Episode 208 Navigating Grief: The Soul Child and the Mind's Surrender

In this episode, we delve into the tender and complex topic of grief, how the mind often struggles to comprehend the depth of grief, and the overwhelming emotions that accompany it.

We begin by examining the first stage of grief, denial, as outlined by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, and how different ego types may experience grief in varied ways. Dr. Joe shares his personal experiences with grief, particularly the loss of his two children, and emphasizes that grief is not something that can be fully healed or resolved but rather something we learn to carry with us.

The conversation highlights the importance of recognizing the soul qualities that we may have lost contact with during our grief. We discuss how these qualities can serve as a healing balm, allowing us to express our feelings and acknowledge our significance in the face of loss.

Dr. Joe recounts his journey of rediscovering his soul child through creative expression, specifically through drawing mandalas during therapy sessions. This practice not only helped him cope with his grief but also fostered a deeper connection with his clients, illustrating the unity of suffering that exists among us all.

As we reflect on the nature of grief, we acknowledge the commonality of suffering and the importance of being present for one another. We encourage our listeners to consider where in their lives their minds may be working hard to understand or manage something that instead calls for presence and compassion.

Thank you for joining us in this heartfelt discussion. We hope it resonates with those who may be navigating their own grief and loss.

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 Howe and Scott Smith. Hey guys.

Joe: Hi Nanette.

Nanette: Looking forward to having this conversation with you guys today. You're doing well, both of you?

Scott: Yes.

Nanette: Yes?

Scott: Doing good.

Nanette: Good, good. We have today a tender topic. We're going to talk about grief and the soul child and the mind's surrender. As we've intended to do, we're going to talk today through the lens of the mind center of intelligence. And we're going to talk about grief and how the mind center often really reaches its limits. with grief, that the mind center, our own thoughts, and the way we can give over to patterns of thinking, are really not any path to healing the process of grief. And this is something that Dr. Joe, you you've experienced in the most heartbreaking of ways. So I'm very, cognizant today of the tenderness of this topic for you. So I thank you for being willing to talk about this today. Okay. So what happens when the mind can no longer make sense of what the heart is carrying? That's really what we're talking about today. And that that can be obviously grief, but that can be other overwhelming circumstances to someone maybe maybe divorce or the loss of a career or a traumatic accident, traumas of any kind that our mind just can't handle. It's interesting that the first stage of grief they say is denial because the mind just can't comprehend and that our first response is to say no, it can't be true or it isn't and that it takes time for us to process sometimes the things that we have to respond to. So can you talk to us a little bit about that first stage denial? Do you think that is the first stage of grief?

Joe: Well, you know, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who wrote the first book on the stages of grief, and it was called On Death and Dying, toward the end of her life, she was writing that the stages of grief, as she had outlined them, could be in different order for different people. Okay, that makes sense. For example, next to the last stage in her book, called Anger, She said that many people begin with anger. You can begin with denial or anger. Sometimes you can begin with bargaining, which is one of the stages. And sometimes you can begin with depression.

Nanette: Do you think somebody's ego type might predict or might be the reason someone starts with a different stage?

Joe: Yes. And I enter that in the context of the soul qualities that we lost contact with are the soul qualities we most need in grief.

Nanette: Can you give me a practical explanation for that?

Joe: For example, the Enneagram number nine, lost contact with their own specific significance and meaning. And that's why in the ego, they merge with others as a way to get meaning and be taken along by the river of meaning rather than to carve their own canal or realize that they have their own parallel river that they could have gone along on the whole time. And so grief begs for significance. Grief begs for somebody to say, I matter. I have feelings. I am devastated. I am without. I have been wounded. I have been decimated. I have been crushed. It is a call for a person to say, I matter. Because if they do not do that, they grieve as a person who doesn't matter, which takes away the profundity and the depth of their grief. Just think about it. If you don't matter, your feelings don't matter. Why should I grieve? I should get over this. I don't matter. I just, you know, I'm really with the crowd. But in grief, it's you who have lost, not the crowd. And if an unhealthy six continues to hide in the crowd, when they are out inwardly begging for mercy because they're so devastated, they never resolve that grief. And you can go around the Enneagram and take every ego type and understand what qualities of soul they separated from. And those are the qualities that loss begs to have expressed. And those are also the qualities that we were born with as a soul child.

Nanette: Do you think that these qualities that the soul is begging to receive, can they heal grief? Can grief be healed?

