Episode 189 Embracing the Small Stuff: Applying the Enneagram to Daily Life

In this episode of The Real Enneagram, we delve into the profound ways the Enneagram can help us understand our souls during moments of daily struggle. Co-hosts Dr. Joe Howell, Nanette Mudiam, and Scott Smith discuss how, while many people are drawn to the Enneagram through a critical mass of suffering, the Enneagram is also brilliant at helping us navigate the smaller, day to day challenges that life throws at us.

We explore these everyday challenges that can lead to small sufferings, such as losing keys or dealing with family dynamics, and how these situations can trigger our ego patterns. Dr. Joe shares a personal story about losing his keys at the gym, illustrating how stress can cloud our judgment and lead us to blame others or ourselves. He emphasizes the importance of recognizing the ego's narratives and how they can distort our perception of reality.

The conversation shifts to how the soul can guide us through these challenges by encouraging us to ask what we can learn from our experiences. We discuss the significance of virtues and holy ideas in helping us respond to life's difficulties with awareness and compassion, rather than falling back into our ego's traps.

Ultimately, we remind our listeners that the Enneagram is not just a tool for understanding ourselves but a means to navigate the complexities of daily life with greater consciousness. We hope this episode inspires you to apply the wisdom of the Enneagram in your own daily struggles and to recognize the opportunities for growth that lie within them. 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 my co-host, Dr. Joseph Howell and Scott Smith. Hi, guys.

Joe: Hi, Nanette. Good to see you today. Hello.

Nanette: It was nice to see you guys. I'm excited about what we're going to talk about. Yeah, I'm looking forward to this podcast today. We're going to talk about how we use the Enneagram to know our soul at moments of daily struggle. So we recognize that many, many people come to the knowledge of the Enneagram and really pursue the work that's involved, the spiritual work, because of a critical mass of suffering. We talk about this all the time at our intensives with our students, that really, unfortunately, and sadly, many of us wake up to our egos when we realize they're not helping us with life's greatest problems. And we're We're blessed by that, honestly. It's a terrible way to find your blessing. But the truth is, is that many of us don't wake up without this suffering. And when we look back on it, we realize that within this event that we go through, or this trauma, or this loss, that packaged within it is the opportunity to evolve, to grow spiritually, to see our souls, to know our souls. And that's wonderful. And it's really the only way to survive very often, except to double down and do it in your ego. And we don't want to do that, because that's just more suffering. But what may be just as challenging is the everyday discovery of our ego and recognizing its incessant patterns that bring continual small suffering to our life. Is that a good way to say it, guys?

Scott: Yes, I think so. Yeah.

Nanette: Okay. Have you experienced this yourself as I'm talking about it?

Scott: My God, yeah.

Nanette: Every day, every day, every day, we're strapped down to this ego that feels like a really comfy suit. But we really recognize it's cutting off circulation somewhere. So, Joe, you have a story of some lost keys that I think might help us to communicate our our quest today.

Joe: Yes. Just before I tell the story, I would just like to say that, you know, the ego, we have to give it its due. It has motivated us. It has given us protection. It's given us a face to the world. It's protected the little soul child when The soul child was getting dropped and unheld and rejected and told it wasn't okay. So the ego came in to give it a script. It worked. It saved a very vulnerable little being who had no strategies of how to cope with other egos that it would come in contact with at all. So the ego we believe in.

Nanette: Yes, we're grateful for.

Joe: And we hired it. And it came aboard. And its patterns are ingrained. And it only takes just a little bit of stress and suffering for those patterns to emerge again.

Nanette: Okay, interesting. That's the interesting word here, too, I think, as far as our daily interaction, that the ego will most easily and readily manifest under some amount of stress. Yes.

Joe: And we're all dealing with stress, unfortunately.

Nanette: Every day.

