From Personality to Soulality: Knowing Your Soul

In this episode of The Real Enneagram, co-hosts Nanette Mudiam, Dr. Joe Howell, and Scott Smith dive deep into the theme of the year for the Institute for Conscious Being: "Know Your Soul." We explore Dr. Joe's new book, Know Your Soul: Journeying with the Enneagram, which emphasizes the Enneagram as a journey toward understanding our true essence beyond mere personality traits.

We discuss the origins of the Enneagram, tracing its roots back to George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and the ancient wisdom he uncovered. Dr. Joe shares his personal journey with the Enneagram, highlighting how it has been instrumental in his work as a psychologist and in his own spiritual growth, especially following the profound loss of his son. This experience led him to a deeper understanding of the Enneagram, revealing that it is not just about personality but about connecting with our soul.

Throughout the conversation, we touch on the concept of the "soul child" and how it relates to our spiritual journey. Dr. Joe emphasizes that while we all possess various soul energies, each of us has a primary energy that shapes our essence. We also discuss the importance of community in deepening our understanding of the soul and how spiritual awareness can lead to transformation.

As we wrap up, we invite listeners to reflect on their own journeys and the maps they use to navigate their spiritual paths. We encourage everyone to explore the insights shared in Dr. Joe's book and to join us in future discussions as we continue to uncover the depths of the Enneagram and its relevance to our lives. Thank you for tuning in!

To learn more about the Institute for Conscious Being, visit: theicb.info

Transcript

Swell AI Transcript: Soulality Talk Part 1, for release on 2-26-25 (Mono).mp3

Scott:
You are now listening to The Real Enneagram, a podcast by the Institute for Conscious Being. To learn more about the Institute and its offerings, visit theicb.info. That's T-H-E I-C-B dot I-N-F-O. And now, here are your hosts, Dr. Joe Howell and Nanette Mudiam.

Nanette: Welcome to The Real Enneagram, a podcast brought to you by the Institute for Conscious Being. I'm Nanette Mudiam, and I'm here with my co-host today, Dr. Joseph Howell and Scott Smith. Hey, you guys.

Joe: Hey, how are you today?

Nanette: I'm doing so good. I'm excited to be with y'all.

Scott: Good. I'm excited to be here.

Nanette: Well, that is a running theme and all of our podcast, our excitement over the event itself. And we just were saying, as we started today, that we're here for the fun of it, because we wouldn't want to do this if it wasn't fun. We really enjoy talking about the Enneagram. And that's why we're here. Right.

Joe: Right. Yeah, absolutely.

Nanette: So we're looking forward to this year because we have a theme for the Institute this year, and our theme is Know Your Soul. We borrowed this theme from a book that we know about and we're excited to tell you about today. Dr. Joe, you have a new book out called Know Your Soul, and its subtitle is Know Your Soul, Journeying with the Enneagram. because it is a journey, isn't it? You don't reach it overnight. And that's the other reason that we're here. We know that there are lots of spiritual truths to mine out of the study of the Enneagram, right?

Joe: There are. In fact, I believe that that is the actual real purpose of the Enneagram.

Nanette: Well, and that kind of leads me to a place that I wanted to almost backtrack to today, which is to talk about why we even call this The Real Enneagram. Why do we call this podcast The Real Enneagram, Dr. Joe?

Joe: I believe it really goes back to a gentleman called George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. who at the beginning of the last century made a discovery somewhere in the regions of Northern Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, et cetera. We've not been able to locate it, but his study at a monastery there gave him this very beautiful and ancient wisdom that was elucidated by Oscar Achazo some decades later. and that we have today secure to sleep.

Nanette: You know, when I think about the word real I think about being real and authenticity. We know that most of us come to awareness of the Enneagram usually in some sort of quest to know ourselves. We maybe take a personality test or we meet somebody who knows about the Enneagram who types us for us or invites us to type ourselves and maybe we read a book, maybe we take a test. But it's basically driven by a desire to know more about our own personality.

Joe: Yes, that's good.

Nanette: That is good. Do you think that that's what Gurdjieff was after?