Joe: Well, that's another huge question. And as for me, grief is never healed in terms of that it's gone. The losses I had, which were of my two children, those losses can never be dismissed or thought of as resolved or thought of as okay now. That won't be. There would be something wrong if I were to say, well, that's done, next. Because it's a part of my soul. that still is woven intimately with two souls who are not present on this plane physically anymore. So, I would say, in answer to your question, which is a very good question, I don't think grief even has to be totally healed.

Scott: I've always, I've always heard people say the, the grief never goes away, but our, our capacity to carry that grief, to hold that grief can increase that we can find more space around that grief. So, so it doesn't feel like, I don't know. So it doesn't feel overwhelming. So it doesn't feel like it's only grief. That said, I don't have the direct experience with grief that many others have.

Nanette: That makes me think of resilience, of people's capacity to handle great suffering, and some people's lack of capacity, honestly, to even suffer minor inconveniences, for lack of a better word. It seems that people who do the work of soul are more resilient that they have the capacity because we've heard it said that you should never compare traumas or griefs or sufferings, that they're all different to different people. That said, I think there's an inherent respect for the grief of people who've lost their children. I think everyone knows that there really isn't anything maybe worse than that. I can't imagine anything worse than that. except on a large scale, mass loss, 9-11, or the traumas of ongoing war and atrocities, which very often include people losing their children. And yet, there is a unity of suffering. There's some sort of resonance in people who've suffered grief. I know, Joe, that you probably would say that you can never fully understand the grief of another person, but you have a certain compassion for other parents that have lost children that I'm incapable of having because I've not been there.

Joe: Yes, I was with a gentleman just a couple of nights ago at a gathering and we hadn't seen each other since the loss of his child, which was an adult child as well. And I looked at him and we looked into each other's eyes and I said, you know that I am sorry. And that you and I belong to a club. that no one wants to be a member of, but I'm in that club with you. And nothing else needed to be said, really. Of course, we were at a social gathering. You don't go into detail there, but it was the union of two souls on a soul level. And we're in two completely different friend circles and everything. But there and then at that moment, we were two club members of a club we don't want to belong to.

Nanette: Yeah. The loss of your son, Ben, which has been well over 10 years ago now, was really the catalyst for you to find your soul child. You had been doing Enneagram work for a long time prior to that and been teaching it and you believed in the power of the Enneagram. But when Ben passed away, how did you know that the Enneagram had an answer for you that you'd not yet discovered? That was some sort of deeper knowing. Your soul knew something your mind didn't know. You're right.

Joe: I did many things to help soothe this trauma. And just one of the things was revisiting the Enneagram to see if it had anything about grief and death that I didn't know about. I had met a lady who had written a book on Enneagram and death. I met her at one of the International Enneagram Association global meetings. Her last name is Weigel. And she was quite serious with me when we were speaking about how the Enneagram has so much to say about death and dying and grief. And so I remembered her and remembered that she has written about it. And I delved into the Enneagram first by myself, and it didn't work. It did not help me. It gave my ego some ways to feel better. But you see, it wasn't just my ego hurting, it was my soul. And I needed healing on the soul level. And therefore, it's only the qualities of the soul, which are fueled by the tethering to the divine, that really make a difference in how we heal. And I didn't know that, and I didn't know that the soul child was actually the deeper level of our number of integration. I had been teaching the Enneagram as a personality system with spiritual roots, but I had no idea that that number that we all go to for integration is a treasure chest full of qualities that are the specific healing balm to our dilemmas. It was amazing. And so I dove right in to what the it's called the soul point or the heart point and began to discover multiple layers of soul qualities that are beautifully explained even in scripture. that I didn't know to compare to the soul point. For example, Corinthians, the 13th chapter on love, has nine descriptions of love at the beginning. And then after that, 18 other smaller descriptions. I mean, there's the law of three right there. But Those are, all of those in Corinthians, the 13th chapter, are qualities of the soul. And to see them in a different light, and that they're not just things I'm reading about, but things that I can tap into right here, right now, to feel a different way, because I am plugged into that divine energy of that soul quality. I didn't know about it. And then I found out about it. And I found out that together with reaching back and remembering soul child, remembering channeling those qualities as a soul child and re-embodying them, I was able to have sanity and joy, which I had wondered if I would ever have again.

