Don Richard Riso > Quotes

“Self-acceptance is a way of viewing oneself compassionately, without condemnation or justification. It is a starting point in life which makes other things possible. It celebrates the fullness of joy of being alive and of being who we are: accepting ourselves, however, does not mean embracing our neuroses or bad habits and celebrating them as if they were virtues. On the contrary, self-acceptance involves loving ourselves enough to accept painful truths about ourselves. . . . Self-acceptance is, at its simplest, the experience of one's self, here and now, as a complete human being, with all the glories and problems that condition entails.”
― Don Richard Riso, Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery

“The process of transforming the heart can be difficult because as we open it, we inevitably encounter our own pain and become more aware of the pain of others. In fact, much of our personality is designed to keep us from experiencing this suffering. We close down the sensitivity of our hearts so that we can block our pain and get on with things, but we are never entirely successful in avoiding it. Often, we are aware of our suffering just enough to make ourselves and everyone around us miserable. Carl Jung's famous dictum that "neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering" points to this truth. But if we are not willing to experience our own hurt and grief, it can never be healed. Shutting out our real pain also renders us unable to feel joy, compassion, love, or any of the other capacities of the heart.”
― Don Richard Riso, The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types

“Every moment has the possibility of delighting us, nurturing us, supporting us - if we are here to see it. Life is a tremendous gift, but most of us are missing it because we are watching a mental movie of our lives instead. As we learn to trust in the moment and to value awareness, we learn how to turn off the internal mood projector and start living a much more interesting life - the one we are actually starring in.”
― Don Richard Riso, The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types

“If we observe ourselves truthfully and non-judgmentally, seeing the mechanisms of our personality in action, we can wake up, and our lives can be a miraculous unfolding of beauty and joy.”
― Don Richard Riso, The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types

“As I turned my head and looked out the window, I saw that everything around me was glowing from within. The sunlight on the trees, the swaying of the leaves in the wind, the slight rattle of the panes of glass in the old window frame, were too beautiful for words. I was enthralled at how miraculous everything was. Absolutely everything was beautiful. . . .

I saw clearly that everyone is made of light—that we are like forms of light—but that a crust has formed over it. The crust is black and rubbery like tar and has obscured the inner light that is everyone’s real, inner self. Some blotches of tar are very thick; other areas are thinner and more transparent. Those who have worked on themselves for longer have less tar and they radiate more of their inner light. Because of their personal history, others are covered with more tar and need a great deal of work to get free of it. . .

If we observe ourselves truthfully and non-judgmentally, seeing the mechanisms of our personality in action, we can wake up, and our lives can be a miraculous unfolding of beauty and joy.”
― Don Richard Riso, The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types

“Kierkegaard's advice. He suggested that we become subjective toward others and objective toward ourselves. That is, when we judge the actions of others, we should put ourselves in their place, trying to understand how they see themselves and their world. And when we judge ourselves, we should see ourselves as others see us, overcoming the ease with which we find extenuating circumstances for ourselves.”
― Don Richard Riso, Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery

“In fact, life is our greatest teacher. Whatever we are doing can be instructive, whether we are at the office, or talking to our spouse, or driving a car on the freeway. If we are present to our experiences, the impressions of our activities will be fresh and alive, and we will always learn something new from them. But if we are not present, every moment will be like every other, and nothing of the preciousness of life will touch us.”
― Don Richard Riso, The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types

“Reconnecting means opening up to whatever part of our experience we were not previously allowing in . . . If our problem has been with another person, we will not react to them in the ways that our habits have previously compelled us to. When we are entranced by our personality, we believe that we know what the other person is always like and what they will do, but when we reconnect with them, we realize how much we do not know about them. We appreciate and respect the mystery of there Being because we are more connected with our own Being. Once we allow ourselves to "not know" what the person is going to do or say, or what they are thinking, a much more real and immediate relationship with then becomes possible.”
― Don Richard Riso, The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types

“The testimony of the greatest humans who have ever lived is that the way to make the most of ourselves is by transcending ourselves. We must learn to move beyond self-centeredness to make room within ourselves for others. When you transcend yourself, the fact will be confirmed by the quality of your life. We will attain – even if only momentarily – a transparency and a radiance of being which results from living both within and beyond yourself. This is the promise and the excitement of self-understanding.”
― Don Richard Riso

“One of the main tools for entering into the vivid immediacy of quiet mind is "not knowing." Ordinarily, our minds are filled with all kinds of opinions about who we are, what we are doing, what is important and not important, what is right and wrong, and how things ought to turn out. Because our mind is full of opinions and old thoughts, it has no internal space for a fresh impression of the real world around us. We learn nothing new. This also prevents us from really seeing other people - especially the people we love. We imagine that we really know people or even what they are thinking. Many of us know from experience, though, that to experience freshly someone we know can instantly transform our state and theirs. In some cases, this can save a relationship.

