In this episode of the Real Enneagram podcast, Dr. Joseph Howell speaks with Barbara Sloan, a senior faculty member at ICB. Barbara talks about her latest book, “THEATRE IS MY LIFE!: Thoughts on Play Quotes: a Book of Meditations for Each Day of the Year.” She also discusses how she got involved in theater and how it plays into her love and expertise with the Enneagram.
Connect with us:
Email us: therealenneagram@gmail.com
Follow us on Instagram: @therealenneagram
Visit The Institute for Conscious Being: theicb.org
In this episode of the Real Enneagram podcast, Dr. Joseph Howell speaks with Barbara Sloan, a senior faculty member at ICB. Barbara talks about her latest book, “THEATRE IS MY LIFE!: Thoughts on Play Quotes: a Book of Meditations for Each Day of the Year.” She also discusses how she got involved in theater and how it plays into her love and expertise with the Enneagram.
Connect with us:
Email us: therealenneagram@gmail.com
Follow us on Instagram: @therealenneagram
Visit The Institute for Conscious Being: theicb.org
[00:01] Outro: You're listening to the Real Enneagram podcast, a Spiritual Quest, brought to you by the Institute for Conscious Being.
[00:11] Joe: Hi, welcome to the wonderful podcast that we do for ICB, and it is The Real Enneagram, a Spiritual Quest. Today, we have with us a very special guest, Barbara Sloane. Hi, Barbara.
[00:32] Barbara: Hello, good afternoon.
[00:35] Joe: Good afternoon to you. Barbara is a senior faculty member of the Institute for Conscious Being. And Barbara is also an artist, a lecturer, a professor, a teacher, a maker of beautiful things, one of those being costumes for theater, because Barbara was for 25 years, a professor of theatre at Samford University.
And Barbara has just come out with a fantastic book. It's a very thick book, because there's an entry for each of the 365 days. And the name of the book is “THEATRE IS MY LIFE!: Thoughts on Play Quotes: a Book of Meditations for Each Day of the Year.” And before we get into any depth in this Barbara, maybe you could tell our listening audience, how you got involved in theatre, and how this book came about? And what does it have to do with your love and your expertise in the Enneagram?
[01:54] Barbara: Yeah, that's a lot. Wow. Well, I taught not only at Samford for 25 years, I taught a couple of years at UAB, and I also worked at The American Village with The Seasoned Performers, which is Alabama's only senior adult acting company. And so I've been in theater now for over 50 years. I still do volunteer work. I don't work professionally in it anymore.
But when you work on plays constantly in a professional or academic setting, you hear lines over and over again. Because you go to read throughs. You go to rehearsals. And then in my case, my costume shop was right across the hall from the green room, and so students would go in there and they would rehearse their lines with each other, by themselves, or they come in my shop and rehearse. And I'd sometimes do 10 or 12 plays a year. So that's a lot of lines and words that you hear.
[03:06] Joe: Yeah.
[03:07] Barbara: And it's incredible. So I think one of the extraordinary things about working in the theater, and hearing those lines is that they would soak through my clothing. They would penetrate my skin. They go into my brain. They would saturate my life. And I would constantly have these play quotes going in my head, and I thought, What am I going to do with all these play quotes at some point in my life?
And then, in 2012, I started a program called Education for Ministry, EFM with the Episcopal Church. It's a four-year program of theological education. And you do a lot of small group and small group study and practice and talking. So the first year is all about the Old Testament. I came to a dark night of the soul over my own interpretation of God. It just did not work anymore. After hearing the Old Testament and thinking... I was still sort of thinking of God as a bearded Santa Claus in the sky with a list that he was making, who's naughty and who's nice. And I knew that through this study, that was not going to work anymore.
And at the same time, my mother's dementia was really taking her into someone I didn't know anymore. And so we also had a crisis at my church. I mean all these things were just building up. It was a very dark time for me. And I still believed in the Divine. I had not given up on the order of the universe and in the energy of the universe. And so I would say, every day I would say, I have to have a change of heart and mind and soul. Something's got to happen to me. I need some deliverance.
And all of a sudden, in the spring of 2013, a friend turned me on to Richard Rohr and I started getting his daily meditations. I'm a huge Wayne Dyer fan, and he was still alive at the time. And he had a thing on his website that said, "Please watch Super Soul Sunday this week, because I'm going to be on it." And I didn't know what Super Soul Sunday was, so I'll look that up. And I watched that, started watching that every week.
And then two friends were gonna go to Camp McDowell to your Enneagram conference, and they asked me to come along. And so when I went to register, there was a training track too, and so I thought, "Wow, I'm just going to jump right in here," not knowing anything about it. I'm just jumping right in. And, actually, so I did training in March and then September, and then during the September training, my mother died.
