Know Your Soul: Journeying with the Enneagram

 

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou:
This is Hugh Ballou. Today, I want to introduce you to Dr. Joseph Howell. Dr. Howell, you’ve got a new book that’s out that’s revolutionary. It’s just so wonderful. Before we talk about your book, tell people a little bit about yourself and your background and why you wrote this book. Know your soul, journeying with the Enneagram.

Dr. Joseph Howell:
Hugh, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure, as always, to be with you and with your people. And I thank you for the opportunity to be able to speak about this book that I’ve written, because it comes from a lifetime, basically, of trying to understand myself and my loved ones, my patients, my friends, my extended family, and to really be able to love all of those in ways that I could not love them only with what I knew. I had to know more. I had to grow more in order to be able to deal with a lot of life’s issues. And this includes some very hard issues like the loss of two children. Those are not easy things to go through. And it made me really, for want of a better analogy, it wanted to make me drop to my knees. to understand more of what this existence is about. As a psychologist, I have spent all my life attending to the psychological healing of many, many dear souls. And that includes my own soul. How can we heal others and really love them? unless we ourselves are on the journey of self-compassion, self-love, and we too have received healing from those people who care about us and from God. So the Enneagram came into my life in my late 30s, which was really very early in the history of the Enneagram in this country, you. because the Enneagram really didn’t even come here in its current form until possibly the early 70s at Esalen Institute in Berkeley, California. And thanks to people who taught me the Enneagram who were in those earliest groups or were taught by people in those earliest groups, I became familiar with this wonderful ancient wisdom fairly early in my life, and it has informed me with every shock point and every ecstasy and joy of my life. It has helped me understand it from my depths rather than from my just superficial understandings. And what I came to find out is that many, many of our problems come from our mental structure that we approach life with. And this mental structure, Hugh, we really all very well know it. It’s called our ego. And the ego, to some people, means that someone is overinflated or thinks more of themselves than they should. They have an ego. But that’s not really accurate. We all have an ego. the apparatus in our soul that helps us move through this world. Without an ego, we couldn’t think as well. Without an ego, we couldn’t protect ourselves from harm. Without an ego, we would not set goals. But the ego can become our main concern and we can lose the substance of our being, if we live from the mental structure of our ego, instead of living from the spiritual component of ourselves, and I like to call that our soul. The soul is interested in other things, other than what the ego is interested in. The soul is interested in enduring love, The soul is interested in alignment with the higher power. The soul is interested with giving benevolently and giving compassion. The soul is interested in doing right action and in being creative and in being wise and having sacred kinships with others. The soul is interested in joy, and how to use its power to bring more love in the world. And the soul is very interested in loving peace. These are bottom lines about why we live. This is what it all boils down to, those things that I’ve just spoken to you about. And isn’t it interesting that we spend so much of our time talking about our personality traits instead of our soul traits? And that’s what Know Your Soul is about, Hugh. It’s a book to help you and me understand what the exact qualities of our soul are. And it would be comparable to the Enneagram of Personality, which helps us understand what the qualities of our personality are. Now, personality is important. We all have it. We all need it. It’s our mask. It’s our face. It’s our way of being in the world. And it’s also our genuine superficial self. But the qualities of our soul, are far deeper and more profound than the qualities of our personality. Why? Because the qualities of our soul come from what the purpose of our soul is. Isn’t that interesting?

Hugh Ballou:
It is. And in your teachings, you talk about going past the numbers. And so I’m an Enneagram type one, Ego type one. But that’s not an ending point, is it?

Dr. Joseph Howell:
No, that’s the beginning. Because once you find what your number is on that nine number clock called the Enneagram, once you understand what your ego type or personality type is, then you are able, through the wisdom of the Enneagram, to know from there what the type is on that clock that represents your soul energy, which, as I say, is a far more profound description of Hue Ballou than what your superficial personality characteristics may be.

Hugh Ballou:
It’s fascinating. It’s fascinating. So people buy books, like I buy books to grow my skills, to grow my awareness, to learn something. Sometimes people buy books because they’re trying to solve a problem. Who should buy this book and who should read this book?

