Russ Hudson and I travel back to the 1970s and 80s to tell the story of the modern Enneagram movement.  Russ will also share his own personal journey—how he first encountered the Enneagram through the Gurdjieff tradition, met Don Riso, and eventually began a decades-long partnership that would shape the Enneagram as many of us know it today. In Part 2 next week, we’ll go beyond the timeline and reflect on what was happening behind the scenes as the Enneagram exploded in popularity during the 1980s and 90s. We’ll talk about the confusion, controversies, and competing schools of thought that marked those early years, along with the pivotal moments that first brought many of the leading teachers together. You can follow Russ at https://russhudson.com/.

If Russ and I’s conversation about the history of the Enneagram really intrigued you, I have good news. I spent months researching and developing a 3-hour Enneagram history course that you can preview for free at https://www.typeish.com/history

 

Timeline

0:00 Audio Intro

0:31 Welcome

2:36 The Modern History Begins

5:09 Russ Hudson's Enneagram Journey

9:42 Meeting Don Riso

12:31 The Don Riso Partnership

17:30 Building the Modern Enneagram

24:43 The Early 1990s & Copyright Lawsuit

29:09 The Birth of the IEA

35:20 Christianity & the Enneagram

42:32 The Future of the Enneagram

49:24 Meeting Claudio Naranjo

51:29 Final Thoughts

53:27 Outro

 

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Enneagram History Course

🖥️ Get a FREE 40-minute preview of our Enneagram History Course

👉🏼 Enroll here: https://www.typeish.com/history 

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Read The Transcript

Tyler Zach (00:31)

Welcome to Typish, an Enneagram podcast where we explore how your personality shows up in all of life. I'm your host, Tyler Zach, and in each episode I connect you with leading experts on how your personality impacts your relationships, mental health, spirituality, and everything in between.

Over the next eight weeks, in episodes 13 through 20, I'll be unlocking some exclusive interviews from my Typish summits over the past few years. You'll get to hear from an Enneagram pioneer, an Enneagram godmother, an Episcopal priest, an interpersonal neurobiologist, a magazine editor-in-chief, a Hollywood actress, and even one of the bachelors himself. What could all these guests possibly have in common? Each of them has been profoundly transformed by this tool called the Enneagram.

To kick off this series, I'll be releasing a two-part episode with Enneagram pioneer Russ Hudson called The Modern History of the Enneagram. Today in part one, we'll travel back to the 1970s and 80s to tell the story of the modern Enneagram movement. Russ will share his own personal journey — how he first encountered the Enneagram through the Gurdjieff tradition, met Don Riso, and eventually began a decades-long partnership that would shape the Enneagram as many of us know it today. In part two next week, we'll go beyond the timeline and reflect on what was happening behind the scenes as the Enneagram exploded in popularity during the late 80s and 90s — the confusion, the controversies, the competing schools of thought, and the pivotal moments that first brought many of the leading teachers together.

Many of you have greatly benefited from Russ's teaching, but in these two episodes you'll get to sit with Russ in the green room and hear some stories you've never heard before. Now, without further ado, let's jump into part one.

Tyler Zach (02:36)

For those who might not be aware of Enneagram history in the US — it essentially began when Claudio Naranjo brought the first group of 54 Americans to Arica, Chile in 1970 to study under Oscar Ichazo. The following year, Naranjo began teaching the Enneagram himself in the US to students like Helen Palmer and Father Robert Ochs. Father Robert Ochs, as I understand it, took extensive notes from Naranjo and then went and taught it to other Jesuits at Loyola University in Chicago, including Patrick O'Leary, Jerry Wagner, Jerry Hare — who I think was one of the men who taught Richard Rohr — and then Don Riso. In 1974, while attending a Jesuit seminary in Toronto, Canada, Don Riso learned the Enneagram through Father Robert Ochs' notes by way of one of Ochs' students named Tad Dunne. And then, after over a decade of study and practice, Don Riso published his first book on the Enneagram, Personality Types, in 1987. Does that all sound fairly accurate, Russ?

Russ Hudson (03:50)

Yeah, fairly accurate. There are a couple of things. The line to Don is correct — he did learn it at a Jesuit seminary in Toronto. It was going around the Jesuit centers at the time; people were talking about it, discussing it, trying to understand it.

