How the Enneagram’s Soul Child Heals Us
Perspectives
When grief feels unbearable, access your soul child: the pure, vulnerable essence beneath personality. Unlock sacred qualities like joy, compassion, and peace to find grounded hope.
A few days after our son Ben died, I found myself driving past the apartment where his life ended after he slipped into a diabetic coma. Behind the wheel, my heart sank and I couldn’t breathe. As a clinical psychologist, I had counseled many people in grief over the loss of a loved one. I thought I knew this journey. But now that I faced my own grief, things were very different. My heart was so completely devastated that I didn’t know how I could carry on.
Many of us find grief and loss to be the most difficult times we ever go through. There is no single healing balm for grief. Each loss has its unique sadness, and each person has their own way of dealing with it. But one thing is common for those of us grieving the loss of someone we love: It’s the dread and emptiness of having forever lost a part of our own being. Our heart was intertwined with this dear one, and no one on earth could ever give us the love they did, the way they did. And there is no one we love in the same way. Our loved one’s departure can rip a hole in our soul.
For me and my wife, Lark, living without our Ben was not in our life plan. Having to bury our child—a young man just beginning his adult life—was unnatural. We had devoted our entire adult lives to this wonderful and beautiful soul, and it was unbearable living without him. The choices were clear: find our life force—or succumb to the entropy of spiraling grief.
In an attempt to recover, I reviewed the principles of psychological and spiritual aspects of loss that I had studied and practiced for decades. But I was helpless to heal myself. The sadness and despair sucked the life out of me. Much needed psychological and spiritual support helped tremendously, but the agony was so penetrating that I needed something more. My first notion was to see how the Enneagram might speak to me.
Discovering the Soul Child
I am a seasoned teacher of the Enneagram, an ancient pathway of self-insight and personality integration. The beauty of this tool of self-discovery is its clarity and honesty about our personalities. In my pain, I made a deeper dive into the Enneagram, and the truths I discovered shifted everything.
To my astonishment, underneath the Enneagram’s nine personality types lies another, completely different set of nine energies that have little to do with personality traits. These are energies of the soul that far better represent who we are than our surface personalities. Each of us is born into one of these nine fundamental and unchangeable soul energies that underlie the universe.
I describe these nine soul energies as follows: Sacred Righteousness, Sacred Benevolence and Compassion, Sacred Action, Sacred Creativity, Sacred Wisdom, Sacred Kinship, Sacred Joy, Sacred Power, and Sacred Loving Peace.
Though I had studied child and developmental psychology, I had no idea how to describe who each one of us is before the personality takes form and runs the show. The answer I found resonated deeply with my truth: Before the ego and personality completely take over at about age 5 or 6, we live primarily from the soul and its qualities.
My soul energy had been alive in me from the very beginning, before all my defenses formed. This led me to the most astonishing discovery of all: The expression of the soul energy into which we are born is our soul child—that innocent and pure entity within each of us who is present, vulnerable, receptive, and tethered to the Divine.
Reconnecting with the Soul Child
We all have an inner soul child, but it is not found in the Enneagram number of our personality type. It turns out that we enter life as a soul with energies that stem from a completely different number. We enter the world with the seeds of our personality, but our most fundamental identity is our soul type.
The soul child is the essence of our being. It lives as a unique combination of qualities found deep within us, shaping how we express presence, resiliency, loving-kindness, courage, joy, brilliancy, and guidance. But we cannot exist with this type of innocence in this demanding and stressful world. So around age 5 or 6, we flip from the unconditioned soul child into the protective ego and its personality. The soul child recedes from our surface, and resides, protected, in our depths.
As life goes on, we may reconnect with our soul child, tethered to the Divine and from whom we access our powerful soul qualities that lie beyond our ego. How do we reunite? Personally, I accessed my soul child through meditation. I would envision and converse with him, feel his vulnerability and his purity. Slowly, almost miraculously, he began to make himself known.
It felt like a homecoming every time. Stories and memories from my childhood that were previously forgotten reemerged. In them I saw my earliest experiences and how the qualities of my soul responded in kind. I saw how these qualities handled life far more wisely than my ego does now.
Stories flowed out of me and accumulated, eventually filling a treasure chest in my soul. As I learned more about my unique constellation of soul qualities, I began drawing on each one to navigate real-life dilemmas, relationships, and, most of all, my ongoing grief.
Since making this discovery and reconnecting with my soul child, I have experienced miraculous healing. Though I still cry when I miss Ben, raw grief has given way to a settled soul. This approach miraculously bypasses the mental structure of the ego and has helped me to heal.
Taking Cues from Your Soul Child
After achieving my own healing, I began to use this method of reconnecting with the soul child in my practice with patients. I developed various guided meditations with detailed imagery that would facilitate access to the soul child. Just as it did with me, this approach helped my patients connect to their depths without spending hours shifting through the ego’s characteristics and blocks. It was quickly evident to me that the ego cannot reach the level where our most profound problems are healed. The Enneagram of Personality is only a path to the deeper Enneagram of Soul.
More than a decade after our son Ben’s death, our only other child, our cherished daughter Lauren, unexpectedly passed away. Like Ben’s death, Lauren’s was a shocking, life-changing, and devastating blow that could have destroyed us. But thanks to the spirituality of the Enneagram and the secret of the soul child within, we instead embodied the divine qualities that give us comfort, sanity, groundedness, and most of all, joy.
By discovering that we have direct access to the healing qualities located within, I am reminded of Jesus’s words, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). How much more plain could Jesus make it? We have to become a child in order to live in the kingdom of heaven. And the child closest to the Divine is the soul child within us all.
A Practice to Begin
You can take the first step in reconnecting with your soul child today. (Be aware that revisiting childhood can trigger many memories, including traumatic ones. Do not do this exercise if it may disturb you.)
Take a deep breath, gently close your eyes, and exhale slowly. If this is possible for you without re-experiencing unwanted trauma, let some of your earliest memories emerge. Relive the sights, sounds, smells, and feelings around you then. Picture the space where you grew up and the people who brought you into being.
Now, with your eyes still closed, imagine your little self—the innocent, stubborn, mischievous, yet totally genuine self you were as a young child. Notice what you are wearing and what you are doing, then look into the eyes of your soul child. You might want to talk to your soul child, embrace them, or simply be present with them. Ask yourself, What do I feel and observe as qualities emanating from my soul child? Which of these qualities do I need to become conscious of and embody to move through my present circumstances?
Recently, while waiting in the grocery store checkout line, I locked eyes with a baby peering at me over her mother’s shoulder. As soon as our eyes met, we both smiled. In the child’s eyes was a deep knowing. We were two souls looking into each other’s hearts. The encounter not only reminded me of the healing power of the soul, but how the entire world would shift if we all saw into each other’s souls.
by Joseph Howell, Ph.D.