Dr. Joseph Howell:
The people who will be buying this book are people who want to have more peace within themselves and with all of the other people in their lives. They realize there are natural issues that people have within themselves, conflicts, unresolved problems, concerns that must be attended to in order to feel free and full and happy, and that these inner conflicts must be addressed by us in order to receive the peacefulness and fullness and happiness that everybody desires. But also we need to recognize that In our relationships with other souls, there is natural opposition, natural irritation, natural competition, natural, what we call in Enneagram language, natural passions, such as envy. This is very human. Instead of judging these things, we accept them. But how do we deal with these in a soulful way rather than trying to deal with them with our egos coping mechanisms? The soul has much more reliable and beautiful and loving ways of dealing with our inner conflicts and our outer conflicts with others. than does our ego. So it’s amazing information, and none of the information is new. It’s all ancient. It’s all sacred. It’s just a new way of looking at these very, very old truths through the lens of this marvelous system, the Enneagram.

Hugh Ballou:
Your previous book, Becoming Conscious, was defining a lot of this. You founded the Institute for Conscious Being and the Real Enneagram podcast. So what’s different about this book than what you’ve written before? And does it continue the learning that you’ve started, or is it something new?

Dr. Joseph Howell:
Well, my first book, Becoming Conscious, and thank you for bringing it up. It is really just my sharing with the reader what the Enneagram is and what the spiritual components of the Enneagram are. It really is a workbook, if you please, that familiarizes you with those nine types and how those nine types can be made more whole by spiritual growth. The book I have just written, well, the book that’s just come out, it’s been many years in the writing. This book really, Hugh, is a personal account of how the Enneagram has taught me who my soul is and how it has informed me of how to be healed and how to feel more whole. And I tell the, in this book, I give examples of when the rug was pulled out from under me in my life, like it is in everybody’s life at some time, some place, and how the Enneagram of soul made a tremendous difference in how I solved these problems and healed from these losses. I am intensely personal in this book, and I tell intimate stories, not only of my adulthood, but also of my childhood, when I was in my soul child, my adolescence, my young adulthood, And as I told you earlier, in my adulthood, when my wife, Lark, and I had these two tremendous losses of losing our two children, the stories that I tell in the book are really basically to illustrate using a life, my life, illustrate the power of this beautiful wisdom called the Enneagram, and how it fits in with my faith. I think some people say, well, these people who are into the Enneagram have learned to worship it rather than the theological concepts that we are familiar with. But I’d like to say this, that the Enneagram is totally consistent with all major faiths. And my focus has been how it has been congruent with and elucidates even more the Holy Scriptures of the Judeo-Christian traditions. So the Enneagram is a power pack to help inspire our faith even more so. So it’s not a contradiction, but it is an aid to the faith that we count on.

Hugh Ballou:
And it’s universal. People of any faith could benefit from this, right?

Dr. Joseph Howell:
Absolutely. The language of it is very universal. I would say that the one thing about, excuse me, the spirituality of the Enneagram is that it does require a belief in a higher power, a divine. It does not, hold to a system that is dependent on one’s own mind and one’s own ego and one’s own strength. It is very conscious of the fact that there is an unseen aspect to life, and that we are, as human beings, all very interrelated with one another. What happens to one culture affects the other culture, and that we are related to the earth very intrinsically, and what we do affects the earth as well. This is a system that is applicable to all people, and especially people who are wanting to become more conscious and more faithful.

Hugh Ballou:
We’re recording this in early December 2024. And as you pointed out, these are age, age old, eternal truths. And you write in it, you talked about the spirituality of the Enneagram. Your teaching is different from many of the other teachings, so it stands alone. So I’m thinking there’s reasons people buy the book. One is to buy them for themselves. But in the holiday season, and there are many holidays over the years of any faith, by two or by several, because we live in a relationship with others. It would occur to me, Joe, that if I bought a book and I bought it for somebody that’s significant and we both read the book, it would give us a basis for a new way to talk about things that we don’t know how to talk about. What do you think about that?

