Mike:               Friends, welcome back to the Everything Belongs podcast with Father Richard Rohr. Each season, we’ve explored an aspect of Richard’s deep teachings, usually focusing on one of his books. So far, we’ve looked at Falling Upward, we’ve looked at Eager to Love, and last season, we looked at Richard’s latest book: The Tears of Things.

Each episode, we travel over to Richard’s house to unpack some wisdom with him, and then we’re joined by a guest who helps us to live the teachings forward, to think about Richard’s wisdom in new ways by asking new questions emerging in our rapidly changing world. But this season is a little bit different. This season, we’re exploring a contemporary tool that draws on ancient wisdom, a tool of discernment, solidarity, and self-discovery that focuses on how our wounds can lead us to our wisdom and to discerning our work in the world. And of course, I’m talking about the Enneagram.

If you’d like to read along, you’re welcome to pick up a copy of Richard’s book, The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective, and check out pages one through 42. But more importantly, we want this season to cultivate a conversation. We want to invite you to expand the exploration and dive into the discussion with us, and with friends who want to listen along and live the teachings forward yourselves.

Whether it’s with one trusted friend, a spiritual director, or a group, a monthly meeting in a coffee shop, a living room, or a Zoom room, we encourage you to find folks who want to listen along or even read Richard’s book together, or one of the many other great books that we’re going to reference this season. Towards that end, we’ve created some resources to help facilitate your own exploration with conversation starters, reflection questions, and bonus content. You can sign up to receive all this great stuff monthly at cac.org/belongs2026, that’s cac.org/belongs2026. Our hope is that as we spend the next year exploring the Enneagram, it helps us understand ourselves a little more, understand others, and figure out how we can put all of our healing into the service of healing the world. Once again, it’s our wounds that lead us to our weird, to our wisdom, and to our work to make the world a better place. Last episode, we talked about Enneagram origin stories with Richard and our amazing hosting team. Today, we’re talking about Enneagram essentials, and next month we’ll start diving into the numbers.

And so without further ado, today we’re first going to go to Richard’s house to explore some of the essential history and themes that influence the way that he understands and teaches the Enneagram. And then we’ll be joined by OG Enneagram teacher and author, frequent collaborator with Richard, Russ Hudson, who’s been studying and teaching the Enneagram for over 30 years. In our conversation with Russ, we’ll discuss an approach for the ways that the Enneagram can help us understand the process of moving beyond our problems to presence and purpose in our lives. We are so excited to share these conversations with you, so let’s head over to Richard’s house to hook up with Paul and Opie and talk about the essentials of the Enneagram. From the Center for Action and Contemplation, I’m Mike Petrow.

Paul:                I’m Paul Swanson.

Carmen:           I’m Carmen Acevedo Butcher.

Cassidy:            I’m Cassidy Hall.

Drew:               And I’m Drew Jackson.

Mike:               And this is Everything Belongs. Richard, Paul, it is so good to be with you again.

Paul:                Great to be back together.

Richard:           Thank you.

Mike:               I am so excited to talk to you, Richard Moore, about the Enneagram, and the Enneagram has become so popular since you started teaching it. Oh my gosh, it seems to be everywhere.

Richard:           Much more. Yeah.

Mike:               What we’re excited about in this podcast is to really dial in to how you teach it uniquely, Richard. And when we think about the Enneagram, however it came to be in its present popular form, in listening to you teach about this, I hear five extremely interesting ingredients that you sort of cook up in your kitchen in the sort of Rohrian recipe.

Richard:           What are they? I have to hear them.

Mike:               Oh yeah. Absolutely. I’m thrilled to share them with you. The first thing I sort of taste in here in the way that you do this is the importance of the way of the wound in Christian scripture in teaching. The second thing is the crucial foundation of the desert fathers and mothers as the headwaters of contemplative Christianity and sort of the origin of what would later become the Enneagram. The third ingredient that I notice is the importance of spiritual direction and the practice of discernment in the Christian mystical tradition, even though they’re very practical things to think about being a part of the mystical tradition.

Richard:           As opposed to confession and getting rid of it.

Mike:               Oh, that’s really insightful. I’m excited to get into that.

Paul:                Yeah, that’s a good distinction.

Mike:               Fourth ingredient is the deep wisdom of the Sufi tradition, coming from mystical Islam. And the fifth and final ingredient is the profound insight of contemporary psychology and helping us understand personality and development. And these are all things I’ve really, really appreciated in the way that you talk about the history, but also in what shows up in your teaching. So if you don’t mind, we’d love to ask you about each of them one at a time.

Richard:           All right.

Paul:                So Richard, let’s start with the way of the wound. You mentioned this in some of your online teachings in Enneagram and the audio teachings. Why is this idea, this way of the wound or the wound of the way, so central to Christian teaching in the Enneagram? We’re

Richard:           Fortunate that the world of the Enneagram emerged in the early ’70s to some degree, simultaneously with the emergence of 12 step spirituality. The transferring from guilt to shame, recognizing what we’re dealing with is not something we easily recognize or even feel guilty about, it’s what we’re trapped inside of. And doesn’t deserve shaming a person, but deserves recognition.

We confessed our sins as little Catholic boys thinking now they’re gone. That implies the whole notion of punishment and reward and forgiveness. Whereas the way of the wound recognizes, “This is something I’m wounded by so much so that I can’t see it.” You impute guilt, you suffer shame, and both the 12 step program and the Enneagram transferred our attention to the suffering of shame. Like when I could still see the place on Mitchell Avenue in Cincinnati, when I was driving home from my spiritual director appointment at Xavier University and it hit me.

“My God, he’s been talking about me when he talks about a one. That’s what I am. That’s why I did everything. How come I couldn’t see it with such clarity? It’s nothing I choose about which I should feel guilty. It’s something imprisoning. It’s something that I don’t know how to change. It’s who I am.” I went back to my office and just began to journalize about why I am a one.

And the feeling was that emerged as I’m doing that was shame of that, “Why did I not see this?” And there’s no point in confessing it to get rid of the reward/punishment thing. It’s you suffer it and it enlightens you, liberates you. It frees you not to really change. I’m sorry to say, that the energy is still there, but now you have a handle on it. You suffer it. You commit a sin. You suffer a wound.

Mike:               Wow.

Richard:           And the more you suffer it, the more it nuances you and enlightens you. Now at my old age, I’m glad I know it without being able to get rid of it. It keeps you humbly wounded.

Mike:               It’s such a gift, though, to realize that your wound and your gift are so close to that.

Richard:           Very good. I didn’t develop that. Go ahead, say it.

Mike:               Well, no, just that’s the insight. You said once that you wished you’d used the word sin a little bit less in the book that you wrote.

Richard:           Yes.

Mike:               And I wonder about swapping the word sin for wound sometimes when I read it. So you say, “God makes use of our sins.” And I wonder, could you just say God makes use of our wounds?

Richard:           Woundedness. Yes.

Mike:               “Thus, every gift we get excessively fixated on paradoxically becomes our sin. Our gift and our sin are two sides of the same coin.” Could we also read that as every gift that we get excessively fixated on paradoxically becomes our wound? Our gift and our wound are two sides of the same coin.

Richard:           We stop looking for sinners so we can localize and impute fault. Whereas that whole game falls apart with the enneagramatic understanding of sin. But I think I used the word sin even in my first book on the Enneagram, simply because the word is so dominant in the Old and New Testament and we’ve all Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox grown up with it without a great deal of help in overcoming sin, I might add. It just trapped us in guilt.

Paul:                What’s coming up for me is you talk about the swapping of wound and sin. Richard, you had mentioned the 12 steps kind of growing in popularity, particularly around the Enneagram popularization as well.

Richard:           Yes.

Paul:                And thinking about the way the step one and the powerlessness of that. And there’s something that’s very similar when you accept the powerlessness of whatever your enneagram type is.

Richard:           That’s right. Very good.

Paul:                And it feels like the wound language helps one move through how to actually deal with whatever your type is or in the case of 12 steps, whatever your addiction is as well. They seem to be good conversation partners for understanding who you are and how to move through them.

Richard:           You know the big giveaway of what you say is true. And you both know the scripture. So is there any story in the four gospels of someone running to Jesus saying, “Forgive my sins.” They’re just saying, “Heal me.”

Mike:               Yeah.

Richard:           It’s always heal me.

Mike:               Yeah.

Richard:           Now sometimes he does.

Mike:               Yeah.

Richard:           He does.

Mike:               Yeah.

Richard:           So your sins are forgiven.

Mike:               And that’s not healing.

