#91 Russ Hudson: The Pursuit of Presence

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/5ac06d9047ffec64

As soon as I bring attention to my breath
To my sensation.

Really being here in this body, for example, just to use that one center.
the more we tend to be present and we'll start to notice things that we were not noticing before.
And that's the other sign is that the field of our attention
Deepens.
Gets crisper.
And we notice all kinds of things that ordinarily we don't notice. Cause our
Attention when we're not present is sort of welded to these
preoccupations and patterns. And that's what we're looking at with the Enneagram. That's what our type does
Without presence.
Yeah.
tends to become the survival machine.
Um
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This week I'm talking with Russ Hudson, the co-founder of the Enneagram Institute.
This episode covers what the Enneagram is, how it was developed, how it helps us grow, its limitations.
The nine interconnected personality types.
The Triad.
How you can use the Enneagram to deepen your relationships.
What it means to be present.
And so much more.
It's time to listen and learn.

How did you get started with the Enneagram?
Well, like a lot of things, it's not a a a simpler a one shot
deal. Um
I
You know, like a lot of people back in the nineteen seventies, I was looking at various uh
systems of spirituality. I was checking out Indian gurus and I was going to churches and I was doing all kinds of stuff.
But I
encountered a a book called In Search of the Miraculous.
And it was uh
It was r a book written by a man named Peter Aspensky.
But it was about the teachings of Gurj, and George Gurj was a Greek guy who
brought the enigram symbol and the teachings around it into the modern world.
So I was really impacted by that book and after searching around for a while I actually found um
an ongoing real Grijf group and start studying it.
And that was long before I learned about how the Enneagram could also be about types, because the original sensibility it wasn't that.
But you know, it was um
This the stage two of that
process was that I read the first book of my
uh friend Don Richard Riso.
And
That book was called Personality Types, came out in the mid nineteen eighties.
And
I was so impressed with it that I sought him out and it turned out his
He lived about a mile away and his office was even closer.
So we started talking and I started working with them.
Oh, that's awesome. And you've been doing that ever since.
Yes indeed.
So uh I was thinking about how to approach this with readers or listeners in this case. And
I think there's just so much mystery around the Enneagram. So we can start with the basics and like work our way up. So what is the Enneagram?
Well I think it gets uh
Complex for people around
The fact that it is more than one thing.
Originally the enneagram is a symbol, but
And it's uh
It's a circle with some inner lines in it, and some people think it looks like a pentagram, but it's not a pentagram. It's uh in fact there's a
There's triangle in the middle of it.
Uh but it that has certain esoteric meanings, the the symbol itself.
It's looking at the relationship between what things are and their fundamental nature, you might say.
As consciousness.
And it's looking at how things come into form and the relationship between those things.
But the uh the part that got popular is that a man named Oscar Chazo
studying the symbol in relation to a lot of other
long term spiritual teachings, shall we say.
Um started to see some connections and brilliantly s
Sa
that there was a sensibility around each of the nine points. The enneagram is a circle with nine
Points on it.
And he saw that there were elements of character.
that have been studied for thousands of years that fit
in a certain pattern around that symbol.
So I think the part that most people learn is this

nine the nine points and how they are actually representing
facets of humanity.
I think sometimes people take it too far and the the sort of
popular version of the Enneagram that is also a turn off for some people is that it's nine boxes. Which box do you go in, right?
But that's not really what it ever was originally.
It was originally about
These nine points were
Gifts.
capacities that human beings have, needs.
That human beings have
But that when we get too identified with any one of them, uh a lot of our total humanity kind of drops out.
But that we
get habituated to live that way.
So the idea was to become aware of that to free ourselves up again.
I think of it as sort of like a topology.
Yeah. I mean most simply that's where it starts. Um
Yeah, but uh
It is a typology, but unlike some of the others, uh w it's a a typology for waking us up.
Go go further on that.
Yeah, it's it's like
The way I tend to explain it to my younger students is that you
Have a type.
Most definitely.
But you are not a type.
It's not who you are, it's not what you are.
But just like we have hair color or height or certain predilections, we're not born a tabula rasa.
uh a blank slate, right? We
have certain predelections, we have tendencies.
We have what psychologists call temperament.
And
It's very interesting that um
There was a major study of
of temperament in infants done at New York University back in she was early nineteen sixties by two famous psychologists Thomas and Chess.
And in that study
Just
Looking at it empirically, they boiled it down to nine basic patterns of temperament.
That they found
respond very nicely to the nine antigram points.
So the idea is your temperament is what you lead with.
It's w how you cope with things. When the chips are down
There's a certain way you're probably gonna deal with some of us if there's a conflict we we get in people's faces. Some people when there's a conflict we go hide. Some people
when we're in a conflict we start brooding. But people have different reactions and
So it's it's not really about just
giving our ourselves a free pass about all that.
It's about noticing it so that we have some options and freedom and can choose other behaviors than other than just our default.
You see what I mean.
So it i is it safe to say that's our default sort of like human behavior. That would be your type, but you're not necessarily
Uh, it's just identifying that default, but you're not defined by that default and you can overrule and part of being human is that you can overrule that default.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Perfectly put. You you have this default and it comes in handy and we don't need to knock it. It we've survived this
long with it, right? And it's very good for certain things.
The point is
when we're just going on default.
Well it's like we keep
doing the same dance no matter what the music is.
And so sometimes that's helpful and sometimes it's not so helpful. Sometimes it messes things up. And so the Enneagram originally was always paired
Вид
A study of presence
or mindfulness.
And I'll be here now.
pay attention, to notice what we're up to.
It was to
Train us in a system of self-awareness so that we could choose things other than that default.
And it helps us do that by seeing how we fall into that default.
How we keep
getting sucked into a certain way of being, certain way of reacting to things.
And again, to look at that without judging it.
or thinking it's bad, but just to notice, oh, I'm stuck.
I have other options.
Like that.
How how was this developed?
Like where did the enneagram like how did this come into being?
Well, there's as I said, there's several pieces. A a lot of credit has to go
to a man named Oscar Chazo, as I said, who
Um
passed away uh just a few weeks ago.
And he was
originally from Bolivia, but lived a lot of his life in Chile.
And he learned about
the enigram through Gurjiv sources.
and really was a brilliant genius guy who was looking at various
Ancient systems for looking at human development. He was looking at ancient Jewish and Christian
uh sources, some Buddhist sources, Hindu sources, et cetera, and seeing correspondences between them, the way they fit together. And so he kinda came up with a map of
these patterns, shall we say.
Uh there was a
psychologist name uh Claudia Naranjo.
Who um
was uh Gestalt psychologist, she actually a psychiatrist to be more accurate, and
and he studied with Fritz Pearl. He went and learned this from eachazo, brought it to the United States, and started teaching it to a small group of people.
Well, subsequent to that, it kind of exploded.
Uh my
old friend and writing partner, uh, Don Richard Risso, learned it through the Jesuits.
And he
started to
Um
right about it. It took him
ten years to write his first book.
It's sort of funny. It's I I get a lot of the uh enthusiasm from young people. It seems like a lot of people have discovered this work recently.
And it it's not really so much about
having a guru tag
Or
being uh an amateur, you know, it's not really about that, but I I just forever trying to explain to people you can learn the basics pretty quickly.
You can learn the distinctions of these nine points and they're pretty mind blowing.
But to really master it, to make it useful, to be able to help people with it.
takes a long time. It th there's a
It more than we
We bargain for sometimes.
It it strikes me that we're we're looking for
somebody to tell us why we do the things we do, not necessarily wanting to change or overrule the things that we're doing or look inside ourselves and figure out what's really going on. Now we can just like throw our hands up and absolve ourselves, right? And say That's right, Oh, I'm I did that because I'm a seven. I did that'cause I'm a four. I did that'cause I'm a three. Whatever.
Exactly. Where where does sort of the Enneagram align with and where does it differ from modern psychological research?
I think a lot of the interesting work that's been done
in the last you know thirty, forty years has been aligning it more
with psychology certainly uh
Don Richard Riso had a master's degree in psychology
From uh Stanford.
And um social psychology, as I recall. And we had Dr. David Daniels, another one who passed away recently, who was a
A professor
uh in the school of medicine
at uh at Stanford. And so there were peop some seriously trained people involved in it.
And so there was always a wanting to show and demonstrate how the ideas
In the Annegram link with things that we've learned.
particularly from di developmental psychology.
How in the process of forming
a personality, an ego, certain m forces get set into play.
And uh so I think over the years, my goodness, I've probably trained or taught
Tens of thousands of psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, a lot of people, and they're all they all marble.
Uh.
Once they get beyond the hearing the cruddy
You know.
pop versions of it and they get into it, they're almost universally amazed at how it illuminates.
things that they learned in psychology, and vice versa. I think that they're
We're
Trying to be good students of human nature.
We're trying to really understand what goes on in the psyche, and there's a lot of different avenues by which we can do that.
Talk to me about the role of environment when it comes to sort of personality or temperament.
Yeah.
Well, it's a factor.
And um
You know, people ask all the time, does your
Your Ennegram type come from nature or nurture.
And
The correct answer is nobody knows and it's the same with psychology.
Uh it's probably both.
Um
What we can say is that the the basic template
Is there in temperament.
Meaning it's
We're born with it.
We don't know if it's genetic or if it's forms while we're still in the womb, but it's very early.
In other words, we're sort of set on a certain track very, very early in life, in the beginning, infancy and before.
Uh, it's not like you become a type because your mom forgot your birthday when you were six. That is way too way too late that.
However.
One of the big
contributions that uh Donriso made was that
we could be at different stages of development in any of these types. We could be in the more healthy
expression of them more grounded, more
heartful, contributing, m not having crazy thoughts in our head.
Or we could
Yeah.
sort of stuck in the more neurotic and difficult manifestations of it. And that is definitely about nurture.
Like
how much I'm wedged into my type, how much I'm stuck in that stuff is a function of
Nurture.
Growing up in a
crazy, difficult, scary
uh heartbreaking environment.
And
That's always gonna be
true to some degree, but if it's a lot,
Then
Of course the child has to form very intense defenses.
And those intense defenses manifest as this kind of
Adhering.
to these survival patterns.
Веорна
The coast is clear.
We're gonna still experience it as being in a siege.
situation we're gonna keep acting certain ways.
So what we do, we I don't think people can do anything about what
their dominant type is.
But what we can do is work at
freeing ourself up from the scary parts of it and opening to the beautiful parts of it. That we can do.
We're we're gonna get into the types here. I know everybody's just waiting to to hear about the types, but before we get there, we sort of have to like build this up a little bit, right? And
And figure out like where it comes from and what the limitations are and like how how does it help us grow?
I think it helps us grow by
learning a few things and and the growth comes from seeing our type in action.
It also comes from
learning a different orientation toward ourselves.
We're learning to be self-aware, but compassionately self-aware, kindly self-aware.
to not judge ourselves'cause you know, we didn't decide to be this way.
It wasn't like I woke up I my dominant
Entigram point is five. I'm a dominant five. So I didn't wake up one day and just decide I was gonna be this. It's just
Happened.
As I start to see what that fiveness is.
In real time.
While I'm doing it.
Not just as a
Reflection later on but
As Don and I used to put it, to catch myself in the act.
in that moment of seeing right now I'm stuck in my pattern.
To take a breath.
To pause.
get grounded, to look at it with kindness
opens up a whole new toolbox, opens up a whole new palette of colors.
to paint with. Suddenly I have access.
When I'm
I always tell people is as we get liberated from being
Identified with the
The pattern.
As we get less stuck in it.
the good sides of all of the nine points
Which also represent human capacities or talents or gifts.
start to come into play more and more.
And that's the why we learn it. So we can be not so we could just be a type, but so we can be a more total human being.
How do we learn to debug our brain in real time? Like that seems like how how do we like sort of like we have this execution path that's debu default and habitual.
And then we want to intersect it. Like how do we learn to do that as it's happening and not as you mentioned later.
Which is post and reflection.
Right.
Well, as I was saying.
The Enneagram was originally meant to go with the practice
Practices to help us be more present.
and awake in our life.
And we do that in the enneagram by learning about what are called the three centers, the three centers of intelligence, which is the body.
The heart.
And the head.
The body is kinesthetic.
Intelligence.
It's instinctual intelligence, as I tell people if you're hungry, it's not a thought.
It's not an emotion. It's a
It's your body in a very direct way communicates that information.
Fo is needed.
Right.
The heart has its forms of intelligence, emotional intelligence, right?
uh heart has certain roles to play and the head
When the head is actually present.
It becomes
something different than what we're used to. It's not this inner chatter box.
It's more a quality of deep listening.
And not just listening externally, listening internally, so that
Yeah.
New ideas.
New realizations can emerge and we're not just feeding on the stuff we already have thought or about or already believe.
So
We we learn
A practice
Of getting more grounded in our body in the here and now.
Good thing about the body is it can't be anywhere but here and now.
It's it's my thoughts and feelings can be all over the place, but you know, if I can feel
Myself breathing or