Dr. Joseph Howell:
Well, I think that’s right. And I’ve done that with people who I care about and want to go deeper with, have them and me read a book, like you say, and discuss it. And it does take us deeper into our own souls and into bettering the relationship with the other person. That’s really beautiful. And one of the other things about Know Your Soul that it has in it that I I haven’t seen in other books is an in-depth study of something called the soul child. I did make reference to the soul child earlier in this interview, but I want to explain what it is. It’s the way you and I and everyone else came into this world. That little baby who was born, came into this world basically wanting to do two things, to give love and to receive love. Now, yes, we are a bundle of joy and much more than just those two things, but primarily when you look at a little baby, and even if you hold a little baby and look into that beautiful face, you realize that there’s love there and that it wants to be in relationship with you. If it’s not crying or if it needs to be changed, those are just the human things about living that sometimes distract us from love. But basically the purity and innocence that humans arrive with is the purity of our soul. And that is the time in this life when you and I were operating totally from our soul because we had no one else to be. Think of it. We didn’t have a developed personality. We couldn’t rely on family to talk for us or to express for us, we had to be just honestly who we were in all of our pure, unconditioned self. Now, at about five years old, that went away, that goes away. Sometimes it is age four, sometimes it’s age seven. It’s different for everybody. But during the sole child years, the ego slowly builds up until there is an obvious tipping point. And it usually has to do with some kind of wounding that we have. that hurts us. And we say to ourselves, once and for all, I’ll never be hurt like this again. And we put on a covering. And this covering is our ego that protects us from ever having to suffer from being wounded again, because of our innocence, and because of our honesty, and because of our openness, and because of our not caring who’s judging us. When the ego comes in, we can no longer be totally honest. We can no longer be totally pure. We can no longer not care who’s judging us. We can no longer take love for granted. We have to strategize ourselves in this world. And in putting on that ego, what happens, Hugh, is we lose contact with that beautiful soul that we were born with. And we know it’s there. We know we’ve experienced it. And yet we can’t quite remember who she is or who he is. And the ego’s job is to manufacture the happiness in the world that we did experience purely when we were in our souls. But the ego does not know how to be a soul because it’s a mental structure. It’s not transcendent. It’s thoughts, it’s behaviors, it’s psychological strategies. But if we can come to know our soul and remember it and re-embody that soul child, we can begin to transfer back to living out of that being again, albeit with the accompaniment of an ego who helps us negotiate through the world, but not as an ego, as more of a whole person who has an ego that serves our soul which is the main being of who we are. Does that explain to you what this book is about?

Hugh Ballou:
It’s powerful. And as you’re talking about that, I’m deciding this ought to be on my list of preferred books for leaders. These are what needs to be in a leader’s library. Now, we look for these how-to books, how to this, how to that. But we can how to better if we work on ourselves first, always working on ourselves. So I define leaders as people who influence others, which is a whole lot more people than somebody who’s the boss. So elaborate on that a little bit, and then I’ll tell people where they can get the book.

Dr. Joseph Howell:
Well, I think that if you’re a leader, you can come off from the ego. Lots of people respond to that pretty well. But if you are a leader with the real need to make a difference in the world, not just economically and not just socially, but to make a difference in the world spiritually, people can feel that. when a leader is coming from their own soul. Because what they say isn’t about bottom line profits. What they say isn’t about how many numbers of people are there. What they say is things that let their followers know that they are interested in the betterment of other people. however it looks and whatever has to happen in order for that to unfold. People get that and they understand, hey, this leader isn’t selfish. This leader isn’t about just making more to make themselves look better or to make profits so that they can have more money. This leader is interested in a larger sphere about this world. This leader is a conscious leader, and if I can learn from them, I too can be more conscious in my life, and the people who follow me will learn how to do the same.

Hugh Ballou:
That is great. I’m ready to get this book and put it on my stand of the next book to read. And you know, I find when I go through a book and I highlight, and then I read it later, I use a different color highlighter, I find different things ready to learn. So the book is available now, and you can get it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. You can read about it and go and learn more about Dr. Howell and the Institute for Conscious Being and the Real Enneagram Podcast. It’s the Institute for Conscious Being. We use ICB as a shorthand. So it’s the, T-H-E, I-C-B.info, theICB.info. It’s just an info page and you can click on those links there and find whatever you want to find. So Dr. Howell, I’m excited about the book and thank you for sharing with us today.

Dr. Joseph Howell:
Thank you, Hugh. I really appreciate this opportunity. Thank you so much.