600 Podcasts and Counting...
Subscribe to Insights at the Edge to hear all of Tami's interviews (transcripts available, too!), featuring Eckhart Tolle, Caroline Myss, Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Adyashanti, and many more.
Most Recent
S2 E5: Look into the Lake of Life
Who are you in the eyes of the universe? Here, Michael talks about our perceptual relationship with the universe—illuminating how we project ourselves onto the unfolding of reality.
For more information, go to michaelsingerpodcast.com.
© Sounds True Inc. Episodes: © 2024 Michael A. Singer. All Rights Reserved.
The Inside Story: The Power of Interoceptive Awareness
Susan Sands, PhD, is a clinical psychologist known for her trailblazing work in female development and body-based disorders. She incorporates Buddhist thought and meditation into her work with patients. A former journalist, she publishes and presents widely on the topic of eating disorders and body image, and she is a core faculty member at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California in San Francisco.
In this podcast, Sounds True founder Tami Simon speaks with Susan Sands about her new book, The Inside Story, illuminating the surprising benefits that come with growing older and deepening our capacity to perceive our inner world more intimately. Tami and Susan discuss how interoceptive awareness is critical to our happiness as we age; body sense versus body image; the connection between having a high level of interoceptive awareness and having access to personal agency; how spiritual practices like meditation, mindfulness, and yoga help us cultivate interoceptive awareness; countering negative thoughts about our aging bodies by using “ageism disruptors”; developing a stable body image in our day to day lives; experiencing the pleasure of the inner body as we age; the positivity bias, and how it increases over time; the surprising beneficial physiological effects of aging; “mixed emotions” and the wisdom that comes with being older; the happiness curve, and how we can work to rewrite negative ageist narratives; addressing age inequality in today’s society; and more.
S2 E4: Taking Care of Your Inner Environment
A filthy home is an open invitation for rats and roaches to move in. In the same way, Michael reveals that neglected thoughts and emotions attract destructive unconscious behaviors.
For more information, go to michaelsingerpodcast.com.
© Sounds True Inc. Episodes: © 2024 Michael A. Singer. All Rights Reserved.
Customer Favorites
Claiming Your Power as a Woman Business Leader
Iman Oubou is a Moroccan American entrepreneur, former beauty queen, and published scientist on a mission to change the women’s media landscape. Through her diverse experience with business, pageantry, and STEM, Iman noticed gender disparities in the workforce and an omnipresent bias across printed and digital media. She founded SWAAY, an all-in-one publishing platform for women, to champion the voices of female change-makers through the power of storytelling.
In this podcast, Sounds True founder Tami Simon speaks with Iman Oubou about her new book, The Glass Ledge: How to Break Through Self-Sabotage, Embrace Your Power, and Create Your Success, to share inspirational guidance for navigating the challenges facing today’s women entrepreneurs and change-makers. Tami and Iman discuss what Iman calls “the immigrant mentality,” or the need to to work twice as hard to stand out in a worthy and positive light; combining our inner work and outer efforts on the path to success; rising above a victim mindset; the interplay of resilience and surrender; becoming comfortable with the discomfort of uncertainty; examining your relationship with power; overcoming “impostor syndrome”; developing the courage and confidence to speak up more; balancing the desire to be both likable and respected; what it means to “compete in the right way”; and more.
In Conversation: Pema Chödrön and Alice Walker
What happens when a beloved spiritual teacher and a brilliant author come together to talk about the most tender, compelling aspects of our human experience? The following exchange, excerpted from Pema Chödrön and Alice Walker in Conversation, offers some unexpected answers—and an introduction to the healing practice that has transformed both women’s hearts and lives.
Alice Walker: About four years ago I was having a very difficult time. I had lost someone I loved deeply and nothing seemed to help. Then a friend sent me a tape set by Pema Chödrön called Awakening Compassion. I stayed in the country and I listened to you, Pema ,every night for the next year. I studied lojong mind training, and I practicedtonglen. It was tonglen, the practice of taking in people’s pain and sending out whatever you have that is positive that helped me through this difficult passage.
I want to thank you so much and to ask you a question. In my experience suffering is perennial; there is always suffering. But does suffering really have a use? I used to think there was no use to it, but now I think that there is.
Pema Chödrön: Is there any use in suffering? I think the reason I am so taken by these teachings is that they are based on using suffering as good medicine. It’s as if there’s a moment of suffering that occurs over and over and over again in every human life. What usually happens in that moment is that it hardens us; it hardens the heart because we don’t want any more pain.
But the lojong teachings say we can take that very moment and flip it. The very thing that causes us to harden and our suffering to intensify can soften us and make us more decent and kinder people. That takes a lot of courage. This is a teaching for people who are willing to cultivate their courage.
