Beatrice Chestnut: "Going Deeper with the Enneagram”

What if the type you’ve been typing yourself as isn’t the whole story? Tami Simon sits down with Enneagram pioneer Beatrice Chestnut to mark the re-release of her classic guide, The Complete Enneagram, and to ask why facing our shadow, not avoiding it, is the real path to waking up.

Beatrice Chestnut, PhD, is a global expert, researcher, and educator on the Enneagram. She holds a PhD in communication studies and a master’s degree in clinical psychology, and is a licensed psychotherapist, coach, and business consultant based in San Francisco. She is the author of several acclaimed books on the Enneagram, including the newly re-released edition of The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge, widely considered a classic in Enneagram literature.

In this conversation, Tami and Beatrice explore:

The difference between personality (the protective “false self” formed in childhood) and our essential, true nature
Why each of the nine Enneagram types has its own distinct shadow challenge to confront and integrate
The 27 subtypes, and why Beatrice believes they matter far more than Enneagram “wings”
How the connecting lines, or arrows, reveal each type’s specific growth pathway — and why the order matters
What each type looks like at its highest, most evolved expression
Why more people may be ready to “wake up” to who they really are now than ever before

This episode is for anyone who’s taken an Enneagram test and wondered what to do next, as well as therapists, coaches, and longtime students of the system looking to go deeper with the subtypes.

Listen now to discover your own path to greater self-knowledge. →

This conversation offers genuine transmission, not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together, and it originally aired on Sounds True One.

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Just One Question | Gabor Maté: What Keeps Me from Be...

Gabor Maté — October 15, 2026

Why do some of the most hardened people—lifers on death row, people who’ve killed—turn out to be, underneath it all, remarkably sensitive? Physician and trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté has spent decades working with addicts and prisoners, and he’s found a pattern that upends how we usually think about cruelty and compassion.

Dr. Gabor Maté is a physician and bestselling author whose work on trauma and addiction has shaped how millions understand pain, illness, and healing. He’s the author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, When the Body Says No, Scattered Minds, and, with his son Daniel, The Myth of Normal.

In this conversation, Tami and Gabor explore:

Why compassion is wired into us from birth and what shuts it down
The neuroscience of care, drawing on affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp’s research on emotional systems
What Gabor has witnessed firsthand working with lifers and people on death row
The difference between “orchid” and “dandelion” temperaments, and why high sensitivity can become either a liability or a gift
Why genes linked to addiction may really be genes for sensitivity

This one’s for anyone trying to understand the roots of cruelty, or working through their own compassion fatigue; toward others, or toward themselves.

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Gabor Maté titled “Gabor Maté: Healing Principles to Embody in a Traumatized World”

Just One Question | Lissa Rankin: Can Healing Our Trau...

Lissa Rankin — October 8, 2026

Physician Lissa Rankin says trauma doesn’t just live in the mind; it can trigger measurable physical disease, from autoimmune conditions to chronic illness that conventional medicine can’t explain. But her most provocative claim is the reverse: that healing the nervous system may be the missing piece in reversing illnesses that have resisted every other treatment.

Dr. Rankin, a physician and author of Sacred Medicine and the New York Times bestseller Mind Over Medicine, has spent years studying the link between the nervous system and self-healing, including polyvagal theory and the ventral vagal branch of the vagus nerve. In this conversation with Tami Simon, she widens the definition of trauma well beyond childhood wounds to include systemic racism, environmental toxins, and the everyday stress of simply living in the world today.

In this conversation, Tami and Lissa explore:

Why Dr. Rankin believes trauma and chronic illness are intrinsically connected
How polyvagal theory and the vagus nerve point to a physical mechanism for healing
Why “developmental trauma” can affect even people who had privileged childhoods
How collective traumas — like systemic racism and white-body supremacy — show up in the body
Why treating trauma isn’t a guarantee of cure, but can still open the door to real healing

This episode is for anyone who has tried everything to heal a chronic or life-threatening illness and wants to understand what role the nervous system might play.

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Lissa Rankin, “Is There a Holy Grail of Healing?”

Laurel Parnell: “The Evolution from EMDR to Mult...

— October 6, 2026

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What if some of what we’re carrying was never ours to begin with?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Laurel Parnell—psychologist, longtime spiritual practitioner, and a leading innovator in EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing). Laurel developed attachment-focused EMDR and resource tapping, and now, in her new book with Sounds True, Releasing What Isn’t Yours: Living from Your True Self Through Multidimensional Integrative Healing, she introduces her most far-reaching approach yet—one born out of the devastating loss of her son.

Join Tami and Laurel to explore:

How EMDR works, and why bilateral stimulation—whether eye movements, tapping, or sound—seems to unlock the brain’s natural healing system
The difference between EMDR and resource tapping, and how each supports transformation
Why Laurel came to believe that trauma work can open a portal to other dimensions
Missing and attached soul parts, spirit release work, and how to sense what isn’t yours
A profound, real-time account of guiding a soul’s crossing at Esalen, and its connection to the region’s Indigenous history
Why Laurel sees Western psychotherapy as, in some ways, colonized—and what other healing traditions have to teach it
The image of a multidimensional mycelium network of light and love that connects all beings

This is a candid, moving conversation about grief, the limits of what evidence-based therapy can explain, and the courage it takes to follow where healing actually leads.

Listen now to explore the evolving edge of trauma healing. →

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