Nanette: Do you remember the moment that you first really experienced this, Joe? The moment that you recognized that your soul child could bring you sanity and joy. Do you remember that moment?

Joe: I did. And this is one of them. Okay, I can certainly remember what what I did for many years. I was see people in therapy, because I'm a clinical psychologist and Right after my son died, we still had bills. Bill had to go to work and carry the burden of other people. Yeah.

Nanette: Yeah.

Joe: And it was impossible for me to do that.

Nanette: You didn't have the capacity to hold anybody else's stuff.

Joe: No. Yeah. And so what are you going to do? So I appealed to a higher power, I appealed to God, for a way to do this. Because I didn't have the capacity to do what had to be done. After a week off, Yeah, you know, the power bill still keeps coming, the mortgage still keeps coming. And miraculously, I was given something to be with people in therapy. That was a pastime that I did when I was a child. Now, let me explain this to you. One of the things I always did as a child was color. Any sheet of paper I would color on, castles, knights, clowns, dogs, cats, whatever level of development I was at, I was just a tremendous drawer. And then when, of course, when I get older, I understand the power of drawing a mandala. What was happening with me in therapy is I take physical notes in my therapy. I write as the client or patient talks. And what I found myself doing was drawing mandalas on another separate sheet of white paper. that I had adjacent to my notes. And then I found myself drawing the mandala instead of writing the notes as the person talked. It was very interesting and I was very attuned to what the patient might be thinking that I'm not writing what they're saying, but I'm drawing something. Uh-huh. Well, they didn't know what you were doing, I suppose. They didn't know, really. Yeah. They could tell I wasn't doing what I usually do. Okay. So I explained to the patient what I was doing. and was very transparent about what had happened to me, because I'm not going to let anybody think that I'm my total self, and got their permission to draw as they talked. And you know, a mandala is a circle, so I would draw the circle and then fill the circle in. And the circle ended up being a hybrid between what they were saying and what I was feeling. And I have books and books of these mandalas to this day. And then as the grief became less, or the capacity to hold the grief became better and better, I was less and less interested in doing the mandalas in therapy, because I was not beside myself. The mandala calmed me. And it enabled me to be present with that person. And isn't it interesting that a very early, primitive even, activity that my little soul child did in union with the divine, did it again at this time of abject shock and grief.

Nanette: It's amazing to me. And, you know, it's not unheard of. There are a whole, I mean, if you go on Amazon or you go to any craft store, you can find all sorts of kind of, quote unquote, adult coloring books. I think we're recognizing that sometimes there are these tactile ways that you can literally tap back into a soul child, that there was some profound wisdom in our creative expression as children, right? that maybe we also as children, we're expressing emotions, right? You know, you could, you can speak to this far more than me, because you you were a clinical psychologist who also treated children. So, you know, angry coloring, you know, that very harsh back and forth movement of small children, or what can be interpreted from the artwork of children, right? And in art therapy or play therapy that you can extrapolate, I suppose. But it's the simple yet really profound wisdom that really the heart center or really the mind center somehow. You said this recently as we were talking about emotional intelligence in the heart center that there is an emotional intelligence that is at the soul level. And that is again must be true in the head center that there is a deeper soul intelligence that also functions that knew that the mandala was an answer to not only carrying the grief that you were living in so actively and acutely, but also that your client was also in, and that somehow that made space for both of that.

Joe: And I would share the mandala with them afterward because they were participating in it. And they were very generous to me in allowing that. It was a gift. It was a beautiful thing. That's why I kept those mandalas.

Nanette: I think there's a certain intimacy that comes in when we share our deepest emotions. Here is your client processing whatever it is that they have been traumatized with or overwhelmed with. And here you are as a fellow human being, not just as a professional, but also as someone who's also caring something which is overwhelming and traumatic. And that is the unity of suffering that it impacts us all, that death comes for us all, right? Whether rich or poor or educated or uneducated. I spent some time recently with one of our one of our fellow students who is a palliative care physician. And he works up in rural parts of North Carolina where people live in very back roads, you know, very deep amounts of poverty. And just talking about how grief, and the work of dying is so difficult and yet so common to us all. It brings about this common denominator in all of us that it's no respecter of persons.

Joe: Level playing field. Yes.

