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.

Last week I released part one of my conversation with Enneagram pioneer Russ Hudson on the modern history of the Enneagram. We traveled back to the seventies and eighties to tell the story of the modern Enneagram movement, and Russ shared his personal journey of how he first encountered the Enneagram. In part two today, we'll continue along the timeline and reflect on what was happening behind the scenes as the Enneagram exploded in popularity during the eighties and nineties — the confusion, the controversies, the competing schools of thought, and the pivotal moments that brought many of the leading teachers together for the very first time. As I said last week, many of you have greatly benefited from Russ's teaching. In part two today, you'll get to sit with Russ in the green room and hear more stories you've never heard before. Now, without further ado, let's jump into part two.

Tyler Zach (02:22)

Could you share a memorable moment in your Enneagram journey that shaped you in a really profound way?

Russ Hudson (02:30)

Well, there are so many of those. We could be talking about hearing something from a teacher or a teaching, or we might be talking about inner experiences where we realize what we're actually up to — which can be very illuminating, even if sometimes a bit painful.

There's one thing I remember — I don't know why this is coming to me right now. I had started working with Don Riso, and he had invited me to teach with him. We were teaching part of our program called the psychic structures, which was a funny name, but Don was an Enneagram four and very visual. He had this idea that there ought to be some way of diagramming what was going on with the types psychologically — and that as the levels changed, the diagrams should change with them. So we were teaching together at the Kirkridge Conference Center in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. We were about to teach this section, and I was lying in my little single bed trying to sleep — and just like a flash, it came to me that what moved those little diagrams up and down was what we might broadly call the inner critic: what Freud called the superego.

It wasn't like I was working through a problem and arrived at a conclusion. It just came, like Venus on the half shell — the whole idea arrived at once. And it felt like a gift. It launched me into a study of the importance of understanding the inner critic on any spiritual journey — how the inner critic keeps taking over our spiritual realizations and crystallizing them into something that's actually more to do with the ego. That was a big aha.

I also remember this — as an Enneagram five, and knowing I was a five, I thought at the time that I was pretty in touch with myself for a five. A little proud of it, if I'm honest. Like, I'm not like those fives over there — I'm a developing five. So I had that idea. But then I went to a conference and workshop presented by John Bradshaw — some of you may remember him — and he was teaching about alcoholic family systems, twelve-step, and things like that. And we were invited to welcome each other into the world. We got into little pods. I lay on the floor of this huge conference center in New York, with some good friends around me — including Don and some musician friends of mine. And they just said nice things to me for a few moments. Kind things, like: we're so glad you're here, it's so lovely to be with you, you're safe right now, we've got you. Things like that.

And I felt as though my chest cracked open. Like I had some shell I didn't know I had — and it finally snapped. Just all of this sadness and grief came out of me, all of the pain of how isolated I'd been my whole life. And it was, to put it in Christian terms, a conversion experience. I could never be the same after that. On any inner journey, I'd say, one doesn't have just one conversion experience — you might have a really important one, but you go through a number of conversions on the way home. That was a big one for me. I just could never go back. I couldn't put the shell back together again. So I was doomed, in the best possible way, to have to learn how to live in my heart.

Tyler Zach (07:16)

Wow. What age were you when that happened?

Russ Hudson (07:19)

I was in my thirties — not yet 40. Probably around 35 or 36. Well on my way by that time, but of course, like most people at that age, I thought I had it all together and figured out. Nope. A few more surprises in store.

Tyler Zach (07:44)

That was a great story to open with. We touched on the eighties and nineties a bit in our first conversation, but people are really curious — a lot of folks are new to the Enneagram over the last decade and don't quite know what went down during that time. Can you share some key moments or experiences from the eighties and nineties when the Enneagram was gaining popularity in the United States?

Russ Hudson (08:21)

Yeah. Well, when I first became aware of the Enneagram of type, we have to distinguish a little bit — there's the Enneagram symbol and what it represents. When I'm talking with Christians, I'm always pointing out: take out that hexad and you've got a circle with a triangle in it. Wonder if that'll ring any bells.

