Reading Room | An Enneagram Podcast

About Reading Room | An Enneagram Podcast

A Chapter by Chapter break down of important books for those who study the Enneagram.

Publisher

Jeff Cook

Category

arts

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

9 Sept 2026

Latest episode

17 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

16 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   17 Oct 2026

   Chapter 5 | "Atlas of the Heart" | Art of Living with Tension

   Join our weekly Reading Room discussions and workshops at : www.aroundthecircle.org (www.aroundthecircle.org) Why are contradictory emotions so uncomfortable—and why might they actually be signs of growth? In this Reading Room episode, Jeff explores Chapter 5 of Brené Brown's Atlas of the Heart through the lens of the Enneagram. From bittersweetness and nostalgia to cognitive dissonance and paradox, the conversation examines why mature people learn to hold tension rather than rush toward certainty. Drawing on philosophy, psychology, and the Enneagram, this episode explores intellectual humility, reflection versus rumination, and the surprising wisdom found in ambiguity. #Enneagram #BreneBrown #AtlasOfTheHeart #PersonalGrowth #SelfAwareness

2. 

   14 Oct 2026

   Chapter 4 | "Atlas of the Heart" : Confusion and Curiosity

   What happens when we stop trying to have all the answers? In this episode of Reading Room, Jeff Cook continues through Chapter Four of Brené Brown's Atlas of the Heart, exploring the emotions that arise when life stretches beyond our understanding: awe, wonder, confusion, curiosity, interest, and surprise. The conversation examines why awe reconnects us to the natural world, why confusion may be one of the most important conditions for learning, and why curiosity is not simply a feeling but perhaps one of the great human virtues. Along the way, Jeff reflects on philosophy, science, education, weight training, Einstein, Oppenheimer, and the Enneagram to ask a deeper question: What if growth begins not with better answers, but with better questions? This episode also marks a personal shift. After years of teaching, writing, and producing content built around providing answers, Jeff shares why he believes the next season of his work will be centered on curiosity, conversation, and learning alongside others rather than speaking from certainty. Join us as we continue working through Chapter 4 of Atlas of the Heart and consider what it means to become people who embrace wonder, welcome confusion, and cultivate the courage to remain curious.

3. 

   11 Oct 2026

   Chapter 3 | "Atlas of the Heart" : Disappointment and Regret

   In this week's Reading Room, we dive into Chapter 3 of Brené Brown's Atlas of the Heart : "The Places We Go When Things Don't Go as Planned." Jeff explores boredom, disappointment, regret, discouragement, resignation, and frustration through the lens of the Enneagram, asking what these emotions reveal about desire, courage, vulnerability, and the stories we tell ourselves. Why does disappointment occupy so much of our emotional lives? What does it mean to name what we truly want? And how can regret become a path toward wisdom instead of shame?

4. 

   9 Oct 2026

   Chapter 2 * Part II | | "The Atlas of the Heart" : Admiration and Envy

   In this week’s Reading Room, Jeff explores Brené Brown’s discussion of comparison and the surprising emotions that can grow from it: admiration, reverence, envy, jealousy, resentment, schadenfreude, and freudenfreude. Along the way, he reflects on why some comparisons inspire growth while others expose our wounds, how resentment may be rooted in hidden envy and unmet needs, and why celebrating the success of others might be one of the deepest forms of connection available to us. From Enneagram insights to questions of justice, self-worth, and belonging, we're invited to pay closer attention to what our emotions are trying to teach us.

5. 

   7 Oct 2026

   Chapter 2 * Part I | "Atlas of the Heart" : Comparison

   This week in The Reading Room, we continue our journey through Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart by exploring "comparison." Join our Tuesday night discussion : HERE (https://www.patreon.com/aroundthecircle/posts/weekly-online-up-153285730?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link) As we elevate other topics in ths text, it seems good to sit on this experience for a moment. Drawing from Brown’s research, we examine how comparison shapes our relationships, self-worth, emotional life, and even our sense of the future.

6. 

   3 Oct 2026

   Chapter 1 | "Atlas of the Heart" : Stress, Vulnerability, and Anxiety

   In this Reading Room episode, Jeff continues our summer study of Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart, exploring the emotions and experiences that emerge when life feels uncertain, overwhelming, or simply too much. Drawing connections between Brown’s research and the Enneagram, this discussion covers stress, overwhelm, anxiety, worry, avoidance, fear, dread, and vulnerability—and asks what these experiences might be trying to teach us. Topics include: The relationship between stress, coping, and Enneagram movement Why overwhelm may require something different than more effort The distinction between anxiety, worry, and fear How personality shapes emotional experience Vulnerability as courage rather than weakness The ongoing conversation between head, heart, and body

7. 

