Eli Jaxon-Bear

Eli Jaxon-Bear (born Elliot J. Zeldow in 1947) is an American spiritual teacher and author. He lives in Ashland, Oregon with his wife, fellow spiritual teacher Gangaji. Before he met his teacher, Sri H.W.L. Poonja, in 1990, he was best known for his work on the spiritual dimension of the Enneagram. Following his meeting with Poonjaji he continued to teach, carrying his teacher’s message to the West.

Jaxon-Bear was born in Brooklyn, New York. He attended the University of Pittsburgh, graduating in 1968. In 1965 he was part of a group of students who went to Montgomery, Alabama to take part in the civil rights marches. Later he wrote of this experience, “Getting on the bus represented a much deeper commitment than simply enduring a few weeks of dangerous adventure. Finally, I had to give my life fully to getting on the bus for freedom without a thought of getting off.” After graduating he became a community organizer in Chicago and Detroit. Freedom of Information documents show that the FBI began a file on Jaxon-Bear after his arrest during the Democratic Convention in the summer of 1968. After six months of working in a steel mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania, he was awarded a fellowship for a doctorate at the Graduate School for International Studies at the University of Denver. He was part of the student strike committee that shut down the university in 1970.

Jaxon-Bear’s eighteen-year spiritual path began after the 1971 May Day Protests, when he became a federal fugitive during the Vietnam War. As he described, “I was brought face-to-face with death. Through grace, I passed to the other side: I awoke to the truth of my own nature as empty, immortal consciousness.” This experience led him on a spiritual search that took him around the world and into many traditions and practices. In 1978, Kalu Rinpoche appointed him the president of Kagyu Minjur Choling, the first Kagyu Tibetan Buddhist dharma center in Marin County. In 1982, he was presented with a Zen Teaching Fan at Cho Sho-ji Zen Temple in Beppu, Japan. Through the 1980s, Jaxon-Bear ran a Clinical Hypnosis and Neurolinguistics certification program at the Esalen Institute. Also during that time, he studied the ancient Sufi wisdom teachings of the Enneagram. His first writings and teachings on the Enneagram emerged in 1989. He was a keynote speaker at the first International Enneagram Conference at Stanford University in August, 1994. His talk was entitled “The Enneagram and Self-Realization”.

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