But I was originally learning it through the Gurdjieff work, which I studied through the seventies and into the eighties. I understood it as a means of — what Gurdjieff called — remembering yourself. His view was that grace is always trying to get to us, but if we're not home, we can't receive it. It's like we've got the phone off the hook. The whole center of his teaching was this idea of making ourselves available to the transformative action of grace. And I'd add that Gurdjieff was not a Sufi as such — he was born into an Eastern Orthodox Christian family, and that was his faith life.

Meanwhile, Don Riso had been in the Jesuits for many years and left in the seventies to pursue his study of the Enneagram. So in the eighties he was busy writing Personality Types. Helen Palmer was out teaching on the West Coast. Claudio Naranjo was doing it in other countries. There were just very small groups around studying this. The eighties was a kind of gestation period. Then Don's first book came out in 1987, Helen's in 1988, and between those two books, suddenly a lot more people got interested.

I saw Don's book in a spiritual bookstore here in Manhattan and thought: what's this? It has an Enneagram on it. I was in the Gurdjieff work — we had the Enneagram — but this personality type stuff was different. So I started reading it and thought: this would be really helpful to anyone on a spiritual path. I met Don in 1988 and we started working together in 1991.

The nineties then became this time when the Enneagram was getting much more widely known. There were a number of schools and individual teachers — Tom Condon was out there, Jerry Wagner was out there — it was getting taught in both spiritual and religious settings and in secular settings. And it was sort of percolating. But in the midst of all that, what interested Don and me — both of us having explicitly spiritual backgrounds — was not how to categorize people, which in the end is kind of boring. What was interesting was that this offered a healing psychology with roots in a spiritual understanding. I thought: a lot of people I know in psychology, if they only had those spiritual roots, they'd really get somewhere. And a lot of my friends on spiritual paths — if they only understood themselves a little bit better, so many doors would open. That meant something to me, and it's always been my focus.

So in the nineties, there was a journey of the Enneagram becoming more popular — everybody was doing workshops, and we were all kind of finding our way, figuring out what the subtypes or instincts were, what happens with the arrows, all of it getting clarified. But we were also trying to figure out what this tool was actually for. And so at the end of the nineties, Don and I put out The Wisdom of the Enneagram, essentially to offer a book that said: here are these distinctions, but they're actually here for your psychological and spiritual development. That's what it's for.

There was a lot of competition and scarcity thinking in the early days. And not everybody who was out teaching it had ever dipped their toes in the waters of where it comes from. So it was a lot like the game of telephone — various rumors and ideas got around that weren't exactly accurate. But I think through it all, the power of the Enneagram and the fact that it does come from spiritual tradition has slowly worked through all that cloudiness. When I look at other important schools of psychology or spirituality, this is not an aberration — it's what always happens. Can you imagine being around for the beginning of Christianity back in the Roman Empire? Some of the conversations and confusion that were going on then. My goodness.

Tyler Zach (14:32)

Yeah. And just to point out — when Arica sued Helen Palmer and there were rumors flying around about Metatron and Ichazo, keep in mind the internet was just coming about. There was no easy way to communicate or verify. So I can see why there might be some confusion.

Russ Hudson (14:40)

It was like an early version of clickbait.

Tyler Zach (15:03)

Yeah. So there was competition and scarcity, as you said. What in the mid-nineties brought all that together? Was it you and Don getting people together at Stanford? How did that come about?

Russ Hudson (15:20)

Well, there were several things. As soon as there's a spiritual movement, there are schisms — you know how it goes. There was obviously the schism between Arica and Helen Palmer. There was also one between Arica and Claudio Naranjo. Oscar Ichazo felt people didn't really understand where this was coming from — and actually he was right — but he didn't always help matters in how he talked about it.

Helen Palmer and David Daniels put together the first conference in 1994. It was not an International Enneagram Association conference — they put it together and invited everybody. They held it at Stanford University, and it was a huge gathering: about 1,200 people. And it was the first time that a lot of us had ever encountered each other in person. That's where I met Tom Condon, met Helen Palmer, met David Daniels — pretty much all the major teachers came, though Claudio Naranjo did not and Oscar Ichazo did not.