Not knowing involves suspending our opinions and letting our curiosity within the realm of quiet mind take the lead.”
― Don Richard Riso, The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types

“One of the ego's main defenses against doing so (experiencing our Essence)is the belief that spirituality is something rarefied, impractical, and very far away. In fact, it is closer than we think, as the mystics assure us: we do not have to go anywhere or accomplish anything. What we must learn is to stop running away from ourselves . . . The good news is that you are already here: your Essence already exists entirely and perfectly . . . We do not need to learn something new or anything to be our True Nature. Spiritual progress involves seeing what is right under our noses - really, what is right under the layers of our personality. Spiritual work is therefore a matter of subtraction, of letting go, rather than of adding anything to what is already present.”
― Don Richard Riso, The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types

“Attaining the goal of a full, happy life, ripe with experiences well-used, means that each of us will become a paradox—free, yet constrained by necessity; shrewd, yet innocent; open to others, yet self-reliant; strong, yet able to yield; centered on the highest values, yet able to accept imperfection; realistic about the suffering existence imposes on us, yet full of gratitude for life as it is.”
― Don Richard Riso, Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery

“Generally speaking, 99 percent of the time life is benign and supportive. The ego leads us to fixate on the 1 percent when it is painful, dark, or tragic - although even in these times, it is usually only painful and tragic to us (our tragedy might be someone else's good luck). Although the mind imagines worst-case scenarios - like car crashes - most of our lives are not composed of these kinds of events. If we look at our lives more objectively, we see that reality is actually highly supportive of us - a miracle, if we could see it for what it is. The universe is much more generous than most of us have ever recognized or acknowledged, and in the face of this overwhelming abundance, it simply makes sense to awaken and open ourselves to this generosity.”
― Don Richard Riso, The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types

“Self-understanding is the prelude to transformation, to moving beyond the ego and all that makes up what is called "false personality.”
― Don Richard Riso, Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery

“[T]he Enneagram is, at its most abstract, a universal mandala of the self—a symbol of each of us.”
― Don Richard Riso

“The superego is the inner voice that is always putting us down for not living up to certain standards or rewarding our ego when we fulfill its demands . . .

In fact, our superego is one of the most powerful agents of the personality: it is the "inner critic" that keeps us restricted to certain limited possibilities for ourselves.

A large part of our initial transformational work centers on becoming more aware of the superego's "voice" in its many guises, both positive and negative. Its voices continually draw us back into identifying with our personality and acting out in self-defeating ways. When we are present, we are able to hear our superego voices without identifying with them; we are able to see the stances and positions of the superego as if they were characters in a play waiting in the wings, ready to jump in and control or attack us once again. When we are present, we hear the superego's voice but we do not give it any energy; the "all-powerful" voice then becomes just another aspect of the moment.

However, we must also be on the lookout for the formation of new layers of superego that come from our psychological and spiritual work . . . In fact, one of the biggest dangers that we face in using the Enneagram is our superego's tendency to take over our work and start criticizing us, for example, for not moving up the Levels of Development or going in the Direction of Integration fast enough. The more we are present, however, the more we will recognize the irrelevance of these voices and successfully resist giving them energy. Eventually, they lose their power, and we can regain the space and quiet we need to be receptive to other, more life-giving forces within us.