Richard:           But our real sin we don’t want forgiveness for. We’re trapped inside of it. The Enneagram study releases the whole notion of liberation from. It’s always, “Go, your faith has healed you.”

Mike:               It will surprise no one that this reminds me of something in the teaching of origin, but he talked about this idea of health bestowing wounds. We’ve talked about this before. What he said is that if we stayed with our wounds … he talks about this in his commentary on the Song of Songs, that they become health bestowing wounds and each wound eventually leads its own unique type of wisdom. They lead us to our unique wisdom, which shows us our work to do in the world, but you’ve got to stay with the wound to get there. And that’s hard work if you don’t have love for it.

Richard:           It is hard. Because it never stops. Here I am 50 years later from when I first learned it, and I’m still recognizing new ways, new exciting ways. I’m a one.

Paul:                Well, it seems without that sense of belonging to the economy of grace, it just becomes a self-referential work.

Richard:           To get rid of my guilt so I can get a reward. That reward/punishment scenario just has to be let go of because it keeps the whole thing in a self-serving circle.

Mike:               I’m really excited in this season to get into not only the wounds, but also the gifts of each of the numbers with you.

Richard:           Good.

Mike:               I love every time you teach about the desert fathers and mothers this-

Richard:           I don’t do it enough.

Mike:               Yeah.

Richard:           Go ahead.

Mike:               Well, no, this early group of Christians at this moment in time where Christianity became the popular religion in Rome and suddenly it became a prosperity gospel and it was a way up and they remembered that it was supposed to be a way down. So in the book you write that countless-

Richard:           Well said. Thank you.

Mike:               Thank you. Thank you. “Countless individuals, both men and women who wanted to be serious Christians saw themselves compelled to retreat. So they withdrew from the urban centers into the wilderness. In order to live in small communities or hermitages, they renounced marriage, worldly goods, secular activities, so as to find peace of the heart or Hezekiah.” Richard, for people listening who may not even know who the desert fathers and mothers are, who are they and why are they important?

Richard:           The people after 3:13 and Constantine began the process of declaring their Roman Empire Christian. That’s best way to say it just started. They recognized the lie, the imperial nature, the win-lose nature of this new version of Christianity and that we’d found a new way to win. They wanted to make sure the path of descent was never lost. I mean, look what’s happening in America right now. The prosperity gospel has morphed into a cult of white nationalism almost without apology. Whenever you’re localizing it somewhere else other than your sin, you know you’re into imperial Christianity, your own sin.

Mike:               That makes sense because then if God blesses the righteous, then we can claim our righteousness as the source of our privilege and not the fact that we happen to be those who have.

Richard:           Very good. Very good.

Mike:               And you notice when that happens, the morality of the righteous tends to look like the things that are easiest for the people that are in power.

Richard:           Right. Well said. Yes.

Mike:               It is wild to realize that this was something that happened. And you’ve taught the desert fathers and mothers as the origin of the contemplative tradition and to realize that all these centuries were here again.

Richard:           Well, The prophets and Jesus are the origin.

Mike:               Yes.

Richard:           But they practiced it more than they clearly taught it.

Mike:               Okay. So ironically, from this movement out into the desert of all these folks who sought to take the path down, to do their spiritual work, to follow Jesus, we get this sort of early psychology of spiritual transformation in the desert fathers, mothers. And you say especially of Evagrius. For folks who don’t know that, who’s Evagrius, and why is Evagrius important?

Richard:           Evagrius was a Syrian deacon. He died in 399. I don’t know if we know his birthdate. And he wrote a book called The Praktikos, Practicals of Prayer. And he rather clearly, it’s immense insight, comes up with eight disguises of evil in his Praktikos. All of them are there except what we call the six, fear. Isn’t that telling? Because most cultures are bound by fear.

Mike:               I always related to Evagrius because he was this young, up and coming, hotshot theologian, and it said he loved clothing and good food. And what happened was he was … I don’t remember if he was in Constantinople. He’s in one of the big metropolitan areas, and he ended up having an affair with a noble men’s wife, if I remember the story correctly. And then something came to him in a dream and was like, “You need to get out of town before you get dead.” And so he fled into the desert and he came under the tutelage of Macrina, who was one of the great women mystics at the time. And she basically said to him, “You need to learn to close your mouth, speak only when you’re spoken to. Do these practices.”

Richard:           I didn’t know that piece.

Mike:               Yeah. And then from a long time in the desert of letting go of all of that privilege and all of that arrogance, he eventually came to have this keen insight. And I love that, the disguises of sin. What a great term.

Richard:           Oh, yeah. That’s as good a description as anything. And there was something that we learned by our contact with Egypt. We know one of them was the idea of monotheism. Monotheism came from a single Pharaoh. It was unknown in the ancient world.

Mike:               Akhenaten.

Richard:           That’s right, Akhenaten. But there were a lot of monks in Egypt, and we’ve got to believe that some of those roots created the roots of Christian monasticism. That’s where it’s most vibrant and where it moves from Egypt to Marseille and moves to Europe.

Mike:               I love how you described this and you sum it up in the book. “Life in the wilderness promoted an examination of the passions that overpowered the hermit, the desert fathers and mothers, particularly in the form of fantasies and thoughts that they had to overcome or integrate, as one might say in the language of present day psychology.” And then in how Evagrius really clarified this thinking, you quote Lin Carollo who says, ” Amongst the writings of Evagrius Ponticus, we find a highly developed contemplative psychology.”

Richard:           That’s right.

Mike:               “Of a kind that has since all but extinguished. The writings of Evagrius and the desert fathers are an inspiration for seekers in a technologically intelligent but spiritually dark age. They can open our heart and our understanding for those greater possibilities that are hidden in each one of us.” It’s great.

Richard:           For many people, now I can say this 40 years into it, the Enneagram has been their entrance way into spirituality. People who the very word spirituality turns them off. They don’t trust it. And they listen to one lecture on the Enneagram and they say, “My God, this is ringing true.” And it becomes a whole opening to the inner life, which is mysterious and disguised, which fit then the later Jungian thought of the shadow hides. It isn’t obvious.

Paul:                Well, let’s keep pulling this thread of the desert fathers and mothers. One thing that was so apparent in their way of life was the sense of Ammas and Abbas. There’s these kind of holy teachers that younger novices or apprentices would go seek a word from. Yes,

Richard:           That’s right.

Paul:                Language that we use today is around spiritual direction and discernment. And of course, these practices are central to monastic and the mystical branches of Christianity and all of these are included in the ingredients of the way that you teach the Enneagram. Can we just start with, for anyone who doesn’t know, what is spiritual direction?

Richard:           It’s a relationship with an elder. It has to be someone who’s walked the journey a little longer or farther than you have. So it’s not just a chatty conversation with a friend. It has to be somehow an elder. They call it a father or a mother in the desert. That is based in how one is actually relating to the notion of God, not your psychological wound, but your spiritual wound.

How do you relate to God? How do you talk to God? And sometimes it’s shock to even ask that of modern secular people because they don’t. They don’t relate to God. That’s what we’re dealing with now. But historically, it’s God-centered therapy, talk therapy, as opposed to psyche-centered. We’ve learned so much from psychology, so I don’t want to put it down, but it still keeps it localized inside of this Richard psyche, Richard’s childhood wounds, Richard’s mothering and fathering, Richard’s American culture, whatever it might be.

It’s always, it’s small. Whereas the Enneagram is, how do you relate to the infinite? Can you relate to the infinite? How do you relate to wonder, to mystery, to suffering, to joy? Are those even relatable? So a good spiritual director keeps asking questions that make you know that those are real issues that you’re living out of whether you know it or not.

Paul:                With this in mind, this God-centered therapy as spiritual direction, how do you see the Enneagram as a tool, as a practical tool within spiritual direction?

Richard:           It gives you a language for God talk. Let’s call it that. And for some reason, in the modern era, people trust. They don’t think you’re laying religion on them. At least most people don’t. It allows you to talk about mystery. It allows you to talk about the hidden nature of good and evil. That’s where you’re going to discover jewels.

Mike:               Jesus says to become his little children. When we look at something like the eneagram, we are touching into a lot of the childlike places in our heart and some of our early childhood wounds. And I think if that’s not done with skill and love, it could become very harmful. And I think, not to push too fine of a point on it, but I appreciate, Richard, even the gentle playfulness sometimes with which you’ll nudge Paul and I to growth. And I wonder how much … Yeah, that place of love needs to be there to use a tool like this well in spiritual direction and coming from a God-centered place and not a psyche- centered place to know that you’re loved even in your sin or your woundedness.

