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
James McCrae: Why We Need the Art of YOU
Where does creativity come from? How do we uncover our authenticity and deepest expression in a society that would have us cover it up to fit in? What is the connection between creativity and healing? Join Tami Simon in conversation with poet, artist, and author James McCrae as they discuss these questions, the role of the artist today, and his new book, The Art of You: The Essential Guidebook for Reclaiming Your Creativity.
A wonderful listen for creatives of every type and anyone who’s ever had the thought, “I’m not creative,” Tami and James talk about the courage to choose authenticity; the magnetic nature of vulnerability; creativity as a spiritual path; intuition as a portal to the invisible dimensions; emotion: the energy that fuels creativity; shadow work and the “creative purge”; the yin and yang of creativity; cultivating the soil; giving your ego the appropriate job; the metaphor of the sunflower; listening: the first stage of creativity; social media, art, and technology; viral ideas and the origination of the term meme; curiosity and the spirit of exploration; and more.
Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
Ep 5 Bonus: Breathing Through
This bonus episode will support you to take the main insights from Episode 4: There is No Future if We Go Numb and Episode 5: This Pain Is Not for Nothing, deeper into your life.
Both of these episodes are about the second phase in the Spiral of the Work That Reconnects, Honoring Our Pain for the World. This bonus is a recording of Joanna leading a meditation called Breathing Through, recorded at a retreat in 2006. In it, she’ll guide you to create space to acknowledge and honor the pain for the world that you carry without numbing or getting overwhelmed. All you’ll need for this bonus exercise is a place where you can close your eyes and relax.
We recommend starting a podcast club with friends or family to do these practices together. Links and assets to help prompt reflection and build community can be found with every episode on WeAreTheGreatTurning.com.
Ep 5: This Pain Is Not for Nothing
Now we get to what may be the toughest part of reckoning with our planet’s situation: dealing with numbness, grief, and despair. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the many crises around us, and natural to want to numb ourselves to the pain.
Joanna and Jess speak with great vulnerability and candor about what it takes to navigate our darkest feelings—and the strength and beauty that can be found when we honor our pain.
Trigger Warning: In this episode, we discuss suicide.
In this episode:
- When it feels like our pain could swallow us whole, it helps to remember that all feelings come and go
- Desperation can take us to dark places, but we are more than our despair
- Numbness—Jess opens up about her familiar tactic for escaping pain
- Our pain becomes sacred when we allow it to deepen our connection with the world
- Bonus Exercise: Breathing Through
We recommend starting a podcast club with friends or family to do these practices together. Links and assets to help prompt reflection and build community can be found with every episode on WeAreTheGreatTurning.com.
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Caroline Myss: The Courage to Confront Evil
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)
Making Money, Making Change
Rha Goddess is an entrepreneurial soul coach and the CEO and founder of Move The Crowd, a movement galvanizing over three million entrepreneurs to reimagine work as a vehicle for creative expression, financial freedom, and societal transformation. She’s the author of the book The Calling: 3 Fundamental Shifts to Stay True, Get Paid, and Do Good, as well as a new audio program with Sounds True, Making Money, Making Change: Build Your Business, Make a Profit, and Serve the World. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon and Rha Goddess talk about the ways so many of us have been indoctrinated into a disempowering relationship with wealth, and how we can break free from this indoctrination by examining six unchecked beliefs almost everyone holds. Tami calls Rha “the liberator” in this conversation, a nod to Rha’s remarkable ability to help us recognize where we need to heal, do the work, and co-create a life in which we make good money doing what our souls are here to do.
Stop Trying to Be Happy: Jeff Foster on Being Held, No...
“Your pain, your sorrow, your doubts, your longings, your fearful thoughts: they ar
e not mistakes, and they are not asking to be ‘healed.’ They are asking to be held. Here, now, lightly, in the loving, healing arms of present awareness . . .”
There is so much pressure on us these days to “feel good.” But it’s exactly our attempts to feel good that can make us feel so bad! Conceiving of happiness as a destination rather than the all-embracing non-dual present awareness that we are, we go to war with our unhappiness and feel shame around it. We split ourselves in two and feel far away from Home. I know—I spent much of my life suicidally depressed. These days I love myself exactly as I am; I see the beauty in my imperfections, and I want to share the secrets of self-love with you.
In my new book, The Way of Rest, through prose and poetry I invite you—and this sounds like a paradox at first—to stop trying to be happy, stop trying to awaken or even “heal,” and instead courageously embrace yourself exactly as you are, including your present unhappiness—your painful feelings, your strange thoughts and longings, even your fear and exhaustion. See them all as perfectly placed pieces of you rather than mistakes or aberrations or signs of your failure.
Today, try this:
If you feel sad or afraid, or feel a tension in your body, just for a moment stop trying to “let go.” Forget about “raising your vibration” too! Instead, simply be with the discomfort. Get curious about it. Soften around it. Breathe into it. Give it space, room, some time. Forget about understanding, “releasing,” or “fixing” it today and just allow it to be here for as long as it needs to be here. Let it stay if it wants to stay. Let it go if it wants to go! Let it come back if it wants to come back. Treat it like a welcome guest in the vast Rest Home of your being, a beloved child that truly belongs.
If you’re tired of the fight, exhausted from the struggle, fed up with trying to “fit in,” I invite you to discover a deeper kind of healing: The Way of Rest.
With love from yourself,