. . . If we feel anxious, depressed, lost, hopeless, fearful, wretched, or weak, we can be sure that our superego is on duty.”
― Don Richard Riso, The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types

“everyone wants insight into others, few people are as willing to look so intently at themselves.”
― Don Richard Riso, Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery

“Perhaps one of the most challenging notions for us to accept at the beginning of transformational work is that the personality—the ego and its structures—is an artificial construct. But it only seems real because up until now it has been our entire reality. Identifying with our personality has been how we have lived and gotten by in life. Insofar as it has enabled us to do so, the personality has been a useful, even highly valuable, friend. As our insights deepen, however, we come to accept the hard truth that our personality is largely a collection of internal defenses and reactions, deeply ingrained beliefs and habits about the self and the world that have come from the past, particularly from our childhood. To put this more simply, our personality is a mechanism from the past, perhaps one that has helped us survive until now, but one whose limitations can now be seen. We all suffer from a case of mistaken identity: we have forgotten our True Nature and have come to believe that we are the personality. The reason we must explore the defenses of the personality and the vulnerabilities it is protecting is so that we can reexperience our Essential nature—our spiritual core—and know directly who we really are.”
― Don Richard Riso, Understanding the Enneagram: The Practical Guide to Personality Types

“The body is extremely important for Inner Work, because it is a reliable reality check in ways that our minds and emotions (the other two centers) cannot be. This is because, as we mentioned earlier, the body is always here, in the present moment. Our minds or feelings can be anyplace - imagining the future, dwelling on the past, or ruminating on a fantasy - but our body is always here and now. It cannot be anywhere else. Therefore, if we are aware of the sensations of our bodies, it is a solid piece of evidence that we are present.”
― Don Richard Riso, The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types

“One of the most important elements of spiritual progress is a willingness and ability to let go of the past, and this inevitably means wrestling with the problem of forgiving those who have hurt us in various ways. But how can we let go of hurts and resentments that bind us to our old identities and prevent us from moving on with our lives? Again, we cannot simply "decide" to forgive, any more than we can "decide" to be loving. Rather, forgiveness arises from our Essential nature and comes from a deeper understanding of the truth of our situation . . .”
― Don Richard Riso

“In the artist of all kinds I think one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found....”
― Don Richard Riso, Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery

“Nines must resist the urge to escape into “premature Buddhahood”... and away from the mundane world. They must remember that "the only way out is through.”
― Don Richard Riso, The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types

“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?” THOMAS MERTON”
― Don Richard Riso, The Wisdom of the Enneagram

“personality types very simply for now; they will become more sophisticated later on. In the Feeling Triad, the types are the Helper (the Two—the encouraging, demonstrative, possessive type), the Motivator (the Three—the ambitious, pragmatic, image-conscious type), and the Individualist (the Four—the sensitive, self-absorbed, depressive type). In the Thinking Triad, we see the Investigator (the Five—the perceptive, cerebral, provocative type), the Loyalist (the Six—the committed, dutiful, suspicious type), and the Enthusiast (the Seven—the spontaneous, fun-loving, excessive type). And in the Instinctive Triad, we find the Leader (the Eight—the self-confident, assertive, confrontational type), the Peacemaker (the Nine—the pleasant, easygoing, complacent type), and the Reformer (the One—the rational, idealistic, orderly type).”
― Don Richard Riso, Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery

“Enneagram 9s

Basic Fear: Of loss and separation

Basic Desire: To have inner stability "peace of mind”
― Don Richard Riso

“Twos have learned that they cannot express their needs and demands directly—they must do so indirectly, hoping that others will pick up the hints and repay them in various ways.”
― Don Richard Riso, The Wisdom of the Enneagram

“the longest way round is the shortest way home.” Our truest fulfillment does not lie in the direction of a jealously guarded self but in the direction of self-transcendence as we learn to open to others and to reality.”
― Don Richard Riso, Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery

“Their healthy simplicity has deteriorated into obliviousness, a permanent absent-mindedness, as if they were constantly daydream-
ing about nothing in particular, perceiving the world like someone
who looks at a clock without seeing the time. Indeed, the way most
people have trained themselves to ignore television commercials is how average Nines experience a lot of reality, disconnecting them-
selves from whatever they do not want to see or hear until inad-
vertence becomes habitual. They are like sleepwalkers, physically
present but not aware of what is going on around them.”
― Don Richard Riso, Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery

“The difficulty is that average Fours may not know what their feelings are until after they have expressed them personally or artistically. But if they express all that they feel, they fear that they may reveal too much, exposing themselves to shame or punishment.”
― Don Richard Riso, Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery

“The Enneagram is not a religion, however; nor does it interfere with a person’s orientation. It does not pretend to be a complete spiritual path. Nevertheless, it concerns itself with one element that is fundamental to all spiritual paths: self-knowledge.”
― Don Richard Riso, The Wisdom of the Enneagram