There's older history about how Oscar got involved with it and how Claudio got involved with it. My friend Sandra Maitri was also in Claudio's original group, as was A.H. Almaas — Hameed Ali — and Robert Ochs was too. Helen actually came to some of Claudio's workshops, but she was not a member of the SAT group.

Tyler Zach (04:48)

Okay, that's really helpful.

Russ Hudson (04:50)

She would very proudly tell you that herself. She was looking at it, was interested, and found the presentation of the Enneagram types fascinating — and of course was inspired.

Tyler Zach (04:54)

So how did you learn the Enneagram, Russ? Where did that come from for you?

Russ Hudson (05:09)

Well, I first encountered the idea of it in the 1970s. I was a musician then, and like a lot of young people in the 70s, I was on this spiritual journey. I would have identified as a Christian at that point, and I was looking at all kinds of teachings, trying to work things out. I encountered the writings of Ouspensky, which led me to the writings of Gurdjieff. Ouspensky talked about the Enneagram and showed it explicitly. I think I was first turned onto that by a musician named Robert Fripp — who had the rock group King Crimson and played with David Bowie, Talking Heads, Blondie, and a lot of people. He's still a colleague, I would say.

Tyler Zach (05:41)

So you didn't learn the Enneagram from another teacher or a Jesuit — you went straight to Ouspensky. That's interesting.

Russ Hudson (06:09)

I went straight to Gurdjieff, really. Later on, by a series of strange coincidences, I found the Gurdjieff work — the legitimate Gurdjieff work. So I was studying under a particular teacher, and there was a lot of anonymity, as in twelve-step programs — which, by the way, were also influenced by this. The big teacher in where I was going was a woman named Madame de Salzmann, who had lived with Gurdjieff for decades and came out of Russia with him. So I was in that work learning about the centers, learning about presence — learning that presence is the foundation of prayer. What is prayer if you're not here? Things like that. Learning spiritual practices.

The Enneagram was part of it, but they did not teach the nine Enneagram types arranged around the Enneagram figure. That just wasn't part of it — that came later. So I was already steeped in what it's for. We had the law of one, the law of three, the law of seven — this whole framework.

Russ Hudson (07:37)

It was later that I read an article in a book called Transpersonal Psychologies — I'm spacing on the editor's name, but the name starts with a T; this is just me getting old. That book had an article about Arica and about this other use of the Enneagram, which I found very strange. I already knew the Enneagram figure in a certain way, and it kind of sort of made sense to me — but I didn't feel any particular impetus to pursue it.

A few years later, Don Richard Riso's first book, Personality Types, appeared. It was the first kind of mass-market book on the topic. There was an earlier book explicitly aimed at the Catholic community, by Maria Beesing, Patrick O'Leary, and Robert Nogosek, but that had very limited distribution. Don's book was the first big Enneagram book. Helen Palmer's book came out about a year later. And when I read Don's book, I was struck by it. I said: these people don't quite get the presence part, don't quite get some of the spirituality behind it — but these are very astute psychological observations. There's obviously a lot of work here, and it makes sense to me. And I thought instantly that people I knew who were trying to deepen their spirituality kept bumping up against the same psychological problem over and over again. This book made a ton of sense to me. So I thought: I want to learn more about this. Little did I know that Don Richard Riso lived less than a mile away from me. That was just good luck.

Tyler Zach (09:42)

No way. Wow. Incredible. Okay, so you read his book in '87, then you met Don. What type did he identify with? You identify as a five, I think?

Russ Hudson (09:59)

Yeah. Don identified as a four with a three wing and self-preservation dominant. And I met him at the American Museum of Natural History in 1988. I actually had to quit my job to meet him — that's a long story. My boss kept suddenly telling me I couldn't go to lunch to meet him. This happened three times, back before we had cell phones or any way to let someone know. Don was probably about ready to give up on me. But when my boss did it the third time, I quit and went to meet him. And we started a long conversation — I wanted to learn about his studies of the Enneagram, and he was quite fascinated to find out I was in the real Gurdjieff work and what that was about.

I was really impressed with how much work he had done on his own, just through patient study — looking at psychology, trying to intuit what was meant by some of the writings he'd encountered. His sheer diligence in working at it for so many years. This was not a minor effort. Sometimes people say to me, "I want to become an Enneagram teacher, I want to write an Enneagram book." I say: do you realize that Don Riso took over ten years to write Personality Types?

Tyler Zach (11:39)

Yes — with not a lot of other source material out there. Just personal exploration.