Richard:           Jesus must mean something like that. When he says, “Unless you become like a little child,” what is he talking about? It has to be in that direction. And in the presence of a good father, good mother, you become a little child in their presence. You can expose yourself vulnerably and know you will not be abused, used, accused, because a lot of people never got received, never got noticed, never got looked at, never got affirmed in who they are in all of its uniqueness.

Paul:                There’s a component that we mentioned at the top of this particular theme that I feel like attends to the holy listening and that’s discernment. For those listening, how would you define discernment?

Richard:           Well, let’s distinguish it from guidance by laws.

Distinguish it from guidance by laws. It’s saying if you just look for a law to obey or to be accused of disobeying, you won’t get very far. It moves you discernment to a whole deeper level of perception where it isn’t 100% always right or 100% fatally wrong. The notion we had with mortal sin, venial sin. It looks at the nature of the trap, the entrapment, the conviction, the compulsion, and helps the individual walk away from it because it’s not helping me. It’s not helping me help other people.

Mike:               Well, when we talk about spiritual direction, discernment, the importance of love, and the history, or even the folklore of where the Enneagram came from and what influenced it, then I can’t help but think of the next ingredient that we pointed out, which is the importance of the Sufi tradition. For folks who don’t know anything at all about the Sufis, how would you introduce them and why are they important?

Richard:           Thomas Merton only discovered the Sufis later in his life, as I did too. I attended their whirling dervish dances in Istanbul some years ago, because I was so intrigued by this group who whirled literally in their case into God by keeping one foot and you can watch it, one foot in place, never losing its center. And that’s the God place. The other hand is reaching out to God and it moves inside of the cosmos, the whirling nature of time and culture, and keeps those two fixed points, the foot and the hand.

But what was compelling was watching them dress in their beautiful robes and how gently they looked at one another and treated one another and walked into the center of the room, and then one began and all imitated. With Sufis, in short, they’re the mystical branch of Islamic religion that met God and made the search for God central and absolute. Don’t they think Rumi was a Sufi?

Mike:               A hundred percent. Rumi was the first Sufi teacher that I met when I was an undergrad and I had grown up through the Gulf War and always been presented a very particular version of what Islam was. And then I encountered Rumi and I read his love poetry and I learned about the Sufis and it just … My heart was strangely warmed when I read it and it felt so familiar in my bones and in my heart, the way they loved God.

Richard:           Rumi discovered a universal poetry. How can you read a Rumi poem and not say, “That’s true.” If you’ve never known God, you probably could. But if you’ve touched upon the mystery of God, every Rumi poet is ecstatic and humiliating.

Paul:                Yeah, that’s a great way of putting it.

Mike:               Richard, you write this really well in the book. You say the mystical contemplative knowledge of the desert fathers has obviously left its mark, and we would say the desert father’s mothers, on the spirituality of the Sufis. As far back as a hundred years after Muhammad’s death, there were Pius Muslims who wanted to live a simple life. And there’s that rhythm again of people who say, “I want to step away and I want to live a simple life.” They often renounced all possessions and war as a sign of aestheticism, coarse wool garments, Suf in Arabic. Some of them set out as wandering preachers, others lived in spiritual brotherhoods and communities, much in their way of life as reminiscent of the later Franciscans who may themselves have been influenced by the Sufis. As in the Christian mysticism in the Middle Ages, there were also a strikingly large number of women involved in the Sufi movement.

And through prayer and meditation, the Sufis wished to become deepened in God’s love. The love of God was a central theme of the movement. And don’t you think there’s so much value even for Christian contemplatives to study this wonderful poetry and these great teachings?

Richard:           That’s best to teach you the trust of other religions is to study the mystics from other religions, and it takes away your very ability to mistrust them. You say that’s from a mature heart, that’s from a formed soul. But if you just avoid them all your life because they’re not Catholic, you’re not going to recognize truth or empathy, sympathy.

Mike:               So Richard, there’s legends, and I don’t know enough. It’s not my area of expertise to weigh the credibility of the history, but it’s very clear that Sufi wisdom finds its way into the Enneagram. What can you tell us about how these two things are connected?

Richard:           I don’t know. I don’t know that we know in the public forum where the contact point was. The mystic recognizes the mystic wherever it is. I was playing the Rogers and Hammerstein song this morning, Hello Young Lovers. It’s one of my favorite happy songs. And I would just think of a mystic as singing hello young lovers. Wherever love is happening, I welcome it. Even the song, if you can recall the melody, it makes you want to dance and swing out your arms. Hello, young lovers wherever you are. It’s from the king and I.

Mike:               What was that line? Wherever love is happening, I welcome it.

Richard:           That’s the Sufi attitude toward love. It’s hello young lovers wherever you are. It’s not, do you read my texts? Do you go to my church looking for lovers and rejoicing in love? Rumi had to be a high quality mystic God touched to write the poetry he wrote, and Kabir and Aphez similarly.

Mike:               Well, it’s fascinating too. Even when you read the much more complex philosophy of the Sufi philosophers, like even Arabi, it’s still dripping with love and beauty. I find courage and it piques my interest to think of the Enneagram as something that evolved out of their tools for spiritual direction, because I know again, it must have love at the core of it.

Richard:           That’s right. We do have, it’s probably a myth inside of Franciscanism. Around 1219, when Francis left Assisi with one other friar and walked, he couldn’t have walked the whole way to Egypt that he stopped and spent an evening with Rumi in Kanye, and the two of them talked about holy things.

Paul:                Well, to round it out with our final ingredient, Richard, we would not have the Enneagram as it exists now without the insights of contemporary psychology.

Richard:           That’s right.

Paul:                The way it’s been furthered and clarified. And of course, you draw upon psychology in your teaching from Carl Jung and Gerald May, your friend and contemplative psychologist. You’ve talked about trauma and neuroscience. How has psychology helped you in your journey and shaped how you think about personality and development?

Richard:           Good psychology tells you there are some facets of the human person that are rather universally available. That discovering of the universal nature of personhood is just very helpful to know that. It’s not one huge mystery. There are patterns. There are ways that keep showing themself despite religion.

Mike:               When you read the writing of Carl Jung, it’s filled with examples from mythology and history and mysticism and wisdom traditions the world over. And I don’t think he claimed to be inventing something new with his ideas as much as trying to bring people back to ancient ways of knowing themselves in a way that was useful in the moment we found ourselves in time. And that helps me think about the Enneagram as a sort of a distillation of ancient wisdom that nonetheless is converted into a contemporary language to help it be useful.

Paul:                We dipped into some wonderful, fun terrain. And just to kind of land it with the Enneagram, how can the Enneagram help us in our own spiritual journey?

Richard:           I’ve watched it help so many people. So many people say that their entire discovery of my books, I hate to admit it, but I’m happy to admit it, began with the Enneagram book and allow them to trust the inner life. There is an inner world. There are patterns that are predictable. There are patterns that trap you. There are patterns that liberate you, but it’s not dogmatic. The only thing it’s dogmatic about is that, it, you never change. You’re a one forever. You’re a nine forever. You’re a four forever, but I think it’s right. So it is a wonderful entrance ramp to the whole world of spirit. Now it’s now called the anagram of personality, which maybe is a little dangerous. I don’t know if it’s the best phrase. And a lot of people put it down in saying that. It’s merely about personality development.

And if you teach it without simultaneously talking about one’s relationship with God, it is a parlor game. It’s just fun. When you teach it to a new group, they’re obsessed with it for the next 12 months. You got to get, okay, let’s get through the first 12 months and go to the mystical, mysterious level of what this is revealing. How can there be so many patterns that are always true? Why do sevens always want to plan positive futures no matter what they’re doing? That’s their obsession. And I haven’t met a seven who isn’t doing that. So it’s a gift to humanity in a time where we think there are no patterns. That’s the lie of post-modernism.

Russ:                Yeah.

Richard:           There are no patterns. It’s all made up.

Paul:                This is so helpful because what I hear you saying is learning the system of the Enneagram is actually just the beginning for the deeper journey.

Richard:           Just the beginning.

Mike:               I want to go out on this note. Richard, there’s a great statement from Andreas Ebert, who’s your co-author in one of your books.

Richard:           Who is now deceased. God bless him. I think of him so often. Go ahead.

Mike:               Well, he says, “The Enneagram is not the answer, but one signpost amongst many. Signposts show the way, but we have to take the way ourselves.” What final advice and blessing would you give our listeners for letting the Enneagram be one strong set of signposts to help us take away this season?