self resting in the chair, standing or wherever I am in the car, what wherever I may be.
it brings me into a a kind of contact with myself. From there, my heart.
becomes less reactive.
when we're present with our heart, it brings out more of the qualities of kindness
Patience.
Peacefulness.
Courage, a lot of good stuff.
When we're not present with the heart, we're reacting to everything. Everything's pushing our buttons all the time.
Positively or negatively, but if you take one, you get the other.
And then
Cognitively we've we
As we
actually come back to ourselves, our mind simmers down.
And
Not into a sleepiness, but a kind of
Calm clarity.
Where we just see what's
going on in us and around us.
And when you bring that sensibility
to your personality, you can see it in action.
because you're not so identified with it. The problem is not that we have an ego.
And I'm not one of those people who goes around saying you gotta get rid of your ego, you gotta kill the ego. I think that's nuts.
I think that
You know, even the people saying those kind of things have an ego.
the problem is not that we have an ego, it's that we
identify it with it to the extent that we forget there's other parts of us.
We get lost in certain
habitual identities and then we stop looking.
So
We're learning to
be present with the manifestation. So that has an interesting implication.
A lot of people think spirituality
is about transcending, about getting the hell out of here. I mean
Gee whiz. We're all suffering a lot.
Of course we wanna sort of

you know, non dual condition where we won't
Be ouchy anymore.
And completely understandable.
But ultimately.
I think that we need some experiences of that nature, but the more those are established, we start to bring that sensibility to
our ego. When we do that.
we're able to live the what we've come to understand instead of it being an escape.
From how we are most of the time.
I like to think of ego as something that helps us
Or hinders us.
And we just need to be aware of where we are on that spectrum between those two at any given time. Like nothing great would be accomplished without ego. We'd never try anything new. We'd never
um, you know, endeavor to do anything because we would we need to feel confident.
Um
Mm.
Where do you think that
Like how do we identify when it's helping us and hurting us? And then a follow up question to that is like where does confidence come from?
Well the the it's it's a tricky business, as you're saying.
From my point of view
The ego is helpful to the degree it's taking its proper place.
In other words
If I'm remembering what I am here and now.
If I'm presencing with you.
Here and now.
Then my ego is here as what it's for, which is to help me function in this world.
It's a set of habits.
And
customs and
protocols and programs that are just help me to operate in the world. And I learned them very young and they still work. I don't particularly want to have to learn how to
Speak English all over again.
Right.
So
that is very functional and necessary, but when we are present in those centers, like I was saying.
the ego more naturally takes its correct position. It's meant to be a servant.
Not the master.
Is it
traditional way of putting it, and I think that's right.
Confidence.
can be different things. Confidence could be
Acting tough.
Yeah.
Uh that's a kind of ego version of it.
But actually
Organically, confidence arises out of our relationship with our
Body.
Like the more I feel embodied
The more I feel I'm here, I feel like I belong here.
Like
it's in a sense right for me to be here, or I have a right to be here.
And
It's it's not a an inner debate.
It's it's not something that needs to be
argued or asserted, it feels natural. So the more we're in our
body, the more we're in our power, and that relates to one of the enagram points.
From this point of view, each of the entigram points is a vital ingredient for living a good human life.
And that's why we want to learn to embrace all of them and not just act like a cartoon of one of them.
W where in your experience teaching this to
Tens of thousands of people over the years. Like what are the limitations of the Enneagram?
Where do people take this idea too far?
Well, they take it too far all the time. For one thing, they try to put everything into the Enneagram and there are things about human beings that just have nothing to do with the Enigram.
talents, for example, if you have musical talent or athletic ability or you're you have a good

