My Refelction on the Closing of CP Enneagram Academy

A personal reflection on the end of an era, and what it taught me about being a Self-Preservation Nine.

I was sitting at my desk at the end of a Tuesday, wrapping up a normal workday, when the email came:

CP Enneagram Academy was closing its doors at the end of the year.

My first reaction surprised me. I wasn't shocked. It almost felt like something I'd been bracing for without knowing it. 

But my stomach still dropped. That quiet, sinking, oh no, this is bad news feeling.

By the next morning, my brain had already moved into fix-it mode: 

What can I do about this? 

How can I help the community process this? 

Within a day, I was planning a roundtable.

Looking back, that reaction tells you almost everything you need to know about how I'm wired.

How I Found CP in the First Place

I came across Beatrice Chestnut through an Enneagram podcast I'd started listening to and, from there, found her work with Uranio Paes. What pulled me in wasn't the surface-level version of the Enneagram. It wasn't "here are the nine types, here's what they mean."

It was the depth.

Subtypes, instincts, the layers underneath the layers. 

I'd never heard anyone teach it that way.

So I joined CP Enneagram Academy, thinking I'd become an Enneagram coach.

I remember the first class like it was yesterday. A week-long online intensive, and by the end of day one, I was elated in a way I couldn't fully explain. 

For maybe the first time in my life, I felt like I'd found my people. My community. A place I belonged.

I talked my husband's ear off for weeks. I couldn't stop thinking about the Enneagram, couldn't stop learning, couldn't stop wanting more depth.

The Retreats That Changed Everything

I did one of CP's inner work retreats online first. Through that process, I started seeing things about myself and my own type I'd never seen before. 

Something shifted in me that I don't fully have words for, something more spiritual than I'd experienced up to that point in my life.

A few months later, I went to the in-person retreat. In California. Alone. If you know anything about being a Self-Preservation Nine, you know that traveling halfway across the country by myself, away from routine and comfort, was its own kind of growth edge. 

Being there in person, surrounded by other seekers doing their own inner work, working directly with Bea and Uranio, was one of the most significant experiences of my life. 

Something opened in me there too, something I still carry.

It was out of all of that, the classes, the retreats, the community, that I found the courage to start my own business. I thought I'd be an Enneagram coach. 

Instead, I pivoted into website design, and eventually into helping business owners understand themselves through the Enneagram, work that's still built on so much of what Bea and Uranio gave me.

What I'm Still Learning

Here's the thing about the Enneagram: it's never one and done. You don't learn it and graduate. 

It's lifelong work, and that's part of why I love it so much. There's always another layer.

Knowing I'm a Nine who loves depth, who's drawn to conversations that go somewhere real instead of staying on the surface, none of this surprises me looking back.

It's just been an eye-opening thread running through my whole business.

Hosting the Roundtable

When it came time to host the roundtable, I genuinely didn't know what to expect. I just hoped people would show up.

They did, and the emotions in that room ran the full spectrum. 

Anger. Grief. A few people trying hard to land on the bright side. 

Nobody was happy about it, but everybody was processing it differently.

What struck me most was realizing, mid-roundtable, that I hadn't processed my own feelings at all. 

I'd spent so much energy organizing and promoting the thing that I skipped right past my own reaction. 

When I heard other people say they were angry, my honest thought was, huh, I didn't know we were allowed to be angry about this.

That's a very Nine thing to do. Numb out, stay busy, skip the feeling entirely.

Afterward, I saw that Uranio had already launched a new website for his next chapter. I'm not on social media often, maybe once a week, so I'd missed it. 

But seeing it with my own eyes made it real in a way the original email hadn't. It was proof. There it is. It's actually happening. 

I wanted to cry.

What This Closing Actually Means to Me

Reflecting on all of it, I can see the pattern clearly now. I did the body-type thing, throwing myself into action instead of sitting with what I felt. I was in denial until I was faced with it directly.

I know myself as a Nine largely because of what I learned at CP. I never would have had the nerve to host that roundtable (being Self-Preservation dominant with Social repressed) if it weren't for the years of practice they gave me in stepping outside my comfort zone.

So losing this isn't really about losing access to more classes. 

It's about losing the certainty that they were there in the background.

Even when I'd fallen behind on webinars because I was buried in my own business, I always knew I could go back. I could rewatch something, or sign up for a refresher like the Type Nine immersion I did last December.

Knowing that safety net is going away is the hardest part.

Someone in the roundtable said it best: 

We'll always have the work we already did with them to look back on, and that's something to be grateful for. 

I believe that completely. I owe so much of who I am today, in my business and outside of it, to the training and inner work I did through CP.

It still sucks, though. They'll keep offering trainings for another year, but it won't be the same knowing it's ending. 

It's sad, but I wish them both the very best. And I know the journey will keep going no matter the circumstances.

If you were part of the CP community too, I'd love to hear how you're processing this. There's no right way to grieve something that shaped you.