Richard:           You’ve almost necessarily got to let it obsess you for six months where everything you see is, oh my God, there it is. There it is. There it is. To recognize the universal character of it, but then get over it. People get tired of being typed, what feels like being typed. You’re actually trying to liberate them, but they can’t feel that yet. So both hands, there we are. Obsess for a year or so, and then put it in the back of your head. Okay, Richard, you’re being a one right now. That’s helpful in this regard. It’s too rigid in this regard. Well, thank you.

Mike:               Thank you, thank you, thank you very much. Look forward to diving in with you. Everything Belongs will continue in a moment.

Cassidy:            Welcome back to Everything Belongs. I’m thrilled about this conversation with Russ Hudson. Russ Hudson is a renowned Enneagram teacher, scholar, and co-authored several bestselling books, including The Wisdom of the Enneagram. He’s a co-founder of the Enneagram Institute and the founding director of the International Enneagram Association. You can find out all about Russ, his work, and his teaching by following the link in our show notes. Today, Russ shares with us his own Enneagram journey, how he came across the tool before pouring three decades of work into learning and teaching. He’ll share with us an overview of each number, and you might find yourself identifying with multiple numbers, and that’s okay. Navigating the Enneagram is a journey towards self-discovery, and we all know that isn’t linear. In our conversation, you’ll notice that Russ uses the word passions, whereas in our previous episode, we use words like wounds and sins.

I’ve personally found using words like this to be really helpful and expanding my own approach to the Enneagram, and we hope that you’ll start to discover the words and the descriptions and the language that work best for you. So let’s jump into the conversation with Russ Hudson, joined by me and Mike Petro.

Mike:               Oh my gosh, Russ, welcome to the Everything Belongs podcast. We are so, so, so excited to have you here with us. Thank you for making the time to talk with us today about the Enneagram.

Russ:                It’s my pleasure. I always love playing with you guys. It’s great.

Mike:               And also, I want to welcome Cassidy Hall here as fellow co-hosts on this episode today. Cassidy, great to see you.

Cassidy:            Great to be here. Great to be here. So Russ, I’d love to open our conversation by learning more about your own origin story with the Enneagram. How did you first come across it and what led you to wanting to teach?

Russ:                Well, like most good stories, it’s not a straight path. It’s kind of a winding road. And I sort of came of age in the ’70s. There was just a big outpouring of interest in deeper spirituality that happened then. All of a sudden, everybody was discovering Hindus stuff. They were all kind of Indian gurus appearing, little hints of Buddhism, Sufism, and indeed people were reexamining Christianity. God spell and Jesus Christ superstar and all these kind of wild things were going on. Being a typical Enneagram five, I had been a science nerd in grade school and I started to get more into art and music and from that started to look more seriously at spirituality. And I was going around, checking out churches, checking out spiritual teachers as many people were at that time. And like many of us, I would find things that were worth remembering, but overall feeling kind of disappointed.

Something was not being addressed, something was being missed. And later on, I was living at the home of a musician and she had a book on her shelf called In Search of the Miraculous, which was by Pyotr Ouspenskii. And it was the exposition of the teachings of Gurdjieff. Now I’d heard of Gurdjieff, but this was the first time I sat down and started reading it. And his one assertion blew my mind and I said, “This is it.”

He said, “Mankind is asleep. We’re not aware.” It’s like Jesus saying upon the cross, “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do. ” And I said, “It’s literally true that we’re caught in something. We’re not seeing reality. We’re not getting it. ” And Gurdjieff said that we were trying to awaken the heart, but we could not awaken the heart unless we first learned how to be present, how to be here. So this was totally intriguing for me and I wanted to learn about it, but through a series of ridiculous coincidences that were too perfect to really be a coincidence, I felt like I was guided toward finding the Gurdjieff work. And I encountered a teacher and started working with him and joined a group and we learned the Gurdjieff movements. And I was in the official Gurdjieff situation here in New York City. It was very strict. It was practically monastic in the way we did things, but it was a good foundation for me.

And being as body-based as it was, as sensate as it was, it was perfect for me as a five to sort of get out of where I was stuck. And I went with that for a number of years. And then in 1987, I encountered a book called Personality Types, which was written by my dear, departed friend, teaching partner, writing partner, Don Richard Riso. And he wrote the book Personality Types, which was fascinating to me. I remember thinking, “This is absolutely brilliant, but I’m not sure that he gets the presence part.” And then about a year later, Helen Palmer’s book came out and I read that and more fascinating insights into the personalities.

And then I encountered the typology. Gurdjieff had a typology, but it wasn’t around the Enneagram symbol. It was a different thing. But I thought, “Gosh, this is super helpful for anyone who’s actually trying to wake up, to awaken their heart, to really follow Christ’s commandments is a great idea and really hard to do if your ego’s in charge.” So I just decided I was going to work to try to get the spiritual community to understand that the Enneagram would help them and try to get the Enneagram community to understand that was really about presence and compassion and the development of our soul.

It wasn’t just about categorizing people. So that’s sort of the winding road. I didn’t seek out being a teacher. It wasn’t an ambition I had. In the Gurdjieff work, you might be asked to start teaching after you’re in it for many years, but you don’t say, “Hey, I want to be a teacher.” The things I came from, it wasn’t like you just get up and start teaching, but the world kind of asked that of me, so I had to learn how to step up to the plate and it was like that.

Mike:               Wow, I got to say, we’re so glad that you did step up to the plate because it worked out great for all of us. Some folks are brand new and they’re going, “Okay, eight, five, I’m a four. I hear these numbers. What do these mean?” Would you give us a flyover of the nine types?

Russ:                I’m always telling people that you are not an Enneagram type, but you have one. And so that’s like your primary coping and survival strategy. Very important thing to know about, but you’ll find bits of all of it in you. And really when people are new to the Enneagram, it’s one of the first things they generally noticed. I’m kind of like all of it. Yes, you are. But you have to look a little more closely to see what’s the foot you tend to put forward when you’re not sure of things. When I teach it, usually I talk about the belly types first, eight, nine, and one, because you get here, self-remembering, kerplunk, I’m here. I’m in the moment with you. I’m alive in my body. There’s no possibility of being present without being present in the body. So kicking it off with eight. Eight is the energy of aliveness, vitality, strength, empowerment, confidence.

And boy, you need that in this world. And when you’re present, that takes its right place and you are that. And it comes through with a good dose of love and care for others and for the world. When we’re not so present, the ego gets a hold of that and turns it into kind of control issues. I’ve got to be the boss. I got to be in control. I’ve got to decide what happens with the money. We’re going to go here, not there. And I get kind of bossy and controlling and it can spiral into really troublesome and problematic places left unchecked. And that’s true of all of them. You can see the beautiful side of it, but as we lose presence and get more fear-based, it turns into things that aren’t so attractive. But again, part of our inner work is to see, yep, I do that.

Honesty, right? Which is a value for point eight. So moving along to point nine, nine is also body-based, but nine is about coming home to ourselves, being grounded. And the ironic thing is the more we’re grounded in the body, the more we feel ourselves kind of embedded in God. And the way that shows up for a lot of people is we feel more at one with nature, with the world, with the sky. And there’s this beautiful sense of unity that comes through our embodiment. When I’m in my power of nine, I invite the world to land, to come home, to come back to ourselves. I can do that creatively. I can do that as a friend or a professional. I can do that in just my daily manner. I help to bring things together to harmonize. That’s my great gift is a nine. I just want to say too, all nine types can be super creative.

All of them can be musicians or artists or actors, filmmakers, painters, you name it. But their creativity will reflect the value of their point, of their type. So when I’m not doing so well as a nine, I get more caught up in my ego. I create that peace by dissociating, by disengaging is the right word. I’m kind of here, but I’m kind of not here. I go do my job, but I’m not there. I’m sitting here nodding and smiling and being nice, but you’re not getting to me. A lot of Enneagram teachers talk about the nine merging. I don’t know what nines they know. It’s the opposite. I merge with ideas of people and situations in my head, but I’m creating a big wall around me so you can’t get to me while I smile and say, “Namaste.” So eight, nine, and one, the theme here is as they get in their ego, they all have problems with resistance.

And the resistance manifests as tension in the body and not breathing. And everybody does that. Just eight, nine, one are kind of the gurus of this approach, the masters of this. And by the way, for eight and nine, all of them, the moment we come back to presence, we start to come back to the gift again. It doesn’t matter which type. So one is when we’re present in the body, we also feel naturally through the body when we’re more in tune and when we’re more out of tune, when we’re more in balance, when we’re out of balance, when we’re in integrity and alignment and when we’re off. And it’s a felt sense thing. When you see people who’ve really done a lot of inner work, genuinely spiritual people, they walk and move with a certain grace and awareness of how they’re manifesting. And that manifests also in a sense of balance and what I call wisdom of right action.

