Episode 201 Obstacles of Faith, Self, and the Inner Critic

In this episode of The Real Enneagram, we delve into the theme of obstacles and how they can serve as profound teachers for our souls. We explore the idea that obstacles, while challenging, can lead to personal growth and deeper understanding.

Dr. Joe shares a personal story from his journey through a PhD program in clinical psychology, highlighting a particularly daunting course in multivariate statistical analysis. He reflects on how he initially felt overwhelmed but ultimately found solace in the belief that if it was meant for him, the divine would help him overcome this obstacle. This led to a surprising outcome on his final exam, which he describes as a spiritual event that reinforced his calling to serve others.

We discuss how obstacles can help us clarify our true desires and aspirations, emphasizing that they often prompt us to ask what we genuinely want in life. The conversation also touches on the collective obstacles faced by society, suggesting that these challenges can lead to greater truths and understanding.

Additionally, we introduce the concept of the "trickster," an archetype that can lead us to confront our own truths, often through moments of humiliation or unexpected realizations. We also address the inner critic, a common obstacle that many face, and emphasize the importance of seeking support to overcome its harsh judgments.

As we wrap up, we invite our listeners to reflect on a thought-provoking question: "When you face an obstacle, how does your heart receive love instead of shame?" We hope this episode inspires you to view obstacles as opportunities for growth and deeper connection with your true self. Thank you for joining us, and we look forward to continuing this conversation in our next episode!

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.

Nanette: 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. Hey guys.

Joe: Hey Nanette, how are you doing?

Nanette: I'm doing well, thank you. Sounds like we might need to come along. Here we are. We're excited to be with our podcast today. And we're talking about obstacles. We decided we would talk about obstacles for a two part series. So this week and our next podcast episode. This is reflected in some daily reflections that Dr. Joe releases through our through email every day, if you'd like to sign up for that daily reflection, you can certainly click on a link in our podcast notes to find the way to sign up for that. So today, we're going to look at how the obstacles we face can actually become teachers for the soul, especially when viewed through the heart center of intelligence, the place of longing, relationship, and love. Dr. Joe, in one of your reflections, you tell a story about your own journey with how obstacles helped you to build your faith. You were doing a PhD, and what was that PhD in?

Joe: In clinical psychology.

Nanette: You know, education is not easy. There's a reason not a lot of people have PhDs. It's because they take a lot of work and there tends to be more than one obstacle. In fact, many, many obstacles. But you had one in particular one that really scared you. What was that?

Joe: Well, in my curriculum, Nanette, there was a series of courses in different types of statistical analysis. The toughest one, I remember the name of it, was multivariate statistical analysis. and a very competent teacher, very good lecturer. I just didn't understand a thing that was said. I've never had a mathematically inclined mind. Now, I know you do, Scott. I would agree. I did not really understand algebra and probably would still not understand it to this day if I took an algebra course. But I needed to get through particularly this high level course in statistics, and I really didn't see a way that that was possible. It was far over my head. Instead of understanding the concepts, I was literally just writing down, this is before recorders and everything, I was writing down everything the teacher said so that I could read it later and maybe hopefully by osmosis, it would sink in. And he was a very good lecturer, I say. I remember one day coming to the stark reality that my PhD would be over if I did not pass this particular course. because it was a requirement. And I understood why, because this particular statistical analyses go into how you collate your data for research and how you make sense of the data in charts and in conclusions and in drawing any kind of analysis from the research that you do. So I saw the rationale. I just didn't know how I was going to do it. And one day, it came to me that this obstacle was an obstacle that I had no way of transversing it with my own ego or with my own ability. And that if really God or the source or the divine wanted me to have the PhD and to go into working with children and adults and families, like I felt very called to do, it occurred to me that this wouldn't be an obstacle for the divine. Now, I was in my 20s, really at the beginning of my spiritual search, but I remember having that thought, and it was a tremendous relief to have that thought because even though I was attached, to getting the PhD, my ego was attached to it. I had felt led in that direction by spirit. I was very convinced that that was my career purpose. And then I thought, if I was wrong, and if the divine doesn't want me to pursue this, and this obstacle is too great, then there's got to be something else that I am supposed to do. And that I will have to grieve, or my ego will have to grieve this degree, and I've got to find some other way of doing what I knew that I was called to do. So, there was a tremendous release of the worry about it. And I don't know what happened, Nanette and Scott, but the final exam came for this course. And as I recall, I don't think I'm wrong on this, there was only one question. And it was, instead of a problem to be solved, you know, with statistics, it was to answer a question about the purpose of unbiased variance estimators. Now, those of you who are in statistics out there will know what an unbiased variance estimator is. But I happened to remember that lecture. And it was not a problem. It was merely just me regurgitating what he said about what an unbiased variance estimator was. It really ended up being prose. My answer was prose. Wow.