All of those things really have nothing to do with your integram point.
They're independent factors. Enigram can help us understand certain kind of emotional problems and things, but for others.
Good old regular psychology will do the trick.
I think also
The big problem I see.
You you touched on this earlier, Shane.
People learn this.
And they use it.
Two
Ріінфорс
Their self concept.
They use it to and oftentimes and and this is
you know, what I have to be very patient with.
Uh
I do not bust people on their Innegram type. I I don't believe in I think it's rude.
Uh and it's just also presuming that I know.
that truth, uh which I may or may not.
I find that people
identify with a concept and sometimes it's not even their correct Enneagram type.
Oh, go on.
So sometimes the like uh a a classic example
i here in North America is that
A lot of people
read this or learn it and they s they instantly assume there are four.
I'm a four because I have deep feelings and well that well, guess what? Everybody has deep feelings. And I'm creative. Well, guess what? Everybody's creative. And uh, you know, there's a lot of attributes that they like and then they're like, Oh, I'm not.
Yes, yes. Or or I suffered in my childhood. Well, that's everybody.
You know, so there's
A way that we can use it to actually
block it getting to us. There's a way we can prevent it from actually doing its magic. We can use the knowledge to
strengthen our ego defenses rather than to
Work through them.
And that's a common problem, particularly now
That so many people are learning about it.
quickly.
online from people who never studied or trained in it, who but who read a book or two and learned the basics and
The the dang of the enneagram is that
If you know even a little bit about it, it seems like magic.
Like, how did you know that?
How did you know that about me?
So you can seem like a wise guru and you've you've just read a couple of books.
But in point of fact to actually be able to use this in service
to ourselves and others is uh
Requires a long
apprenticeship in acquiring those
Capacity skills I talked about, presence skills.
and learning to be with people in that. That that takes time.
Alexander Pope had that poem where he said a Perry and Spring, right? A little knowledge is a dangerous thing and we we read a website and all of a sudden we're experts and we can teach it to everybody else.
Yeah, and and that's the thing. Um
I I have a friend uh named Suzanne Stabil who
co wrote a book called The Road Back to You with uh
A man named Ian Cron.
And
Their book is hugely popular. It's just out recently and it's particularly popular with evangelical Christians.
who are the new group that's just flooding into awareness of this. And it's understandable. I think a lot of Christians are seeking uh a deeper, more mystical relationship with their faith.
stands to reason the Enneagram has some of its roots in Christianity, so that would be uh natural.
But Suzanne was
uh talking with me the and she asked me this great question and I
Just to paraphrase it, she's saying, How do we old timers
hold the enthusiasm and energy of all these new people when a lot of that enthusiasm is based on an assumed
knowledge or mastery.
Of something that we've spent decades our whole adult life trying to master.
Right. And you're not gonna figure it out in five minutes on the internet. Right.
Right. Yeah. And it just there there's a thing here that it does reveal to me is that
It is true.
that everybody
has access, everybody has a point of view, everybody has some kind of truth.
But sometimes in that
conversation what drops out is the value of experience.
that you know there are people with more experience and some things like working with people psyche, you kinda want somebody to have a little more experience. I don't want to go and get brain surgery from someone who's just read a couple of medical books.
I want somebody who's had experience in how to do surgery and and had medical training and so forth. And the Enagram, in a sense, we're we're going into the core motivations. So it goes very deep. It's not like Myers Briggs or some of the others.
Which is no diss to those systems, it's just that the integram is looking at a deeper
layer of human motivation. So it opens up a lot more for people.
So I I th I'm just I suppose I'm just advocating for the fact that
We need to be humble.
And patient in learning it because it takes a long time. Can we dissect experience a little? Like a as you were saying that, I was thinking back to this study I read a while ago about
Doctors and it was like they stopped getting better.
after sort of like five or six years of practice. So experien that point doesn't actually
correlate and I'm gonna have to look this up and try to find it for people, but experience doesn't correlate for
um beyond a certain point. Like at what point
Like what is experience? Is it is it just that you've gone through something, or is it the reflection component that you've thought about it?
And then you come up with
um sort of heuristics on the other side of it or an understanding or simplicity because you've gone through the complexity. Walk me through your your thoughts on like what experience actually is.
Oh, what a cool question.
Yeah, there's well, there's some elements to it.
In this work that's
the a little different than maybe
what they were finding in that study.
And if I look at it more from a medical
or a physiological perspective. One thing that they
were studying out in California a few years back at uh U CLA Medical and some other places.
Was the fact that
What we're calling mindfulness or presence changes some things about the human brain.
Uh, which isn't surprising to people.
H
Explored it, but you know, it's interesting that they actually were looking at this. They were doing real time brain scans and they were actually studying, um
People with O C D.
Obsessive compulsive disorder.

And seeing what
methods helped them because it's known as a cognitive disorder.
When they did this study, they gave placebos, they gave drugs, they gave them different things to do, they did different kinds of therapy, but they have one group that
practice, they learn mindfulness, they learn Buddhist
Meditation.
Practice.
centering presence, etc.
What they discovered in doing these brain scans was
was something they did not expect.
Was that
The group that was practicing mindfulness had good results in terms of their OCD, but also
That it seemed to reactivate what
psychologists call neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is our brain's ability to rewire itself.
Now it was thought
for many, many years that there were limits to neuroplasticity.
And that basically
We were hugely
enable to rewire in the first few years of our life.
Right. And then after that
It kinda drops off precipitously.
But the study suggests to those willing to look at the data.
Let no.
We stop being present.
around age five or six.
What does it mean to be present?
Well, that's a lifelong study right there.
I I need the thirty seconds internet answer. Okay. The the the short answer, yeah.
Well, it ha going back to the centers, the centers are a great way to sort of calibrate.
That
Am I with my breath?
Can I sense my body here and now?
That's one indicator.
Am I identified with my emotional reactions and by the way being detached and shut down is a reaction.
Or am I
meeting my emotions with a a
Fuller sense of heart.
Is there any quiet in my mind or am I completely identified with that?
Incessant inner dialogue.
Right. So
All those are indicators on these different fronts, and the more we're present
The more we are
able to access these other resources and the way
We learn to do that.
is simply by bringing attention to those things.
As soon as I bring attention to my breath
To my sensation.
to the kind of luxurious feeling of
Really being here in this body, for example, just to use that one center.
the more we tend to be present and we'll start to notice things that we were not noticing before.
That's the other sign is that the field of our attention
Deepens.
Gets crisper.
And we notice all kinds of things that ordinarily we don't notice. Cause our
Attention when we're not present is sort of welded to these
preoccupations and patterns. And that's what we're looking at with the Enneagram. That's what our type does
Without presence.
Yeah.
tends to become the survival machine.
I always thought of present sort of as where you are on the spectrum between the past and the future. And there's only one moment right now. And if you're thinking about the future, you're not present. If you're thinking about the past, you're not present.
I it that's one way it can manifest, but I would suggest that you can be present
to thinking about the future.
Oh, go go deeper on that.
Yeah. You for example
If I'm really
here in the moment with my body and breath.
And I need to think about what I'm gonna do next week.

I can be aware of myself in the here and now.
And present with
the thinking process and planning.

Otherwise we start to think of presence as a trance.
Which it isn't.
That's a common error that people make, and this is the experience side of it.
We think of presence as a groovy place to hang out where m life won't bug us anymore.
Right.
That's the trance of point nine, for example.
Which is at the top of the enneagram for a reason.
When we
Are actually present.
We're present with content.
We're present with what's happening in our body. We're noticing our postures and how we're breathing. We're noticing what's in our emotions. We're noticing what's in our mind. And as we're noticing.
Again, it gives us options. In other words, instead of my mind just coming back to its obsessions and
it's fears and it's the paces it goes through every day. I used I used to say, Can you imagine if
we could like in the Matrix plug something into the back of your head, but instead put a little TV screen on top of your head and along with our
masks we're wearing these days. You put a little s
Screen up there with
two little speakers hanging down the side and everybody could see what
I'm thinking.
I think people would quickly realize no one's thinking.
No one's thinking about anything. Our minds are on idle, just running and regurgitating the same nonsense.
Over and over and over
Ninety
eight percent of the time and I'm being kind.
To think.
To realize, to ponder.
To not question as a position of skepticism, but question is to really be curious about something is not common. And those are attributes of being a little more.
Present.
I like that a lot. Okay, l let's finally dive into these types here. Um
This is a question you've probably had a million times, but let's go through all nine and maybe you can give the the name of them and then maybe the one or two sentence summary of the key.
sort of behaviors associated with that.
uh dominant type.
So just diving in, uh a lot of times I like to start with eight and people wanna know, why don't you start with one?
Well, it's because there's a certain
order to the way these are. They're not a random grab bag.
And the eight, nine, and one
represent
what we call a triad.
And they represent the intelligence of the body.
So you go through eight, nine, and one, you get lessons about embodiment.
What that means.
Eight.
Starting off with eight.
It's it's
We call this type the challenger.
And it's pretty easy.
To recognize uh
kind of person. So
The way I I like to talk about is what's the gift here and what's the
the challenge or the difficulty. The gift of the eight is that when we're
Present and we're
connected with what it's really about, we feel confident.
To answer your earlier question, we feel empowered.
We feel not like we're powerful, but we're
empowered.
And the more uh we are with that, the more we
are living life in immediacy and fullness and energy, and we got it. And we are decisive
We don't dilly dally around. We're not timid.
Uh
The the downside of this is
Each type
The ego does a substitute for the real thing.
And so the substitute
In eight.
And the eight part of all of us is to the degree we don't feel that aliveness and energy.
In immediately.
We get tough.
And we harden ourselves.
And we resist and uh we also control.
So we become control we control our feelings, we don't want to cry, we control
our lives in different ways. We control other people if we feel like they're gonna get to us.
So and to the degree that we're disconnected from the eight gift
We're gonna be some kind of a control freak.
And that can go very far.
So as I said, a a person who is an eight is
It isn't that they're
Not engaging the other
Yeah.
Uh the other eight types.
But that that's their the main track they need to be aware of. That movement between that alive real
Sensitive empowerment.
And that
kind of.
hardening oneself.