And so then when we went to Canoga for graduation and some of us students were able to do some teaching and leading tables. That's when Canoga still had a bookstore, a gift shop, and part of it was a bookstore. And so I had been for 12 years reading daybooks. I just fell in love with daybooks. I had 10 or 12 different ones, different authors. And I found a daybook there. And it was "Meditations on the Psalms" by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton. She's a fantastic person, writer. She was one of the first female priests that was ordained in the Episcopal Church way back in the 70s, when women were getting to be ordained.
And so, I just loved her book. It really resonated with me. And it was not only a spiritual work, I got to know her day by day. She was so vulnerable. And I thought, when I finished, I thought, Man, I would love to write a book like that. And maybe that's where I can use those play quotes that are always going around in my mind. Some people might think well play quotes, that's not any sort of spiritual writing, but I think plays are holy. I think the arts are hallowed and inspired by the Divine. So that's how it came about.
[08:02] Joe: And each one of your reflections or meditations has at least one or sometimes two or more play references and play quotes. But you also weave in your own life into every reflection about something that you do that day or... I remember one entry is about your Christmas tree one year and how it was absolutely beautiful. And that when you took it down, it was still a sacred tree, even though it was bare. And you took it out of the house, and in a way, it was still very much alive for you.
[08:48] Barbara: Yes, I've always been a person who looks at every day. I have a calendar, and on every day, there is a special occasion. It might be an author's birthday or death day. It might be something that happened in our family. It might be a big historical event. So I've always celebrated every day. And I think that's part of what I was hoping to get across in the book was that every day can be a source of celebration.
You asked about the connections with the Enneagram. I bought the book during training. I bought the day book that Barbara Crafton wrote during training, and then I mentioned the Enneagram and several of the meditations. And I just think, along with the Enneagram and meditation and recovery systems and prayer and spiritual ratings and journaling and being in community, the arts is a pathway to the holy and to consciousness and awareness and waking up and understanding life and understanding people.
One of the earlier quotes in the book, I think it's from Thornton Wilder's "Matchmaker," Malachi Stack says "Everybody should eavesdrop once in a while. There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world inside your head is different from the world outside your head."
[10:35] Joe: Oh, my goodness. Yeah.
[10:37] Barbara: And that's...
[10:38] Joe: Yeah, that's the ego.
[10:42] Barbara: The ego. Absolutely. Yeah. And the Enneagram shows us that. The theater can show us that. We have to get outside of our own egos, our own heads.
[10:54] Joe: And the theater allows us to do that.
[10:57] Barbara: Yes.
[10:58] Joe: Yeah. Sometimes in our school, you have the students do a small theater. For the listening audience, what's that like? And how does that help the student?
[11:15] Barbara: Well, it helps the students get in touch with their essence, with their soul child, hopefully. Now, some students can't let go of that ego, and they resist getting up on stage. They're self-conscious about getting in front of people. And I understand that because I used to be one of those people, too. I spent most of my theater career backstage, not onstage. I did do some acting, but I can understand how people are reticent to get up in front of people and maybe make a fool of themselves. I've learned over the years that laughing at yourself is one of the best things you can possibly do.
And as a Four Ego, that's a very hard thing to learn. And it took me a long time to do it. But so our students… Of course, we do it at our conferences as well, but when we do it at conferences, the faculty is involved in. And the reason we use theater is that it shows people who are in our audience who might not know their ego type, it reinforces what ego types are like in sort of sticky situations or... Sometimes we show people being healthy and integrating, but the funny thing about theater is when people are disintegrating and when they're not doing what they actually should be doing or whatever.
But then when we're doing it in our intensives. The point is to... Well, the point is to have fun, to release, have a release time at the end of the day. We do it on our last night before going home. And it's a time, like I say, for people to get back in touch with their essence. We remember, a lot of us when we were kids would put on shows in our backyard or pageants or parades or things like that. And so hopefully, it gets our students back into their essence.
[13:29] Joe: Absolutely. Well, why is that important in terms of Enneagram? Why is essence very important in terms of learning how to step into it?
[13:44] Barbara: Well, we're all caught up in our egos all the time. Even those of us who study either the Enneagram or other paths towards wholeness and awareness, we still... Daily, I found myself talking to myself, like telling myself what a terrible job I've done all my life or you know.
So if I can get back to my essence, and we have several ways we do that with ICB. One of those being in the conferences, your backyard exercise and how we remember our backyards and remember ourselves as children. When we can go back to that more and more, we get out of that ego. We become more whole. There's that amalgamation that we like to talk about where the ego and the soul are working together, and the soul is now leading the ego instead of having the ego lead the soul.