   22 Sept 2026

   Atlas of the Heart | Introduction

   Sign up for a Free Membership : HERE (www.aroundthecircle.org) We've selected our next book. Brené Brown's Atlas of the Heart is one of the most influential books on emotions in recent years, and we're going to talk through it this June and July. The first 2 classes are free to all free members. Register : HERE (https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/jfQjst6YQkuEmhbIJMT3bQ) In this episode, Jeff highlights fifteen key ideas from the introduction that connect emotional awareness, language, and personal growth with the wisdom of the Enneagram. Along the way, he reflects on the relationship between feeling, thinking, and behavior, the importance of naming emotions, and why emotional vocabulary matters for both self-understanding and healthy relationships.

8. 

   21 Sept 2026

   Conclusion | "Personality and Wholeness in Therapy" | How Your Enneagram Type Solves Problems

   In this episode of the Reading Room, Jeff begins wrapping up Daniel Siegel’s Personality and Wholeness in Therapy by turning to one final piece of the framework: how the nine Enneagram types respond when their usual ways of solving problems stop working. This time, Jeff compares Siegel’s “emotional regulation modes”—upregulating, downregulating, and shifting—with what Around the Circle calls coping styles. Are these simply three tools that healthy people learn to use flexibly, or are they part of a deeper pattern involving how each type moves between the body, heart, and mind? Jeff uses Enneagram Ones as a test case and considers what actually happens when we move from our centered state into problem-solving, stress, and security. Lastly, Jeff asks what integration really requires. Perhaps growth isn't simply getting better at our favorite strategy, but recognizing when the tool we habitually reach for isn't working—and learning that we have other ways of responding available to us.

9. 

   20 Sept 2026

   Stress and Security | "Personality and Wholeness in Therapy"

   In this episode of the Reading Room, Jeff steps away from the text of Daniel Siegel’s Personality and Wholeness in Therapy to ask whether Siegel’s framework might help explain one of the strangest—and most important—features of the Enneagram: our movements in stress and security. This time, Jeff proposes a simple theory. When we move along the Enneagram’s traditional lines, we aren't mysteriously becoming another number. Instead, just one element of our personality pattern changes: either our center of intelligence shifts or the direction of our energy shifts. Jeff works through all nine types to show how this pattern appears repeatedly in both stress and security. Lastly, the question becomes whether the Enneagram symbol might be describing something far less mystical than it first appears. Could these lines represent predictable shifts within our nervous system as we adapt to stress, safety, and the fulfillment—or frustration—of our deepest motives?

10. 

    19 Sept 2026

    A Discussion | "Personality and Wholeness in Therapy"

    Previously released as "The Enneagram Book Everyone’s Talking About | A Review and Critique". Find all our material on Dr. Siegel's Book : HERE (https://www.patreon.com/collection/2059905?view=expanded) In this episode, Jeff Cook sits down with Danielle Fuller (Scientific Enneagram) for a deep conversation on Dr. Daniel Siegel’s Personality and Wholeness in Therapy—the book many are calling the most important scientific contribution to Enneagram theory in years. Together they unpack the book’s core framework around agency, bonding, certainty, emotional regulation, and developmental pathways while wrestling with both its strengths and frustrations. Jeff and Danielle explore where Siegel’s work reframes the Enneagram for therapists and skeptics, where the language becomes overly dense, and how neuroscience, polyvagal theory, and personality theory intersect with classic Enneagram ideas. Along the way, they debate whether the book advances the conversation, complicates it unnecessarily, or both at the same time. This is a theory-heavy discussion for serious students of the Enneagram, psychology, and human development.

11. 

    18 Sept 2026

    Chapter 5 | "Personality and Wholeness in Therapy" | The Science of Enneagram Growth

    In this episode of the Reading Room, Jeff continues through Daniel Siegel and the PDP Group’s Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, focusing on how our developmental pathways become the patterns we recognize as personality. This time, Jeff digs into Siegel’s ideas about temperament, adaptive strategies, emotional regulation, and the possibility of becoming more flexible without somehow becoming a different type. Along the way, he connects Siegel’s framework with familiar Enneagram concepts like centers, coping styles, wings, stress, and integration—and asks what the science might add to existing Enneagram theory. Lastly, the chapter turns toward the purpose of all this work: greater choice. If personality gives us habitual ways of responding to the world, growth may not mean escaping our type at all. It may mean becoming less imprisoned by it—developing the freedom to access more of ourselves when life calls for it.

12. 

    16 Sept 2026

    Chapter 4 | "Personality and Wholeness in Therapy" | Why You Became Your Enneagram Type

    In this episode of Around the Circle’s Reading Room, Jeff continues through Chapter Four of Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, digging into one of the densest—and potentially most useful—sections of Daniel Siegel’s Enneagram theory. This time, we look at how the three Centers organize themselves around the primal needs for agency, bonding, and certainty, and how anger, shame/separation distress, and fear function as protective emotional responses. From there, Siegel proposes three different ways we handle that emotional energy: experiencing and expressing it, containing and channeling it, or reframing and redirecting it. Together, these patterns offer a fascinating way of understanding how the nine Enneagram types emerge as adaptive strategies. Lastly, Jeff goes around the circle, testing Siegel’s descriptions against established Enneagram theory—finding some remarkably insightful connections, raising questions about Fives and Sevens, and considering what all of this might mean for stress, security, and genuine growth. If our personalities began as automatic strategies for navigating the world, what happens when we become capable of choosing something more?

