Does transformation have to be a complete life makeover? Do you have to radically alter everything you do in the search for authentic spirituality? Caroline Myss says that the opposite is true.
In this short teaching, Caroline offers a way that you can take just one minute to make a profound change in your life—and deepen your connection to an essential part of who you are.
Caroline Myss is the author of four New York Times bestsellers: Anatomy of the Spirit, Sacred Contracts, Invisible Acts of Power, and Why People Don't Heal and How They Can. A leading voice in the field of energy medicine and human consciousness, she holds degrees in journalism, theology, intuition, and energy medicine. She has appeared on two highly successful public television programs, and on The Oprah Show.
Author photo © David Sutton
Caroline Myss is a five-time New York Times bestselling author and a leading voice in the field of human consciousness, spirituality, mysticism, energy medicine, and the science of medical intuition. A long-time friend of Tami and Sounds True, Caroline has created more than 20 audio learning programs with us. Her latest audio program is called The Power of Holy Language to Change Your Life, which is the topic of this episode of Insights at the Edge. Tami and Caroline talk about how our souls will literally starve without holy language, and how it can both transform us and our understanding of our experiences. They also discuss how prayer, outside of any religious institutions, is the ultimate form of holy language. Finally, Tami and Caroline explore how we can open ourselves to the field of light and grace that is all around us and within us at all times.
Caroline Myss is a renowned author, teacher, medical intuitive, and researcher of human consciousness. Her many works include Anatomy of the Spirit, Sacred Contracts, and Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can. A longtime collaborator with Sounds True, Caroline has recently published the audio program The Courage to Confront Evil: The Most Important Challenge of Our Time. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Caroline about a subject that’s often divisive: the concept of evil and what we can do to counter it. Caroline defines evil from a number of different angles, emphasizing that it most often arrives when someone intentionally abandons their conscience. Tami and Caroline discuss the existence of both angelic and demonic forces, as well as how the inner workings of the universe are ultimately impersonal. Finally, they consider why looking evil in the face does take considerable courage—a courage we all need to muster during an era of great arrogance and inhumanity.(62 minutes)
Caroline Myss is a bestselling author, medical intuitive, and leading voice in the fields of energy medicine, human potential, and spiritual exploration. Together with author Andrew Harvey, Caroline has partnered with Sounds True to create The Shadow Course: An Eight-Week Journey to Know Yourself and Bring Light to the World. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Caroline about this upcoming online course and how it guides participants in a deep exploration of the aspects of themselves that they have disowned or denied. They discuss the ways that Shadow issues such as greed, entitlement, envy, and self-absorption show up in everyday life and can even manifest as symptoms of physical illness. Finally, Caroline explains how bringing awareness to our personal Shadows is the first step in initiating deeply needed social changes for our world. (72 minutes)
There is a saying that goes “hurt people hurt people.” I believe this to be true. We have been conditioned, in environments of scarcity and violence, to react more with fear and self-protection than curiosity and connection. As a result, we live in a world that is deeply in need of more kindness, more ease, more connection, more sweetness. It’s time we offer more sweetness and ease to ourselves, to one another, to our planet.
Now, this does not mean being a Pollyanna or “sickly sweet.” It does not mean being addicted to sugar and finding other ways to hurt ourselves. It means moving through the world and offering sweetness to ourselves and others. It means setting good boundaries and protecting our community and the hive from those who would “rob” us of our sweetness, of the sustenance (love, connection, inclusion, belonging) that helps us endure.
But first, we have to allow ourselves to taste and feel the sweetness on our own. We have to practice being deeply grateful for what is sweet in our life, holding it with reverence, and freely sharing it with others.
We invite you to build your own relationship with, and deep worthiness of, sweetness. We invite you to find and taste the sweetness in your life. Times of abundance and sweetness are special, and we must remember to taste them fully and live into them. We must also remember to share them.
What sweetness do you have in your life? What sweetness can you share with others? What sweetness do you crave from others? How can you cultivate more sweetness in your life? What does that look, sound, and feel like? Where do you deny yourself sweetness? How can you give yourself permission to taste and share all of the sweetness that comes to you? How can you bring sweetness into the lives of others?