So uh the nine next door neighbor.
Don and I call this the peacemaker and each Enneagram teacher, each Enneagram teacher
tends to have their own names for it, but
I always encourage people, the names are just there to get you started. I always use the numbers'cause they're neutral. They don't
say anything about the type good or bad and and they don't
highlight a particular quality at the expense of another.
But nine's peacemaker is about
When we're present, we're grounded.
And we feel at home in ourself.
And as feeling at home in in ourselves we are s are
Agitation settles, we feel peaceful, we feel ready for life.
And we feel more this is the weird thing. The more present we are in our body, the more we feel connected with everything.
We feel connected with nature, with life. We we feel more of the wholeness of everything.
that comes through our body. It's not a cognitive thing.
So
Um, that's beautiful and a lot of great things come out of it. People who are nines have that
beautiful capacity to land and invite other people in for a landing.
Nines also tend to be very creative type. That always gets underestimated. A lot of great musicians and artists and writers are nines.
When nines are not so present.
What we do is we disengage.
We're still there.
At the meeting, but we're not there at the meeting.
We're saying I love you to our partner, but we're just saying it.
And there's a way we we've sort of
withdrawn ourselves into an inner world that we then protect against the outer world.
And that that disengagement. And you know, everybody does this to some degree. Nines are just the best at it.
And it's uh something we learned to do in childhood to handle what was scary or overwhelming.
It's a great example.
But when we're in there, it it's costly in the long run to our relationships.
to our work and so forth. And so there's a way that nines don't really bring their gifts forward, even when they're brilliant and so talented.
And and so
it you can get into a place where people just wanting to connect with you feels threatening. So you you just stay in the inner world.
One.
uh is the reformer
I've also called one the educator.
One is the part of us that really loves integrity.
That has it's a kind of when we're in our body we kind of naturally don't
Slouch.
We're not like all crunched up. We kind of when people are present, there's a beautiful
alignment and
expressiveness to the way people are. There's an elegance and a dignity to people who are more present. And that dignity and alignment is is what the ones are generating and expressed behaviorally as integrity.
Honesty.
There's a way that the ones then when we're in that space life feels more sacred.
And and I don't mean by that
according to any particular religious point of view, although if you have a religious view, it would make it more
real and immediate for you.
But people have sacred experiences.
Mm um that aren't necessarily connected with any religious belief.
So that
beautiful part of the self is also about
And it's hard to find language for this, but it's about goodness, feeling good.
Knowing there's goodness in me.
So much of the
Mm.
difficult part of ego is that we feel not good.
So much so that we even get defensive by trying to be badass. Like we're trying to be bad. Just as a defense against the despair of feeling the loss of goodness. So it's easy to look at the world and see, man, where is the goodness?
Right. And so the one
Out of presence.
Can't
feel or find that goodness in the same way.
And so the world seems kinda corrupt.
Nasty
Dishonest.
mean spirited
And so the ego rises up and says, Well, I gotta set things straight. I gotta be a straight arrow.
I gotta and that natural alignment becomes a kind of physical tension.

Because it's all on my shoulders and I'm gonna make sure things straighten up and fly right, at least
In my world.
And if I can affect beyond that, so much the better.
So it's like being a a warrior for goodness.
But again
The ego in trying to do that tends to
create even more problems for myself and others.
I become kind of rigid.
Kind of testy.
impatient sometimes, judgmental.
not attractive traits and not things that I really wanna be.
But it's it's out of the ego trying to get someplace that it's is not really his promise.
Moving along, we come to the heart triad.
Which is two, three, and four.
Two is um
The part of the heart that
Where we feel connected with others.
And you know, obviously with someone weak.
are in relationship or love or
Could be family member, could be
Yeah, friend.
But can be with animals.
You know, if a lot of people have their pets and my gosh, you you can sure have a heart connection with your pet.
But you can even have heart connection with nature, with the sky, you know, it it's the way our heart kind of goes out.
into some kind of sense of communion.
And it's also the part of our heart that wants to respond.
Like when we see need, when we see hurt.
when we see suffering.
There's just natural. It takes a lot of conditioning to stop this part of a person. Can happen.
But we naturally
respond when we see someone in need. And that part of us is the two part.
And it's intelligent. The heart is smart. It's not just
having sentimental feelings.
When it's liberated
our responses to people and their difficulties are intelligent.
Like sometimes we might see someone crying and we get the
The heart wisdom
Give them space.
This person needs to cry. They haven't cried for years. If I go over and and fuss over them, that's actually gonna stop something they really need to do. So that heart intelligence is attuned.
Now when we
or not present that beautiful
Heart
Connection.
We can't feel it.
And
the the beautiful attunement.
the intelligence of that gets blurry. So we're
going out trying to do th we get more impulsive if we are to to trying to do things for people.
whether they need it or want it.
And the other side of it is we're trying to connect all the time.
Which blocks us from noticing the ways we already are connected.
Like if you know, I yeah, I ride I live here in New York City, I ride the subways and
Sometimes
Yeah, without being, you know, in any way creepy
You can just be sitting on the subway or a bus and you just make that little eye contact with somebody for a second, just a little smile and a nod, and there's nothing that needs to be said, but in that moment it's like two hearts said.
Howdy.
and I'm a human and you're a human and we're on this journey and there's something
That can change your whole day.
If you have a moment like that. You feel connected.
That's right.
That's a moment of essence. That's a moment of a deeper
aspect that the Energim is trying to
Get us back to.
That's not weird or far out or these sorts.
real normal human experiences that make our life livable.
But we forget how to get there.
That's the point. And that's the helper.
That's the helper, yes. Thank you for reminding me to put the name in. Yeah.
Uh so that's the helper and you see why it's called that.
The next point is three.
We call this type the achiever.
And three is
having to do with the heart, although people are threes might not initially recognize themselves as heart types.
Because threes are the the doers of them all. They're doing stuff. They're
active. They they like to have things to do. They like to focus on on
Getting things done. Get
that checklist done.
To get to the the nine items.
That's right. Get through the stuff and get to the goal. And and Three Sur also um
Thinkers.
can be very smart, they they strategic, they like to lay have plans and lay things out and they like
To be logical.
All that being said, what's motivating them is from their heart, because the heart is where we find
Meaning.
Meaning is not cognitive.
You can argue endlessly in your head about what's meaningful.
But if it doesn't
Land in your heart.
You don't get it.
Meaning
Purpose.
Big word for three is having a purpose.
And
It's weirdly the heart that connects our ourself as consciousness.
With our functional life.
It's through the heart that we feel the connection between what we are beyond our personality and
in our actions in the world.
And when that's happening it's what, you know, in if we're
talking about this in the business where what we call flow. It's about when you're
in that state of flow, you're just with your heart, you're present, you're just doing what you do and you're loving it and that you're not
reviewing yourself or worried about what anybody else thinks about you're just
into it and doing it. And that's and that's a hard thing.
You just your our hearts get so lit up when we're able to do that.
Right.
And so threes at their best.
They know that they're finding, they're taking their amazing talents and skills, and boy, they really work to acquire those things, but those things are in service to stuff they care about.
It's in service to what they love. And then in a way, what they're doing is like an act of love. W you know, whatever it is, whether they're helping out their family or whether they're doing their career, whatever.
And that's a gorgeous way to live.
When
We lose the presence
The doing
Stays.
But the sense of meaning fades.
So we think that by getting stuff done we'll get that sense of meaning.
we think that by accomplishing that goal, then we're gonna feel all happy about ourselves.
But you don't need to go too far looking at the
hit the newspapers and magazines and blogs to see that many
Enormously successful people are in great despair.
get into addiction, commit suicide, et cetera, because it feels like sup such a ripoff to work so hard, achieve those goals, and you still feel empty inside.
So
The three is about that journey back
to the heart being there in the midst of what we're doing in this world.
So you you can think of all these as a a journey or a lesson as much as they are a type of person. If you are that type, it means that's your kind of personal myth. That's your life.
Journey.
That's your hero's journey, you could say.
So the four, uh the one I was mentioning earlier that everybody seemed to want to be in North America. This is not true, by the way, in Asia.
Uh, they don't wanna be forced in Asia.
I was g I was gonna ask you after how cultures play into what how we see ourselves, but four let's let's go through the list first.
Okay. So four is that
Our heart
Brings
Depth.
And intimacy.
People always say they like intimacy, but when it actually starts to happen they sometimes get a little scared because
Intimacy is the experience of
landing the dip depth of what we are beyond our personality.
So if we're really identified with thinking that we're our personality, when we actually have a moment of intimacy, in that moment
Who am I?
Who is my friend?
what's actually here. The it the mystery deepens.
But as the mystery deepens and we're actually moving closer to what we are beyond our personality, let's say our true identity.
Everything gets more beautiful.
Everything's filled with a kind of
resonance and mystery and beauty and and fours are on the lookout for that. And when they're in their healthier manifestation, they're bringing that to other people. They're inviting people into that. They're creating a life of
Intimacy and beauty and richness and their
reminding other people to come back to their
Depth and humanity.
And four fours are the individualists.
That's right.
Uh I don't often use examples, but I just uh was posting the other day about uh
Your fellow Canadian uh Joni Mitchell.
as a great example of an Enigram four.
uh who has done exactly what I was talking about, as that was her offering to the world.
When we lose the presence
It's as though the mystery and the beauty fade, and then the world seems barren, ugly,
Pedestrian
Uh purposeless, dull.
And so forth, just as the three, there's no meaning. Why am I doing all this? The four is like, Who am I? What am I? What is the point of all this? And there's a kind of existential despair.
About the loss of this depth and mystery and beauty. Uh everything seems ugly.
I I sometimes feel ugly.
Right, I've lost whatever it was that made me beautiful.
And so
There's a
The four in
in the fixed pattern is is
gets caught up in emotional reactivity.
Because
I know that what I lost has something to do with my heart.
But I can't go to that deeper place without the presence. So what I see is all my reactions to the loss that
My reaction to this ugly
crude.
senseless world.
And that and or or to myself and all the ways I feel I'm not being this truth of what I am. And so that reactivity.
Kind of
Engulfs me.
And

