the University of Oklahoma, one in Human Relations with an emphasis in counseling and personality psychology, the other in Public Administration. She is a Master Coach and certified Enneagram teacher, the Executive Director and co-founder of Central Oklahoma Dance Company, and the co-owner of both Empathy Architects and Zykr, where she has shaped much of how this work is taught and held.
The Lineage
We have been studying the Enneagram since 1999, long enough to have watched it flatten in the popular imagination into nine tidy labels, and long enough to know how much it actually holds when it is taught with care. Both of us trained in counseling at the graduate level, with a focus on personality psychology, diagnosis, and the practical work of sitting with another person's interior life.
For more than a decade we studied within an established school of Enneagram typing, working closely with Katherine Fauvre, whose teaching belongs to the deeper psychological tradition that descends from the work of Naranjo and Ichazo. We are inheritors of that tradition, once removed from its origins, and we teach from inside it rather than from a summary of it. The depth you encounter here was handed down, then tested against thousands of hours of real practice.
That testing became formal in 2021, when Sterlin conducted an IRB-approved research study on the lexical patterns of type, alongside hundreds of one-to-one typing interviews. Out of that work came an Enneagram assessment, independently validated at 77% accuracy in identifying instinctual type and 54% for type itself, which is a notoriously difficult thing to measure with any precision.
Aaron is the primary coach, and together we have certified dozens of practitioners now carrying this work into their own rooms. We have also spent years in our own, across week-long contemplative retreats and the slower, less visible labor of meeting our own egos honestly. We teach and coach from that experience, from having felt an ego quietly run a life, rather than from a perch above it. Sterlin is a certified teacher of presence through Eckhart Tolle's School of Awakening, and that contemplative thread runs through everything we do.
In Their Words
I feel lighter, physically and mentally, since engaging in this work. I don't have to carry so much mental heaviness, which in turn makes the light easier to see.
I probably learned more over the last two days of diving into this course than I ever have in any other study. A deep and accessible experience, and a gem.
It works because it does not ask us to change the way we learn. It uses what we already enjoy and how we naturally learn to bring us to light.
Aaron was extremely professional yet easy to talk with, and able to identify my tri-type after one session. I was so impressed with her knowledge of the Enneagram.
The Correspondence
Occasional letters on the Enneagram, presence, and the inner life, sent when there is something worth saying rather than on a schedule.
Get started today before this once in a lifetime opportunity expires.