Joe: Well, no. I mean, when Gurdjieff brought the principles of the Enneagram to the West, there was no Enneagram of personality at that point, because it hadn't been even defined until Oscar Achazo many decades later. He had, Gurdjieff had the basic energies that he understood involved everything, not just personality, but all disciplines, all knowledge, all energies. That would include music, law, electronics, architecture, the basic of Western civilization. And now we know that in the Eastern Hemisphere, these things were developing even before or alongside human development in the West. So, ancient wisdom. Ancient. And he was given a way to tap in to those nine energies. And who would have thought there would be nine? But the more we understand it, the more we understand it's that the Enneagram is built on two basic foundational laws, the law of three and the law of seven. And those are topics in and of themselves. But he was able through his work with the monks to understand this ancient wisdom, which had pre-existed his coming to their monastery for hundreds of years.

Nanette: So by grace, we really understand this ancient wisdom because many men mined its truths out and made them more accessible to someone like me who doesn't understand all of that, but has been able to grasp the truths of the Enneagram really by your mentorship and by the Institute for Conscious Being. So how did that develop in your own life, Dr. Joe? You have this background as a psychologist, and then also you've always been spiritually inclined and in pursuit of the divine, and then you engage with the Enneagram, but you realize somehow all the way back to Gurdjieff that it was about more than just personality, right? Right.

Joe: And that's what captivated me. But the personality aspects captivated me too. Because my work as a psychologist is with people who have things that they want to improve upon in their life. And for me to be able to understand that an inroad to their healing comes through the Enneagram because it delineates their personality strengths and their weaknesses was a tremendous insight to me.

Nanette: So, so you wrote your first book, Becoming Conscious, The Enneagram's Forgotten Pathway. And you, what what made you feel like this is, there's lots of books out there. So what made you feel like I need to write another book?

Joe: Well, that's a very good question. I believe that I experienced the spiritual aspects of the Enneagram on a very personal level in the late 2000s, 2008, 9, 10. And even though I had known the Enneagram since the mid to late 80s, I experienced a tremendous shock point in 2008. And that shock point was the death of my son, Ben. The teachings of the Enneagram up until that point, had been tremendously insightful and helped me so much with my own practice of clinical psychology. But when Ben died, as I say, there was a shock point. And a shock point is an enneagram term, which means that we have come to a point where our life has paused. as we know it. And during that pause, we have the opportunity to advance our consciousness, to remain static, the same, and swim where we are, or disintegrate in terms of our personality and spiritual functioning. Well, it was very tempting to disintegrate, because when you lose a 26-year-old person who is part of your soul, the reason for your living is questioned, the whys of your very existence, the cosmology, one's cosmology is questioned. The other thing is that grief comes into the picture. And when grief comes into the picture, there is a deepening and a saddening of one's life because a very integral component of that life has pulled away and is no longer accessible. I say pulled away because for some people, grief doesn't mean, doesn't happen because of death. It's a type of separation. In this instance, it was death. And after that, I did a lot of those existential questionings. And one of the things that was very hurtful to me was that here you are, a psychologist, supposedly helping other people to mend their lives. But you can't even save your own son, nor can you save yourself. And those types of questions are like, I mean, an analogy would be like an earthquake. And it sends everything, all the structures, it demolishes. You have to decide, am I going to build new structures? Am I going to sit in the rubble? Or am I just going to go slither away and go to the forest and disintegrate? I pulled away from my normal existence. And what I did was I decided to study the Enneagram more so and go more to its original sources, more to what Gurdjieff had written, what his student, Peter Ospensky, wrote, which was a very wonderful and complicated book called In Search of the Miraculous. and many, many other original sources, including Claudio Norano's work and Oscar Echaza's work that was accessible to me. It became not an intellectual exercise. It became a life-changing experience when I was able to read these words and come to an understanding that this Enneagram is not about perfecting one's personality or even integrating one's personality alone, but that this ego of ours is the veil that we get so entrenched with and so fascinated by that it takes us off the true pathway. And the true pathway is the pathway that shows us our soul. which is our true nature, our original being, and it is the essence of who we are, much more so than any superficial personality trait or egoic quest we would ever have.