Nanette: It doesn't matter, you know, here he is with his, you know, advanced education with someone who maybe didn't even graduate from high school. And yet we know that death is coming for us all. And it also makes me think of a lady, a widow in my neighborhood that I was recently talking to. And her and her husband were married over 50 years. And my husband and I see her when we're walking in our neighborhood. And she was outside doing some yard work. And we were just trying for just a few moments to hold her grief with her in the loss of her spouse. And when I walked away, I commented to my husband, and I just said, one day, that will be you or me. And it just reminded me, as so often I think that we can, if we can allow the wisdom of grief to remind us of the beauty of life, that I still wanted to stay present with Sai in that moment with my husband, and just appreciating the gratitude, you know? Yeah.

Scott: It's easy to feel like we're alone in our suffering. I mean, for me, at least, I can't necessarily speak for every human being, but it can be so easy to get hung up on like the nuances and the uniqueness of my particular suffering so much that like, I forget that we all, we all suffer. Every human being suffers and you know, yeah, each person's suffering is unique in a way in the same sense that our personality is unique and our soul is unique, but there are so many more commonalities. I mean, there are broad, there are broad flavors of suffering, you know, like, you know, like each personality type is like a broad category. And then we're, You know, we're a unique individual within that category, but we belong to a group. And it doesn't solve our suffering, but it can make it easier to carry when we remember we're not carrying it alone.

Nanette: It reminds me of a scripture, you know, carry one another's burdens. And in doing so, we fulfill the law of Christ. And it doesn't mean that you understand someone's suffering, but just saying I can come alongside you. And I, as Americans, I feel we're so, as a culture, so incapable of handling people's grief and suffering. We just don't seem to have good ways of responding. It's like we need to do some grief training for people. I thought it was so wise what Joe said when he encountered the man who'd recently lost his child, that he realized that you didn't need to say a lot. But we also, as Americans, so often say nothing. because we don't want to touch that. So we're afraid to bring it up, like it didn't happen. You know, like, if we don't, yeah, it's taboo, like, if we just don't talk about it, then, you know, that's also the right thing. And I, we have a a wonderful fellow student in our institute who is a grief counselor. And she encouraged me several years ago to read a beautiful book, which I highly recommend called The Grief Recovery Handbook. And it talks about some of the things that we say that really maybe aren't the wisest things to say to people in grief. You know, oh, it was just God's timing, or they're in a better place, or somehow we try to bring this superficial type encouragement to people who, you know, are suffering.

Scott: And when we approach people who are suffering, when we approach them from our egos, we end up trying to organize How am I presenting? Can I help organize how you're feeling? Can I help fix this? What can I do? You know, back to last episode, do, do, do. When we approach them from our souls, we can just be with them without baggage, without expectation, without this charge. And greatest gift you can give someone else is simply your presence.

Nanette: That's so insightful, Scott, that our souls really do know how to be with the soul of another.

Scott: We've all heard people who are grieving complain about, not only am I grieving, but all these people coming to show their respects or what have you, I'm having to This idea that like, not only am I grieving, but all these people who ostensibly are here to help me, I'm really having to do additional emotional labor to make sure they're okay.

Nanette: Yeah, you're shouldering the grief of another. I remember my father passed away last year, and it's the good intention of many people, but I recognize that many people who I received in the line told me stories of their own father's passing. And while I appreciated their intention, which was to say that they understood my loss, in that moment, that's not really what I needed to hear. Like I'm already shouldering my grief and now I feel bad for the loss of your father. So it seems like this is that thing where it's exactly what you just said, Scott, that our egos try to organize a response for us. If we can drop into our souls, I do believe that they have a real balm for another person's soul, especially if comfort is what we're trying to give another human, which I think we are in grief. I think people soften and that is our intention. So can we drop into the head centers intelligence of our souls, and I believe we can. we are looking to draw on the soul qualities for real life grief. And that again, I think it's an encouragement that those of us who really are very familiar with our ego types can look to our soul point for its wisdom in giving us what we need. I think that reminds us also of at least nine different unique needs, right? That we can be sensitive, that there is, that you and you both, Scott and Joe, might need to hear words that, or maybe experience actions that I don't as an ego type nine, so that we can be sensitive to our different ego types. Well, thank you today, really, Joe, especially for your transparency and your willingness to talk about your own journey. And I know it's going to help those who may be suffering loss out there today. As we continue to do, we will close with our inquiry for your reflection. Where in your life might your mind be working hard to understand explain or manage something that is asking instead for presence. Thank you guys so much for being here with me and for sharing your hearts today.

Scott: Thank you.

Scott: 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.