Have um
A good life.
So we move on, uh, to the five, six, and seven, the head types.
have to do with being
more or less connected with our
Presence in the head center.
So so hold on. The the
Eight, nine, and one were which type?
The body or belly.
Body and then the two, three, and four were the heart. Heart. And then so the five, six, and seven are the head. So the five is the investigator.
That's right. The investigator. Another popular name is the observer.
Which is fair enough, but I think it it muddies the water a little bit because nines are also good observers.
Nine is observe, but observing and investigating are kind of different.
There's more of an aggression investigation. You're gonna go find out.
You're gonna
Yeah, you're not just looking at the beautiful stone, you're turning it over and looking at what's under it, or you're chipping off a piece and looking at what it
What's inside.
Investigators the five and the
The five has to do with the the
capacity in human beings to
To come to realizations.
To new
Awarenesses.
To
Seeing new truth.
And you know, think of where we'd be if we didn't have that. We'd still be back in caves, if we even found caves, right?
So that capacity's enormous to come to to have a kind of clarity, a clarity of thought, of communication.
Of perception.
And I would add that um another big component here is that when we find our true mind.
her deeper mind, it brings with it a sense of solitude.
Solitude is a kind of inner quiet that's kind of
Not disturbed.
Uh by the activities of life.
uh not disturbed by other people. So that solitude is kind of like I can hear myself think.
So those are really important and in a healthy five, not only are are those uh qualities there, but they're also in service of the heart.
It's a kind of a Buddhist view here.
The the
awareness and the realization, the enlightenment about what's true and isn't.
is helping me
See what's needed and help people.
Help the world.
It's it's in service of the heart.
In service of compassion.
The other big element here is also as you see what's real, you're also seeing what you believe that isn't real. So it's the part of us that can liberate us from stuff we used to believe.
that we now see well, okay, that was like training wheels. It was good at the time
But I don't really need that now.
And so we can let go of concepts and beliefs and ideas.
Without getting freaked out.
Uh it it's and that's necessary for us to grow up, and certainly if we're gonna get any freedom from our personality pattern.
So when fives are
Not so present.
The their challenge area is that they're trying to have that knowing and discerning of truth and untruth.
And there's solitude but without
the basis of them. So
What happens then is my my mind is constantly working, trying to figure things out. What's going on here? What is this? What's that? What's that?
You'll see sometimes little kids who are fives going around naming everything.
Like oh that's a there's a truck. Uh oh and there's a
Playing and it's like I'm constantly trying to establish what's here and what isn't.
What's real and what isn't.
That can lead to certain kinds of expertise, but can also really lead me down a rabbit hole of obsessive thinking.
And the the need for solitude becomes the avoidance of human contact.
So it's not true that fives don't want any human contact, but they want to be in control of the duration and amount of it.
Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah, I'll I'll go to the party with you, darling, but what time will we come home?
Right.
Or I need to know a destination when we're going for a walk or something. Exactly.
Yeah, it's like I'm willing to do it, but I I
The sense of the five starts to be that
More than a little will probably burn me out, deplete me.
Uh
Be too much.
And so depending on some variations within the type, which that's another whole topic.
You know, my capacity for being with people.
Yeah.
is perceived as limited.
So then that can lead me to a lot of isolation and the isolation and weird thoughts and away we go. One of the types that when we are having
problems they actually look like mental problems. It's not
Some of the types they're still running a company or a country and they got a lot of problems. But five's
look like they got problems.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So six, um
We call this type originally the loyalist, uh, although not when we're we don't call that in Ireland. Um
Ha.
The the loyalist is uh
I also like to call this type the troubleshooter.
'Cause a troubleshooter is somebody who's
Anticipating problems.
and looking down the road and figuring out what could go wrong.
And then doing the necessary steps.
To make sure
that those bad things don't happen. Or perhaps they're also looking at problems that have happened and
considering alternative
things to do to create safety.
And that's what sixes do.
Sixes are just as much thinkers as fives.
Uh, they they're very analytical. They think about a lot of things, but they're more um overtly feeling than five star. They they're more
over openly emotional. They respond more to people's emotions.
That being said, what is their gift?
The gift of the the six is the quality of alertness and awaken and paying attention.
Even the ability to pay attention.
Like how cool that we can be mindful.
Yeah, the there's
Yeah.
We can gather our attention and
Notice what's
What's going on?
And that serves them in
paying attention to what's going on in their life, with their families, with their loved ones, with their company.
Um et cetera.
And sixes often will get this heart feeling of being entrusted with something.
There's uh it's
It's I'm on my watch now.
I'm um yeah, I'm in the night watch, right? For you Game of Thrones fans. And I I have a duty to uphold something and to be aware and
On my watch, I'm gonna do my best to make sure these things get taken care of.
And I'll use my mind to do that. And so there's a kind of devoted quality, a beautiful
Sense of service.
in sixes that I I find very
Lovely. Now when we lose presence
we lose that sense of alertness, awaken, that alu it's it's an interesting thing too. That alertness when it's present
It's also steadying.
We feel more confident, courageous.
Steady
Uh it stabilizes us somehow.
When we lose it,
The awareness turns into a kind of hypervigilance.
Well I
We're like deer that just heard a sound. Like what was that? What was that?
What's going on? What's happening next?
When when's this pandemic gonna be over? What's happening here, right? And so our minds now get activated.
And we start to hyperthink.
And that hyper thinking is driven by anxiety.
The anxiety then is is not what my focus is. My focus is
on my thoughts that are generated by the anxiety. But I'm now I I
Life isn't to be lived or enjoyed, it's to be
handled.
And so I'm like
In my mind forever putting out fires, fixing problems, dealing with life rather than living.
And then the stress of that can get really wearying.
and I can get impatient with myself and others and really kind of
into a downward spiral where just
I I feel like nothing I do is ever good enough.
And that
The the
I'm in like in a pit of sand that no matter what I do, it just keeps getting worse. The self sabotage in that one seems very more apparent.
Yes. Uh
Don used to say, and I l I like this, that the three
uh anchors of the difficult parts of the ego.
Can be found in the nine
the three and the six that are on the central triangle. Self forgetting is the nine, just forgetting to be present here.
I it doesn't matter if I'm here.
Three.
is self deception.
I am the ego and what the ego wants is what's important.
And what's gonna fulfill me.
Wrong.
But we have to convince ourselves to keep going with a lot of this stuff. And then six is you you named it self sabotage.
How I keep my life off kilter so that there isn't the space to consider that there might be anything else going on here.
Uh so anyway, you get the idea of that being kind of anxious. Sixes are one of the types that sometimes thinks they're
fours because they
They
When they're
Caught in their stuff, they have a lot of emotions, and they they have a really low self-concept, so they can think they're force.
Seven.
Is uh
Our last
stop on the train. Seven is
Also about the head center. So we saw that clarity of the five, the awakeness of the six, seven is the openness of mind.
This is the enthusiast.
The enthusiast, right.
uh and so there's a kind of enthusiastic positive energy curiosity
willingness to try things, try new food, try new experiences, travel, experience this world while we're here.
And
And that openness
Also brings a sense of
Appreciation.
That openness experience brings a kind of lightness of heart.
and makes us feel positive
But not a positivity that's an avoidance of difficulty or pain.
It's the positivity that's there for us.
when we're having difficulty and pain.
It doesn't flee.
because we're having difficulty. It's it's the spirit in us that stays there even when we're having a terrible time.
When sevens are in their power.
They're the most exploratory, adventurous people. They check things out. They read, they study, they learn about a lot of things. They if something grabs their attention, they check it out.
And that's a cool thing.
Not only that, but they're the ones who bring hope.
They bring positivity when
bad things are happening, they rise to the occasion and and show people that
You know, don't give up.
We we can still do this.
They keep the lights on.
And so they're the bringers of that positivity.
When they lose their oh, the other big thing here didn't say is that
Openness is also the experience of freedom.
But inner freedom.
It's it's
Freedom not as the ego understands it. It's
M it's not that I have freedom, it's that my nature is freedom.
In my soul I am free.
It's funny how many people
Discovered that in prison.
G go deeper on that.
Yeah, I w I was in um South Africa years ago. I used to go there and teach
pretty regularly and you know
God willing and health permitting a
Go there again sometime, I
Beautiful country, great people. But I was uh at Robin Island and um
went and visited the prison cell.
of Nelson Mandela.
And it was really small.
And very simple, very primitive, and just thinking of him
In there for years.
But it was in there that his vision of how to
save South Africa and end apartheid.