Russ Hudson (11:44)

Right. And he was doing something similar to what Naranjo did — taking these spiritual observations coming through ancient traditions that Ichazo was studying and aligning them with modern psychological thinking. But Don did that too. A lot of things that people think of as just generic Enneagram were actually Don's early work. He did a lot of that integration of different perspectives with the findings of modern psychology. Naranjo obviously did that too, but I don't think Don always gets the credit he deserves for the enormous amount of work he put in.

Tyler Zach (12:31)

Yeah, and I definitely want to make sure people understand all the work that he did and that you did together. So how did the partnership start? I know you wrote The Wisdom of the Enneagram together, you started the Enneagram Institute, you created the RHETI test together — can you talk a little bit about that story of you guys partnering and what that looked like?

Russ Hudson (13:06)

Well, it didn't happen all at once. After our initial meeting, Don and I enjoyed talking with each other. Maybe once a month we'd arrange a phone call and just talk about the things that were interesting to us. He was at the time beginning to write his second book, Understanding the Enneagram, and he wanted more of the original teachings — questions about Gurdjieff and the Gurdjieff world along with reading about it.

But I was working a corporate job in midtown Manhattan, and our company got acquired and I got laid off. So I was out looking for another job and I got this call from Don — he timidly asked me if I would consider coming to work for him, essentially as an office assistant and administrator. Maintain files on the computer, respond to calls, and so forth. The attractive thing was flexible hours. I said sure. I thought it would be more interesting than a lot of jobs I was being offered, though less lucrative — Don didn't have a lot of money to spend in those days. But I came, and we were working in an office on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Gradually, he had the idea that I could also help him when he was teaching. Don, as a four — and a self-preservation four at that — had a lot of social shyness. People always liked him and he was funny, but he would always have to push through this resistance before he felt comfortable teaching and interacting with people. He'd taught one training program on his own and used to say, "I almost died" — it was so hard for him. So he had this idea that I'd join him. Initially I wasn't a co-teacher; he was up there teaching and I was sitting at the side, and he'd occasionally say, "Russ, what do you think of that?" or "What would the Gurdjieff work say about this?" Gradually that extended into people wanting to hear what I had to say, and we started working on projects together.

The first big project we worked on together was the RHETI test. Being a five, I'm not averse to numbers or research, and again people fly out these tests — but we worked on that test for years and years of refinement. That was the first project. And then we had this idea of writing a book showing how the Enneagram is not — as I flippantly say these days — not a filing system for human beings. It's actually a way for us to remember our truer self, or in more traditional religious language, our self in God. How do you do that? We wanted to show how studying the personality types supports your spiritual life, without hitting anybody over the head or selling a particular version of any religion. We worked on it, had a version done, and it didn't feel ready — the cake wasn't baked. So we continued to teach and do other things. Eventually it started to come together and we worked furiously on it for a while. But that too was not a quick project. That book came out in 1999, so we'd been working on it a good seven years or so before it was released.

Tyler Zach (17:30)

Wow. Incredible. It's so good to hear that all this wisdom didn't just come from picking up a few Enneagram books and spitting something out — it was a long, tedious process of trying to get it right, to produce something solid to give to the world.

So — Ichazo in the 50s and 60s began overlaying the vices and virtues, the holy ideas, the traps, those sorts of things, onto what he called the Enneagon. Naranjo then formulated the Ennea types and started correlating defense mechanisms. But then when we get to you and Don, all of a sudden we have the basic fears and basic desires, childhood messages, the levels of development from unhealthy to healthy. From my research, here's just some of what you and Don developed: the basic fears, the basic desires, childhood messages, the levels of development, the Hornevian triads, the harmonic triads, the dominant affect triads. A lot of people don't know that.

Russ Hudson (19:01)

Yeah, no, they don't. And there's a lot of other things too. We were working at this full time for at least a decade before a lot of people even got into the game. Don's big thing was the levels — his desire to map not just what the types are, but the full spectrum of each type, and what the mechanisms are by which we ascend or descend in those patterns. Part of our early conversations was: what did the inner work of Gurdjieff have to say about that process?

Don also did a lot of work on what he called the psychic structures — these visual diagrams. My big contribution to that was understanding that it was the action of the inner critic that made the structures either get more complex and tight — fixated — or open up into the more spiritual elements of our nature.

