Russ Hudson

Russ Hudson is one of the best-known teachers of the Enneagram, the nine-pointed map of personality, and has written and taught on it full-time since 1991. A graduate in East Asian studies from Columbia University, he worked for many years alongside the late Don Richard Riso. Together they wrote five books, among them Personality Types and The Wisdom of the Enneagram, now read in more than a dozen languages, and built the Riso-Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator, a questionnaire still in wide use. He co-founded the Enneagram Institute, helped set up the International Enneagram Association as a founding director, and later co-wrote Keys to the Enneagram with A. H. Almaas and Sandra Maitri.

His approach treats a person's type less as a label than as the starting point for inner work. Workshops pair psychological insight into each of the nine patterns with meditation, presence practice, movement, music and small-group exercises, aiming at a direct taste of qualities such as clarity, compassion and joy. He also has a scholar's interest in East Asian religion and the early history of Western spiritual thought. A New Yorker since 1980, he teaches around the world in person and online, sells recorded courses through his own site, and returns to Esalen in Big Sur for week-long Enneagram retreats.