And if you read his writings, it was there when he didn't have the ego's idea of freedom.
He found his inner freedom.
Now we would want him to have the outer kind too.
But the cool thing about the inner kind is you can't take that away from somebody.
Right.
You know, people found that you know, Victor Frankel wrote about this. Yeah, I was just thinking that about the Holocaust and his experience and Auschwitz, right? And hi he said the last of the human freedoms is sort of like the ability to respond.
Yes.
And exactly, and so people sometimes discover these deeper aspects. Uh Sri Arabindo in India, one of the great saints of of
The last

He
also came to his realization while he was imprisoned.
for sedition against the British government.
So
You know.
What we're saying here, that doesn't mean that it's okay that people are suffering or imprisoned or
Uh that's not what I mean, but that
We will be dissatisfied by what looks like freedom to us.
Which on the ego is having more options, having more choices, being able to do whatever I want, which is I call that lovingly my inner two year old.
Yeah, but real freedom, as one of my teachers used to say, is no longer being ruled by an inner two year old.
Right. It's another
thing and y look at these figures who found it.
They didn't come out and just indulge themselves. They
were i pivotal figures for their cultures. So that
Finding that inner freedom, that positivity is becomes a source of inspiration. When we lose it, then we're just trying to
Find what's interesting, keep our options open, do this, do that. And the the danger sevens is that they scatter themselves.
They're often brilliant talented people, but they don't
they lose patience with themselves before they get to the gold of whatever it is that they're exploring.
So uh they're they try this, they try that, they try that, but you can feel the kind of frustration that
I'm looking for something. I'm trying to find out who I'm supposed to be when I grow up, right?
But the the point of the matter is that
That
mental activity like in the six and the five is obscuring the freedom and the spaciousness that is my nature.
So just to recap for everybody, one was the reformer, two was the helper, three was the achiever, four was the individualist.
Five was the investigator.
Six was the loyalist, seven was the enthusiast.
Eight was the challenger and nine was the peacemaker.
Right.
And
Like
I I remember reading
um one of your books in preparation for this. And you said the dominant emotions in the triad were anger, anxiety, and shame. Yeah.
Oh
Walk me through that which is which and
And that's when you're disconnected with your your your presence, right?
Right.
The idea is that when we start
in the course of ego development in childhood to lose
The felt sense of what we are, which must happen.
It happens, right? Just for some reason.
We go through these developmental stages and that's part of it.
But in the course of losing that grounding,
Mm-hmm.
our heart goes into reaction and our nervous system goes into reaction.
And so we talk about these as kind of emotional instinctual energies that are there.
In all ego states.
So there's always some degree of anger or rage.
And the way we look at this too is that if you dig into particular psychological issues
you will sooner or later hit a layer that's just pure
emotional energy.
that what's really there underneath whatever the story is is just a lot of
Yeah.
Anger that didn't have an outlet.
And
We talk about also how each of these emotions is workable.
It's not bad or wrong, but again, if we bring that three centered presence and kindness to it,
It
Yeah.
Finishes its job.
It does whatever it was there to do and it transmutes into an ingredient we actually need.
So anger
If we're present with anger, it only lasts a few seconds.
When we're not prison with anger, it can last our whole life.
Yeah, I like to think about that as like we often just push
feeling actually aside. We we analyze it, we rationalise it, we
investigate it, but we we do everything but actually feel
that feeling and that emotion and because we don't
Experience it.
it it comes to crop up later and it boils over and we we can't
And if you just take the time in the moment to feel what you're feeling.
It'll pass.
That's right. And there's a difference between
W this is where some people get scared of their emotions. There's a difference between feeling my emotion and acting it out.
Many people think if they feel their anger they're gonna go around smash
things or attack people, but that's not it. The people going around smashing things and attacking people are not.
in touch with their anger.
It's going instantly into a behavior and that's how they've learned
to control it.
But that's not the same as being with it.
So what does it mean to be with your feelings or your emotions?
Well again it comes down to this uh
Acquiring the capacity
To be
in the body.
If I'm in the body with anger, anger has
Very particular sensations. It usually feels like heat.
For one thing.
Uh we may feel it in particular places. Sometimes it manifests when we're resisting it. It locks up our jaw.
our necks get tense, our shoulders, there's a whole musculature around the resistance and holding of anger. But when we sort of let it go, it it feels
almost more liquidy and it feels like liquid heat.
And that heat can be useful in dissolving these rigid places where I've been holding anger.
So there's a logic to how we unpack. You know, some people study trauma, I think of Peter Levine.
Uh
looked at how animals are so good at just doing going through their kind of physiological paces to release trauma, but trauma will usually come accompanied with really big emotional energies.
It doesn't always have to be at the level of trauma.
But we learn from that.
study that that's how you can work with these things.
So just
l getting in touch with the energy of it, moving.
Expressing
Can all help.
to move anger through, when anger is presence, it transmutes into
empowerment and confidence.
In the ability to take a stand
to have a voice, to speak your truth.
People who can't be in touch with their anger have trouble with all of those things.
What do we do with anxiety?
Anxiety is um
it it's deeper root, I I was looking for a long time to find the right word. And I use this for the the so-called passion of point six. Each type has a
Particular.
quote passion, but we don't mean like being passionate. It means a form of suffering.
And
I couldn't find a good English word, so I turned to German.
And the best word is angst.
Angst, which is not just anxiety, but the suffering of anxiety, the sort of twisted anguished, uh
Feeling.
Anxiety is
You know
Unprocessed fear.
Oh, tell me more about that. Yeah, fear could be
You know, you see
something dangerous, uh somebody's approaching you with uh a weapon in their hand, it fear is just suddenly adrenaline pumps through your system and activates your arms and legs to move and groove you toward running away or fighting back or
Or f freezing, you know, fear is you know, fight, flight or freeze.
However, w when we don't process fear, it becomes this backlog of
sort of jitters and unease and not being able to sink into ourselves and
the it keeps our mind turning and turning and turning. You know, I noticed a lot of people, um as we're having this conversation, we're in the midst of this
Uh Covid.
uh experience across the planet and a lot of people are having anxiety.
Needless to say. And so a lot of what's a manifestation? Sleeplessness. A lot of people having trouble getting to sleep at night.
So this restless quality.
Is is the symptom of anxiety and the mind turning.
But anxiety
When we feel it again it's an energy in the body.
It feels like
Batter acid.
It's kind of
Acrid and
energized and a little electrical feeling.
When we presence anxiety.
And we we're with it in the body.
the heart, with the mind, to whatever degree we can.
It transmutes into awaken.
into paying attention. Cause when we're scared, we're not sleepy.
We're not out of it.
Our attention may be misdirected.
But we're paying attention.
If you hear a bump in the middle of the night, you're suddenly not sleepy.
You know, you're still like
You're activated. So when you can relax.
The tense
reactive part of that.
When you can breathe through the anxiety.
It becomes awareness.
becomes lucidity.
Yeah, I think it was uh
Virginia Sateer.
Who said that
Anxiety
is excitement without breathing.
So they're all workable, but again, the five, six, and seven.
ha tend to have more issues with anxiety.
The turning thoughts, the restlessness, and so forth.
Uh, sometimes people say, I'm not sure if I'm a nine or a five. I said, Do you fall asleep easily or is it hard for you to sleep?
There's does your mind keep turning and you can't stop it or are you able to just chill out? That's
One distinction.
Whereas the eight, nine, and one have more issues with anger and the expression of anger and finding out how to be with anger.
The uh
The two, three, and four are about we we talk about shame.
Let's talk about hurt.
Broken heartedness.
If you got an ego.
You got some broken heartedness.
Part of the challenge of waking up is
being able to be with our brokenheartedness.
And my gosh, everybody else.
But it's a weird thing, you know, we're so afraid of it, yet it's the
One of the main ways we human beings connect.
When we can acknowledge each other's hurt.
and the difficulties and how despite the difficulties we've been through, somehow we're both still here.
Well that's kinda remarkable.
So there's a a sense of
being able to learn to be with our brokenheartedness and not be into some kind of narrative or story about it.
Like it's some proof there's something wrong with me. I'm not lovable. I'm a flop.
I I'm boring, I'm not sexy, whatever.
We have all kind of negative narratives that can come out of that.
On the other hand, the defense against it is narcissistic grandiosity.
I'm more loving than anyone and without my help, ever the whole everybody in my life will fall to pieces. Well, that's kind of grandios.
I I'm the one only one who knows what to do in this company. I can make things happen. I'm gonna
little grandiose. I'm I'm the most talented person around, maybe.
I'm deeper and more profound than anyone I know. Really? How do you know that?
That's a rather narcissistic view of yourself. I need to be needed.
I need that validation.
Exactly.
Narcissism, if we look at it this way, is a pretty normal human thing. And if we're gonna work with this stuff, it needs to stop being a dirty word.
W we need to sort of acknowledge everybody has some.
But it's to what degree is it running my life and
What is it defending me against?
People are more narcissistic, have big wounds.
and heartbreak around their lovability, their value.
their sense of worth, and so they need to create an inflation as a defense against that. So
when you're looking at this, this underlying shame
And hurt.
The shame actually is the recognition if I can be present with it.
It's the recognition that I
I'm aware that I'm not being my truth.
I'm aware that I'm not who I am.
And the first step I always tell my students is
Acknowledging that you don't know who you are is a step into who you are.
Right, to start to feel
just that question alive, then the shame becomes more of a a fire.
That's gonna carry me toward the truth that will set me free.
And so everything that we're looking at is workable. And that's why we learn it. It is no point just saying here's what's wrong with you.
We already think there's so many things wrong with this. This is how the Enigram takes us from what seems to be
malfunctioning in us and connects it with what is most beautiful in us. That's I think the magic of it. It's both. Yeah. What are wings and stress arrows?
Wings are just the idea that
Whatever your enagram type.
the two types on either side of your type on the circle.
Represent
mm, tendencies or variations on the theme.
So for example

Point five.
My wings could be four.
'Cause going around this goes four, five, six. So my wings can be four or six. Meaning
As a five, I lean towards the four side of that, or I lean toward the six side of it.
Now
I think the wings are a little more flexible, and I used to talk about this with my friend Richard Rohr, who some of you may know.
We both felt that people
In childhood.
Figure out one of those
Angles gets my needs bet met met better than the other one. Right.
It gets fed.
Exactly. You get your people respond, you get
Taken care of by
Emphasizing some part of your type.
The range of your type.
But
As you get older
Usually in midlife.
Some some people in their thirties, some people in their forties, some people in their fifties.
you start to explore the other wing again, like, Oh, here's this part I kinda
the side of my type I didn't use. It's like opening up some rooms in your home that you you you you closed off. Oh yeah.
There's some old stuff here. It's kinda interesting.
And you start to
Find this it it part of um
The cool thing about midlife and going into your later years is you start to find these other parts of you that you didn't necessarily develop in the first part of your life. Why do you think we find that later in life?