Ones really want to know what’s the best way to live? What’s the best way to operate? How do I serve something higher? And even when ones are not religious, they still have this idea that there are values that we all ought to be living with. And so when they’re healthy, they’re also beautiful at communicating that and sharing that and inviting people. Let’s play in the higher ground, shall we? We can do that. And when we’re not so healthy, we get kind of frustrated, impatient, and indignant that everybody’s screwing up, including me. And nobody’s measuring up, nobody’s meeting the standards, and I’m kind of going around with this kind of slow burn …

… standards and I’m kind of going around with this slow burn residual anger and frustration at this lousy condition that humans are in. Can’t we do better than this? And the kindness gets hidden. And I may still have a good idea of what to do, but I’m not communicating it anymore in a way that people are going to respond to it, they’re mostly going to notice I’m angry at them or judging them. It doesn’t help. So, that’s those three. Then we’ve got the heart triad, the two, three, and four, this doesn’t mean they’ve got more heart than other people, and eight, nine, one doesn’t mean they’ve got more body than other. What would that even mean? It just means their main gift and their main psychological issues are around that center. So, kick it off. Two, when we’re present in the heart, our heart is naturally generous.

Our heart naturally seeks connection, and we’re happier when we feel our heart is in some kind of connection or communion with others. And doesn’t even have to be another person, that’s nice, but sometimes it could be with your cat. Sometimes you can have that with the sky. But that feeling of heart communion, my heart is in union with something else here, that’s home base for two. Also, we’re here to take care of each other, we’re here to nourish each other. And so, there’s this natural part in the two that seeks to care, nourish, nurture, it’s kind of the divine mother quality. Even if you’re a male too, it’s still there. When we are not so present, we forget to accept or receive nourishing, a nourishment. Or we may be trying to create some kind of emotional deal to get that because we’ve done something nice for somebody else.

The problem with two is not that they stop being generous, they’re still going to be generous even when they’re rather in bad psychological condition. As they stop being aware of what they’re up to, they not aware of their agenda anymore, that there’s things that they want and need. And it goes more and more underground and starts to create all kind of problems for them. But again, a moment of presence and you’re back on the road. Three, some threes are surprised to find out they’re in the center of the heart triad, but it makes sense if you understand it on a deeper level because threes appear initially as thinkers and doers. Where are the threes? They’re getting ideas and they’re doing them. They always have a goal, something they’re working toward. But really, the three in their heart of hearts is about realizing their preciousness and value of my existence, of my life.

It connects with two here, to realize I’m beloved of God, no matter how much of an idiot I’ve been. And to really take that in and feel that, then what we do in life tends to come out of that love, come out of that self-awareness. So, my work in life, the little things I do, even just daily chores, they’re all gestures of love. And that’s the home base of three, and boy threes, which you’re like to live in that world. When we’re not present, we forget, and that value goes out, we feel empty inside, like our heart light’s gone out. And then we’re constantly doing stuff, achieving goals, getting stuff done, doing things for other people to prove to ourselves and to the world that we do have value, that we’re precious. You see, I have value because I got all this stuff done.

I have value because I took care of that for you. I have value because I achieved this. Do you see, Mom and Dad what I did? And it’s quite a hamster wheel that one can get on. Sometimes with threes, it takes a personal catastrophe of some kind to get my attention and get me off that hamster wheel. But a lot of times, for a lot of threes, that becomes my salvation. So, four. Fours are also heart type, they’re more obviously focused on their feelings and the realm of feelings. Twos tend to overspin their positive feelings. Everything’s love, everything’s care, everything’s kumbaya. Whereas fours are suspicious of all that, it feels a little phony to them. And so, they’re going to vote for what they see as authentic feelings. Like if you can’t tell me that you had a crappy day, you’re not honest enough, I don’t know that I really want to hang out with you. You’re not real, you’re not honest, you’re not… It’s funny, eight and four are very different, but they both have their own filter of what authenticity looks like.

What’s beautiful about four? Four is about a thing we learn through the heart, which is what we are in reality. Our true identity, which is infinitely mysterious and deep and profound, and the closer you get to it, the more all your ideas dissolve. It’s sort of as we approach our identity, we’re also approaching our identity in God, and therefore we’re also approaching God, and the whole mystery of that makes sense. You start to understand why in Judaism you can’t say the name of God. These things that you learn suddenly, oh, that’s why they came up with that, but you’re learning it from the inside out.

When you are closer to the true identity, everything seems more beautiful, and beauty doesn’t mean I like it or I don’t like it. When beauty gets mixed up with like and dislike, it becomes taste, and that’s a sign we’re stuck in the ego of four. But really you start to realize the world is an expression of beauty. Gee, I’m an expression of beauty, you’re an expression of beauty, and that’s where I want to be, and that’s my heaven as a four. When I’m not so present, I think depth is stirring up difficult feelings, talking about my feelings, getting people to see what’s going on in me, and sometimes not being so interested in what’s going on in the other person. I become kind of overly self-focused. And I try to create an identity that I can believe in through how I’m different from people, by what I like and don’t like, by the story I have about my history.

There’s a lot of ways egos do that, but as a four, I become very focused on those things because it’s, again, the poor ego trying to make up for the main thing, which is the true identity, and can’t get there except through presence. Again, we get back in body, heart and mind, true identity starts revealing itself. So, five, six, and seven are head center and they have to do with issues of trust, faith, and traditional language. What can I trust? What can I believe in? What’s safe and what’s not safe? I used to joke five, everything out there is not safe, so I’m going to go inward. And seven says, everything in there could be scary, so going to go outward. And six says, darn, they’re both scary, I’ll just have to be on a shuttle between the two. But we have to have a laugh about it because it helps.

Head center’s capacity to realize, to recognize that moment of, aha, I get it now. But beyond just having knowledge, if you go deeper into the head center, it is the ability to recognize what’s true, real, relevant, what illuminates the universe we’re living in. And what would spiritual awakening be if you couldn’t do that? We’d be stuck in the ground congratulating ourselves on the banana bread we made for each other on Sunday. There’s the sense of discovery and ongoing revelation, and wow, people tend to have the stereotype of fives being about science, and I certainly was as a kid, but could be in spirituality, philosophy, art, all kinds of things. But just this sense of discovery, exploring, and fiddling with things to see what’s actually true and what works, and it’s very five. Fives also have part of the head center is an immaculate solitude. When your head center opens up, there ain’t nobody there, not even you.

It’s just complete… As we talked about earlier, it’s this beautiful silent stillness. When you’re in personality, that isn’t there, you got this chatterbox in your head. So, you think that the stillness or silence has to be physical, which means you have to be alone, you have to get away from people, and it becomes a reflex. The terrible irony for five is what reopens the head center and opens up the wisdom we’re seeking is contact. It’s what we avoid when we’re in our stuff. We don’t want contact, we think we need to isolate to figure it all out and to deal with whatever we got to deal with. And so, fives could get very isolated, very eccentric, very difficult to engage. And again, that can go to very problematic levels left unchecked.

Six. I think one of the types that gets most misunderstood, partially because I don’t think sixes are not the best at revealing what’s going on in them in a certain level, but I also think because the early authors just weren’t getting certain key things, six is about the awakeness of mind. Being awake is the whole thing. We’re trying to wake up, do what? Awakeness. And so, the awakeness of mind, the alertness, the vivid, crisp, attention, being mindful… We use that term cheaply nowadays. But mindfulness means being rested into the moment in such a way that my attention is taking in everything around me inside and out, like this field of awake attention, that’s the home base of six.

And from that, five is about what’s real and what isn’t, what’s true and isn’t, six is more about what should I do? Should I go forward? Should I hold back? Should I mention that to my friend? Should I wait until a later time? Which career is right for me? So, all these things about how we make decisions and move into life and engage life or not is really part of six. And of course, that wakefulness has in it the intelligence, which almost calls guidance. Five, six, and seven are all about guidance where you just kind of know without question, this is what needs to happen. This is what I’m doing. It’s nothing figured out, you just know. And when you have that, you can live your life courageously, and do what you got to do in life, and take care of the people you love, and sixes do that in all kinds of ways.

