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E81: Expanding Beyond the Personal Mind
Michael Singer — May 28, 2025
The mind is not inherently a problem—it becomes one when used to narrowly define reality based on...
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Zach Leary: Psychedelics in the 21st Century and How to Use Them
Zach Leary — May 27, 2025
He's the son of Timothy Leary and one of today's leading voices in the psychedelic renaissance of...
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Honey Tasting Meditation: Build Your Relationship with Sweetness
There is a saying that goes “hurt people hurt people.” I believe this to be true. We have been...
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Amy Burtaine, Michelle Cassandra Johnson
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Many Voices, One Journey
The Sounds True Blog
Insights, reflections, and practices from Sounds True teachers, authors, staff, and more. Have a look—to find some inspiration and wisdom for uplifting your day.
Standing Together, and Stepping Up
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Tami Simon -
The Michael Singer Podcast
Your Highest Intention: Self-Realization
Michael Singer discusses intention—"perhaps the deepest thing we can talk about"—and the path to self-realization.
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Zach Leary: Psychedelics in the 21st Century and How to Use Them -
Many Voices, One Journey
The Sounds True Blog
Insights, reflections, and practices from Sounds True teachers, authors, staff, and more. Have a look—to find some inspiration and wisdom for uplifting your day.
Take Your Inner Child on Playdates
Written By:
Megan Sherer
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.
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E78: Understanding Shakti: The Flow of Conscious Energ...
Shakti is the universal life energy that flows through the body, mind, and heart, and its flow is the basis of all emotional and physical experiences. Blockages created from suppressed past experiences distort this flow, leading to mental, emotional, and physical suffering. Instead of releasing these blockages, most people try to manipulate the external world to avoid triggering them. True spiritual growth is the art of letting go of these blockages and allowing Shakti to flow freely. Ultimately, this leads to a life filled with love, joy, and Self-Realization.
For more information, go to michaelsingerpodcast.com.
© Sounds True Inc. Episodes: © 2025 Michael A. Singer. All Rights Reserved.
E77: The Journey from Intellectual to Experiential Tru...
There is a fundamental difference between knowing something intellectually and experiencing it directly. In spiritual practice, realization arises not from thinking or believing but from resting in the seat of consciousness and ceasing to be distracted by thoughts, emotions, and ego. The ultimate path to enlightenment involves letting go of identification with the personal self and returning to the direct, experiential awareness of one’s divine nature. God-realization is not a belief, it is a lived experience of merging back into the ocean of universal consciousness.
For more information, go to michaelsingerpodcast.com.
© Sounds True Inc. Episodes: © 2025 Michael A. Singer. All Rights Reserved.
Take Your Inner Child on Playdates
Have you ever been ice-skating before? It sounds like a fun winter activity (especially if you enjoy the cold, like I do), but it can be frustrating and even downright scary if you’re new to it.
Picture this: I took my nephew ice-skating for the first time, full of excitement to see him experience some joy. At twelve years of age, he was already taller than me and had size thirteen feet thanks to his six-foot-eight-inch-tall dad (my brother). The biggest rental skates they had came with worn-out laces rather than the secure plastic bindings all of the other skates had. I could see that they were a little loose around the ankle, but we tied them as best we could and hit the ice.
If you’ve ever seen a newborn deer figuring out how to walk for the first time, you can picture my nephew’s first time on ice skates. His ankles kept knocking in, and he was reaching to hold onto anything for dear life as he wobbled around the perimeter of the rink. It was difficult to watch, not because it was embarrassing, but because I know how hard he is on himself when he’s not immediately good at new things. I wanted to see him having fun, and instead I saw him frustrated and discouraged as all he could do was attempt to remain vertical.