We did different groupings. I believe Don was one of the first to work seriously with the Hornevian groups, connecting them to the work of Karen Horney. I created the harmonic groups — the positive outlook, the emotional realness, and the rational competency groupings. A lot of people teach workshops on that, but that was not an ancient Sufi teaching. It's something I struggled with and worked out over a few years. And there were a lot of other things too.

We also worked a lot with how these concepts correlate with the underlying Gurdjieffian teachings about the centers and the imbalance of centers. Little things like: a fixation is not a bad habit. It's a limited way you use your mind to not feel your suffering. And the passion — the idea that the passion is not just a bad habit either. In spiritual terms, a passion is the suffering created by our separation. And so we're meant to have that pain until we are in reunion.

Russ Hudson (21:54)

We worked to have concepts that would help people get in touch with things — like those lost childhood messages. We just came up with those one day and had no idea how popular they would become. I've seen so many memes appear — always uncredited, but the childhood messages are everywhere. At some level, you just have to say, I'm glad the work is out there and people are doing it. It would be nice if people acknowledged the source, but there it is.

Tyler Zach (22:42)

So if you're listening, take note of that. Naranjo modeled that well — he always credited Ichazo in his books. He'd say, "I'm getting this from Karen Horney" or cite Carl Jung. His books are well cited; he was a scholar.

Russ Hudson (23:24)

Yeah, he was a scholar. In academia you'd never get away with writing without proper credit — people are going to find the books you're cribbing from. But Naranjo was good about that.

Part of what you learn in this work is how we stand in lineages, in traditions. As a five, I wasn't real big on traditions — humbug. But I've learned that we stand on the shoulders of others and on the spiritual work that people have done before us — work that prepared a path and made something possible that would have been much harder otherwise. I never take that for granted.

Tyler Zach (24:35)

Well, speaking of copyright and borrowing other people's information — right around the early 90s, Ichazo and the Arica school sued Helen Palmer for copyright infringement. That came up in my research and I found it really fascinating. The US courts decided that Ichazo didn't own the copyright to the Enneagram, and ever since then, no one has really owned the Enneagram. Can you take me back to those early 90s? What was the Enneagram community like at that time, and do you remember the court case?

Russ Hudson (25:21)

Oh dear. Yeah, I sure do. One thing was that not many of the Enneagram authors or teachers knew each other back in those days. In a few cases they did — Don Riso knew Patrick O'Leary; they both came from Jesuit circles. There were people who knew Helen. But there was no across-the-board connection, and there was a lot of suspicion. And then this whole debacle with Arica and Helen and the lawsuit was not exactly producing a lot of relaxation and goodwill.

I think it's interesting — people say, well, why didn't Ichazo sue Don? A couple of reasons. One, Don acknowledged Ichazo both in his teaching and in his books. He'd say, "Ichazo came up with these things, and I'm trying to do psychological work with them." Ichazo disagreed with some of what Don did, but Don acknowledged him. And Don went out of his way to use his own language rather than Ichazo's language directly — and when he did use Ichazo's language, he'd say, "Oscar Ichazo's term for this is such-and-such." That was a big and important distinction.

There was also a big, hairy falsehood in the early days, which was that all of this was some sort of Sufi oral tradition. Well, it wasn't, and it's not. That isn't to say that you can't find related ideas in particular schools of Sufism, but it has a lot more to do with Jewish mysticism and Christian mysticism, and it has a particular pedigree — but people didn't know that back then.

Helen won that lawsuit, which was probably a good thing — it would have been a little odd for Oscar to have ownership of the whole Enneagram. And the way Arica pursued the lawsuit was very strange. They were going after it almost like a heresy case — going after the fact that Helen and others were distorting the teaching. There was no court of law in the United States that was going to decide something on a charge of heresy. That's just not how we roll.

Over the years I've worked hard to connect with people from the different schools — people from Naranjo, people from Arica — to foster goodwill, because it was a very conflicted, confusing field in the early days. The beginning of it shifting was the big conference that Helen Palmer and David Daniels organized in 1994 at Stanford University. Some people think that was the first IEA conference — it wasn't. Helen and David put that one on themselves. But it was at that conference that the IEA was created, out of a gesture between Don and me and Helen and David and some other teachers. We just decided to do it. And that began a dialogue of healing and sorting things out. There were bumps along the way, but through the 1990s and into the early 2000s, there was a lot of transformation of the field — a lot more respect, acknowledgment, and collegiality. We survived the adolescence that all psychological and spiritual movements go through. And I will say that I now consider virtually all of the teachers and writers to be my friends. I can't think of anyone who gives me the heebie-jeebies these days.