I can’t imagine any kind of career that you wouldn’t find a six in. On the other hand, when I’m not, that confidence of knowing is, I can’t find it. So, I’m constantly trying to figure everything out. What if I do this? What if I do that? But on the other hand, but that person said that, and I read Eckhart Tolle said this, and Richard Roy said that, oh my God, what should I do? And you, wah, wah, wah, wah overthink it. And so, we talk with six about phobia and counterphobia, when you’re overthinking it, you’re hesitating, that’s what we call phobia. When you just say enough of this nonsense, I’m just going to do something, that’s counterphobia. I’m just going to jump out of this plane right now, and do my… I’m going to do my bungee jump, I’m going to go tell that boss off finally, he needs to hear a few words from me, that’s counterphobia, which is different from courage, as we’ll see.

There’s so much more to say about all this, but just to give you a little flavor. So, sixes at their best have that awakeness, when they’re not, they’re second guessing themselves, they can be too cautious or sometimes too reckless. They are more nervous, antsy and reactive. It spirals into being suspicious and even paranoid, if you go too far with it. So, seven, our last one. When we’re in touch with our true mind, it has no limits, it’s completely open-ended. It’s just an endless field of awareness. And this was the big surprise for this five, you feel a causeless happiness when you find your home. When you start to realize yourself as presence, as you remember yourself, you come home at the nine, with your value as the three. You are back in the sense of guidance as the sixth.

There is just this sense of causeless positivity. You’re happy for no reason, and it’s not a happiness against unhappiness, it’s there whether you’re sad, whether you get your way or don’t get your way. It’s like this light that stays on. And that’s what sevens are looking for, and what they’re trying to share with the world. They’re trying to say, don’t give up hope, there’s a light in us and around us that is real, and can be trusted. Now, that’s beautiful, and a lot of sevens I know when they’re developed as people, they’re the first to go and help where there’s trouble. I know sevens who work in hospice, or work with ALS patients, I know sevens who rushed into natural disasters, and because they have learned that the positivity isn’t real if it’s afraid of the darkness. Positivity that’s afraid of the devil isn’t the positivity, you haven’t got God yet, you’ve got a reaction to your fear.

There’s a boldness in seven that’s quite beautiful, in that keeping the hope, keeping the evolutionary possibilities, trying to optimize everything. In old school terms, it’s hallelujah. When sevens are not in their presence, they don’t feel connected with the real source of that, so they’re trying to keep themselves positive and interested by being into one thing after another. Trying this, trying that, trying that… It’s not always parties like some Enneagram teachers say, they’re not trying to go to parties all the time, but I might be reading one book after another. I might be going on a lot of trips. I might try different jobs. I might go from one conversation to another.

But there’s this kind of restless jumping from one thing to another that can eventually wind into a lot of anxiety and loneliness, to tell you the truth. And all of these, taken too far, can lead to very painful and dark places, but we learn about it to reverse that process and to come back to the gift in the home of each of them. So, I think that’s all nine, and-

Mike:               Oh my gosh.

Cassidy:            Yeah.

Russ:                A quick marathon.

Cassidy:            I just want to comment what a gift it was to hear you talk about all the numbers with I and we statements, and the way that just makes me eager, and I’m sure our listeners eager to keep studying the Enneagram, and to keep navigating not only our particular number, but also the wholeness of who we are, and how we can see ourselves in all of the numbers.

Russ:                I’m really glad you caught that, it’s the way I’ve tried to do it, particularly when I’m talking about the difficult stuff. If I won’t own it, why should I ask anybody else to?

Cassidy:            So, I want to jump on here with one thing. I wonder if you might have any stories from your life that you might be willing to share about how the Enneagram helped you maybe increase your compassion for or understanding of someone much different than you.

Russ:                Yeah. I would say that it helped me understand my parents and how they saw things very differently than me. Sometimes we realize that people are not the way we would prefer them to be, and no matter how many manipulations we pull out of our bag of tricks, we’re not going to change them. So, you get to sort of be with, what am I willing to be with? How can this be an education for my heart? And when is it time to me to realize that what I’m hoping for in this particular interaction is not going to come about the way I want it to?

And to me, those are signals of a mature heart. Those would mean that what we call the virtues in the Enneagram are starting to work on me. People think I’m going around diagnosing people all the time, and I think you go through a Enneagram adolescence where you do that. It’s a fun thing to do, but at a certain point you realize front and center, the main purpose of it is for me to get out of my own way, for me to clear the filters, to be here as much as possible in my life, with my life, and with whoever I happen to be with. And to see my ego patterns, not as who I am or as some kind of lame excuse for my bad behavior, but to see compassionately, I keep forgetting myself, and when I do, I’m reduced to this set of reactions.

And then it’s just a matter of chance whether my reactions are going to line up with somebody else’s. But I have the opportunity through grace to remember myself, and in remembering myself, something other than just my Enneagram pattern becomes available.

Mike:               Oh my gosh, I appreciate that so much. Richard loves this idea that he borrows from James Hillman, that if we don’t mythologize our pain, we’ll pathologize it. And I have to tell you, I worry that we might be living in a time where pathology has become our culture’s mythology. People over-identify with their problems. And so, from this cultural moment, the Enneagram could feel like just another diagnosis, and while that makes me nervous, I know the Enneagram is a tool that helps us deal with problems. How does the Enneagram help us deal with problems?

Russ:                Well, I think it’s like everything with the Enneagram, it’s probably triadic, how it helps us. One of them is what you were just mentioning, Michael, it’s to see with clarity and sincerity and authenticity what my problem is. Now, people do that without the Enneagram, you might discover you have bipolar disorder, got some borderline tendencies, but I think what’s interesting about the Enneagram is it’s looking at these diagnoses in relation to something real in us. In Enneagram speak, we talk about essence or what’s essential in us. Essence is the material of the soul. And when we’re caught up in our personality, we’re just looking at a way the soul has been patterned. And we get identified with that, and we run that as if that’s the totality of what we are and the totality of what we can see or experience about reality. But the Enneagram is meant to come with practice. It’s meant to be paired with practices of self-remembering. And we learn about what does it mean to actually be present in my body?

It isn’t just running around doing things. And what does it mean to be present in my heart? It doesn’t mean being a slave to all my emotional reactions. And what does it mean to be present in my mind? We have to first see what it is to not be present, not be here, to recognize the patterns, and the way they sit in my body, in my emotions, in my mind. And that’s not a quickie thing. Once you start to see it starts at what my Gurdjieff teacher used to say is the hotdog factor. He told this hilarious story of how when he was a young guy in the Gurdjieff work, he would leave his job and he had just a short time to get to the Gurdjieff Foundation for movements, classes, and whatever else responsibilities he had.

And he would stop by Nathan’s Hotdogs in Times Square, and grab a hotdog and go. He says, “And that worked for quite some time until one day he said he tasted the hot dog, and he tasted how it been sitting in that water all day, and the chemicals in it,” and he actually had an impression of it. And it’s like that with tasting what we usually acquiesce to, what we give our soul over to. And when one day you wake up and suddenly something rises in the heart and says, you know what? I don’t want to just be that anymore. I want to open to something else. That’s one thing, Gurdjieff said, “The presencing gives us the ability to notice what we’re caught in,” but then the heart comes in, not initially as love, love, love, that would be great if it did, but usually it’s ouch, ouch, ouch first.

As part of, if you really think about it, that is a big part of the Christian message, it’s not taking on some new pain, it’s coming to terms with the pain I’ve already been in, and finally, allowing it to be sacrificed, made sacred, offered up. And the passions, the Enneagram types, and this is where Richard and I used to talk about this quite a lot, the passions are not bad habits, they’re the core of suffering created by our separation from God. And as long as we’re identified with our ego pattern, which is inevitable, we all go through that, it almost needs to happen, but the cost is huge. And it remains in our heart as a core of our suffering that drives most of our compulsive behaviors, but when you stop, when you refrain, when you hold in the moment, both the wish to be real and seeing also what we give ourselves up to, and grace comes in and starts to heal the suffering that we’ve been in… We can’t do it ourselves.

It’s really about being present with our problem, to use Richard’s language, sufficiently to allow it to offer it up to God, to Christ, to grace. And in that lies our possibility. But there’s no possibility as long as we’re making our ego pattern into God, which is what most people do. Talking about false idols, it’s not the stoned ones out there that are the problem.

Mike:               It’s so helpful. When I was younger, I had an older Irish mentor, and I can’t do justice to his accent, but he would throw these pithy maxims at me. And he always used to say to me, “Just remember, Michael, the pain that you can feel is the only pain that you can heal.” I internalized that as, well, this is going to show me what my mission in life is, and probably. But the imminence of what he was telling me, that you have to feel something, you have to get in touch with your pain, you have to become aware of your wound before it can be healed, I imagine that takes a lot of humor and humility to do so.