Don Riso had had the idea to create some kind of umbrella organization that would function as a way to get everybody together. He presented this idea at the conference, but there was a lot of mistrust from all these schisms. People said: okay, but you can't administer it — it can't be coming from you. And to Don's great credit, he gave up the name, the copyright, everything, and said: okay. That was the birth of the International Enneagram Association. It was born at that Stanford conference, at the closing ceremony. And then it went on to create a place where the different schools of thought could get together, share notes, and find out that there weren't really bad guys out there in the way that people had fantasized.

Tyler Zach (17:38)

That's really helpful to understand — the schisms, the lack of communication, and then that pivotal moment in the mid-nineties where there was enough humility to come together from different schools. And that's what led to the IEA as we know it today.

One thing that was interesting to me: the Jesuits kind of leaked the Enneagram out through Helen Palmer, but it was really gaining traction within Jesuit circles in the seventies and eighties. And it seemed like there was some confusion about where the Enneagram came from. I remember in Richard Rohr's first edition — his 1991 or '92 book — he said something about Oscar Ichazo claiming it came from Metatron. And then in his second edition in 2001, Richard Rohr actually gives credit to Ichazo for the first time and acknowledges that Ichazo came up with the traps, the vices, the virtues. So my question is: what was the Enneagram you received? And then how did you and Don build upon that?

Russ Hudson (19:20)

It's important. We're always looking for a single thread, and you're not going to find one. It's more of a tapestry. The ideas of the Enneagram — the centers, the work of transforming the personality, the idea of essential qualities — all that was there in the Gurdjieff work. And Oscar Ichazo actually was in the Gurdjieff work. He says a few disingenuous things to throw people off the trail, but I know he was there, because I know people who were in a group with him in South America. So he knew that material. I think he took Gurdjieff's teaching that if you understood any complete system through the lens of the Enneagram, it would open up new understandings — and he worked with that view in looking back into antiquity.

So I think Ichazo started looking at some really major, pivotal maps of human consciousness. From Judaism he used the Kabbalah. And incidentally, Metatron is the archangel who, in that tradition, supposedly delivers sacred knowledge to humanity — the archangel said to have inspired the understanding of the Kabbalah. So when Ichazo says that, he doesn't mean he was sitting in his parlor and some angel appeared and started zapping him. He's saying he tapped into that sacred tradition of understanding divine knowledge that runs through Judaism, Christianity, and later Islam. He was saying it in a way he figured his audience would understand. One of the dangers when we've been studying something for a long time is that we forget most people don't know what we're talking about.

He was working from the Christian tradition — that ought to be obvious by now. He was working with the ideas from the desert fathers and mothers — I've taken people to Egypt to see some of this for themselves. He was working with the sins, the passions. The idea of the virtues comes from that tradition. The whole pivotal piece is actually coming out of Christianity. The teachings of the desert fathers, the writings of Evagrius, got carried over to France through John Cassian, who then taught Saint Benedict, who brought these ideas into the Benedictine rule and the whole monastic tradition of Christianity. Saint Benedict passed them to Pope Gregory the Great, who then restated the passions — at least seven of them — as the seven deadly sins. People don't know the history of their own religion, and it would help us a great deal to know it.

So when Oscar says "it was Metatron," how I receive that is: he was a devoted student of Western metaphysical traditions. He knew Kabbalah deeply, he knew the teachings of the desert fathers, he knew elements of Sufism. He was looking at these from a new modern light and trying to use the Enneagram to open them up further. The Metatron angle means he had some kind of inspired aha — because what he did that's actually kind of amazing is figure out from these maps the sequence on the circle, which is hugely significant. And if you study the idea, he did get it right. It starts to be uncanny how beautifully it works.

Then Claudio Naranjo comes along. As a psychiatrist, he learned about it from Ichazo briefly down in Arica, Chile, but he came back to California and started looking at how all this fit with psychiatric categories. He began the whole process of looking at it in terms of modern psychological models — Ichazo wasn't particularly interested in that. The good thing about Naranjo is that it made it understandable and available to a lot of people. He created the panels — not because this was some ancient Sufi oral tradition, but to show the parallel between psychological categories and the Enneagram types. He was showing that people with certain OCD characteristics, for example, had congruent features to the Enneagram one profile. That was Naranjo.