Tyler Zach (30:14)

That takes a lot of humility — to befriend each other, work together, give each other credit, share information. That's powerful.

Russ Hudson (30:22)

Yeah. There were certain people who were really working to take the lead on that. I used to tell my students: someone has to be the first one on the dance floor. Part of leadership sometimes is a kind of vulnerability — you walk where faith is guiding you, even when it looks a little hairy. I knew, and others knew, that this field was not going to survive very long with that sort of competitive, rancorous energy ricocheting around. We needed to do a lot better than that.

I'm always advocating for this: it's not seemly to be teaching about going beyond our fixation while operating from our fixation. As the field has evolved and more people have worked with it longer, there are people who know how to be exemplars of walking the talk — exhibiting by their behavior that they've been through a transformational journey, that they've been touched by grace. One of the things I used to teach about the virtues: the very Western idea of the virtues holds that if you went up and had a vision of God and saw the light and all that, great — how has it changed you as a person? Or are you still an idiot? The virtues are the signs that we've actually been through the transformation that grace offers, that we've stepped into the invitation and let it work on us. And the virtues are also unselfconscious — you wouldn't know you had them. I say humility is one of the virtues. If you think you're humble, it kind of ruins it.

Tyler Zach (32:31)

And that's really something from your type — you probably most identify with the social instinct, being a social five. And I know social fives are all about virtues, ideals, totems. So for you to say it's not about the idea, but to actually have it worked into you and change you from within — that's powerful.

Russ Hudson (32:57)

Well — I'm not exactly self-conscious about this, but I try to do my work every day. When I'm talking about this within the context of a religious tradition, grace does 99% of the work — but there has to be that 1% of me getting out of my own way so that there's a possibility of saying yes. And it often has to do with me seeing what I'm caught up in, what I'm believing that isn't true, what reaction I'm imprisoned by. There's a process of seeing that, and then my heart turns toward its source.

Tyler Zach (33:39)

Hmm. There's an author, John Ortberg, who gave an illustration about sailing that I've used in some of my Enneagram work — the idea that we can talk about the wind and talk about sailing all we want, but unless you actually do the hard work of setting the sails, the wind won't have anything to use to push you toward your destination. There is that hard work of setting the sails that needs to be done.

Russ Hudson (34:17)

Yeah. There's a big difference between talking theology and being touched by God. There's a difference between the moments where we actually feel the presence of grace working on us — it's not a rumor at that point. And sometimes in those moments you see how, out of our fear, we try to pretend like we know what this is all about. But there's a way in which we have to come to a kind of innocent, open-handedness. To me, if that isn't faith, I don't know what is — where you're led to the next step in a kind of beautiful trust. And the Enneagram types, another way you can look at them, is what we trust instead of God.

Tyler Zach (35:20)

That's really good, Russ. Well — going back to the early 90s for a moment — one of the only distinctly Christian books on the Enneagram, Richard Rohr's The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective, was sort of the go-to book for a number of years. His first edition came out in '91 or '92. And right around that time, Ichazo came out with his letter to the transpersonal community, responding to claims a journalist named Richard Leviton had made in the East West Journal. And then I read that Father Mitch Pacwa — who was an early believer in and teacher of the Enneagram — changed his mind when he saw it being used in unhealthy ways within the Jesuit and Catholic community, and wrote an article in a Christian journal saying we shouldn't use the Enneagram. Do you remember some of those debates and conflicts from that time?

Russ Hudson (36:18)

Yeah, I sure do. I remember when Father Pacwa's articles were coming out. I had a couple of different internal responses. One was: he's got the history wrong. He doesn't know it. My five snarkiness is that a lot of people who have claimed to be spokespeople of the Christian faith don't actually know its history very well. So I just have to hold my tongue and be a nice person — but no, you're completely off the mark there.

But the other thing was, I was aware that because so many people were playing telephone with the Enneagram — they'd heard a little bit here, a little bit there, and now they're all masters and teachers without having really learned very much — there was a lot of mischief going around. Which did no service to the Enneagram. And I'm sure Father Pacwa saw some people using it in foolish or toxic ways. That continues.