Honey Tasting Meditation
For this practice, you’ll need some (ideally) local honey. If possible, find out what you can about where it came from and what was in bloom at the time it was made. This will help deepen your relationship to the place you live. If you cannot find local honey, that is okay; you can still complete the meditation as instructed.
Find a quiet spot in a quiet moment and sit with your jar of honey. Before opening it, sit in a few moments of conscious breathing to quiet your mind.
Start with your sense of sight and smell. Hold the jar of honey up in front of you and observe its color and viscosity. Take note of how it looks in the light, in the dark.
Next, open the jar of honey and bring it to your nose. Inhale deeply. Notice the sensations, images, or thoughts that come to you as you breathe in the aromatherapy of the honey.
Now, reverently taste the honey. Take a small amount on a spoon and meditatively savor the flavors, sensations, feelings, and images that come to you. Chew the honey. Hold it on your tongue. Allow yourself to indulge in its many flavors. Do this again with another spoonful (or as many as you want) but take your time.
When you’re done, write down any messages or insights you received from the experience and the nurturing and healing power of the honey. Take this moment of sweetness with you into your day.
Excerpted from The Wisdom of the Hive: What Honeybees Can Teach Us about Collective Wellbeing.
Michelle Cassandra Johnson is an author, activist, spiritual teacher, racial equity consultant, and intuitive healer. She is the author of six books, including Skill in Action and Finding Refuge. Amy Burtaine is a leadership coach and racial equity trainer. With Robin DiAngelo, she is the coauthor of The Facilitator's Guide for White Affinity Groups. For more, visit https://www.michellecjohnson.com/wisdom-of-the-hive.
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People once believed that emotions were the opposite of rationality, or that they were lower than or inferior to our allegedly logical processes. But decades of research on emotions and the brain have overturned those outdated beliefs, and we understand now that emotions are indispensable parts of rationality, logic, and consciousness itself. In fact, emotions contain their own internal logic, and they help us orient ourselves successfully within our social environments. Emotions help us attach meaning to data, they help us understand ourselves and others, and they help us identify problems and opportunities. Emotions don’t get in the way of rationality; they lead the way, because they’re vital to everything we think and everything we do. Emotions aren’t the problem; they’re pointing to the problem, and they’re trying to bring us the precise intelligence and energy we need to deal with the problem.
In [The Power of Emotions at Work], we’ll learn how to listen to emotions as uniquely intelligent carriers of information, and how to build healthy and effective social and emotional environments at work – not by ignoring or silencing emotions (you can’t), but by listening to them closely, learning their language, and creating a communal set of emotional skills that everyone can rely on. This work is not difficult at all, but it can be unusual in an environment that wrongly treats emotions as soft, irrational, or unprofessional.
The serious problems we’ve baked into the workplace don’t come from any specific management style or ideology, so I won’t focus on managers or leaders as if they’re uniquely powerful or uniquely to blame. These problems also aren’t limited to specific occupations or income brackets (though low-wage work is regularly dehumanizing and hazardous); these are long-term, widespread problems based on a failed workplace model – and on an outdated social and emotional approach that does not support (or in many cases, even comprehend) human relationships and human needs.
This book is the result of decades of exploration and study into how the workplace got to be so unworkable, plus decades of experience in how to access the existing genius in people’s emotional responses (in surprisingly simple ways once you understand how emotions and empathy work). With the help of the genius in our emotions, we can create emotionally well-regulated and worthwhile places for all of us to earn our living and spend our lives.
Luckily, we don’t have to do anything special to welcome emotions into the workplace, or even to make room for them, because emotions are and always have been in the workplace. They’re in the responses people have to workplace abuses; they’re in disengaged workers; they’re in workers seeking other jobs while on the job; they’re in workers who rightly avoid communicating upward about serious problems; they’re in low-wage workers who learn how to survive in hellscapes like call centers, fast-food restaurants, gig work, and robot-like warehouse jobs; they’re in living-wage workers who tolerate unhealthy workplaces because they can’t afford to leave their health insurance behind; and they’re in high-wage workers who may have to bow down to their superiors and compete with their colleagues to be seen as “winners” – and whose experiences of workplace abuse may not be taken seriously because they make so much money and therefore have no right to complain.