Joe: Right? Every day. We can talk about soul, we can talk about going to the point of integration versus the point of disintegration. We can talk about all the different stances that we have, Hornavian and otherwise, but when the rubber meets the road, is the Enneagram and its truth that it maps out, is it really working for us? Is it lowering our stress level? Is it making our life purpose more crystal clear? Is it disengaging us from wastes of energy? Is that map helping us to see the truth of the situation rather than a perception of the situation that may not be true? So we have to look at all of this stuff about the Enneagram and decide, is it getting us anywhere? And a lot of people get discouraged because they have a mishap during the day after a lot of spiritual growth. And something happens and they say, oh my gosh, my mother or my father said something to me that really pushed a button and I went off on them. I cannot do this Enneagram stuff. I can't do this spiritual growth stuff because I go back in an instant. Eckhart Tolle once said, and I was with him in the same room as he said it, and he said it on a recording as well. If you want to know how spiritually progressed you are, just go spend three days with your parents. And there's a lot of truth to that, because the parents know all the buttons. And they were the very first ones to have pushed them.

Scott: They installed many of those buttons. They didn't realize they were doing it. That's right.

Nanette: They're specifically labeled for them, I think. There's buttons my parents have that no one else has. There you go.

Joe: So there you go.

Nanette: Yeah, they trigger us in very specific ways. It's so true.

Joe: There you go. They carry a lot of weight. But other people carry weight too. Sure. And there are a lot of ways during the day that you and I can forget that we are okay, that we are held, that there is a divine order. that there are sources of nurturance that we have forgotten about, that there are ways around a dilemma that we have forgotten about. And the reason we forget all of these spiritual tools is because an accident happens. And we don't have time to sit and think. we have to get into mode ASAP. Or we come across something like we've lost our keys and we're not going to go anywhere until we find them. Or our spouse says or our partner says, I'm very unhappy and I don't want to continue. Or our spouse just says, I'm very unhappy. What are we going to do about it? Or our child has a difficulty and we realize that they need us, but we're not there where they are. They're in college or they're a young married person and they need us and we're not there. What do we do? We go to the grocery store. And we get all of the things on our list. And by golly, when we get home, we've forgotten the most important thing on the list. And we berate ourselves because of it. And we go shoulda, coulda, oughta. Somebody says something to hurt our feelings. An off the way comment that is a real downer and it hurts us to the core. and they don't necessarily even mean to do it, that you infer what they meant, and it really sends us into a tailspin. It could be that there's a commitment coming up, and you double booked and didn't realize, and you've got to choose between one of them, and you don't want to hurt the other one's feelings, and you go, oh, no, no. It could be something that we said in an off the way comment that we realized we should have explained or apologized for or had a way to take it back. And the guilt just grinds on us. These aren't big shock points, but they're little daily sufferings. that the Enneagram's truths and consciousness can be applied to if we're able to be conscious enough during these episodes to make that application.

Nanette: Okay. So tell us this story, Joe, your recent story of losing your keys.

Joe: Recently, I was at the gym and I was in a floor class, an exercise class. And at the end of it, I went to the back of the room to get my keys and water and coat and everything. And my keys weren't there. I realized that somebody must have taken them by mistake. And in my own mind, I figured out who it must have been because there was a new person in the class that day. And of course, I believed that their things must be right near mine. And they scooped up my keys along with theirs. I didn't know that for sure. So I checked in all the places in the gym that I had been, the weight room and the restroom and other places just to make sure. And then when I was sure, and very alarmed because I had important errands to run that day for my wife. You had added stress. It was tremendous stress.

Nanette: Okay.