I figured it couldn’t get worse, so I suggested that we trade in his skates for a smaller pair with the more secure plastic buckles to see if that made any difference. He went along with it, probably just to humor me, and we stuffed his feet into some size twelves and made sure his ankle support was good as could be. When I tell you it was a night and day difference, I’m not exaggerating. Suddenly he was speeding around the ice like a pro, lapping past me and his sisters with the biggest smile on his face. He circled the rink over and over again; as his confidence grew, so did his joy, and he even began to try tricks and spins. All he had needed was one little adjustment to his foundation, and he suddenly felt safe enough to have fun.
Here’s the thing: most of us go around in our lives on rickety old skates with worn-out laces. When your only focus is doing your best to remain upright, there’s not much room for joy or play. The big shame in that is that play often is the medicine we most need.
In my experience, the crux of inner child work is reconnecting to the part of you who knows how to play. Sometimes you may first need to make some adjustments that allow you to feel safe enough to play, like practicing nervous system regulation and self-soothing. Once you’ve done that, though, your goal is to invite in as much play as possible. And not adult versions of play that are really just a facade for dissociative behaviors, but real, childlike wonder.
Invite in curiosity and awe and silliness and uninhibited joy. Start by returning to the things you loved to do when you were a kid. Maybe that means setting aside time each weekend for arts and crafts. Maybe it means participating in physical activities that feel like play, such as dancing, swimming, sports, or jumping on a trampoline. Maybe it just means giving yourself permission to skip while you walk or sing while you drive.
The point is, when you bring those younger versions of you into your present-day life, you not only have more fun, but you also experience more healing. We were never meant to lose touch with our inner child. Yes, it’s important to learn how to be self-sufficient and responsible, and aging is inevitable. But it’s equally important not to take yourself too seriously along the way.
Try This
Your homework is to set regular playdates with your inner child. Do things that sound like fun, even if they don’t make logical sense. Allow yourself to be as carefree and openhearted as possible, without judging the things that bring you joy. The sillier it feels, the more on point you likely are. Here are some examples to consider:
- Take an afternoon off of work and go to an amusement park.
- Schedule an evening of watching your favorite childhood movies.
- Spend the weekend out in nature, frolicking with your imagination.
- Try something brand new, like rock climbing or ice-skating, to tap into that feeling of beginner’s mind.
Play is an important part of our overall well-being. Consistently making time to get into that creative flow state will help you deepen your relationship with your inner child . . . and your adult self. I suggest checking in at least once per month, if not weekly, to see where you can fit more play into your life.
Excerpted from Choose Your Self: How to Embrace Being Single, Heal Core Wounds, and Build a Life You Love.

Megan Sherer
Megan Sherer is a certified somatic therapist and licensed hypnotherapist whose mission is to help others build healthy and fulfilling relationships, starting with self. She hosts the Well, Then podcast and founded the women’s therapy app The Self Care Space. For more, visit megansherer.com.

Choose Your Self
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Sex That Changes the World
Kimberly Ann Johnson is a sexological bodyworker, Somatic Experiencing® practitioner, yoga teacher, postpartum advocate, and single mom. She helps women heal from birth injuries, gynecological surgeries, and sexual boundary violations. She is the author of the book Call of the Wild: How We Heal Trauma, Awaken Our Own Power, and Use It for Good, as well as the early-mothering classic The Fourth Trimester.
Kimberly Ann Johnson joins Sounds True founder Tami Simon to speak about her new audio learning program, Reclaiming the Feminine: Embodied Sexuality as Spiritual Practice—and the journey many of us need to make to work through shame, heal from patriarchal oppression, and begin to prioritize ourselves and our need for pleasure. Kimberly and Tami discuss the code of ethics of the sexological bodyworker; the shroud of shame that surrounds sexuality in many cultures, and the vital task of “unshaming” work; dealing with the pressure to “want to want to have more sex”; determining and expressing your genuine wants and needs; the concept of feminist sex; the social nervous system—the first branch of determining safety and how we relate with others; building your arousal capacity; “jaguar work” and healthy aggression; a self-care lovingkindness practice; and much more.