Nanette: Okay.

Joe: And obviously, because I remembered a lot of it word for word, it must have impressed him because he gave me an A on that exam. And I never thought I would see an A. I was really praying for a C or anything, C minus, anything that would get me over the Rubicon. But to me, this was a spiritual event because though we can get low, there is a supreme spiritual reality that I believe if we can tap into, we will receive a lot of comfort and a lot of relief. For example, our country right now is going through upheaval and it is an obstacle for our country to continue We are kind of at a standstill, really, because we have factions that are at loggerheads with each other. Now, I could easily get bogged down in that. I could easily say to myself, there is no way to get through this. This is a permanent war. This is an entrenched difficulty that we cannot surpass. I see that our nation has surpassed other obstacles. In fact, it even began in an obstacle, which was oppression, taxation without representation, and that led to Of course, the Revolutionary War, and it led to the establishment of our country. And then, of course, we had to fight other wars. And World War I, we were able to transverse that. Then World War II, and Korea came up, and Vietnam. And the nation found its way out of all of these and learned a tremendous amount because of these struggles. One of them being the price we have to pay for freedom and that it isn't free, that there is a story, if you will, that is a divine story. that's unfolding. And it has dips, and it has moments of ecstasy, it has regressions, and it goes two steps forward instead of one step back. It has periods of oppression, and it has periods of great understanding of freedom. And We're not, we as a nation are not a finished product. We're in process. And just as my obstacle in graduate school helped me to see a spiritual truth. without the obstacle, I would not have seen. Possibly the obstacles that our nation is facing right now will in some way help a critical mass of us see some truths that we were not able to see before it.

Nanette: It makes you almost willing to embrace the obstacle like, oh, it's here for a reason. It's here to serve me. Without the obstacle, I won't learn this lesson. Generally, I find that many pursuits in our careers or in our education or, you know, in raising children or whatever obstacles you might face, they do ultimately service and help us grow, which is kind of one of our next points is that obstacles serve our souls, and that they help us to grow. Right?

Joe: Yes, because I mean, I'm sure you guys will agree with this, that obstacles help us be more alert and more conscious to reality. Some obstacles can hurt us.

Nanette: Yeah.

Joe: They can attack us. And helping us be on a spiritual caveat, as it is, as it were, or a spiritual alertness, raises consciousness. And we're able much more to see the non-dual world instead of the world of me and them.

Nanette: Yeah.

Scott: I mean, every obstacle can be an opportunity for growth. And, you know, you said a moment ago, Joe, about our country, it's, it's a work in progress. It's, uh, you know, not finished. And I think that in a way is all reality, like. reality is made up much more process than it is of static things. But because of our, because one, we live in the ego primarily in our culture. And two, just the way our language is shaped around nouns rather than verbs, we mistake the world for a collection of static things. And we think of ourselves as a static thing. So If we want change, we want to just jump straight to the destination. Yeah. And we want to skip the process. And then an obstacle delays us from getting to the destination. But the soul knows that all there is, is process. Like nothing is static. Everything is changing and growing. And obstacles are part of that. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk, It was famous for saying, no mud, no lotus. No lotus is a beautiful flower, but it needs that icky mud to grow in, or else it has no life. Very good. It's a fluid thing, isn't it? It really is organic. I believe so, yeah.