Joe: that I went to the front desk and told the very nice lady there that I'd lost my keys and that I suspected someone in the class took it. And she was very understanding and found the name of that person on the list that went to the class and Looked up her phone number on the member list and gave her a call and the person said that they did not have my keys. And when the nice lady at the desk coming up, she said. Well, they didn't have them, but they didn't check either. So I just don't know, which put a lot of doubt in my mind. And then. Luckily, my wife came with my keys. I borrowed somebody's phone. My phone was locked in the car and she came with the key and I got my phone out of my car. And I have a little app that tells me where my keys are. I've never used it before. I'd forgotten all about it. But when I got my phone, I remembered it. And we used the app to locate the keys. Now, I need to add this in my travels. There was a young man in my travels around the gym. There was a young man who offered to help me and he did. And he kept saying to me, you're going to find your keys. And that really gave me a lot of hope. But I'll tell you this, what happened is that I used the app and it did supply an address where these keys were. And when I got that address, I was, I guess the word was gleeful. I was glee, full of glee. And I can feel in my body, my body prancing to the front desk with my phone so that the lady behind the desk could see that indeed these keys were at somebody's address. And I knew that they were at that lady's address. And the lady behind the desk took my phone and looked at it. She looked at it very closely. And then she gave my phone back to me saying, that's the address of this gym. Which meant that my keys were indeed in that gym somewhere. And I thought about what that guy said. that you'll find your keys. And that thought gave me the impetus to search one more time. And I went to the weight room where I had been on some weight machines. And sure enough, inside the metal track of one of those machines, my keys were. And they had blended in because they're metal too. And I didn't, I guess I just didn't look that closely because my ego already knew where the keys were. They really weren't looking for the keys. They weren't allowing the keys to find me. My ego was imposing an answer already that the keys weren't there, that the keys were in another place, that my imagination had invented to go along with my ego's projection of that somebody took my keys. So that's a story of what my ego did to me, for me, about me, and very recently. And I put a lot of time in spiritual growth, meditation, etc. But I wanted to tell this because it's a story of how stress affects all of us, and how desperation affects all of us. And that when we are in a corner, how that early pattern of our earliest egos, we repeat it. Because it did work for us at one time. It gave us ways to solve problems.

Nanette: If you reimagined that incident, and you thought about how the soul would respond to lost keys, how would that incident have looked for you?

Joe: I believe time would not have mattered.

Nanette: You were under the stress of time. You had a to-do list. So I'm going to the gym and after that I'm going to do this and this and this. And so you were first under the stress of time. So often, that is the case, isn't it?

Scott: You had a Christmas party that you were throwing that evening that you needed to do some things for.

Joe: We were having a lot of people to come over to our home.

Nanette: So you needed to prepare. You wanted to prepare, obviously. Had to prepare. Yeah, yeah. They're coming, whether you're ready or not.

Joe: I had a long list of things I had to do out in the community to be able to bring what we needed in, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so a lot depended on this. It wasn't just, oh, I would like my keys because I can eventually get more keys. Yes. But I needed them that day.

Nanette: Yes. you weren't going to be stranded at the gym. I mean, someone would, someone would come and get you, right? But how would the soul have responded to lost keys? First time doesn't matter because we recognize time, time is here for our benefit.

Joe: Well, first, the soul would have had a chat with the ego.

Nanette: Okay.

Joe: And it would have said to the ego, if you're serving me, you're not doing a very good job being unchecked like you are. And the soul would have asked for quietness and contemplation. The soul would have asked for the ego to serve it rather than its own narrative. and to really try to understand what I am trying to be taught through this incident.

Nanette: What is this here to teach me?

Joe: How is this a teachable moment? The meaning of this? The value of this? of the lesson, if you will, in this, the spiritual insight that I am to gain, that no other constellation of circumstances could teach me as well as this one. And then to go to my center and claim the truth of being, which is I am not diminished because of this error and circumstance, and that divine order will correct this error in the order of the divine timing. But the ego does not want to sacrifice and give up its own narrative of how that day had to go.

Nanette: It's so funny how the ego, as you alluded to earlier, will tell us a story. Immediately you knew what happened. And because you decided what happened, it clouded the truth, right? I mean, you were never gonna find the keys as long as you thought that they were with someone else at another location.

Joe: And I haven't convinced the lady behind the desk of my story. She was just all for me. She even said, she didn't check.

Nanette: So I'm just thinking about, you know, what is it in those moments? What are some practical applications of interrupting the cycle of stress that our ego so easily answers for.

Joe: Well, you know, that's kind of where we were with your very good question about how would the soul deal with this. The soul would challenge the ego's strategy and say, if you're not working to serve me, then you're working against me. And then the soul would begin to quiet itself, to think about what this is teaching me. Now what my soul taught me during this episode was that if somebody can tell me the truth that I cannot tell to myself, I can embrace their truth until I can begin to believe it myself, to remember it myself.

Nanette: Uh-huh. So the man who told you you will find your keys was really used by the universe to remind you of the truth of your soul.

Joe: Yes.

Nanette: Interesting.

Joe: And I hung on to that until my soul could take over.