Russ:                Yes. It is the feeling, yes, but it’s also the embodied sensation. In my experience, when we come up against an emotional issue, we’re usually doing it in some kind of relationship with our head center. Our head center brings the fixation of our type, which is a management system. It’s how we manage the pain of our passion. So, the fixation helps you keep it under wraps by narrowing your focus of attention, narrowing what you’re able to think about, narrowing the range of experience that you allow yourself. So, we’re reversing the process by first getting embodied, sensing, breathing. Breath is synonymous with spirit in many of the ancient languages. Richard used to… He had so many quotes I love. One of them he used to say is, “How did the religion that is about the incarnation of God become so antibody?” And I said, “Yeah, that’s the thing.” It was a shocker for me because like a lot of us, I was trying to transcend, get the heck out of here. This world, oh my God, let’s fly into some nice pastel reality, but that isn’t it. That’s just dissociation.

And I had to learn the hard way, as many people do, is through embodiment that there’s another relationship possible with the heart. When it’s with the head, it reverts to a story, a narrative that ends up being repeated endlessly. When you sense it in your body, it’s a specific energy. So, you feel it as a sensation often in a particular place in your body. When we do that, the bigger heart comes into play. What we call the higher emotional center brings kindness, brings patience, brings courage, and I call those higher centers the grace centers because you know they’re not coming from you. When you’re feeling, I use the example…

… No, they’re not coming from you. When you’re feeling … I use the example of peacefulness. When you feel peaceful, where is it? When you’re feeling kindness, where is it? It’s not locatable because it’s a quality of presence, of being. It’s the beginning of that turn where we stop thinking ourselves so much as a thing and more experience ourself as a soul, as a spirit, as part of God’s plan for this world. It’s a bigger journey than what a lot of people think. And I think a lot of people, even people who have been studying it a bit, haven’t necessarily fully mined the possibilities of what this is trying to help us with.

Cassidy:            So I think about Richard. Richard talks about how you cannot not be in the presence of God because he says there’s no other place to be.

And Russ, you’ve said that the Enneagram is a tool to help us remember ourselves. And these things feel similar to me. This idea that the Enneagram is a tool for almost like unification to God, ourselves, and each other.

And as we talk more about presence and how that relates to the truth of our core and who we are, this idea that when we are undistracted, when the problems don’t sidetrack us, we can truly be present, which perhaps is the ultimate place of our purpose. And pending where we are, we might initially feel our lack rather than our fullness.

And so I wonder if you could give us maybe a concrete example and maybe focusing on those three centers, the head, heart, and the gut, of tangible ways for us understanding what it means to pivot from those distractions, to turn back into that presence, to come back to that unification with God, ourselves, and each other.

Russ:                Yeah. If it were easy, we’d see saints walking around everywhere. I see potential saints walking around everywhere.

Those who actually make that pivot, it’s really something. The ability to hang in there through the changes. To me, that ability to hang in there has a lot to do with trust. And in the old school language, we call that faith. Faith is not adhering to something somebody told me in 1983. That’s not what it means. It means this trust in the intelligent unfolding of the teachings of what they point to, of how that’s living in me, and to be able to bear the ways that it’s not. And that’s the thing. Part of the passion, working with the passion, at first we’re asked to hold our suffering and to see our limitation.

To remember oneself is not suddenly seeing a shinier, more brilliant, groovy version of myself. It’s to begin to experience myself in God, in Christ, as we’d say as Christians. And it’s indescribable what that is. It’s not an object relation, as we say it. It’s not a guy with a beard holding me in his arms. It’s not what it is. You might have that image as an encouragement to take you to the next step, but the journey into God, or as they say in Christian and Islamic messages, into the beloved is a whole different thing.

But I used to say, “It’s a certain point, we start to understand we’ve settled for consolation prizes. We have settled for things to sort of make us feel okay about that inner separation.” And when we start to realize any sense of what I’m calling the beloved, it’s like when you fall in love with someone and you have a hot date lined up, it might not be convenient, but you’re going to get to that date. There’s a fire that starts to kindle in us about being willing to pay the price.

This might stink and maybe I’m seeing what an idiot I’ve been for years. And if I could look at that with compassion instead of judgment. Big enemy of working with the Enneagram, as Richard would fondly tell us, is suspending judgment and looking at things more from the heart. It’s hard for all of us because that judgment is how we protected ourselves and protected ourselves from parts of ourselves. But there comes the point where just there’s no turning back. And then more and more, we start to experience what we are as essence, as soul. And then the suffering is that the personality doesn’t just go away right away. There I am being an idiot again. And that’s going to happen till further notice.

Essence doesn’t say, “Let’s destroy the ego.” Soul doesn’t say that, spirit doesn’t say that, the love of Christ doesn’t say that. It’s more that as we recognize and remember what we are, the ego can take its correct place. It serves us.

My little quip is I don’t want to learn how to speak English all over again. There are programs running in me that I need, but I just have to remember I’m not these programs. So what am I? Ooh, that’s where it gets interesting.

Mike:               This podcast is called Everything Belongs. It’s taken from the title of one of Richard’s most popular books. And I think sometimes folks hear that and they think we’re saying everything’s all good and everything’s great just the way that it is. And this other idea that everything can be redeemed, everything can be healed. I hear that in what you’re saying about touching the wounded and the hurting places in ourself. And that’s encouraging.

Russ:                Yeah.

Mike:               Because like you said, when we’re not in that place, it’s dark and scary to be in the grip of the less healthy parts of who we are.

Russ:                Yeah. It’s right in front of our eyes in the Enneagram symbol. It’s in our face. It’s the triangle and the circle. The circle is the unity of God. That’s what it means. All the Western religions, one God, one divine reality, one source. The Eastern handle it a little differently, but same idea. But that everything that is manifested manifests through three manifestations, forces, not two. Our ego mind can only see it in two and forgets the third force.

So what does that mean just practically in terms of what we’re talking about? Always, there will be something I’m identified with, some way I’m trying to be, something I’m saying I to, something I’m saying yes to, and something that I’m resisting or that is bringing resistance and so forth.

Now, Gurdjieff would tell us that we need that resisting force. Without it, there’s no possibility of development. And anything that is manifested becomes the particularity that it is because what it’s not. Light doesn’t mean anything without darkness, and vice versa. Up needs down. Gender, all these things, they’re polarities. And the universe is expressed in these polarities, but the polarities have their root in something deeper, and that’s what’s forgotten.

So the practical teaching here is, let’s say I’m an eight, Enneagram eight, and I want to be strong and effective and action-oriented and take care of things and can handle stuff. When I don’t want to be is weak, vulnerable, at the mercy of things beyond my control. Whoa, get all that out of here. Yet in a moment of truth, am I those things? Yes, I am. Does that negate the strength? No. When I take a deep breath, find that breath, that sensation, that felt sense of presence, that heart, and hold this paradox in me, the third force opens and reconciles the two. And I become something beyond any of those concepts. I become like many eights, like a beautiful, compassionate leader because the two are not at odds, but they can only come together in that deeper ground of presence. They’re reconciled in this deeper place.

Mike:               Oh, my gosh, I love that so much.

My two-part question is first, what do I do if I find myself in all the numbers? But two, what’s the value of learning about all the numbers? Does every number have something to teach me?

Russ:                Yes, every number has something to teach me. I might not be an eight, but learning what it means to be strong without putting up armor all the time, how to be strong and loving at the same time. Yeah, I could learn about that. I might not be a one or a nine. Do I need to learn how to come more into my body and connect? Do I need to learn more about integrity? They’re all lessons.

I did an audiobook for Sounds True called The Enneagram: Nine Gateways to Presence about how each of them is a path. As much as it is a type, it’s a path to the divine, it’s a path to salvation if we understand it right. So you can learn something from all of them. I would tell people there’s no rush, it’s not a race. Read the books, talk with people, talk with people who know you well and love you. They, a lot of times, can see it better than we can see it ourselves. But most of all, I think it was designed to help us see what takes us out of the moment, what takes us out of presence, what takes us out of the sense of being connected with God. So as you start a practice and start watching yourself as you go through the day, it will get clearer and clearer.

Mike:               Thank you so much. Just for that reminder that the Enneagram is a tool for us to recognize when we are out of presence and to help bring ourselves back, and the grace and the permission you give us to just keep noticing and coming back and coming back and coming back without judgment or shame. Thank you so much for that.

Russ:                Yeah, thank you, Michael. I just say, one way I’ve talked about it when I’ve been discussing this with Christian audiences and seekers, being present is saying yes to grace, being present is showing up in such a way … Is like the old prayer’s like, “Lord, I’m willing. Work me, Lord.” Well, Lord can’t work with you if you’ve closed all the doors. Lord won’t come in when you’ve closed up shop. Being present in the moment in the centers is offering yourself up for grace to work you, and it will, and it does.