The Choice to Be an Artist at Work
Ari Weinzweig is the cofounder of Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, which includes Zingerman’s Deli and more than a dozen other food-based businesses in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has also published a series of books detailing his unique philosophies on leadership and transformation, titled A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach. With Sounds True, Ari is a featured presenter in the Inner MBA program. In this episode, Tami Simon speaks with Ari about his decision to forgo the franchise model and run his businesses from the heart—not unlike making art or writing poetry. They discuss the “visioning” process that Zingerman’s uses to grow in positive ways while staying true to their organizational roots. Ari also shares his personal recipe for transforming the beliefs that drive our behavior, both in business and in life.
Scott Shute: Moving from Me to We: Compassion at Work
Scott Shute is the head of LinkedIn’s Mindfulness and Compassion Programs and a featured trainer in the Inner MBA, a nine-month immersion program that Sounds True has created in partnership with LinkedIn, Wisdom 2.0, and MindfulNYU. In this week’s podcast, Tami Simon and Scott discuss the new revolution that is underway at today’s workplaces. Their conversation explores the importance of being present in order to find strength from the inside, learning to relax our minds and bodies, integrating spirituality and business, the power of compassion to shift a workplace from “me-centered” to “we-centered,” and much more. (57 minutes)
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The Way of the Feminine to Save the World
You feel special. Sometimes this feels like a curse. Like no one will understand you. Ever. Like you will always be an alien walking among regular humans, pretending to blend in. You have learned to live with this gulf, but what you really crave is community. You long to belong to the human family. To Mother Earth.
Participating in the human condition can be bewildering. It is just not always cozy and easy—rather, it’s humbling at best, downright humiliating when it is not flowing. It can seem so much simpler to ride solo, slaying your own dragons and singing the ballads you wrote about yourself. Collaboration can be tedious, and the prevailing masculine value system may have conditioned you to feel like you are giving away your power when you share it with others.
So what? Give it away. The time of the singular sage bestowing his unique wisdom is over. That was a method devised by the men in charge who sought to regulate wisdom. They taught us to suffer alone in the desert for forty years, collecting our insights in a secret box called “Esoteric Knowledge.” Then, we were supposed to dispense those insights stingily to those who proved themselves worthy by also suffering alone for the requisite forty years in the desert.
It turns out that the world is filled with special beings, grappling our way through the anxiety of solitary conundrums and tasting the occasional reprieve of connection. When you realize this, your body lets out its breath and relaxes. The curse lifts. You come in from the cold. You hold out your cup, and some other special being fills it with sweet, milky tea spiced with fragrant herbs. You drink.
Our way, the way of the feminine, is to find out what everyone is good at and praise them for it and get them to teach it to one another. Maybe you know something about the hidden meaning of the Hebrew letters, or how to build a sustainable home from recycled tires and rammed soil, or loving-kindness meditation. You, the one who knows the Islamic call to prayer, climb this minaret and call us all to prayer. You, the one who knows how to sit quietly at the bedside of the dying, show us the way to bear witness. You, the one who knows how to get us to wake up to the shadow of privilege, please wake us the #*#@ up. It will be chaotic, all this community building, but your cooperation will save the world.
Besides, it will be fun.
Diana Winston: The Big Bang of Natural Awareness
Diana Winston is is the director of mindfulness education at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center, a member of the Teachers Council at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, and a pioneer in mindfulness education for children. With Sounds True, she has released The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering Your Natural Awareness. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Diana about “natural awareness”—an always-available, foundational flow state distinguishable from deliberate mindfulness practice. They share “glimpse practices” designed to open up perception and embodiment of natural awareness, commenting on how each can be practiced in day-to-day life. Diana and Tami discuss the value of going on retreat, the spectrum of different awareness practices, and common misconceptions about what it takes to become a mindfulness teacher. Finally, Diana explains why it’s important not to become a “bliss-ninny” as well as the difference between natural awareness and spacing out. (64 minutes)