And then Don learned about it through the Jesuits. In the early days, some Jesuits found it and got very interested — they called it "the Sufi numbers" and spread it through the Jesuit seminaries. But again, they didn't have access to the full range of where it comes from, so some of what they were teaching was good and some was kind of made up. For example, they thought the direction of disintegration was how you go down and the direction of integration was how you go up. Don learned it that way. But nobody thinks that now — we know you can go to the high or low side of either direction. These things just get clarified over time.

The way I experience it is this: in antiquity, there was a deeper understanding of the human soul and of our role as human beings within a larger divine plan. People in the ancient world lived in that. Over the many years of cultural change and the imposition of different human ideas on things, people kind of lost that sense. And I think the Enneagram is actually part of a revival — people wanting a deeper dive into their spirituality, into their religious tradition, into feeling their soul as part of a divine plan. Not just as a nice rumor somebody told them, but to know it in their bones. I think people really are looking for that. And I don't think the Enneagram is the beginning and end of that search, but I think it's a helpful component.

Tyler Zach (26:56)

Yeah. Let me go back for a moment and then we'll work our way back to your contributions. Oscar Ichazo — I found this quote from his letter to the transpersonal community. He said: "I do not have visions of flying archangels, Metatron or the Green Qutb, and the Arica system and method is the product of my whole life's work." And later: "I am clearly saying that I did not receive messages from some archangel entity or entities coming from the sky, because that would be contradictory with Arica philosophy." So I just wanted to share that. And then we get to Naranjo, who said he got the Enneagram from automatic writing and caused a lot of controversy. You mentioned that in our first conversation, but can you revisit it? I think you actually sat down with him and said, "What were you thinking?"

Russ Hudson (28:02)

Yeah. Claudio and I were friends — we're both fives, both a certain kind of inspired lunatic, and we had a lot of fun. I just said to him: Claudio, why in God's name did you say that? Do you realize what trouble that's going to create? And he said he'd just had a long day. He was frustrated. People were asking him questions he didn't have time to answer and thought he'd already answered. So he said it to get the interviewer off his back, essentially. As a five, I can understand that impulse — but I'll add, it's not my style.

You don't have to be a nuclear physicist to do the basic homework to go back and see how the passions and the virtues and all these ideas are well established in early Christian traditions and in Greek Neoplatonic philosophy, which massively influenced the church. It's obviously not something Naranjo made up. He was just blowing off steam. And of course, if you're inclined to dismiss the Enneagram out of hand, that's pretty good ammunition. But he was just saying nonsense. What can I say?

Tyler Zach (29:22)

That's really helpful, because it's unfortunate that for some Christians the first thing they encounter is someone pointing back to that June 2010 YouTube interview and painting a picture of Naranjo sitting down with a Ouija board, receiving the Enneagram like Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. But when you do even a little homework and look, you see that Naranjo was studying at Berkeley, at Harvard, on the cutting edge of personality research as a psychiatrist. The picture of him just making it up out of thin air doesn't hold up at all.

Russ Hudson (30:21)

Right. Like Ichazo, he took these seminal insights and looked at them in the context of what he had already been doing. He was one of the first proponents of Gestalt psychology — he was working with Fritz Perls. The idea that this major international psychiatrist was sitting around fooling around with a Ouija board is a comical image. He was just pulling their leg. And I knew Claudio pretty well — he was just trying to sneak out the back door.

Tyler Zach (31:00)

Well, thank you for clarifying that. Okay, so going back to contributions: we have Gurdjieff, who gives us the Enneagram symbol and used it not as a personality tool but as a blueprint to understand all of life — and gives us the centers of intelligence, the idea that we're three-brained beings. Then Oscar Ichazo comes along with the fixations, passions, virtues, holy ideas, the traps — drawing on those ancient Christian sources. Then Claudio Naranjo begins formulating the Ennea types, starts correlating defense mechanisms, talks about idealized self-image, is heavily influenced by Karen Horney, and starts developing the instinctual variants and subtypes. And then you and Don come along — levels of development, the Hornevian triads, the harmonic triads, the childhood messages, the basic fears and desires. And as you said in our first conversation, this didn't happen in a year — this is a decade, two decades of hard work. How did your contributions actually come about?