Nanette: Yes.

Joe: And my soul told me, after I was quiet, to go back and check one more time. And that was the time when my ego was not imposing onto reality where my keys were, but my ego was relaxed and my soul was inviting the keys to find me.

Scott: Uh, I feel like when, when the ego is unchecked, We kind of feel our ideas about the present more clearly than we feel the present itself. Like ego loves its narratives, you know, it loves to interpret and analyze and all that is useful when, when we use that as a tool. But when we become preoccupied with that, I know for me, it's paralyzing. Like, when I'm doing the technology, when I'm doing the AV stuff at one of our Enneagram weekends, and there's some bug or glitch, especially when I first started doing it, man, it would really trigger my ego, my five, you know, I'm an ego type five, my need to be competent, you know, because it wasn't just Oh, this is an annoying thing that happened. It was a My God, I'm obviously incompetent. If I was just competent enough, this wouldn't happen in the first place. Why is this? This shouldn't have happened and all of that. And the thing about that is that's not a good place to actually solve the problem from. Like I would, I, I would have to drop into my soul to just deal with this simple, this is the situation. This is what's happening. What are we going to do? So I know for me, like I can, I can stay in my unchecked ego and just whine and gnash my teeth that the things that shouldn't be happening or not happening, or I can be present to what is happening and then work with it. Can let all that in extra unnecessary interpretation fall away into just the simplicity of this is where I am and this is what is happening.

Nanette: all of these small happenings in our life are the stuff of our life. And if we can't take this big work of the Enneagram and use it in our daily life, then what's it all for, right? But I think one of the first things that we start to realize is no matter how long we've been doing it, We're still failing, you know, the ego is still responding for us so often, you know, it's still the patterns and the habits that we tend to deploy, right? Why should that not be discouraging, Joe? I will. I still look like an egotype nine. I mean, like, I was when you guys were talking, I was thinking about how, you know, it's funny, the the things that we most dread, avoid are the things that come to us, right. And so, you know, everything kind of feels like a conflict to me, you know, and I was thinking about how often in my family interactions, I sense the conflict. And I, I My first response is always like, how can I get out of this conversation? How can I avoid this? How can I disengage from this? And recently, I was having a conversation, honestly, with my daughter that felt like a conflict. And I really in the moment said, how can I lean into this conversation? What is it that she needs me to say? How can I speak my truth, respond in kind, but also assist her because she's someone I love, rather than just try to avoid it? And I'm not going to say I did it or I accomplished it, But it's just amazing to me that despite my awareness, I still don't necessarily always have the answer to how my soul should respond.

Joe: But you had the awareness that that's where you needed to shift.

Nanette: Yeah.

Joe: And just the awareness really is all we need at times to get the wind out of the ego's sails.

Nanette: Okay.

Scott: I don't know that it's so much that the soul gives me an answer, rather the soul helps me shift my energy, shift my perspective from judgment to curiosity. why isn't it the way it should be to this is how it is, you know, to feeling that and then, you know, I don't get like a prescriptive answer from the soul that I'm able to feel my way forward. If that makes any sense.

Nanette: Well, I, it does. And yet, I'm just trying to think about in all of our stories, how we could shift away from the ego's narrative. And so obviously, what we're collectively saying is it starts with an awareness. my ego has an answer, my ego is telling a story. It's so interesting, the ego always wants to blame somebody, right? We might blame ourselves, why am I so stupid, incompetent, unable, whatever, versus who else is to blame? My spouse, my friends, my partner, my coworker, my boss, my kid, there's somebody to blame. I don't think the soul blames. I think the soul says, what is this here to teach me? What lesson is there in this for me? How does this serve me? Even when it's stressful, or difficult, or disappointing, or not how we expected the day to go, right? So we shift out of, well, first, we have an awareness. Second, we ask, what is it here to teach me? And then what's next? What do you think, Joe?

Joe: And then the quintessential point is to be conscious enough to move to the next step to actually apply what we know the soul wants. Don't say the next angry word. Don't have the next catastrophizing thought run through your head. Do an apology when an apology would not be something the ego would want to do. employ courage to step into an area of a relationship that had not been broached before. Go into an arena with meekness instead of pride. The soul is really the virtues.