Nanette: dawning awareness as you did this research or did you have an aha epiphany?

Joe: There were a lot of little ahas all the way along. Okay. It really, for me, went back, Nanette, to answering the question, is it worth going on with the following thought that came into my head after I read all these original sources. And that is, yes, I am worth it because I am an aspect of the divine. I am not junk. I am not a failure. I am not someone who made a mess of things, but am a soul who lives in the mess of the human condition. That was a tremendous insight to me. And it did take me multiple retreats away from my normal routine. I found a retreat place that I could go to regularly on weekends to spend a lot of time alone reading, meditating, being in nature, writing, and doing physical work. And that gave me answers that I could not get in the perpetual grief that I was experiencing. This took my shock point and raised me to a different level of consciousness. I hope I'm making some sense to you.

Joe: You are, though I- Me too, Scott. Oh, very much so, Joe.

Nanette: But all of this predated becoming conscious, right? So you get this awareness really of the real Enneagram, the authentic function almost of the wisdom, which is that our soul has the capacity to heal us of enormous loss and suffering. And it is the antidote to our suffering. Is that is that? Can I say that? Okay. And so becoming conscious is, is really kind of the student manual for us at the Institute, we use it, we refer to it, we read it as we study for our students. And yet, during these years of the Institute, you still felt compelled that there was still something else that needed to be said. There is some overlap, obviously, I'm sure, from becoming conscious to know your soul, but why were you compelled to write Know Your Soul?

Joe: Well, I'm glad you put it like that because when the first book came out, it was just a basic overview. And I was compelled to write it because in teaching this new spirituality of the Enneagram, not new, but in teaching the spirituality of the Enneagram, And another book greatly affected me along that line is Sandra Matre's book, The Spiritual Dimensions of the Enneagram, which far preceded my book, Becoming Conscious, which was a tremendous guide for me. But that book that I wrote, Becoming Conscious, in 2012, was a call by the people in all of our workshops that I was giving out tremendous amounts of handouts explaining the basics of this spirituality of the Enneagram. There were several books out at that point, many, on the basics of the Enneagram, but not, except for Sandra's book and a few others, no primers on the spirituality of the Enneagram. That's what becoming conscious is. It has no real personal stories of my own. It's just a compilation of all of these handouts that the students said, please don't give us any more of these handouts.

Joe: They're just voluminous and put it in a book, please. Yeah, so that's what you did. You encapsulated your handouts into a book. That's what it was for.

Nanette: Yes.

Joe: And people said, I love this so much.

Joe: I'm studying it, can we have a school? And that's why Lark and I formed the Institute for Conscious Being, because we had people who wanted to study the book. And so when 2013-14 came around, we had an institute that met in person to study the book and to go in even deeper.

Nanette: So, Know Your Soul is a personal book. Yes. It's really your voice. It's a beautiful voice. It feels very personal when you read it. I hear your voice in Becoming Conscious because I have the privilege of knowing you, but this book does feel more personal. So, talk to me about what compelled you to write Know Your Soul.

Joe: When I kept studying, even after my publishing Becoming Conscious, when I kept studying the book, I realized that there is a deeper Enneagram than just having a spiritual personality. And that the deeper Enneagram is the nine energies of soul. that are actually the nine essences into one of them, everyone is born. And so it became evident to me at that point that long before we're personality types, we are soul types, which were part of our soul child, which I did speak to in Becoming Conscious. But the soul child became much more fleshed out over the years after I wrote Becoming Conscious. I began to understand the power of the individual soul child within everyone that is not just a mental structure. because it is part of our soul, which is not just mental. It's the spiritual and transparent being that we have in our body, heart, and mind. And in their workings together, how it becomes our soul. I hope I was able to make myself clear.

Nanette: Yes. Is Soul Child a teaching that is out there widespread? Did you term this?

Joe: No, it was a term Sandra Maytree wrote about. And her mentor, A.H. Almas, has written about. And my understanding is that they both got that concept from Claudio Nohrano, because they were both in Claudio's SAT group for several years at Berkeley, at the Esselstyn Institute. And Sandra develops that and has, I believe she has a chapter in her book on that as well.