[14:55] Joe: Why do you think that that isn't talked about much when people talk about the Enneagram? Why do you think that the soul and the amalgamation with the ego is not a very hot topic?
[15:10] Barbara: Yeah. Well, I think a lot of Enneagram teachers focus on our ego and our types, which you have to learn that to begin with. You can't do anything with the Enneagram until you learn what your ego type is. I think a lot of teachers want it to be a popular sort of study. They want a lot of people to come to it. You've got to be ready to face your foibles and your traps and your passions. Not everybody's ready to do that.
You have to be at a point in your life where you're ready to take that on and be able to say, "Oh, I see what I've been doing all my life, and it's pretty bad." But there's good parts of it too. So I think that's why not many teachers stress the essence or the soul child. It's a deeper subject. It's something that if people want to go deeper, they can find us or other teachers who go deeper into the Enneagram. A lot of people like to stay on the surface of the Enneagram and just want to know their types.
[16:33] Joe: Maybe that's why your book is so good, that it doesn't stay on the surface. You use plays to speak about the deeper human condition. So every one of your entries takes you really into soul material.
[16:55] Barbara: Right. Right. It does, because, well, theater makes you very empathetic, if you let it. Theatre is... I love all the art but I feel like theater touches our... you have to use your body in theater. If you're an actor, your body is your instrument. If you're a designer or on the tech crew, you're using your body doing all sorts of things. You have to use your mind. You have to study. You have to research. You have to use your emotions. And you have to use your soul, your spirit because there's spiritual underlying of almost every play you read or do or see.
And so it made me so empathetic, because when I designed costumes as a living, I created clothing for 100 people or more characters every year. Well, I had to create not only into their shoes, but into their entire wardrobe. To think about how they lived and what made them tick, and how would that manifest in a piece of clothing that they would wear? So it makes you very empathetic. And I think that's what all the great teaching tools like the Enneagram do. It makes us understand other people.
[18:21] Joe: It's sort of like real life.
[18:24] Barbara: Well it is. Yes.
[18:25] Joe: Yeah. I want to read an excerpt that's from your book, Barbara, page 233. "The Cowardly Lion learns over the course of their adventures, that he has a spirit of boldness deep inside him after all. And comes to understand that courage means taking action, even when you are afraid. There is a reason the lion is the king of the forests.
The wizard gives him a metal as an outward and visible sign of his inward truth. Like the lion, many people are paralyzed by fear, and by failing to live up to their own importance and significance. As Marianne Williamson has said, 'It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.’"
That's a kind of a taste of the art and the qualities of soul that you bring together so much. Do you have anything to say about those couple of lines?
[19:34] Barbara: Well, of course, I think about the Enneagram Type Six. I think the lion is definitely the embodiment of the Six really, because he thinks he's afraid of everything. It's silly, and it's supposed to be silly but very deep at the same time. Baum writing this understood that a lot of times we have to be decorated on the outside before we can figure out what's on the inside. I hope we can all wake up to the fact that, and I love that Marianne Williamson quote.
We think about ourselves in the darkest terms. And if we can just bring that light out, we're afraid of that light. We're afraid to be bold. We're afraid to live our life. It's like Gurdjieff says, people are just walking around in a daze, not really living their real lives. We just need to jump out, jump up, jump out and do things. And that's why I'm happy I did this book. I had written books before. It's not my first book, but it's the biggest undertaking I've ever done.
[21:05] Joe: Absolutely. And again, I'd like to say the name of the book is "THEATRE IS MY LIFE!" by Barbara J. Sloan. "Thoughts on Play Quotes: a Book of Meditations for Each Day of the Year.”
And Barbara Sloan, I see our time for this podcast is waning, but I want to thank you for taking time today, to come on to The Real Enneagram: A Spiritual Quest. Without you, the ICB would not have come into existence because you are one of the founding senior faculty members. So everything you do is something very important to many of us. So thanks very much for coming on today.
[21:55] Barbara: You're welcome. And people can buy the book on Amazon, if you’d like to find it.
[22:00] Joe: Okay, very good. Thanks for mentioning that. Talk to you guys later.
[22:06] Barbara: Bye-bye.
[22:10] Outro: That wraps up another episode of The Real Enneagram, brought to you by the Institute for Conscious Being. If you're interested in furthering these conversations, please reach out to us through our Instagram at @TheRealEnneagram, or if you're interested in our upcoming trainings or other resources, please visit our website, www.instituteforconsciousbeing.org. Thanks for listening.