Joseph Howell’s Know Your Soul is an engaging and reassuring tool that makes the Enneagram accessible for anyone seeking its help in healing or searching for spiritual transformation.
In this Q&A, we talk with author Joseph Howell and his openness about how he was able to turn his seismic losses into a journey of healing.
Your journey with the Enneagram began as a search for healing after your son’s passing. How did this experience reshape your understanding of grief and spirituality?
Huge losses seem to make us aware of things that we probably never would have known. That’s the case with me. Ben’s death collapsed my world. He was our first of two children and came to us after a long period of infertility.
Ben was a gift whose life healed so many years of pain and frustration. And he was a beautiful soul. But when his illness began at age 18, we lost him slowly over 8 years until his death at 26. As I write about it in my book, Know Your Soul, I hit bottom. Although bottom-held, I was devastated because a huge part of my reason for living was gone.
The grief was life-altering: I experienced many of the classic symptoms, including withdrawal. But I couldn’t put my head in the sand; I refused to live in shame that I couldn’t save my child, and I had my wife Lark and daughter Lauren to be there for and to uphold. So, in my withdrawal, I took a closer look at my spirituality and my purpose.
One of the wonderful things about my life had been the Enneagram, which I’d taught for years. I took a closer look at that too and found a new interpretation of it that spoke to my grief. My conception of spirituality shifted in the realization of the Enneagram’s interpretation of the ego.
The ego’s message and approach was “It’s not fair; it’s not right; This shouldn’t be happening to my child or us; this loss is a waste.” But in studying the Enneagram and especially some of the very first teachers, I understood that the real purpose of the Enneagram is to reconnect us with our souls. And my soul’s message about our ordeal was very different from my ego’s. The soul said “This is happening; this is painful, this is suffering. There is meaning in all this, and that meaning is for you to find. The outcome is not yours but the person you become because of this loss is yours.
How does your approach to the Enneagram differ from traditional personality-focused interpretations?
As I alluded to previously, when you go to the roots of the Enneagram and its having been brought to the West by George Gurdjieff and Oscar Ichazo, you see that it is a spiritual concept. Wherever Gurdjieff studied and learned the Enneagram, we know that it was a spiritual monastery steeped in hundreds of years of spiritual and religious teachings.
Ichazo’s many Enneagrams were received by him in a state of spiritual consciousness. His Enneagrams encompass the spiritual underpinnings of the entire world, not just human personality. He states that the world is run by the Divine Forms (Holy Ideas) and that we have a true nature he refers to as the Divine Child. The spirituality of the Enneagram is inconvenient for some people, nevertheless, it is what it is.
Gurdjieff and Ichazo were very spiritually oriented and approached the Enneagram as such. They were not teachers of a personality parlor game or methods to improve our personality, but of a serious method of understanding our true nature and spiritual identities. If we focus only on the ego and personality levels of the Enneagram and its personality dimensions, we miss its infinite wisdom.
So my approach is in the vein of Gurdjieff, Ichazo, Sandra Maitri, and A.H. Almaas, which focuses on the evolution of the human being through reconnecting us to our true nature, our essence, and our soul. It is about raising consciousness, not about constructing a better personality. Though having a better personality is fine, it is on the level of ego, which is a mental structure. Progressing the soul is working from our depths, where our most genuine identity resides. Knowing our souls is a way by which our species may have a chance of surviving.
What role does the Enneagram play in bridging self-awareness and spiritual transformation?
Simply giving us someone to be other than our personality is a huge gain for serious students of the Enneagram. What I mean by this is the conundrum we get into when we realize that our ego causes us much suffering. What do we do then? Become a better personality? Maybe, but will a better personality substantively help us with the deeper issues of life like loss, illness, divorce, job loss, financial ruin, estrangement, rejection, hatred, etc?
These issues are where the rubber meets the road. These issues penetrate the exterior and go straight to our hearts. The personality is not designed or equipped to deal with the gravity of these issues. But our soul, however disconnected we may be from it, is designed and equipped to deal with these things.
We can disparage the ego all we want to, and say it needs a shrink or that it has gotten too big for its britches … but if we do not know who else to be but our ego and personality, we are up the creek. Happily, the soul and its qualities ARE the somebody we can be, instead of only our egos. We are already that somebody, we just don’t know them very well.