Scott: So Joe, you wrote Becoming Conscious before you and Laura founded the Institute for Conscious Being. Yes. And you've written Know Your Soul after, obviously. Yes. I wonder how do you feel your experiences with the ICB may have affected the writing of this new book?

Joe: Well, that's a good question, Scott, and I think it does affect it integrally because When you have a community like we do at ICB, and people are on the frequency of soul rather than ego, or at least we're all trying to be. Of course, the ego is going to come in to all of us all the time at various places, and we have to have it. But there is a concerted effort. Correct me if I'm wrong, if you disagree. because both of you are in the Institute, but there is a concerted effort to speak from our souls to each other there. And when we have a community that speaks that way, it deepens our own soul. And so you guys have helped me to deepen my soul because you are the ones with whom I can share this language and hear your soul speak to me and me speak to you. And when you've got that going on with all of these people for years, you're going to transform. And so I myself have become transformed more and more and more each year.

Nanette: Joe, how do you define the soul?

Joe: Well, I mean, that is a huge question. And of course, the Greek philosophers tackled that one, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, and more. And of course, in scientific terms, we can't measure that. Therefore, it can't be described scientifically. We may not have the tools yet as a species to be able to measure and really understand in terms that make it sensible and provable. the soap. For example, in the early 1800s, if somebody told somebody else that they would be able to speak to somebody 2,000 miles away in just a few short years, they would probably say, that is impossible. We don't have the means. We don't have the technology. How can you do that? You can't Voice can't travel. And yet, voice does travel all the time. It's traveling right now over these podcast waves. Who would have ever thought that in one, if maybe 50 years ago, that you said that I can show you thin sections of your gallbladder or your heart so that any imperceptible tumor can be not only x-rayed, but it can be determined as to where and how it could be extracted. Someone would say, well, that technology doesn't exist because how can you envision something inside somebody's body?

Joe: So I have hope.

Joe: that we will one day be able to perceive the soul. But until then, we have got to perceive it with what we do have, which is intuition, belief, manifestation of soul qualities, and the individual epiphanies that come to people who have made the search of soul their quest. That being said, to me the soul is who we are without our ego, without our external personality, and it has to do with what of God, or the divine if you prefer, do I manifest on the deepest level of my being, my communication, and how I move in this world. Therefore, if you go back to the Enneagram of Soul, and if there are truly nine energies, These are the nine soul intentions. These are the nine various and broad ways each of us has in terms of just one of these. As the, not only how we entered this world, but how on a soul level we have manifested the divine in this world. And that soul energy one, would be sacred righteousness, sacred alignment with the developer. Point two, sacred compassionate benevolence.

Joe:

1. Sacred Action 4. Sacred Creativity 5.

Joe: Sacred Wisdom 6. Sacred Kinship 7. Sacred Joy 8. Sacred Power 9. Sacred Loving Peace Now you may say, well, I have a little bit of all of those. And I believe we do. Because we all have all of the holy ideas and we all have all of the virtues. And we all have the essential aspects, we all have the idealized essential aspects. However, there is one main one. And it is like the first float in a parade, if I could give an example. That first float sets the tone. And although the other floats in the parade and the bands and everything else are integrally related to that first float, they are not the first float. And so, it's like we all have nine soul energies, and we express them in our own unique way. But our first energy is the one into which our soul child was born, and which we express all of our lives on a soul level.

Scott: Joe, would it be fair to say that while the soul can't be known in an abstract, conceptual way. I mean, at least not definitively. We can certainly describe it. And it can't be known empirically either. Yeah. We can talk about it in concepts. It's my sense it can be known sensationally, experientially. We have just desensitized, through putting on our ego, the faculties in us that are able to sense it, because it can be known to be subtle.

Joe: Yes, that's what I was saying. The intuition, and of course, you being a person who's an expert in embodiment, would understand what I'm talking about. That when you go into the body, as you do, you are sensing much more than just your body. You're sensing, I believe, the soul within the body.

