Embodying Your Soul: Practical Applications of the Enneagram

In this episode of The Real Enneagram, we continue our exploration of Dr. Joe Howell's new book, Know Your Soul: Journeying with the Enneagram and delve into the practical applications of the Enneagram, emphasizing that the ultimate goal is to deepen our understanding of our souls rather than merely improving our egos.

Joe shares his insights on how each person is a, "living document," with unique experiences that shape their understanding of the universe and spirit. He discusses the concept of "shock points"—moments in life where we face dilemmas that challenge our capacities and require us to seek deeper truths. We explore how spiritual practices, such as mindfulness meditation and embodiment practices, can help us recognize when our unchecked ego is dominating our lives.

Throughout the conversation, we highlight the importance of inquiry as a tool for self-discovery. Joe recounts a profound experience of inquiry that led him to realize that the expectations he felt were imposed by his parents were, in fact, expectations he had internalized himself. This realization brought him a sense of freedom and empowerment.

Scott shares his own experience with inquiry, illustrating how it helped him cultivate self-compassion and shift his inner dialogue from self-judgment to curiosity. We emphasize that the journey of knowing our souls is not about achieving a destination but about navigating the complexities of life with awareness and openness.

As we wrap up, we encourage our listeners to recognize that their souls are always available to them, offering guidance and insight as they navigate life's challenges. We hope this episode inspires you to embark on your own journey of self-discovery and soul knowledge. Thank you for joining us!

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

Transcript

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: Well, welcome back to The Real Enneagram, a podcast brought to you by the Institute for Conscious Being. I'm Nanette Mudiam, and I'm here with Dr. Joseph Howell and Scott Smith. I'm so happy to be with both of you today.

Scott: Well, we're very happy to be with you, Nanette.

Nanette: Good.

Scott: Very happy.

Nanette: Good.

Scott: Well, we're looking forward to it.

Nanette: We're very much looking forward to continuing our conversation. We started a conversation on Joe, your new book, Know Your Soul, journeying with the Enneagram last week. And we'd like to continue having that conversation. So first off, I know you were really, really pleased with the blue cover of this book. You didn't have a lot of control in it. You released that into the universe and it somehow came back to you in something that looks remarkably like you. Can you just tell me about how you felt when you got the book?

Joe: Well, my first book, Becoming Conscious, I worked with the publisher to create the cover and everything. And we used green and we used a photograph that my wife had taken of an opening gardenia. And that was to signify becoming conscious, the growth aspect of it. the unfurling of the buds of a gardenia, and the fragrance that it emits as it continues to unfold. And we wanted to do something like that for the next book, but with in stock publishers, said that they wanted to do their own rendition of what they thought the cover should look like. And I backed off and they came out with a very lovely blue cover, which is my favorite color. they have the figure of an enneagram arising out of, I guess, groundedness and the shape of what I take to be a door that might be opening as somebody walks through the enneagram. So to me, they did a beautiful job portraying the nine points. Yeah.

Nanette: It is a beautiful rendition. And what's especially moving, obviously, is the content of the book. And hopefully, the outside reflects that. And so we're excited to be talking about it today. And we landed last week, talking about spiritual awakening and what that means, especially as we think about it in terms of the Enneagram. But today, I think I want to shift into a conversation that we were having just prior to hitting record today, which is the application of what we know. It's learning, not how to be a better ego and find your number and figure that out and do good, be good, get better, the whole striving. But recognizing that know your soul is really the absolute motivation of learning the Enneagram for you at this point. It's the It's the practical application is to know your soul. So, Joe, can you talk about how the information of this book can deepen soul knowledge?

Joe: You know, we are, every human being, is actually a living document. Meister Eckhart said this centuries ago that every human is a book. And they are a book about the universe and the spirit. Because everyone has an experience that for them, they are the authority of that experience and how it is interpreted. And the truth of what any individual knows comes from their experience of where the rubber meets the road in their life. And I'm no different from everybody else, the road and the rubber meet in my life. And I felt that the best way to get some of the enneagramic ideas across that are for some kind of abstract, especially in the area of spiritual growth, was to use many of my own experiences and how I interpreted them. of how I applied the Enneagram to my life at certain shock points, whether I knew the Enneagram or not. We still have virtues and holy perspectives, whether we know what the names of them are or not. The book is full of stories. that are happenings to me that illustrate how these truths were applied at various shock points in my life. And the shock point is an area that we come to where our capacities call for more than we have. It is a place of dilemma. It is a place where we are at loggerheads with something and we can't, it's an impasse. And our capacities do not have the storehouse of techniques or understandings or ideas or strategies or spiritual perceptions enough to work through it. Therefore, we have to step back and find out how we are going to approach this. And a lot of times it's trial and error. That's how we learn.