Nanette: So in thinking about this truth that the heart really learns clarity when obstacles make us ask, what do we really want? Because what you really wanted, it was not so much a PhD, what you wanted was a career in service to a calling, to serve people, to serve families. It was your heart's longing. And the obstacles served so beautifully to show you what was affirming in that when you win, I mean, surely in the moment where you knew you got this a you were like, Oh, well, I really am called to do this. It's affirming. And so I think obstacles help us see what we really want. If I think Collectively in this moment, I think most Americans fundamentally and most citizens of the world, we simply want all the same things. We want to be loved. We want security. We want a happy family. We want health. We desire the same things. And so we have to think if we have these obstacles, not only individually, but obviously collectively in our country's midst currently, that there is something to be learned. There is some value, a destination on the other side, if we can figure out how to respond to it.

Scott: I think so. And to me, it's a process of feeling your way forward, which requires feeling, which requires experiencing, which requires being present as opposed to imposing some idea of how things should be that requires no presence, no feeling, no sensitivity. And so even when we do get through to the other side, I think, yeah, it's a destination in that, but it's not an ultimate destination, right? Yes, it continues because it's so easy to get activated into being more present in a crisis. And then the crisis passes and without, without an integration of the experience, we go back, we go unconscious again when the stress is gone. You know, we, we accept this as a new status quo and our, our fluid experience of life calcifies back into static concrete concepts again. So how to stay curious comes back to curiosity versus judgment in a way.

Nanette: Well, you know, it makes me think so often we do just fall back asleep, right? We have these moments of clarity and, you know, we get through whatever the challenge is that we have in our life. We get the cure, whatever it is we think, and then we go back asleep. It's almost like we just, we fall back into the routine. And this is where one of the obstacles that we've discussed sometimes comes to play. It's the trickster. Joe, can you tell us a little bit about a trickster and how you've seen that come out as presenting an advantageous obstacle?

Joe: Well, the trickster was well described by Carl Jung as an archetypal energy that is in the world and captivates you and me and everyone at different times. And it comes from a deep need that our psyche has for equilibrium. Okay. maybe another word to keep a homeostatic level of our emotions, that we not get overinflated and we not get underinflated. We don't think more of ourselves than we should, and we don't think less of ourselves than we should. We don't get over hysterical about events, but we don't get under alert. about events. And so when we get out of joint and we don't consciously realize that we are, oftentimes something we do tricks us. We are our own trickster, so to speak. We are tricked into making a mistake. making a foible, doing a Freudian slip, doing a behavior that betrays how we really feel, even though we would do anything to make sure no one understood that we feel that way, and all of a sudden it's there. One example in the Enneagram world is that of a nine who has gone to sleep on his life, and everybody in the room is talking about going someplace to eat. And they mentioned a few places like the Chinese place, the Indian place, the Mexican place. And he says, I don't care. Wherever you guys want to go, because you know, nines merge. And a very unconscious nine will even go to a place that they dislike because They want to be agreeable. No conflict. Well, this one nine went with the play with the group to the Mexican restaurant, which he couldn't stand that food. He hated it. And not only did he trip and fall at the threshold on the way to the into the restaurant, he lost control in at the table and he vomited in front of everybody onto the table.

Nanette: Okay. This was his body telling him to be true to himself.

Joe: that if he's going to deny that a certain food makes him sick, and that it's more important to be agreeable, his body is saying, no, it's more important to take care of your body. You forgot what reality is. And it just came out with it. And there was no denying. It was the truth was right there on the table for everybody. And he ended up saying, I knew I shouldn't have come because Mexican food makes me sick. And everybody said, well, why didn't you tell us? They were more magnanimous toward him than he was to himself. And of course, you know, the story of Freudian slips. I just read about one that is very hilarious. This this corporate executive happened to be a female. It could have been a male or a female. But in this story, she said something in the Well, she was known, I need to preface this for saying, she was known for her stilettos and for her coiffures and for her wonderful ability to wear clothes. That was her trademark. And she used it very successfully in business negotiations and everything. But in her email, this is one of the lines that she wrote. that she later had to retract and say she didn't mean. And she said, I'm so pretty that I feel like we need to go for this merger. Well, she didn't mean pretty. I mean, she had probably meant I am persuaded that we needed to go. And she said the computer just typed that out. It wasn't me. I'll never forget her writing. But obviously, at least in proofreading the email, she let that go because she didn't see it. Her trickster didn't want her to see it. Her trickster didn't want her to correct it. Her trickster wanted her to see that she puts tremendous importance in some external things. And she finally lived it down. But it taught her a tremendous lesson.

