Know Your Soul: Journeying with the Enneagram by Joseph Howell
For anyone seeking healing, wholeness and deeper meaning, “Know Your Soul” is an essential tool.
When psychologist and spiritual teacher Joseph Benton Howell lost his son in 2008, the bottom fell out of his world. Years later, his daughter died in her sleep following a relapse after a hard-won period of sobriety. These seismic losses shattered the coping mechanisms that had previously held Howell together. The traditional psychological and spiritual tools he had relied upon his whole adult life could not fully address the depth of grief or the existential rupture he experienced.
What followed was not a rejection of his former knowledge but a deepening of it. Howell found himself drawn again to the Enneagram — a system he had studied and taught for decades — but this time, he found something he hadn’t fully seen before: a profound framework for healing and spiritual transformation. The result is Know Your Soul: Journeying with the Enneagram, a book that reimagines the Enneagram not simply as a tool for understanding personality, but as a spiritual map leading to the rediscovery of our deepest, most sacred self: the soul.
Emotionally Healing and Spiritually Transformative
For those unfamiliar, the Enneagram is a nine-pointed symbol used to describe nine core personality types, each shaped by particular fears, desires and coping strategies. These types are grouped into three Centers of Intelligence — body, heart and mind — and reflect the dominant emotional struggle of each center: anger, shame or fear.
The system’s roots are ancient, drawing from early Christian mysticism, Sufism and Greek philosophy. In the modern era, key figures such as George Gurdjieff, Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo shaped the Enneagram into the framework used today. Much of its current popular use centers on personality typing, whether for self-awareness and personal growth or for enhancing interpersonal relationships.
But Howell takes it further.
What distinguishes Know Your Soul from other approaches to the Enneagram is its fundamental shift in focus — from the personality to what Howell calls soulality. While most Enneagram literature examines how personality types develop and how to become healthier versions of them, Howell argues that our ego is not the endpoint of transformation, but the obstacle to it. The soul, he writes, is the deeper self we lost touch with in childhood, and the Enneagram, if used consciously, can guide us back to it.
One of the concepts at the center of his framework is that of the soul child — a sacred, unguarded part of ourselves that existed before the ego was constructed. Reconnecting with this soul child is not just emotionally healing; it is spiritually transformative. Whereas the ego is preoccupied with fear, control and validation, the soul child lives from love, peace, surrender and presence. The journey Howell refers to in the book’s subtitle involves learning how to live from our soul rather than our survival strategy.
An Essential Tool You’ll Want to Revisit
Throughout the book, Howell explains terminology and theory for readers with little to no background in the Enneagram, making it accessible for anyone curious about the topic. Moreover, his writing is marked by an emotional depth and spiritual warmth that engages and reassures. His openness about loss, grief and spiritual searching is brave, vulnerable and utterly engaging.
Howell writes as both a teacher and a fellow traveler, not as a guru or other authority figure. It’s like having a compassionate guide walking beside you, inviting you to participate. The narrative alternates between reflective passages, informative explanations and practical examples or exercises. This is the kind of book you’ll want to underline, revisit and sit with — one that rewards slow reading and reflection.
For anyone seeking healing, wholeness and deeper meaning, Know Your Soul is an essential tool. However, it is also a significant milestone in the study of the Enneagram, opening new avenues for practitioners to explore.
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.
Publish Date: 11/14/2024
Genre: Better Self, Nonfiction, Religion, Self Help
Author: Joseph Howell
Page Count: 272 pages
Publisher: Cascade Books
ISBN: 9798385215720