Nanette: Shock points don't call for theory, right? Theory is the idea that, you know, out there is some idea that theoretically could be beneficial. But if we don't learn a practical application, it does no good in the moment of terror, of loss, of trauma. But the truth is, is that not everyone responds to a shock point in a positive way. No, right. I mean, like you can, you can not grow spiritually from a shock point, you could double down and get worse, you could be thrown into deep depression or, or anger or so what helps the person out there? who's enduring some suffering to find a different way to deal with it.

Joe: Well, we have to be familiar with our unchecked ego, for one thing.

Nanette: Most people are not aware of their unchecked ego, right?

Joe: Right. But that's the spiritual work that, for example, we teach in the Institute. How can I be aware of when my ego is really dominating and taking over and I'm the one suffering at its expense?

Nanette: How would somebody kind of do a check right now? If they, if you said you might be dealing with an unchecked ego, what are some questions they could ask themselves that might confirm that their ego is really in charge?

Joe: The Enneagram has given us one sure way. And that is, are we going to our stress point on the Enneagram?

Nanette: Okay.

Joe: Okay. Are we, is our ego thinking in terms of the lowest areas of functioning of our stress point, not the highest, but the lowest. For me, the stress point is three, and it would be to continue in the vein that I'm continuing, just do it harder, faster, more efficiently, and make my case known more loudly and accomplish enough that my fears won't come true.

Nanette: But that doesn't work.

Joe: It could work for a little while, but in the long run, it's not fine at all. It's part of disintegration for me and all people of the six ego who go to the unhealthy aspects of three. That's one way. Another way is to know, am I feeling bad? Am I frustrated? Am I angry, fearful? Am I shamed? Am I hopeless, exasperated? These are all symptoms of an unhealthy ego. Yes. Yes. Not to disparage the ego, because that's its job to, you know, let us know when things are going right. But then what do we do? Do we continue to follow the ego's recommendations for how we are to solve this? If it's unchecked, that won't work. But if the ego is checked, It begins to serve the soul and the soul's ideas of how we can get out of these very negative places. You know what I mean?

Nanette: I do. Unfortunately, I know all too well. What do you mean? I've lived in an unchecked ego and experienced those things myself. How about you, Scott?

Scott: I think another part of it is our spiritual practice, whatever it is, can be a means of, call it training, that facility in us that helps us notice when the ego has become unchecked. Take, for example, mindfulness meditation, where you simply sit and you anchor yourself to the breath and you witness the thoughts coming through, you know, and you notice when you get wrapped up in them. Then when you do notice, you return to the present moment, to groundedness. Practicing that in a controlled setting, for me at least, helps strengthen that mental or spiritual muscle as it were, so that when I'm in the stressful situation, I'm more likely to notice and then I regain choice and I can relax out of that. I mean, I know for me, my embodiment practice has helped me greatly to, um, to, to notice like what is happening sensationally. Then I, I have, um, gone into my ego. Like I feel a physical sense of like my breath becoming more shallow of, of, of feeling my awareness as if it's been contracted right behind my eyes. Like I lose any sense of spaciousness. So, all that to say, you know, I think one of the values of the spiritual practice is to help us practice. I mean, it's right there, spiritual practice, help practice at being able to notice.

Nanette: Let's talk about some ways that not only we, but those who study with us in the Institute, employ spiritual practices in order to know our souls. So, as Scott just mentioned, embodiment practices, mindfulness meditation. Joseph, what are some of the ways that you use spiritual practices to know your soul?