Russ Hudson (32:52)

Well, first off, we just have to tip our hat to Don Riso. He learned about this in Jesuit seminary in Toronto — I believe in 1973 — through a Jesuit named Tad Dunne. But he was fascinated. He got hold of the early notes that had come from Claudio's workshops and circulated through various Jesuit channels. He found them intriguing but not very clearly structured. He perceived there was some structure to this — that it was not just a pastiche of observations about people — and he strove to find it. That's how he came upon the levels of development.

He used to tell the story of trying to write a chapter about type six, which he found the most challenging to describe. His initial chapter was around 88 pages — clearly unworkable. So he asked: is there some spine to this? And that's where the idea of the levels came to him. He started figuring out how to structure the healthy manifestations, the everyday egoic manifestations, and the pathological or troubled manifestations — recognizing that there was a continuum within each type. He did the psychic structures, he did tons of things. And all the while he did this having his own faith. He said without that he would never have finished it — it was what inspired him and kept him going.

When I came on board, I came from the Gurdjieff work, and I wanted to know what Don had been doing, and he wanted to know about that fourth-way Gurdjieff material. We set about trying to clarify the psychology and make the whole system more congruent with the underlying spiritual understanding and traditions it came from. So it isn't just running around going, "Look at her being such a two, look at him being such a seven." Primarily it's about me seeing the filter I keep putting on myself. It's a way of coming back.

When I used to talk about this with Christians in the early days, I would say the Enneagram is about presence. They'd say, "Well, what does that have to do with God?" And I'd say: whose presence do you suppose it is? Because there's only one. From a Christian perspective, presence is the direct experience of the presence of God — not words, not ideas, not concepts, but actually opening your soul to the presence of the divine. That's what presence is. And that's why it was always central to all contemplative traditions, all the monastic traditions — those who wanted the deeper dive in the faith. To me, that was the whole point. The Enneagram is really a study of what we do instead of turning toward God. If you're sincere in your faith life, that is invaluable information.

And I think for me, the Enneagram has woven together different elements, different streams of my life, into a coherence where things that once felt like contradictions — like science and faith — aren't contradictions to me anymore.

Tyler Zach (37:41)

Yeah, that's really good, Russ. As you look back — and I know as an Enneagram teacher and coach there are things I'm teaching one year and then a year later I'm thinking, well, I wasn't really teaching that very accurately — you have three decades now of teaching and writing. Is there anything in your work that has evolved or changed in your mind from when you first started? You have Personality Types, The Wisdom of the Enneagram — books that were written quite a while ago. What has evolved or changed? You mentioned the question of integration and disintegration directions, and the subtypes — talk a little bit about what's changed over the years.

Russ Hudson (38:42)

Well, you've named two of them right there. It's not necessarily that I've said, "Wow, we were completely wrong about that." It's more of a refinement and clarification. Take the inner lines. Some teachers say there are no inner lines, that they don't matter — I don't understand how they can say that. To me, they're super important. But you have to understand them in the right way, and then they become hugely helpful. While yes, you can go to the high or low side of either direction, there are circumstances in which that occurs, and it's not random. Don used to always say: authentic spirituality is not vague. It's crystal clear.

We've refined our teachings about the levels. The instincts were a big area, and that's still evolving. Claudio presented his view of the 27 subtypes with names for them — a lot of which I agree with, but not all. And it made clear to me that Claudio was working from a slightly different model than what I was coming from in the Gurdjieff work and my understanding of what these so-called subtypes or instincts actually are.

What I would say now in general about the instincts: instead of "which one am I?" — because you're all of them — it's more helpful to ask: what is my relationship with my self-preservation instinct? What is my relationship with my sexual, erotic instinct? What is my relationship with my social or adaptive instinct? We got more specific about the instincts, opened up the understanding of what they are, but I think it's led me in the direction of: how does this open up a deeper, more compassionate exploration of what's going on in me? Not just a new label and a new name for myself. That's the gold this system offers.