The only thing I'd say in defense is: do we judge Christianity by the mischief that goes on with some practitioners who call themselves Christian? My goodness. Humans are involved — there are going to be mistakes. People are going to use things for their ego. There's nothing new about that. You can't find a single thing of value on this planet where that isn't true. You look, you can find the gold — but you're also going to see a lot of human error, because humans are involved. I can't vouch for everybody. We can only deal with the integrity of how we ourselves work with something.

Tyler Zach (38:39)

Yeah, that's exactly right. A lot of people throw the baby out with the bathwater when something is misused. There were actually some things in Father Pacwa's article I agreed with — yes, the Enneagram can totally be misused in these ways.

Russ Hudson (38:57)

Of course it can. X-rays — which have saved a lot of our lives — can also be used for atomic weapons and to kill people. Medicines can be poisons. We're up against this argument now with technology — it can be used for really awful, pernicious things, and it can be used to make our lives better. This is what the Enneagram and real spirituality points back to: here are all these things humans have created, and how we use them — what we use them for — comes down to our self-awareness, our relationship with ourselves, and a sense of sacred responsibility that comes when you start to really know what you are and a little bit of why you might be here.

Tyler Zach (39:54)

Marcia Montenegro — I don't know if you've heard of her — she's an ex-astrologist turned Christian with an apologetics ministry, and she's been quite vocal against the Enneagram. She's kind of the Father Mitch Pacwa of the 2000s. She wrote a book targeting Richard Rohr, and her argument is essentially: because Richard Rohr's theology is off, and because she sees him as the founder of the Christian Enneagram, we shouldn't use it. And it's like — it doesn't really matter if Richard Rohr is right or wrong about theology. One person's theology doesn't determine whether the Enneagram is true or valuable, just as a bad Christian church or a bad preacher shouldn't negate all of the Bible. I get a lot of social media comments about this — people saying, "Do you know about Richard Rohr? Do you know about his theology?" And I'm just like — that doesn't matter to me. I know you've worked with him — he's had quite a target on his back.

Russ Hudson (41:05)

Yeah, well, I used to joke about that with him. I'd say, "Richard, you get it from both sides." He agreed. I said: on the one hand, you've got all these sort of new-age people who won't listen to you because you're a Catholic Christian priest, so they won't give you the time of day. And then you've got all these Christians mad at you because they think you're not doing their version of true Christianity. I said: you're getting it from both sides. He said, "You want to come sit in the fire with me?" I said: I'm already sitting in my own fire, brother.

But you know — study Christian history. Christianity has always been a big tent, and there has never been a time in the history of this religion that all Christians agreed about the correct theology. People had wars over this. It's not a new thing. I would suggest that, for myself, I feel a little closer to God when I can relax my fearsome opinions and positions and be genuinely interested in what the other person might be bringing.

Tyler Zach (42:24)

I want to close with this: as you look at the past few decades, what are you thrilled about? What are you excited about? And what do you wish could have gone differently, or what do you hope goes differently in the next few decades in terms of the Enneagram community?

Russ Hudson (42:46)

I'm thrilled about the fact that there are more people now doing their best to teach this in a responsible way. That's first and foremost. They're in all sorts of settings — everything from people working in organizations and corporations to people working with evangelical communities. I have Islamic students in the Middle East who are trying to teach it in a healing way. I have Jewish communities too. So there's another thing I'm excited about: it has become a way for people to look at their faith tradition with fresh eyes and let it impact them with greater receptivity. That moves me and inspires me.

Many people are finding — correctly, in my view — that the Enneagram is a help for faith. The Enneagram's not a religion, and it was never meant to be. It's meant to be a psychological assist for those on a faith path. That's what's important.

Tyler Zach (43:56)

That is an enormous point. I went back and found a Naranjo interview on YouTube where he said, "I teach the Enneagram as a piece of the pie." And I love that — Jesuits find it really helpful, psychologists find it really helpful, this group over here finds it helpful — it can sort of plug in to whatever religious beliefs you already have and be used as a tool within your worldview. You don't have to adopt beliefs you don't hold. You can use the Enneagram as a tool within your own tradition.

Russ Hudson (44:39)

Right, absolutely. It has a certain neutrality to it. I'd also say that if you're really progressing in your faith, some of your older ideas will start to look like training wheels on a bike — they were really good, they got you this far, but maybe you don't need them anymore and God is inviting you to more. Something else I find encouraging now: we're getting clearer about the history. People say all sorts of things. One time Naranjo did an interview where he was just annoyed with the interviewer, and he said he made the whole thing up.

