What’s so profound about the Enneagram is not just the behaviors and attitudes that we may have. It’s what’s going on underneath the waterline. I use an iceberg model, and what’s above that’s visible is what we might most connect with. Underneath are those deeper levels of motivation and hurt. The inner critic really comes into play. There are our core beliefs about ourselves.
Roxanne Howe-Murphy interview
This Enneagram Insights podcast episode’s guest is Roxanne Howe-Murphy.
She is a renowned American Enneagram teacher and a best-selling author.
And the founder of Deep Coaching Institute, and Deep Living Lab nonprofit organization. SHe also co-discovered the body or work called EnneaCrossings.
She was originally in the higher education system and has taught leadership, wellness, and recreation theory at different universities.
She has written the #1 Amazon international bestseller, “Deep Living with the Enneagram”, along with the internationally adopted book, Deep Coaching: Using the Enneagram As a Catalyst for Profound Change.
Her newest book, Underneath Your Personality will be released in January.
She relates to type nine.
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
iHeartRadio
In this episode of Ennegram Insights podcast we talk about:
✔ A physical sensation when Roxanne was re-introduced to the Enneagram by Don Riso and Russ Hudson
✔ How the Enneagram helped her to go from coaching people´s ego and patterns to be able to create deeper awareness and change with the Iceberg model.
✔ How to become fully Human – and what does that even mean?
✔ On Presence, Awareness and Compassion in our relationships with ourselves and others.
✔ The pain of people’s rejection of themselves. And why it’s unnecessary and gets in the way of sharing one’s gifts and sharing what is really true within you.
Interviewer: Charlotte Haase
Quotes from the episode
Roxanne Howe-Murphy always felt like something was missing in her coaching.
That it was difficult to get to the core. But at a week-long introduction to the Enneagram with Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson something landed in her. She had the feeling “This is your work”.
In the Enneagram Insights interview she recalls:
“One of the teachers said something. And my heart dropped. And I recognized there’s something very profound here, much more than I thought there would be.
I actually felt arms around me. It was a very amazing experience.
I had no idea what that meant- to have these arms shaking me. This may sound very odd for a lot of people, and it was very odd for me.
And I had tears rolling down my face. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew that I had to say yes, because it’s such a gift.
So that one week turned into going through their certification, and then diving into my own work and recognizing, oh, so coaching. This is what was missing in the coaching experience.”
Underneath the Waterline
What Roxanne Howe-Murphy discovered was that she was coaching to the ego up until then:
“I was coaching to patterns, and I knew that that wasn’t deep enough, because we don’t just change patterns necessarily. There’s something else that is taking place.
So the Enneagram, what’s so profound about it is not just the behaviors and attitudes that we may have, the external expressions or characteristics. It’s what’s going on underneath the water, what I call underneath the waterline.
I use an iceberg model, and what’s above that’s visible is what we might most connect with.”
Roxanne Howe-Murphy explains:
“What really distinguishes us, actually distinguishes one orientation to life, one type from another, is what’s going on underneath the waterline. So it’s those deeper levels of motivation and hurt.
The inner critic really comes into play in a profound way. There are beliefs, our core beliefs about ourselves. Our very sense of self that we are trying to show the world, which isn’t really our true nature. It’s not that none of it’s true.
We have our higher gifts, but we often try to polish the apple and show our best self, which is the ego.
That’s where a lot of the hurt is. That’s where the inner divide in our lives comes into play.
Trying to be entitled to show, trying to express ourselves in a certain way because we think that that’s what is needed, and then what’s really happening internally.
When those get cut off from one another, we have pain. We suffer.
I know I was certainly having that experience before the Enneagram found me. Underneath the waterline, there are dynamics and drivers that shape our experience and that we are maybe not aware of.
The Enneagram can help us be aware of that fears and other motivations may be driving our behaviors”
A profound turning point
After this experience Roxanne Howe-Murphy wrote her first book in this field called Deep Coaching, using the Enneagram as a catalyst for profound change.
And she finds that her journey since then has just been one step after another.
“I would say for me there was a before the Enneagram, and the after continues for me, because it’s such a lifelong journey.
It was a profound turning point for me. It’s a profound turning point.”
The wish
The hope Roxanne Howe-Murphy has with the Deep Living Approach that is offered through the Deep Living Lab is to offer a healing of the inner and outer divide.
Instead of a fix-it approach she wants to offer a way of both knowing ourselves and being in the world –connecting our inner awareness with expressing ourselves authentically in the world.
She explains in Enneagram Insights podcast that her hope for the next next generation is to develop and know that there’s the capacity for being with the amazing being that you are for accepting that your life is precious and that you are a mystery.
“There’s so much more to discover and that you are part of a larger mystery of this unfolding of the human condition and human nature and being, beingness.
I feel the pain of people’s rejection of themselves. I often feel that pain when I hear that.
But it’s unnecessary.
And it gets in the way of sharing one’s gifts and sharing what is really true within you.
And so sometimes we forget about that bigger truth that we’re part of something bigger and that we’re here for a reason.
I believe we’re here for a reason and that is to become more present, more conscious. And then whatever way we are to offer our gifts is our gift back.”
Links to Roxanne Howe-Murphy´s work:
https://roxannehowemurphy.com/
https://www.deeplivinglab.org/