We can also see the emotions in our responses to workplace successes; in our healthy working relationships; in the ways we gather together to solve problems; in the ways empathic workers and leaders empower everyone around them; in the ways our colleagues support us when we’re struggling; in the ways businesses step up in times of loss; in the ways we create open communication and humane workflows; in the ways we teach each other; in the benefits, support, flexibility, and living wages we provide for our workers; in the honest sharing of business difficulties or financial losses; and in the laughter we share on great days and rotten days.
Emotions are everywhere in the workplace because emotions are a central feature of human nature. They aren’t removable, and in fact, trying to remove them is a huge part of what created the failed workplace model we have today. Emotions are crucial to everything we do and to every aspect of our work; therefore, we’ll learn how to listen to emotions, work with them, and respect their intelligence. And in so doing, we’ll build a better workplace – and a better world – from the ground up.
Karla McLaren, M.Ed.
Karla McLaren, M.Ed., is an award-winning author, social science researcher, and empathy innovator. Explore her books and audios on the power of emotion and creativity here.
This is part of a Conscious Business series brought to you by The Inner MBA®. You can learn more about the program at Innermbaprogram.com
Each of us has a somewhat mysterious inner power that could be called a “soul force.” In my experience, our soul force feels unstoppable, and it carries with it our uniqueness and what we care the most about. You could say it is the most essential part of us, that which we cannot be “talked out of,” that which demands expression.
Many people believe that this soul force, if it even exists, is not necessarily related to our work in the world. I am proposing just the opposite: that if we are to find our deepest fulfillment at work and achieve the highest potential in our career, in whatever field that might be, we need to engage and unleash this power.
What does it feel like to “work from our soul”? In my experience, there is a sense of drawing on a source of pure potential that is self-renewing and feels electrically charged. I don’t feel like I am working from a thin and limited layer of thoughts or strategy, but instead, there is a sense of being tapped into a charged energetic system of support and creativity.
Your Belly, Heart, and Head
For many years, I practiced somatic meditation, a type of meditation where we practice (among other things) inhabiting the inner space of the body and developing what’s known as interoception (being aware of internal bodily sensations). One of the things I discovered was the felt experience of three energy centers—the belly, heart, and head—that are referenced in many different systems of spiritual practice, and how these three centers can help us in engaging our soul force at work.
This might sound esoteric, but I actually think these three inner energy centers (called the “three brains” or “tan tiens” in Chinese medicine or “elixir fields” in certain types of qigong) are very discoverable and accessible to people who start to turn their attention inward.
To say more, when our belly center is open and energy is flowing through it in an unimpeded way, we can feel a sense of grounded power. We feel anchored and sense that we can weather the storms of life like a strong tree that is rooted deeply in the earth.
When our heart center is open, we can feel a sense of love streaming from us in every direction. This stream carries with it our care and concern for others. You could even say that we sense a stream of well wishes pouring out from our heart. Our work becomes imbued with a motivation to be of service to others and our world.
And when the center of our head is open, energy and information flow in through the top of our head in a way that often feels, at least in my experience, quite mysterious. New ideas come to us that can feel sparkly, such that even we are surprised by what is occurring to us. We become endlessly innovative in our work.
The Power of Letting Go
What does it take to awaken the intelligence of these three “inner brains” and allow the full power of our soul force to stream through these three energy centers? In my experience, what is required is not what you might expect. We don’t need to add anything to us. What is needed is a whole lot of letting go.
What are we letting go of? All of the ways we block ourselves, all of the ways we hold back. We are letting go of all of the ways we seek approval and are twisted up trying to appeal to others to be liked by them, the many ways we try to find acceptance and success via the unspoken and sometimes spoken rules of the status quo. We let go of twisting ourselves to fit a norm that doesn’t fit the truth of who we are. We let go of the mental construct of who we are so we can be the unique expression of the truth of who we are.
One year at Sounds True, we decided to give T-shirts out to the staff as part of our holiday gifting. Not a particularly original idea, but something we thought people would like. And our creative director put this slogan on the T-shirt: “Sounds True: Here for the Weird.” And I loved it.
Now, not everyone likes the word “weird”… but I do. A chapter was once written about me for a book on bringing your whole self to work, and the authors called it “Tami Simon: Flying Her Freak Flag.” I didn’t mind the use of the word “freak” either. The reason is that these are just words in popular culture that mean someone is willing to be themselves in all of their uniqueness and eccentricities. And that courage to step forward and be a brave truth-teller is something that I value.