Joe: There are hundreds of spiritual practices and the trick is for the human being to expose themselves to enough of them to know which ones really help them center and focus, to find their still point. to be at a point of awareness of the self in terms of being able to look at ourselves objectively. That's part of consciousness. For example, when our inner critic is operating, telling us we aren't good or that we did something poorly or we should be punished for something or that we weren't good enough for something, for us to be aware that that's going on. And this requires a certain amount of time of our psyches being still, being calm, being tranquil, and not being just bombarded by the ego chatter that we are bombarded by literally all day long if we don't have a means by which we stop that ego chatter. So any spiritual practice that helps us, and as Scott said, I loved that thing that you said, Scott, if it gives us tranquility and it gives us spaciousness, we are no longer corralled by the ego into a corner. We see more alternatives. We see greater spaciousness. We know that we are not our ego's fair game. That there are a lot of avenues that we can go down that are not the ego's choices. And so for some people, I know the labyrinth does that for them. does it for me to some extent. But some people, it's very important to have their body actually go from outside a labyrinth to the center of it. Because that symbolizes a physical, mental and spiritual transition from the outer to the inner being. And once you do travel those mazes of any labyrinth into the middle with that intention of arriving at your center point, then you have got a spiritual practice that will give you that tranquility and therefore the spaciousness and ability to see when an ego is approaching and what it wants to do to us. Still point, center, those are very important words. There is something called centering prayer that you may have heard of, that a lot of people are proponents of. And this is using prayer as a labyrinth to take us to the center of our being where we can be tranquil. Prayers that shed all kinds of anxieties. Prayers that shed concerns about other people that we're scared for or have hopes for. Prayers that evoke a spirit or a power higher than ourselves. Prayers that ask for something special that we know our spirit needs. or that we don't even know what it needs, but we want it. And those are the kinds of prayers that take us away from the ego, its relentless chatter telling us how to get there. We can dispose of the ego chatter when we are praying. And then we can go to the center, to the still point through prayer. A lot of people can do it through art. They say art is the co-creation between them and God. And they completely leave the outer world of ego and enter into a centering position where they're co-creating with God. A lot of people say meditation does this for them. A lot of people say that actually reading does it for them in certain types of literature.

Nanette: Very good, Joe. Do you find that there are certain, I want to say, spiritual practices that are specific to the ego types? Or is art something available to all nine types? Are these spiritual practices universal?

Joe: Well, I think they are universal. But of course, you know, we have our three main centers, the body center, the heart center, and the mind center. And as Scott just so beautifully discussed, the body center is the one he explained in terms of his physical body practice. And that is the inroad for Scott, not that his ego is in the body, it's in the mind, but his soul point is in the body center.

Nanette: So that might be a clue as to our practice.

Joe: It could very well work. Both of those, I've seen it work both ways. The ego center or the soul center, and sometimes both. The spiritual practices of those centers, yes.

Nanette: Can you talk to us, this book is so personal, Joe, and so I'm interested in personally what your spiritual practices are.

Joe: Meditation is very important to me.

Nanette: Okay.

Joe: And I do heartfulness meditation, which is the quieting of one's emotions and the tethering to one's soul energy through the heart. It is a beautiful entryway because of its relaxation. I love it. You can go to heartfulness.org and get a heartfulness meditation there. It's from India. I've been lucky enough to have been to that ashram two times now. And you and Sai have been with me and Lark on that first visit, and we were so impacted by this meditation, which really brings in all three centers. I love it. Writing is a very important spiritual practice for me. I'm in the mental center because my ego is six. And it does help me to get to where I need to be, which is the body center. When a six is anxious, It affects their bodies. It affects their mentation, their ability to process, cognition, the way we see and perceive emotions and emotional circumstances. The body is not concerned with any of that. The body is the instinctual groundedness that we have in the ground of being. And writing gets me there. You may say, well, writing is just a mental exercise. How can it ground you into your body? And it does it this way. It does it by helping me surrender the anxieties of my mentation. And there's nothing left to be in but the body and the soul done. I hope I'm making some sense.

Nanette: Yeah, and I'm thinking too, you know, writing is very present. If you're writing, you stay in the present moment, right?

Joe: You do good. I forgot to say that.

Nanette: Yeah, and there are some benefits we know to actually handwriting because there is a tactile sensation that helps us to stay very present as well.

Joe: The other spiritual practice that I have that is important to me is actually being in the natural world where I feel the wind, the sun, touch the leaves, the ground, listen to the sounds of nature like the birds and the wind going through the trees, and smelling the smells. Even sometimes tasting nature. When I was a little boy, there was a, I remember tasting the different leaves in the woods behind my house. One of them was a sassafras leaf. And as you know, sassafras is a root from which we get root beer flavor. And the root had that root beer flavor in it. And I would pull up little bitty sassafras seedlings and put them in my mouth and just chew on them as I was making my safari through the woods with my dog, you know. I think sometimes we want to be very near nature and drinking The water drinking the honeysuckle juice inside the honeysuckle blossoms, smelling magnolia blossoms, gardenia blossoms, and all flowers is another very, that's the olfactory memory that completely bypasses all thought. So nature puts me right back into the body center.