Cassidy:            Here at the CAC, we’re always encouraging folks and we’re asking ourselves, “What is mine to do to make love more real in the world?” So in ending on this question on purpose, how does the Enneagram help us find our purpose? Or to say it another way, how do I put my healing and the service of healing others? How can the Enneagram help us get there?

Russ:                We know purpose in the heart. We might have ideas about it, but our heart lights up when we’re on track, and we know I’m on track now, this is it. What lights up my heart?

I think when I’m doing my inner work, I’m growing my capacity to be, to be in my body, heart, and my true mind. And when I’m like that in the midst of other people, whatever may be going on in them, whatever troubles they may be challenged with, something in them knows what that is and remembers it. So we’re like giving people permission to come out of hiding by us coming out of hiding, by us being real and being here.

But I also tell people our humility around purpose is really important. Your purpose may be to be a fantastic parent to your kids. Your purpose may be to be a grounding in your immediate community. Your purpose may be something on a bigger stage, but I’ll tell you, when that’s real, you don’t feel like you’re important. You feel like you’re just there and doing what you can do for a situation that needs love and attention.

Cassidy:            What a beautiful note to end on. Thank you so much for your wisdom and for sharing it with us all.

Mike:               Oh, my gosh.

Russ:                Thank you so much, Cassidy, and thank you, Michael.

Mike:               Such a joy. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And thank you listeners. What a gift.

Cassidy:            Practice presence and purpose. Mike, I just loved these conversations. What a tool we are getting to explore together.

Mike:               Oh, my gosh, Cassidy, the great riddle of my learning journey the last 15 years has been reflecting on this idea from origin, where he talks about how our wounds lead us to our wisdom and our work. If we stay with them, they become health-bestowing wounds. And now I’m learning so much about the Enneagram and the entryway it is into this process and into remembering who I am. And the beginning point there is the wound. As Richard shared, you commit a sin, you suffer a wound, and the more you suffer it, the more it nuances you. Our problems become pressure points to get our attention.

Cassidy:            Wow. Yeah. As we research the Enneagram war together and have these conversations, I’m realizing that I don’t see myself in every aspect of the five. I’m realizing there’s a nuance to the numbers that we don’t always talk about. And I know you’re experiencing this too.

Mike:               Yes, Cassidy, you are outing me. I am struggling as a longtime identifier with the Enneagram four, I have doubts, and I have questions, and the listeners will hear about that as we go on.

In so many of these great tools that we’re given, the vitality really is in the variance. When we notice something and it speaks right to our experience, we take wisdom there. But when we notice something that doesn’t seem like it speaks to our experience, there’s an invitation to wisdom there too.

Cassidy:            Yeah.

Mike:               Oh, and by the way, speaking of nuance and noticing things that aren’t quite on the money, I want to offer one correction. When we chatted with Richard, we were talking about the historical influences that created this sort of contemplative intercultural conversation that the Enneagram evolved out of. And I was talking about Evagrius, who I am a huge fan of, probably because of Evagrius was a huge fan of origin. Just saying. And I said that Evagrius studied with Macrina, but actually it was Melania the Elder. My bad, I’m so sorry. For all of you out there who are Evagrius super fans like me, I apologize for getting that one wrong.

Cassidy:            All right. Well, since you mentioned Evagrius and Melania, it’s always so interesting to me to connect contemporary tools or practices to ancient sources. So for instance, should we think that they were busy in the monastery somewhere developing the Enneagram as we know it now? Or are we more talking about the ways in which connective tissue or things like values and ideas from the ancient world impact our practices and tools in our spiritual lives today?

Mike:               Oh, my gosh, that is a great question. And I think you could talk to a dozen Enneagram teachers, and they would all answer it differently.

Cassidy:            Yeah.

Mike:               I think about this all the time as a Jungian. We have these great contemporary psychological tools that point back to ancient wisdom to illustrate their depth and connect them with human experience. And then we have teachers like Richard and Jung and Russ who see these contemporary tools as our expressions of questions and conversations about human experience and healing and transformation that have very, very deep ancient roots.

Regardless of the literal history of how these tools came to be, which is often debated. I mean, we can see this in Richard’s book. It was originally published with the title, Discovering the Enneagram: An Ancient Tool for a New Spiritual Journey. And then it was republished as the Enneagram: A Christian Perspective, as Richard’s own understanding of the history of the Enneagram and its connection to the contemplative tradition deepened. And it goes this way.

So to answer your question, I don’t personally need to believe that Rumi, for example, was giving his students an Enneagram test to recognize how interesting it gets when I look at the teachings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers and the Sufis, and I put that in dialogue with the Enneagram, especially in the way that Richard teaches it. It’s so obvious that these ideas influence the depth of Richard’s application of this brilliant tool for spiritual discernment.

I think it’s also always best not to get too literal or dogmatic in how we cling to the history of something when discussing the myths around it. Like Richard said, “Did Francis actually meet Rumi?” Probably not. Am I enriched by imagining their meeting? Yes, I am. But the literal level, the historical isn’t always the most helpful.

Cassidy:            When I think about stories like Jonah and the whale, was Jonah really swallowed by a whale?

Mike:               And you know I love that story. I’ve got it tattooed on my arm. Does it take away from the story if Jonah wasn’t literally swallowed by a whale? For me, no, it doesn’t. It’s still absolutely beautiful. Is it fun to imagine what the history of that story might be and to research it? Also yes.

Cassidy:            That’s right. And I think for me, it doesn’t impact the importance or the significance of the tool or the spiritual practice in my life. And if anything, it enhances it, it enlivens it, it gives it more 3D motion and flavor in my world so that I can interact with it more. And I like that you keep saying the word deepen because I think that’s a really crucial word here.

Mike:               It’s so exciting to me, Cassidy, to think about the contemplative tradition as a conversation that has been going on as far back as we can tell. When people look at their own experience and ask how they can grow and they can heal, and they look at the great mysteries and ask how they can be more connected to the divine and living more aligned with their own nature. And I think that’s what we see in the way that Richard teaches this wonderful tool that is the Enneagram. And we’re so excited to share reflection questions with folks to kind of apply this to their own lived experience and deepen their own journey with it.

We encourage folks at the top of the episode to look for conversation circles to get into, to live the teachings forward on their own. And I know, Cassidy, we have a few questions that could help folks reflect.

Cassidy:            That’s right. And as a head type, it’s so important for me to think about these things to really digest and metabolize, again, make this come alive, make this more 3D in my world.

And one thing I think I would love to reflect on with our listeners is what are the stories of your wisdom? How have they shaped you, and where do they come from?

Mike:               Oh, I love that so much because so many different people have so many different ingredients in the recipe of wisdom that shows up in their own lives. And as you apply sort of what we talked about in this episode, start at the top, what are the wounds in your life that have really shaped your wandering and your wondering and might become health-bestowing wounds if they’re given the opportunity?

Cassidy:            That’s so powerful. And in thinking of wisdom, I also think about our conversation with Russ and presence. So how do we find presence or wisdom in our lives right now, and how are we hoping to find it going forward in this exploration of the Enneagram together?

Mike:               And with that, how do you want to find your purpose or your work in the world right now? What’s making you come alive? These are great questions to sit with the entire season. To get those questions in writing and even more resources, don’t forget to sign up for our monthly emails at cac.org/belongs2026.

Friends, we are so excited for this journey. Next episode, we will be back to talk about the Enneagram type one, which is Richard’s number. So it is going to be an exciting and rich conversation, and we can’t wait for you to join us.

Corey:              Thanks for listening to this podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation, an educational nonprofit that introduces seekers to the contemplative Christian path of transformation. To learn more about our work, visit us at cac.org.

Everything Belongs is made possible, thanks to the generosity of our supporters and the shared work of …

Mike:               Mike Petrow.

Paul:                Paul Swanson.

Drew:               Drew Jackson.

Carmen:           Carmen Acevedo Butcher.

Jenna:              Jenna Keiper.

Izzy:                 Izzy Spitz.

Megan:            Megan Hare.

Sara:                Sara Palmer.

Dorothy:          Dorothy Abrahams.

Brandon:          Brandon Strange.

Vanessa:          Vanessa Yee.

Cassidy:            Cassidy Hall.

Corey:              And me, Corey Wayne.

The music you hear is composed and provided by our friends, Hammock. And we’d also like to thank Sound On Studios for all of their work in post-production. From the high desert of New Mexico, we wish you peace and every good.