13. 

    9 Sept 2026

    Chapter 3 | "Personality and Wholeness in Therapy" | How the Brain Creates Nine Enneagram Types

    In this episode of Around the Circle, Jeff continues the Reading Room through Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, turning to one of the biggest questions in Enneagram theory: Where does your type actually come from? Daniel Siegel and the PDP group propose a biological and developmental framework in which personality emerges from fundamental motivational systems connected to agency, bonding, and certainty—and the emotions of anger, separation distress, and fear. This time, Jeff follows the science behind the nine types. The chapter connects the traditional Body, Heart, and Head Centers to underlying motivational and neural systems, then combines those three systems with three directions of attention and energy—inward, outward, or both—to explain how nine distinct personality patterns emerge. Type, on this account, becomes a developmental pathway reinforced through temperament, experience, emotional regulation, and increasingly established neural networks. Lastly, the conversation turns toward what all of this means for growth. If our personalities are adaptive strategies written into increasingly familiar neural pathways, those pathways don't have to determine our futures. Neuroplasticity, emotional regulation, and greater integration may allow us to loosen the grip of our dominant patterns and develop more flexible ways of responding to life. What if understanding your Enneagram type means understanding not only who you are, but how your brain learned to become that person?

14. 

    9 Sept 2026

    Chapter 2 | "Personality and Wholeness in Therapy" | Is Your Enneagram Type Making Choices for You?

    In this episode of Around the Circle, Jeff continues the Reading Room through Chapter Two of Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, examining Dan Siegel’s emerging framework for understanding the Enneagram as nine patterns of inner experience. The conversation begins with both appreciation and skepticism: How strong is the scientific evidence for the Enneagram, and what can thousands of first-person narratives actually tell us about personality? This time, Jeff digs into Siegel’s claim that personality develops through the interaction of temperament and experience—and that repeated patterns of attention, emotion, and behavior can become increasingly automatic. He considers Siegel’s preference for “patterns” over “types,” the role of the Centers and affect groups, and the idea that our greatest strengths and greatest liabilities may be two sides of the same coin. Lastly, the episode turns toward what makes the Enneagram valuable in the first place: self-awareness gives us greater freedom over the motives and habits that might otherwise run our lives. Growth isn’t about escaping your personality; it’s about recognizing excess, seeing your blind spots, and developing greater integration across heart, mind, and body. What becomes possible when we understand not only what we do, but why we do it?

15. 

    9 Sept 2026

    Chapter 1 | "Personality and Wholeness in Therapy" | Can Neuroscience Explain the Enneagram?

    In this episode of Around the Circle, Jeff continues the Reading Room with a deep dive into Chapter One of Daniel J. Siegel’s Personality and Wholeness in Therapy. Siegel is attempting something ambitious: translating the Enneagram into a scientifically grounded, clinically useful framework that connects our inner motivations, personality, and patterns of behavior. This time, Jeff explores Siegel’s three fundamental ideas, including the relationship between temperament and experience, the three emotional systems of anger, separation distress, and fear, and our underlying drive toward agency, bonding, and certainty. The discussion also gets into how repeated experiences may reinforce neural pathways—and how those pathways could help explain both the development and persistence of Enneagram type. Lastly, Jeff considers what all of this means for growth. Perhaps the goal isn’t to escape or change our type, but to recognize when our patterns become excessive and develop greater flexibility and integration across heart, mind, and body. If neuroscience can help explain both why our personality sticks and how we can become healthier, what might that mean for the future of the Enneagram?

16. 

    9 Sept 2026

    Intro to the Reading Room | Intro to "Personality and Wholeness in Therapy"

    In this episode of Around the Circle, Jeff launches a new season of the Reading Room with a deep dive into Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, Daniel J. Siegel and his collaborators’ ambitious attempt to bring the Enneagram into conversation with neuroscience, developmental theory, and psychotherapy. Drawing on tens of thousands of first-person reports, the book asks what science can—and cannot—tell us about the nine personality patterns. This time, Jeff approaches the book as a philosopher, asking what it actually means to say that the Enneagram is scientifically supported. He examines different kinds of evidence—from personal experience and explanatory power to clinical usefulness, prediction, measurement, and replication—and considers why a theory can be valuable even before it has been conclusively validated. Lastly, the conversation turns toward the purpose of the Enneagram itself. Siegel's framework suggests that personality doesn't have to be a box that confines us; understanding our patterns may instead create greater flexibility, integration, healthier relationships, and freedom. If the Enneagram really can help us understand how we perceive and engage the world, what might it reveal about who we are—and who we can become?

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.