Nanette: Uh-huh. That's what I was, yeah, just thinking about this is where our holy ideas and virtues can be a really great clue for us.

Joe: The holy ideas and virtues and idealized aspects and essential aspects are some bones of our soul along with other religious traditions. But for example, in the Christian tradition, more bones of the soul would be the Beatitudes and the fruits of the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit. For other religious traditions, like Judaism, it's the Kabbalah and the Seraphites. And you can go on with all of the traditions, the religious traditions, they outline in their fundamental basic tenets what the bones of the soul are. And it's trans-religious. Because love is love. It's just interpreted in the different cultural religions in different ways. So the soul is always asking us to shift to those responses to life. And it's asking the ego to help it.

Nanette: if we just go back to your story, Joe, of lost keys, and we think about your holy ideas and virtue, if you had brought these to your awareness, how would they have helped you to shift that story?

Joe: My ego types virtue is courage, which really is It's antithetical to anxiety. Courage replaces anxiety. You can't have anxiety and courage side by side for very long.

Nanette: And that's the truth of all the virtues, right? They are antithetical to the person's passion.

Joe: Or trap. Or avoidance. And the holy idea, my specific holy ideas are holy strength and holy faith. Well now, those are very important in any little daily mishap or problem because my ego says you don't have the wherewithal to solve this. and you're in a mess, and it doesn't have the faith that I know how to get out of the trap. It wants for me to chase my tail thinking I am just a person without the capacity and without the trust in the future. And here I sit, and it chases its tail as a way to soothe itself. like an animal chewing on itself to soothe itself and it doesn't work. I know of a story that the campers went camping and they had a big pot of stew on the fire and they went to bed and they thought they'd put out the fire, but there was some embers still underneath the pot and the stew they had left there. And a bear comes into the campground after the campers had gone to their tents. and smells this beautiful pot, picks it up, scrapes in it, and tastes the wonderful beef stew. Well, it says to itself, it's one of those big iron pots that had been cooking all night. It says it's going to take it to its den. Well, the next morning, the campers see the pots gone, and they see that bear tracks and follow them, and they find the bear dead in the woods. holding on to this very hot iron cauldron that it had hugged because it was trained to hug what hurt it, hug its enemies. And in hugging it, it burned through its hair and its skin and burned through an artery and the big bear bled out. Our ego sometimes asks us to hug all of these patterns that really end up burning us and killing us. But that's what it knows to do. So the soul helps us relinquish the big burning pot of stew that had been heated to the boiling point all evening.

Nanette: Well, that is an ease of our suffering when we can embrace that, right? I'm just thinking about all the people I know and their ego types and the traps that they find themselves in. obviously, the people I really know and love and hold most dear and think what a relinquishment it would be the burden set down of the heavy weight of the ego story. Because, you know, it's funny, sometimes you'll see these little cartoons or memes of of how different Enneagram types respond to the same scenario. We've all lost keys before. And it's funny, my narrative would be something different. Mine would be very self-blaming, honestly. It would be angry, honestly, it would be real frustration. And same if I was under the time stress of I've got errands to run, I've got places to go, I would feel the same. I certainly can disintegrate to six. So I know exactly, I probably would move to the same patterns as you very quickly. But It's funny how we all respond with our own ego types traps when we get under stress and that really these virtues and holy ideas can help ease our suffering. even in daily life in the small stuff. It's like, I think we can recognize that we're really doing the work when we start to embrace the wisdom of the Enneagram in our daily stresses.

Joe: That's why it's so important to know our soul, Nanette and Scott, because when we are in these vulnerable positions, sometimes we think, well, I don't have anything else to do but this. Aha, I am not anybody else but this. And the facts are, we are a whole lot more than that. But we have not known to understand what we are, who we are, at our depths.

Scott: We desensitized ourselves to the totality of our being.

Nanette: Well, I thank you for this conversation. Thank you. It's kind of like a don't sweat the small stuff with the Enneagram in your daily life. So I hope our listening audience and our students out there are encouraged that we're also working out our daily stories with our soul and really finding awareness every day. So thank you so much.

Scott: Thank you, Nanette. 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.