Recently, I was in a discussion with a spiritual teacher about how interesting it is that we don’t become a blob of paste-like oneness when we drop deeply into what some people refer to as the “field of being,” the boundless, awake awareness that we share. Instead, we often become more uniquely expressive and can even appear a bit quirky. He shared his observation that it is our ego-construct, the veneer of “I’ve got it together,” that keeps us looking like copycats of others. When we allow that ego construct to lose its presentational grip, and perhaps even drop away, we make room for the emergence of our soul force, the innermost part of ourselves, to shine forth. We liberate our own “weird.”
As a leader of an organization, one of the things I have noticed is that when I present and speak from this innermost place without a lot of self-censorship, it naturally invites others to do the same. It is as if a “permission field” has been established. The company founder is telling it like it is—talking about what she learned in therapy this week, or something that occurred when talking with her wife (of the same sex), or a discovery that came through a sleepless night—and this sets up a new norm. This organization is actually a place where I don’t need to wear a mask at work; my truth-telling and uniqueness are welcome here. And this liberates a tremendous amount of energy and, dare I say, “soul power.”
What’s Your Genius Zone?
Several years ago, as the CEO at Sounds True, I found myself having difficulty figuring out how to best structure our organization (as our direct-to-consumer digital business began to grow rapidly with a different set of infrastructure needs from our traditional publishing business). I decided to hire an organizational consultant, Lex Sisney, the founder of Organizational Physics, whose expertise is helping midsize companies design to scale.
To my surprise, Lex started his assessment of Sounds True’s structural needs by having me do a deep-dive review of whether or not I was working in what he calls one’s “genius zone.” As I have come to understand Lex’s approach, part of what he believes contributes to organizational flourishing (and the ability to scale) is when people are in job functions that make the best use of their natural capacities and passions.
In a way, this seems utterly obvious. Like any good sporting team, you want people in the positions where they have the most natural affinity and talent. And when you have a whole team of people working in their genius zones, you have a much greater likelihood of having a winning team.
And yet as a founder, I have always had the attitude of “I will do whatever it takes. This isn’t about being in a ‘genius zone’; this is about getting done what needs to be done. All work is not enjoyable anyway, and just buck up and do the next thing needed.” This sounds very dutiful, and it is, but it is not the stance that creates the most high-functioning team, nor the most joy, nor the most soul engagement at work.
About a year and a half ago, I did an exercise where I went through my calendar for several weeks in a row and numbered every scheduled meeting on a 1-to-10 scale in terms of how excited I was for the meeting to take place. A very obvious pattern emerged: about half of the meetings in my calendar received the number 2 or 3, and about half of the meetings were an 8 or a 9 or even a 10.
The events in the calendar that received a high score related to interviews I was hosting, new partnerships that were being formed, and working directly with authors on new projects. The meetings that received a low score had to do with the business’s strategic execution in terms of finance, operations, and the coordination of various departments. This simple exercise presented a clear picture: I needed to shift my role and pass on a whole set of responsibilities so I could be free to focus on and expand the parts of my work that were exciting to me.
We have this notion that we need to trade what we really care about in order to make money. In a conversation with Rha Goddess, author of the book The Calling, I asked her about this. She said something to the effect of, “Why wouldn’t you earn the most money in your career doing what you are uniquely good at, what you excel at, what you uniquely have the ability to contribute?”
Her words landed. What if our greatest career achievement can only come from working in our area of natural genius, from letting go of all the ways we hold ourselves back and bringing our full soul force to work?
I believe that when we do, we find fulfillment at work. And also in life. And then, when our days come to an end, we find ourselves at peace, hands open and empty. We gave away all that we were given.
In support of your journey,
Tami Simon
Tami Simon is the founder of Sounds True and the Sounds True Foundation, and cofounder of the Inner MBA online immersion learning program and conscious business community created in partnership with LinkedIn and Wisdom 2.0.
The Inner MBA program connects a global community from more than 90 countries. It includes teachings from conscious business leaders, influential CEOs, spiritual luminaries, and faculty from leading universities. Together, we engage in the inner work of growth and transformation, empowering ourselves and our organizations to contribute powerfully to our collective good.
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