I think because

As we're getting started in life.
We're
we're sort of eliminating things that don't
get what we need and we're putting our eggs in the baskets
That seem to provide
the best means for us to get
what we're looking for.
And so we narrow our focus. We're trying to figure out who we are when we're adolescents and teenagers, we're we're trying things on and eliminating things. So we're zeroing in on something. But having zeroed in on it and it producing whatever result it does, in the latter part of life, we can relax a little bit and say, Okay,
what's what else is there in life. It's pretty normal, you know, uh

a lot of the people that I end up working with who are in mid or later life, that's it. Like I did X, Y, and Z.
And now I'm feeling like what's the what are these chapters about other than you know playing golf or something. Right.
What are stress arrows?
Stress narrowers are the internal lines, um
If you look at the enneagram symbol
It's got a circle, but each of the nine points has two internal lines connected to it.
Now
one of the common misunderstandings is
And it it came out of one of the
Uh
let's say lineages of transmission in the early days of the enagram, is that one of those directions is good and one of them is bad. Well, it's not like that.
They both are
Ingredients.
that can be helpful.

Because they tend to be ingredients that get
Dropped.
When we're
overly focused on our core point.
When we're two
Identified to stuck.
in the fixated pattern of our own type.
we're not conscious of the importance of these other two
uh directions. So they're they're sort of like skeleton keys. They're magic.
Um so when we're not particularly present
These are so important to us we act them out.
in different situations in life.
Some more generally, some our loved ones are gonna get.
So for example, I'll use my example again, I'm a five when I am
under stress one of the directions is to seven. If you look on the enigram symbol, there's a line between five and seven.
What that means is
I can't
mm focus. I can't contract. I can't
withdraw any more. I'm I'm sort of
Fiving out, if you see what I mean. So
the psyche automatically starts to compensate.
By do bringing the opposite.
which is the seven is to suddenly go out, explore things, do this, do that.
I I used to say I could tell how overstressed I am by how many
Books I have stacked on my nightstand.
Because instead of reading one I've I've started you know, six.
And that's more like a seven in stress.
So it's not like I become a seven.
But the seven represents a reaction to me overdoing my fiveness, and a necessary reaction.
But it's very different thing.
When I'm consciously
Invoking.
the good qualities of seven as a balance to my own type. The other direction would be for me is if I would be eight.
And so
that direction I I tend to be more blind to, but you know
I can be really
And the low side of it, the acting advert can be real bossy.
I can be real controlling.
If there's a party going on, I'm gonna decide what the music is or I'm not going to that party.
I'm not gonna listen to somebody else's terrible mix unless I really trust them. Now I'm better at that than I used to be, but when I was a younger guy, forget about it.
Very dominating.
If you guys don't wanna do what I wanna do, I'll go do it on my own.
But I didn't see that about myself. You march to the beat of your own drum.
And beyond that, I made other people march to the beat on my drum. But you see, I didn't see that about myself, but it represented, yeah, as a five, I needed that grounded, confident embodiment so that there was an outlet and an output for all this stuff I had figured out.
So it uh when I brought it in consciously, see, consciously is also acknowledging the shadow part of it.
But they there's they suggest
Paths of
Development again.
And that's and so that's the the really short version of it. You could do a big study of those inner lines, but some teachers say they they're not really they don't matter. I think if you take them out, you don't have the enneagram. You just have, again, a tic tac toe board of nine descriptions, which
won't get you too far.
One of the things I appreciated when you were giving the descriptions is sort of
What it looks like when you lose your presence and what it
feels like and and what happens in those cases. So you can sort of like feel yourself slipping away and see
uh what that default response would be. How do you think about
um the mental biases arising from each of the nine
sort of approaches or um
Types.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Th we all are gonna sort for
What we value.
And we're all gonna look
to certain kind of responses. Some types
Are looking for an emotional response.
They're looking for some kind of visceral real
put your cards on the table, get in the trenches with me. And so I'm looking for that.
And my bias is that
s people respond that way are straight shooters.
That's somebody I can work with. That's somebody I trust.
Some types.
want to be
positive and want to be inspired and want to be reassured and they want to reassure.
And that's their gift and it's their bias.
And some types don't want to get into positivity or emotions, they want to be logical.
And reasonable.
And so like that's what my prejudice is.
toward
Talking about things that way. It needs to make sense to me. It needs to, yeah.
Exactly. So I am always um
saying that if we're gonna be skillful in human communication and working with people, we need to develop
Two other languages.
We might kinda usually people are really good at one and
kind of okay to nether and one they just don't know that language.
So if you you're gonna be good at this, you you can be logical and rational, you can inspire and reassure and bring positive vibes.
And you can be real and say what's really going on in you and invite that from others. And that doesn't it sounds so easy and reasonable when you lay it out on paper, but actually doing it.
is not that common.
And how do we use this information? Like how do organizations use this commonly to improve their ability to
um hire people or be more productive.
Well, you know, people use it a lot of different ways.
I've used it.
in a few particular modalities. There's things I think it's good for and things it's not good for, to go back to one of your earlier questions. Um my friend and colleague Catherine Bell
lives out in Calgary and she's been using it in organizations a great bit. I have other colleagues
Here. Um
who have been doing so. I find that it's especially good
for executive coaching and leadership development.
and kind of the formation and of qualities that are needed for people to be effective in any kind of leadership role.
in organizations. And I also find it very good for team building.
And when I'm using it for teams
I'm not necessarily focusing on everybody typing everybody in the room.
Oh, go on.
I'm getting more of a sense.
In a a group.
Even a country or a uh any organization
Has