Nanette: Joe, can you talk to us about the application of inquiry and how you have experienced it, learned it, taught it?

Joe: Inquiry is one of the major ways that we are able to explore the facets of our ego and our soul, and all the other facets in between, such as our higher self, our superego, our inner critic, our id, and helps us really go to our depths. Inquiry is a set of questions that we ask ourselves or a question that we ask ourselves and then we tell ourselves the answer. Sometimes inquiry is done with another human being and sometimes it's done with two or three other human beings, and they take turns having the question asked and answering that question. There are various advantages to having several people in the inquiry versus two people in the inquiry, which is called a dyad, or versus having self-inquiry, which is that we inquire of ourselves. It is a chance for us to explore these strata of our ego and the layers of our ego that overlay the truth of our being. And when we are asked that question from a fellow journeyer, and we give our answer, Many times, it's important that the questioner continue to ask that question, the same question in the same form, so that we can explore it in an even deeper way and penetrate one of those other levels that are keeping us from the core of our truth. And eventually, It's amazing how we get down to essential things that maybe we wouldn't have said, well, we possibly would not have said on the first go round of the inquiry. Does that give you an idea?

Nanette: Can you tell us a story of a profound inquiry that you experienced?

Joe: Yes, I believe. Well, I experience it all the time. One of the first inquiries I did was about imposed expectations that I have on me. Those imposed expectations my ego had blamed on my mother and father. And in the inquiry, I had several answers that explained how well my mother had expectations for me and demanded it, and how well my father did, and how I was the victim of what they said to me. and now that they are even gone, the internalized voices of what they expected of me. But during the inquiry, I got so deep as to voice the following insight. Yes, my parents had expectations on me. But it was my own ego that bought in to those expectations. I was not laboring under their energies. I was laboring under my own.

Nanette: Wow. How did that feel in your body when you realized that? How did that help you to embody your soul? I felt free.

Joe: Now I'm not underneath my parents' expectations. Those expectations are what I placed on myself. And myself can do something about it. So the freedom to realize that that truth was in my soul and I had never inquired of myself why that difficulty was happening to me over and over and over.

Nanette: So I'm just thinking about the person who might be listening to that story, and they know that they're suffering in their ego, and yet they don't know the question to ask themselves. How might you direct them to a question?

Joe: Well, this is what therapy is all about, isn't it? That we don't know the questions. And so we usually go to somebody to help us answer the questions. Sadly, so many people go to friends whose egos are invested in the friend liking them. And so they continue to agree with the friend's answers to the question. For example, I would go to a friend and I would say, well, my mother always expected this superior performance and all that. I was supposed to do piano lessons, schoolwork, grades, athletics, blah, blah, blah. And my father pushed it and pushed it. And a good friend would say, wasn't that, that was bad parenting, wasn't it? I can understand how frustrated you are. And that would embolden my ego. And a good friend is going to do that. A therapist will, if they're good, A therapist would say, let's look at what you're saying about your parents. Let's ask a few more questions. And a good therapist will, in a non-threatening way, ask the patient or the client, however you want to call them, to answer questions that they would not bring up. in and to themselves, and they would help them question their own answers to that question. Do you really have to think that way? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, that's therapy. It is a discipline in and of itself and into itself. Inquiry, if you've got somebody invested in true inquiry, whether they're a friend or not, They know that when they ask you the question and they listen to the answer, there's no judgment to be made. There's no expression of relief or happiness or whatever in what you do. They are there to do holy listening. And they are there to ask that question again, without judgment, to help us penetrate those answers that our ego keeps on giving as a defense until we reach bottom.

Nanette: Have you had a profound experience at some point with inquiry, Scott?