What are some common misconceptions people have about the Enneagram and its purpose?
I believe many people misinterpret the Enneagram as being purely a personality test and a method of personality improvement. While this is a popular approach, it is not the original purpose of the Enneagram. The Enneagram of Personality is only one of many Enneagrams that can be applied to all subject matter, including Law, Medicine, Physics, Mathematics, and Geology.
The Enneagram can be used to discern our personality but that is one very small usage of this amazing wisdom. The Enneagram is more about the nine basic energies underlying and running the universe, how to understand them, and how they work together. It just so happens that we as individuals are born into one of those nine basic energies: This is what I refer to as our soul energy. Then, in late childhood, our essence goes under a crust and looks to the emerging ego for protection. We need the ego, but the ego we choose is not the same energy we were born in. It is another one of the nine energies. This principle is not the focus of many interpretations of the Enneagram.
You emphasize that reconnecting with our soul can impact the collective. How do individual transformations contribute to global healing?
There are some lyrics to a song I listened to in the 1950s when I was very little: “ If everyone lit just one little candle, what a bright world this would be.” I tried to imagine a world full of lit candles, but in my childish mind, it was impossible. Yet with the new photos from outer space, we can see the entire globe. And in these pictures are lighted areas of the world where there are high concentrations of people, cities, towns, etc.
The glow from these areas is dramatic, even from hundreds of thousands of miles away. All those glowing areas are lighted by millions of single light bulbs in individual rooms of individual houses and offices. And like the cumulative mass of light bulbs that light the globe, what we need is a critical mass of individuals on this planet who are willing to do the work of the soul.
The Enneagram is a perfect tool to help us do this because it is not a religion and it transverses all cultures. It gives us a common language. It does have a spiritual purpose and this has got to be acknowledged. Our higher selves are what will save us, and they are not rooted in the ego, but in the soul.
What inspired you to write Know Your Soul, and what was the most surprising discovery during the process?
I believe that the discovery about the soul child was my most illuminating find. I learned the concept of the soul child from my teacher, Sandra Maitri. It was intriguing and made so much sense to me as a psychologist who practices in Child and Family Clinical Psychology. But then I realized that the soul child is not just a mental structure like the ego, but a palpable identity made up of our unconditioned, pure, and innocent selves — our essence!
Yes, when we came to earth, we were not our egos or personalities — we were simply our souls. The beautiful part of all this is that if we can recontact our soul child (and I teach how to do this in the book), we have direct access to the qualities of our soul. These fill a treasure chest of qualities of our most authentic and divine selves.
When we turn toward these qualities and develop them, we automatically enhance and rebuild our personality. We have been working on the upper floors of the skyscrapers, wonder why so many fall in earth tremblings. But when we understand the physics of foundational structures, all work together. If we can concentrate on the foundation of our being, its goodness, and beauty, we have a way to amalgamate the ego and the soul. Then, the ego serves the soul instead of ruling it.
The information about the soul child and teaching the process of discovering one’s soul child was very healing for me especially when hundreds of people reported tremendous shifts in positive directions for their lives.
Another life-altering trauma hit my wife and me a couple of years ago. We lost our only other child, Lauren, a beautiful person, a psychotherapist, and a marathon runner. The shock and loss were terrible and would have been unbearable. But the type of soul work we had done for the previous 16 years gave us the strength to live through that season and begin our healing process. The direct experience of our soul strength and the soul child were vital for us.
If you could give one piece of advice to someone just beginning their journey of self-discovery, what would it be?
Be gentle with yourself, and know that the greatest power in the cosmos is love.
What’s next for you in your journey?
Even though Know Your Soul covers the soul child, I am working on another book devoted to the soul child as a gateway to our higher selves.
Joseph Howell (PhD) is a clinical psychologist. He was a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School and an assistant professor in Birmingham, Alabama. Since 1980, Howell has been in private practice in clinical psychology. In 2012, he and his wife, Lark, founded The Institute for Conscious Being, which teaches consciousness studies through the lens of the Enneagram. He is a professional member of the International Enneagram Association and an accredited teacher.
