I was delighted to discover Beatrice Chestnut on youtube these past couple weeks. I have her book, The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge, and it is one of the few Enneagram books written in the 2000’s that actually offers new material… and good, useful material at that. She knows her stuff, particularly about the subtypes, which she learned from studying with the late Claudio Naranjo. Shy’s a psychotheraphist herself, and I believe she’s one of very few people in the world who have a PhD in the Enneagram itself. I already knew I was a SP 4 before her book came out, but a lot of SP 4’s say they weren’t able to type themselves accurately until they read her description of the SP 4 subtype. Other subtypes say the same thing about her accurate descriptions. It’s definitely worth checking out.
She hosted an Enneagram retreat at Commonweal and filmed the panels of the nine Enneagram types. While some of the people on the panels were mis-typed (I counted at least two, maybe three), I got a lot of connection to Essence, or even just community while watching them. I highly recommend watching the panel for your type, even for Beatrice’s 5-minute introduction at the beginning for each type- like I said, she knows her stuff, and she’s got a really compassionate take on each type’s ego structure and how we move against our own goals and desires in an effort to emulate the divine characteristics our ego structure is modelled after.
P.S. If you want to laugh, watch the Type 6 video- the panelists were pretty funny.