What’s wonderful about it is that you have plenty of material to work with. If you’re waiting for only the high points to work with, you might give up, but there’s an endless succession of suffering.
Alice Walker: I was surprised how the heart literally responds to this practice. You can feel it responding physically. As you breathe in what is difficult to bear, there is initial resistance, which is the fear, the constriction. That’s the time when you really have to be brave. But if you keep going and doing the practice, the heart actually relaxes. That is quite amazing to feel.
Pema Chödrön: When we start out on a spiritual path, we often have ideals we think we’re supposed to live up to. We feel we’re supposed to be better than we are in some way. But with this practice you take yourself completely as you are. Then ironically, taking in pain—breathing it in for yourself and all others in the same boat as you are—heightens your awareness of exactly where you’re stuck. Instead of feeling you need some magic makeover so you can suddenly become some great person, there’s much more emotional honesty about where you’re stuck.
Alice Walker: I remember the day I really got it that we’re not connected as human beings because of our perfection, but because of our flaws. That was such a relief.
Pema Chödrön: Rumi wrote a poem called “Night Travelers.” It’s about how all the darkness of human beings is a shared thing from the beginning of time, and how understanding that opens up your heart and opens up your world. You begin to think bigger. Rather than depressing you, it makes you feel part of the whole.
Alice Walker: … Everybody is in that boat sooner or later, in one form or other. It’s good to feel that you’re not alone.
Pema Chödrön: I want to ask you about joy. It’s all very well to talk about breathing in the suffering and sending out relief and so forth, but did you find any joy coming out of this practice?
Alice Walker: Oh, yes! Even just not being so miserable. Part of the joyousness was knowing we have help. It was great to know that this wisdom is so old. That means people have had this pain for a long time; they’ve been dealing with it, and they had the foresight to leave these practices for us to use. I’m always supported by spirits and ancestors and people in my tribe, whomever they’ve been and however long ago they lived. So it was like having another tribe of people, of ancestors, come to the rescue with this wisdom that came through you and your way of teaching.
Pema Chödrön: I think the times are ripe for this kind of teaching.
Alice Walker: Oh, I think it’s just the right medicine for today. You know, the other really joyous thing is that I feel more open, I feel more openness toward people in my world. It’s what you have said about feeling more at home in your world. I think this is the result of going the distance in your own heart—really being disciplined about opening your heart as much as you can.
Personal, Interpersonal, Transpersonal
I was recently sitting in the audience of a talk by a spiritual teacher who was pointing out, again and again, the timeless nature of being. Although I could feel the depth and profundity of the eternal moment, at a certain point, I noticed myself feeling contracted and frustrated. I thought to myself, “What about focusing on interpersonal relationships and helping us develop skills for being intimate with other people and communicating well at work, that type of thing? I am sick of timeless being!”
And then I remembered that some people are what could be called “subject matter experts” and everyone can’t be good at everything. And that the way I could benefit the most from this talk was to relax into timelessness and learn from this teacher what he is gifted at transmitting and communicating. Fortunately, that approach worked, and my critical mind relaxed.
However, I also started reflecting on something I read in a book by Robert Augustus Masters. Robert is a new author with Sounds True and has written a new book on Emotional Intimacy, and created a new audio series called Knowing Your Shadow. Robert talks about the “personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal” dimensions of experience. And when I read his description of these three different aspects or dimensions, I just loved it! I notice that whenever people just talk about the “transpersonal”, about what is formless, I begin to long for the personal and interpersonal. And when people just talk about the “personal”, about their challenges and woes, I begin to long for a bigger view that doesn’t place any limits anywhere. Maybe I am just a chronic complainer?
But actually, I think it is more than that. My sense is that the personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal are always all three happening simultaneously. And if we leave any dimension out (in a chronic type of way), we are missing something. And when we include all three — how we are feeling individually, how we are experiencing inter-relating with others, and what it is like to transcend any sense of self and other and experience pure being – then we are experiencing a type of wholeness that leaves nothing out.
So I guess we could say I am happy in wholeness and cranky when transcendence is favored instead of recognized as one dimension of multi-dimensional being. And I feel cranky because I have seen people walk out of these transcendence-focused talks without any clue about how to work with difficult emotional states when they arise (and as we all know, they arise). Teachings that are wholly focused on the transpersonal dimension can be a breeding ground for what Robert Augustus Masters calls “spiritual bypassing” – using our spirituality to avoid facing aspects of our experience, particularly difficult emotional experiences. Robert’s focus is on “emotional literacy”, that we can learn to be fluent with all of our emotions, appreciating their nuances and what is being called forth in us in any given situation. To learn more about Robert’s work, you can check out this two-part podcast I did with him recently on Emotional Intimacy, here and here. Listening to Robert, I felt the opposite of “cranky”; I felt whole.