Scott: I have. I remember that the first ICD event I went to was conference in Swanee, Tennessee. You know, I don't even remember what the question was. I feel like it had something to do with your capacity to love yourself, to offer compassion to yourself. And I don't remember how the question was phrased, and I don't remember even the specific words that I responded to the question with. But somehow in that process, it helped me realize just how much how much I was being hard on myself, just how like terrible my inner dialogue was, but it wasn't like a conscious dialogue. It was just the sense of being so severe with myself, not cutting myself any slack, you know, just constant self-judgment and self-consciousness that I was in turn projecting onto everyone else. Not that I would say anything to other people, but man, just constantly judging, judging. And something about that inquiry just really helped me realize that that was going on. And then later that evening, you know, at the end of the day, when I was all by myself, I noticed like that I was being very hard about on myself, you know, about a specific thing. Like I caught myself in it. And somehow, spontaneously, I was able to, to not say, because, you know, I had occasionally noticed this sort of thing before vaguely. And usually the response was, my God, I'm being so hard on myself. What the heck's wrong with me? I can't believe how hard I'm being on myself, which is just more of the same. It's just a way for the ego. you know, to keep playing its game on a subtler level, if you will. But this time, just somehow, just suddenly felt so much compassion for myself. I was able to tell myself that I loved myself, and I really meant it and felt it. And there was such a sense of ease that that came with. I mean, a sense of that spaciousness we were talking about, a sense of I can't quite describe it fully, but I very much believe that that experience that evening was precipitated by that inquiry earlier that day, that it primed me to be able to notice later when I was in that specific situation of being too hard on myself, of being judgmental, and it gave me a little opening to shift into to self-compassion and to curiosity about noticing I'm doing something that's not working for me. And instead of saying, what the hell is wrong with me? To be able to say, well, isn't that interesting? And that curiosity coupled with that self-compassion, that That's what lets those patterns change, I really believe. Just judging them and beating ourselves up over them, in my experience, just reinforces it.

Nanette: Listening to both of you share your stories and reflecting on my own experiences with inquiry. What I recognize is the value of it at a very basic level is to bring us to the truth that we haven't known. We've been we've been asleep to, right? That is the awakening of the soul that our soul actually knows the truth and the truth really can set you free for lack of a better way to describe it. It is when we know it, we can we can deal with the impact of it, right? When we recognize the sickness, we have the healing in just the awareness. Somehow, just the awareness of each one of your truths at that very basic level was quite liberating. And it's been the same for me. And that our soul really has has the answers for us. It's just, how do you get to that knowledge?

Joe: Yeah, it was just lovely to listen to you, Scott, saying that it was compassion, self-compassion, and curiosity that were your medicine.

Nanette: That's your soul qualities. Thanks, Joe.

Nanette: So, it is attainable. It's not out of reach. It's not so ethereal that we cannot obtain our souls. Like, I think when we think about doing this work, it is, it's the idea that it will always be too hard. It will always be just out of reach, that it's pie in the sky maybe to think about embodying our souls. But really, it's quite practical. It's quite logical. You had the answer in you all along, Joe, that you were not laboring under your parents' expectation, but it was your own. And when at the point you liberated yourself from that, you were free from that in that very moment. Though you may slip back into those patterns in the future, that wisdom is always accessible now to you. For me, that makes this work so practical. It is such a practical application. It is not theory. We can embody our souls, which is the journey, right?

Scott: as I experience it at least. Yeah, the soul is not something to go out and find or obtain. The soul's been here all along. We've just lost our ability to feel it and to feel through it. To me, spiritual practice is less about obtaining something or carving out a place to retreat to inside myself, and it's more about sensitizing to the things in me that are keeping me from feeling the soul, from feeling the present.

Nanette: Maybe that's too off topic. No, no, I think that's beautiful. I think that is what we're after. That's the title of the book. That's the theme of our year. It's to know your own soul, your soul that is journeying with you already, that's always been available, that has an answer for the problems we face. It doesn't mean that it's going to fix all our problems, but it's certainly gonna help us navigate them.

Scott: And it's about navigating. It's about, it's about the journey. The ego is all about destination. The ego wants to acquire things. The ego wants to acquire spirituality. It wants to achieve spirituality and then say, look at me, I've arrived. Now I'm spiritual. Yippee. But in my experience, you never just wake up one day and say, well, gee golly, now I'm conscious and I can check that off my list and now I can move on to the next thing. It is a moment to moment day to day thing. And you're up and down, you're in and out and you can, you can go it on your own and try to will your way through things or you can surrender to your soul. You can surrender through your soul to the present and then And then you can move with reality instead of trying to fight against it.

Nanette: Well, that's a beautiful place for us to stop today, I think. And I just pray today that our listeners would be encouraged that their soul is available to them, that they would know their soul. So thank you for joining us.

Nanette: Thank you, Minda.

Scott: Thank you. 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.