And certain conservative Christians have used that to argue: you see, you see. But he was just being a jerk in that moment, frankly. And I told him that, so I don't feel bad about saying it. He said, "Oh God, you created more mischief for us."

Tyler Zach (45:42)

You're talking about the June 2010 interview that's on YouTube, where he said he got the Enneagram from automatic writing.

Russ Hudson (45:58)

Yeah, automatic writing and all that. He was just blowing off steam because he was sick of answering the question. But point of fact — if one is not lazy about it, if you actually start looking into what these terms mean, where they come from, where the idea of virtues comes from, where the passions come from — did you know that the seven deadly sins were originally described by Gregory the Great as eight? Because pride was one of the eight, plus the seven. And that funny ninth one, faithlessness and doubt, was not there in that version. But this was part of mainstream theology. This is not some obscure little thing — we've just forgotten so much of the history.

And so this is an opportunity. Those of us in the Western spiritual traditions have a chance to remember and reawaken — to recover, let's say, the mystical heart and core of our traditions. We have a lot of the structure, but there's a part that when I talk with young evangelicals who are on fire with their love of God, they're wanting this deeper truth, and it's available — but we've forgotten a lot of the pieces of the puzzle. I think of the Enneagram as something that's inviting us to go back and find some of those pieces that got dropped along the way, even within our own tradition.

As for what I have some regret about — what I wish was otherwise — it's how many people flatten this into nine stereotypes and don't do their homework. There are just too many instant experts. Somebody asked me once, "How do you teach the way you teach?" I said: I was in spiritual preparation for twenty years before I got up and talked in front of anybody about it. I'm not saying you need to do that. But I'm saying it might require more than having read a book and seen a couple of YouTube videos. It might require a little more. I just wish people would do more work — however they come to it — to walk the talk. To be ambassadors of the good news. That's what I'd wish for more of.

Tyler Zach (48:55)

That's so good. One quick question that came to mind — I think it's a big one, because Naranjo was such a big part of creating the Ennea types. I heard he came back in the 90s and actually met with you guys after being sort of disconnected for a few decades. Was that at an IEA conference?

Russ Hudson (49:28)

I don't remember the exact year. I remember I had communicated with him by phone a few times. And he came to an IEA conference — the first one he came to was in Los Angeles. I'm thinking it was around the beginning of the 2000s, maybe 2002 or so — I don't remember exactly. We finally met in person, and he was very eager to meet Don and me, and we were eager to meet him. So we had dinner and a really wonderful conversation.

The one part that always touched me was — he says, "You, of course, are a fellow five." And I said, "Yes, I am." But the thing that was so moving was that at one point he asked: so where did you come across the sacred, Mr. Hudson? And I said: the Gurdjieff work. And I mentioned various people — did you know this person, did you know this one? And he'd say, yes, yes, I learned from this one. And he just blushed. And he said: "I have been guilty of bad-mouthing you guys, because I thought you didn't have any real connection. I've always found it very bad taste for people to teach this work without spending time in a genuine initiatory tradition." And he said: "I will never do that again." So that was one of those moments of healing and building bridges — people acknowledging that there's more work behind this than might be initially apparent.

Tyler Zach (51:03)

Wow. I just feel blessed by this conversation and grateful to sit with you and learn. It's so valuable. Thank you so much for the time.

Russ Hudson (51:29)

You're so welcome, Tyler. I just figured — doesn't everybody know this? And then I realized: no, most people don't. And a lot of the people who did know it are now retired or gone. Helen Palmer said something to me as a kind of send-off before her retirement — you may know she's had some health challenges. But before she retired, we were sitting together, having some iced tea, I believe, and she put her hand on mine — virtually, over our call — and she said: "Russ, you're the last man standing. There are some other teachers from your generation, but you're the one they're all going to look at. Don's gone, David's gone, Claudio's gone, Oscar's gone. Many of the others are retired. I'm going into retirement now. You've got a link to hold." And she also said: "Please be nice to my school." And I said, I will, I promise. She said: "I'm going to hold you to that." And I said: okay.

Tyler Zach (52:31)

Wow. "Be nice to my school." I just feel like we need to give credit where credit's due. Every time we talk about the core fears, the core desires, the levels of health, the triads — we'll be thinking of you and of all the work you've done, and the shoulders we're now standing on. I hope you feel honored and blessed by being on the summit and having people listen in.

Russ Hudson (53:11)

I do — I'm very honored, and it just tickles me. Thank you for having me.