Memes, if you like, dominant.
And every group has certain type
capacities or
Or um
Ingredients.
Somewhat
lagging or in some cases even absent.
And so you can look at a group that way and analyze w what are we do well, what comes easily as a group, what's been our focus, what's kinda okay and what
really do we need to put a little loving attention into because in my experience the stuff that you leave out
comes back to bite you on the the back side later on if you don't deal with it.
What do you mean the stuff you leave at?
Well for example.
practical example, I worked with a number of banks.
back in the mid to late.
uh knots, you know, around two thousand seven and so and
Not surprisingly, a lot of financial institutions were reaching out for help at that point.
because in their you know eleven thirty uh wake up call, they realized they were in big trouble.
And
A lot of times
I would work with
A group of
directors of those institutions.
And what we found on their team over and over was they had a lot of energy that
another grouping that we use the Enneagram. They a lot of assertive energy. They a lot of go getter energy, which you would expect from somebody in that in
finance and arbitrage and so forth. You kinda need to be that.
If you're gonna succeed in those businesses. And so there was a lot of that energy.
a a predominance of those types in the group
But also just
their overall values were in that direction. So they saw goal, went for it.
There was a certain degree of what I call the sort of maintenance and standards types.
that were and that energy was there, like maintaining things, making sure protocols were observed, making sure that you know things got connected and there was follow through and all that stuff. They had a certain degree of that. What they were
almost always absent in
uh was what I call strategic long view.
Or what in uh in our book we called the withdrawn.
style.
Which is they each corresponded types. Three seven and eight is the
Go getters, the
the assertive.
Um
Initiators.
And then the one, two, and six is um
The dutiful style, altruistic, dutiful
Make sure it gets done.
The mechanical sort of proficiency almost.
Well, just making sure that the right things happen and
uh willing to make sacrifices to have that occur.
Right.
The the
Four, five, and nine are the withdrawn style, but I in business I call them strategic long view'cause they're the people who are really quiet at the meeting.
and sometimes have something to say at the end.
But their style is to take in all the bits of what's going on and get the gestalt of it and say something about the bigger picture.
Now imagine banks
In the mid naughts making money hand over fist.
What were they not doing?
Thinking about the future. They weren't seeing the bigger picture. They weren't seeing the implications. They were not hearing that waterfall that they were headed toward.
They weren't reading the signals. They didn't want to because they were getting
excited and about approaching the goals that they had. So
When that's a really practical example and I I think a
a pretty understandable one.
Uh so when you bring in that view, when I work with a group like that, I wouldn't necessarily say you gotta hire a certain type.
That may or may not be practical.
But we look at the group and say who in this group
can play that role.
Which one of you could
reasonably and then they have an interesting creative discussion about it.
So I when I use it in organizations I'm not using it going around typing people'cause a lot of times
People just get obnoxious with that. They
They use it to make fun of colleagues. I mean it's not helpful.
But I use it to help them
Si
Their strengths and weakness is in accomplishing whatever their particular mission is.
I think it's also I mean, it sounds like it'd be super useful in the context of a couple or relationship, right? Where
Walk me through that. Let's let's dive into that.
Sure. I I you know, one thing that uh Don and I always used to say people would ask us questions like uh which type should I be with? I'm this type, what would be a good type for me?
And Don's uh funny answer was always healthy.
Get a healthy type.
Uh fine the the higher of any of them, somebody who's done some psychological work is gonna be uh more of a delightful person to live with. And I would add
Y if you want to be with such a person, make sure you're ready.
Right. What does that mean to be ready?
Well that you've been looking at yourself. You know yourself. You know your guts. You you have some awareness of your strengths and weaknesses, and you've done some psychological or some spiritual work so that you are able to engage meaningfully in conversations about these things should problems come up and
Will problems come up? Yes. Yeah. How you handle those problems is sort of like everything, right?
Absolutely. So it gives I think gives a lot of couples language to talk about what's going on with them.
It helps them see where they align on values and where they see things differently.
And so when I'm counseling couples that really are committed to working things out with each other.
Uh I'm always saying, Okay, here's where you guys are different.
How can you turn that into a benefit?
Where your
kind of coaching and helping each other with something that's your strength, but you're also receiving the strength.
and the wisdom of your your partner who has a different
set of values. We get into that talking about just the enagram types, but there are all kind of other elements to that. Like we we haven't talked about the subtypes or the instincts. It's another you could do a whole here a week just for that. Yeah. Um but like maybe we could break it up into the triad a little bit. And if I'm um
If I'm in a relationship or I'm married to somebody who's thinking like
How do I how can I
um go deeper into my connection with them or what if they're feeling uh what do I do as a partner to
Um to
bring that to a more meaningful place? Or what if they're anxious? How do I respond when they are anxious? What are the things that we can do as partners to improve
That aspect of our relationship.
And go deeper with our partner.
Well it it's kind of a two parter and uh
There's general principles I could give us in in the time frame we have. Um
People when they're having difficulties.
Are always hoping
That someone will show up for them.
in the way they would for us when they're at their best.
For example, if if I'm in relationship with a nine.
When I think about my nine beloved or my nine friend
What do they do?
that's so helpful to me when they're at their best.
They're just there.
They're not laying trips on me. They're not putting an agenda on me. They're not trying to fix me. They're just there in a steady, kind, understanding way.
And
And in that I can kind of find my feet and
and get back into orientation again.
They're present, you feel safe.
They're present, you feel safe.
Not land trips.
Guess what?
My beloved nine once.
Me to do.
Right.
Be there in the same way.
Yes, now I may bring also the gift of what I can do from my type, but I don't have to think about that. I just do that very automatically. But if I do that in the context of what that person is seeking,
That reminds them of them at their best, which helps them find their center.
So my eight friend would be really
fiercely there with me, would be so there, would be inviting me to
to talk about what I was feeling would let me know that they're strong enough. They can take it.
Let me know, right?
and the and that kind of bid for realness.
That's what they want.
They wanna know.
I'm in the trenches with them. I I'm I'm with them. I'm not feeling their feelings for them, but I get it and I'm there and I'm
I care.
Right. I got you.
That's it. So you if you study your partner as what they do.
As their gift.
to you when you're having trouble, see if you can bring some of that to them. That's one thing.
The other thing is that
By those triads, as you were asking me.
Each triad.
meaning the belly oriented types, the heart oriented types, that they're looking for certain things from their relationship.
For the eight, nine and one
S they're looking for respect.
They're looking for a field of respect.
So if you look at the eight nine and one, even if they're troubled.
Even if they're having a terrible time.
They can feel if you're there in a way that
Honors their integrity.
Their autonomy.
who they are, you're with them, respecting them and who and what they are, even in the midst of their difficulty, and they will pick that up.
Because again, at their best, that's what they do.
And again it's kind of a non negotiable eight nine and one um
You know, if if I don't feel you're respecting me
Yeah, the deal's off. I'm done with you.
Nines might be nice about it. They they
And it's a Namaste with the certain Anglo Saxon phrase that follows it.
But uh
You know.
The that
I've written you off. You don't respect me. But it's also true that they
when they're really angry with somebody, they they punish people by not respecting them.
Two, three, and four. Um
Want to be seen.
Known.
And validated.
You see me, you get me.
You're validating you're you're okaying you're with my feelings.
All those types
May
later on want to sort things out.
Okay, let's see what this is really about. But that ain't gonna happen if first there isn't that sense that
You're with me, you're seeing me, you're getting me.
You're you're really wanting to know me. You care about that I'm having these feelings, and you're letting me have these feelings.
Right.
And
They they work that out in different ways. It's sort of interesting'cause force that's leads.
They're they're gonna put those feelings out right away and see what

The two and three are more cagey.
I don't
necessarily trust that you will be with my feelings or see me.
But if I perceive that you do see me and get me and see that I'm struggling
And you're making that okay.
Oh.
I'm relieved and I'll come forward and I'll
I will meet you more.
And the
You know, the all three of them really don't expect they they they're surprised when they perceive that someone sees them or gets them.
They don't they don't expect it. Of course everybody's like that to some degree.
But twos, threes, and fours, that's the main thing. And
again, when um we are not doing too well, we punish others by withdrawing our seeing and validation of them.
We we just
Kind of cut them off emotionally.
Um, five, six, and seven, it's a little harder to put into words, but
They're looking for someone who can just be there with them in a steady way.
Not approaching, not withdrawing.
Not
gloming on or taking over or fixing and not abandoning.
Like you're you're not leaving me?
And you're not
Getting into my stuff.
Just consistent.
consistent. Right. And so
I if I perceive that that you're just here with me and trust you know, it and
I'm gonna work this out.
All five, six, and seven.
Has that
conviction. I will work this out.
But if I know you're there, you're my ally, you're in this with me and you're
Not leaving me and not trying to take over and
And
I all three five six seven hate to be
the recipient of someone else helping them or saving them.
Right, don't solve my problems for me. Just hold my hand and like go through it with me.
Exactly. So um
As as
w I feel someone will do that, then I will start working it out and I'll feel more connected and and and it helps heal what's ever going on in the relationship. And of course, again
Five, six, and seven are the worst in being steady for somebody when they're not having troubles. Am I in the relationship? Am I out? Am I too close? Am I running away? I'm all over the place. Nobody knows what I'm gonna do, including me.
So
Th that's one bit of uh advice around all that stuff.
That's amazing. Um, I know we're we're cutting up on time here. So two two final questions. Um
What's the best starter material? Like where can people go to learn more about the Enneagram if they're interested and curious?
Well, you know, there's a lot of good uh material out there. There's a number of books. Kinda depends on your orientation. Um, I of course
Um
Um
feels
that the some of the books that Don Richeriso and I wrote together are very solid and helpful.
a lot of people would say that
the book uh the wisdom of the enneagram
that he and I wrote um
That's the best one.
Yeah, a lot of people, you know, including other teachers will sort of acknowledge it's like a classic textbook. You know, I've I've done twenty more years of study, so there's a few quibbles I'd have with things
I said in that book, but
Overall I think it
It's
powerful because it also gives you the orientation. It's not just describing types.
Uh there are other we wrote a number of books and any of them
would be, you know, worthy
we have websites, uh the Energim Institute dot com is or just Enneagram Institute dot com is um
Is that is that where people can find you on the internet is sort of the Enneagram Institute.
Well, two places. That would be the site that was created uh for Don Riso and me and our work is on there and our our Enneagram tests the
the ready R H E T I is on that site. Uh
Also, uh I have a site just for what I'm doing that includes stuff that I'm not doing with the institute.
And that's just Russ Hudson dot com.
You know, some of my colleagues had done wonderful work, I would say, um you know

You're better off with people who have been studying this a while.
And I would also say that whatever book you look at
Consider that it is a
view on this.
None of them is the Bible. Yeah, none of them is the final say.
And you can you'll feel in just what's helpful, what's useful.
What actually opens things up for you and what tends to
Reinforce. The other thing I always look for in any Enigram book or teaching or teacher, how even handed is it?
How much are the
teacher or writer's prejudices hanging out, like they had a bad relationship with the four, so the four gets a lot of shade, you know, or the or maybe it was a three, and or some type is still idealized for some reason. So when you
When you have more mature teachers or teachings,
There's a fair and a
Seeing the light.
And shade of each of the
Enigram types.
Russ, thank you so much. This has been an amazing conversation.
Thank you so much, Shane. I had a lot of fun. These were really uh
Good questions for me to think about too.