Scott: Oh, yeah. And what the body what we feel through the body, through the soul. You know, in my talk, Embodied Present Process, Approach to Embodiment, you know, we talk about this idea that real embodiment isn't listening to the body. That's great, but that still treats it like it's something else, that it's listening to the world, to the present, and I say, to the divine, not my personal body. It's listening to that through the body. And I wonder if it's not similar with the soul. Maybe at first we need to listen to the soul, but then we can listen through the soul.

Nanette: as I understand it, Joe, you find your soul point at your point of integration, right?

Joe: Absolutely.

Nanette: Okay. So for me, that is sacred action at the three because I come into my ego at nine. And so that means that my soul point is at three, right? And I think most of us, We say this all the time that the Enneagram is a map that you travel whether you realize you're on the road or not, right? I mean, truth is truth. Right, right. And so we can, if we come into an awareness of the Enneagram, we can go back and usually track our lives, you know, in disintegration and integration. you know, those numbers that resonate with us, the truths that resonate there. But basically, if you are going to embody your soul, or if that's a good way to say it.

Joe: Yes, we do it all the time at the Institute when we embody the soul child.

Nanette: Right. And if that happens, the spark for that is some sort of spiritual awareness.

Joe: Absolutely.

Nanette: Yes.

Joe: Yes.

Nanette: And that happens for different people in different ways. But fundamentally, or at a very basic level, it is spiritual awareness that brings us to the soul. Would you agree?

Joe: I do agree.

Nanette: Is there any other way to the soul?

Joe: I have no idea of any other way.

Nanette: I'm interested in your thought on that, Scott, because as somebody who, were you an atheist or an agnostic, or you went through a period of… Yeah, I self-identified as an atheist from, I suppose until about 17, until I got into all this about five or six years ago. So would you have called that a spiritual awakening?

Scott: Oh, what shifted me?

Nanette: Uh-huh, yes.

Scott: Well, it was, I mean, it was both a spiritual awakening and a huge critical mass of suffering. Early on in that, I read a Brene Brown book and she talked about how she had a nervous breakdown and her therapist called it a spiritual awakening and she kind of has come to understand it was both. Yeah, I mean for me it very much was a spiritual awakening because it helped me realize that the way I was operating in the world, the way I was experiencing reality, the way I was thinking, the way I was being was just a way and not the only way that a human being could be. Just that was earth shattering and provided a certain amount of relief from the anxiety and the other emotions I was struggling with. So I very much say spiritual awakening is an accurate description of that. Now I've met people at some of my embodiment retreats who have done this sort of work and they continue to identify as an atheist.

Nanette: Okay.

Scott: And they would not want to call the spiritual way. Okay, uh-huh. But when I talk to them, I come to realize they are a very different kind of atheist than the kind of atheist I was. Like, they have different terminology and a different conceptual framework, but they are doing what, in my opinion, they are doing what we call spiritual awakening. They are embracing mystery. They're embracing being present and grounded in reality. Because when I think of presence, the present, I think of the divine, personally. I mean, that modality is called the embodied present process. You're embodying the present, which for me is wholeness, which for me is the divine, which is what my soul is tethered to and not separate from. To circle back, yes. And yeah, we're all navigating the same terrain and we just have an incredible variety of maps. And it's just beautiful, there are so many maps. Our egos want to fight over who has the right map.

Nanette: It's not about the map, it's the map that works for you. That's a beautiful place for us to land today. Because we certainly don't want this work to be in any way exclusive or isolating to anyone. We want it to be accessible to the people who need this work, who really may be enduring their own suffering, their own seismic shift today. They might be going through their own shock point. And we have found something that works for us, and we are certainly offering it. So Know Your Soul is available. We're going to continue to have this conversation. There's so much more we want to talk about with the book, Dr. Joe. So I look forward to continuing this discussion with you.

Joe: I do too.

Nanette: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Scott: Thank you for listening to The Real Enneagram, a podcast by the Institute for Conscious Being. To learn more about the Institute and its offerings, visit theicb.info. That's T-H-E I-C-B dot I-N-F-O. The music for today's podcast was composed and performed by ICB faculty member Drexel Rayford.

Nanette: Thanks for listening today. We hope you liked what you heard. If you did, please subscribe, leave a review, and share this with your friends and family.