Nanette: It's funny that the trickster always seems to be somewhat humiliating to us. And, and, you know, the, the ego does get humiliated. We have a a deep capacity for shame and the ego, right? And we can't, we don't think we can survive it, right?

Scott: Oh yeah, but we can.

Nanette: But we can.

Scott: Some of my favorite spiritual practices are ones that ask you to be foolish in some way or another.

Nanette: Yes, yes.

Scott: We sometimes do certain practices at some of our intensives, like we'll do dramatic pieces, they're sometimes called.

Nanette: Well, even just at our recent intensive that we had a dance party, I mean, I don't I think and you know, there was no alcohol involved, you know, it was just intentional, you know, letting your body move and and for most people who are concerned about how things appear, if they can't let they can't let their egos go enough to even enjoy themselves. And yet there's so many beautiful experiences to be had when we can put shame away.

Scott: It can be very freeing, but it's the ego that's afraid of being embarrassed. Yeah, absolutely. But man, when I am feeling most resistant towards looking like an idiot, that's when I need to act like an idiot the most, or at least risk it. Yeah.

Nanette: Because otherwise the trickster might take care of it for you. So it's almost like we might should choose it instead. But it is amazing how this obstacle can really redirect us in a positive way to bring out truth that really matters. Okay, this final obstacle that we find ourselves very much dealing with, especially people in the heart center, is the inner critic, which it kind of leads out of just what we were just talking about, where there's a lot of shame and there's a lot of criticism of self and comparison and doubt. It says you're not enough, but the soul knows better. The soul whispers love and truth and worthiness. And so how Joe just in these last few minutes, could you tell us someone who's really struggling with an inner critic as a real obstacle in their life? How, how do you suggest that they overcome that?

Joe: Well, there are various levels of this. Most of us slap our own hands to some degree when we make a mistake, and we really should. I mean, the superego has to keep us in some guardrails. But there are people who, and all of us probably at times, take it to the extreme. When we're young, we're in a holding environment when we're just born and three, four, five, six years old. And that is when our holding environment teaches us when we have crossed a boundary, done a transgression, done something wrong, et cetera. And depending on how they treat us, our holding environment, the people in charge of us, is the way we internalize our own inner authority. We kind of take it from them. If they're very harsh, we tend to be harsh on ourselves. If they are enlightened and tend to understand human frailty and have a tremendous amount of grace, then we too usually end up being very graceful for ourselves. So people who come from a punitive environment have a much better chance, I should say, of having an overactive inner critic. But nevertheless, we all have to deal with it if it becomes oppressive, extremely harsh. I know at times in my own life, I have believed the lies that my own inner critic tells me, such as in catastrophizing a problem of mine, it may say, you'll never be such and such, or you'll never get this right, or see, I told you, you were just this and nothing more. you'll always be this way, blah, blah, blah. And that is a kind of a doomsday attitude. But if you come from a punitive, catastrophizing family, you tend to, the word is introject, you tend to absorb and take on the very standards that they tell you you're being judged by. But we have to Whether it takes therapy, whether it takes group therapy, whether it takes talking in spiritual direction, whether it's just a good friend that you talk to, that type of horrendously punitive inner critic has got to be tamed because it causes mental health issues. And it even causes depression, anxiety disorders, and suicidal behavior. You can imagine if people are always running themselves into the ground, they may not, at the end of it all, think that life is worth living.

Nanette: So it really is important that if someone has this obstacle, this just constant running inner critic, that they not just live with it, they need to really address it. And whether that's with a mental health care provider, or with some spiritual leader, or like you said, a dear friend, it's not It's not the way that we should live. The spirit invites us. The soul invites us to live at a higher level. So, well, these obstacles of faith, of desire, of trickery and criticism all test the resilience of our heart. Yet each one invites us to deeper love and trust. As we started doing a couple of weeks ago, we're going to close today with an inquiry for reflection. So if we would invite you to take this question with you, as you finish this podcast episode, and maybe journal with it, or maybe talk to a friend about it. But this is a question we invite you to reflect upon. When you face an obstacle, how does your heart receive love, instead of shame? Thanks so much, guys, for being here with us today. Thank you to all of our listeners.

Scott: Thank you, Nanette. 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.