There have been a number of things like that. The holy ideas, for example — I didn't tackle those until I'd been working with this material for quite a few years. I didn't want to teach any of it until I understood it experientially. And I would wish that for people who have ambitions to be ambassadors of this work — do your own inner work and homework before you presume to show others what's going on.

Tyler Zach (42:03)

That's so good. With the last few minutes we have — what do you feel is a little wonky about some of the Enneagram teaching out there today? What needs some course correction?

Russ Hudson (42:21)

Well, I notice that there is a tremendous narcissistic void, a real pain and suffering in a lot of young people in the world. There's a desperation as we're bombarded with all this information about ourselves and about the world. Everybody's kind of in a state of overwhelm: who am I?

In the midst of all that, the question becomes: what am I? But trying to answer that on an ego level is going to be quick, and it's not going to fix the problem. And that's what a lot of people are doing with the Enneagram these days — piling on more and more details about their pattern, learning more and more about not who they are but who they've taken themselves to be. That's not going to turn the trick. And it's certainly not in the direction of a faith path.

I hear people say things like: "The wing of my tri-type, when it's in stress, goes here, and then my instinct stack..." and it's just a hot mess of madness. Look — if I can just notice my passion operating from time to time during the day, I'm doing well. Getting more and more details is not going to lead to edification. All these theories and views are interesting, but don't get lost in the morass of them. Even the ideas like the harmonic triads — I put those forward because in the heat of everyday life, you can't always think of nine things. But sometimes if we can make three distinctions and you're having a debate with someone, there can be this moment of: wait a minute, I'm coming at this like that and the other person's coming at it like that. And there's a breath, a coming back to yourself, an opening to another approach. So there are theories that are interesting, theories that are elaborate, and theories that are helpful. You want to find the helpful ones.

When Don and I wrote The Wisdom of the Enneagram, we had three rules for what we wrote. One: is it as accurate as we can understand it to be? Do people who are that Enneagram point actually say, "Yes, that's right"? Two: is it helpful? Does it heal? Is it compassionate? Does it help people recognize their soul nature, what their heart is really longing for? For example, when I'm teaching the types, I always give the good news first. I always talk about the spiritual nature of the point before I go into the difficulties — because if you have some feeling of what's beautiful about what you are, you're ready to take that dive into seeing the nature of your sin, so to speak. And three: is it expressed in a way the listener can receive? That's a cultural thing. If I'm talking to executives in Silicon Valley, I'll talk about it very differently than if I'm sitting with a group of religious sisters, or with tribal communities in Tanzania. I've taught all over the world. If you really know the material, you're not stuck in jargon and theory — you can live it in a way that you can present it.

So that's the last thing I'd say: what the Enneagram field needs now are people who can walk their talk. Which, by the way, is not different from the whole future of Christianity. I might know my scripture — but if I can't walk my talk, what is going on? With mercy for ourselves too, because sometimes we're going to stumble, sometimes we're going to forget, sometimes our little ego is going to say "yeah, me." That's going to happen. But learning what we're learning is the path back to that juncture in our heart where we're really back in touch with everything we care about. That's what the Enneagram field needs: people who can embody what it's teaching. Be the good news. That's what I'm saying.

Tyler Zach (47:40)

Well, that makes me think of that verse in the New Testament — people are always learning but never arriving at the knowledge of the truth. And I think that's true of the Enneagram too. You can keep learning all this knowledge but never arrive at the truth, which is why the Enneagram was created in the first place. That's a really good place to end, Russ — we're at the hour mark.

Russ Hudson (48:09)

Thank you so much, Tyler. This was a lot of fun. I've really enjoyed both of our conversations, and I hope this continues to flower.

Tyler Zach (48:19)

Thank you for being so generous with your time and sitting with us to help us understand this tradition that we're all a part of, teaching, and genuinely proud of. Thank you for the clarifications and thank you for your contributions. We're sorry for plagiarizing you on Instagram slides and presentations — but thank you to you and Don for all the work you did. We appreciate you and just want you to feel honored.

Russ Hudson (48:51)

Thank you very much. God bless everybody. Have a great week.