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
Anna Goldfarb: Wholehearted Friendship
Friendships aren’t always easy and fun. Like all meaningful relationships, they require work. They require nurturing and a willingness to grow. And in today’s world, explains author and journalist Anna Goldfarb, many friendships are being pushed to the brink and painfully ending. In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with Anna about her new book, Modern Friendship, an empowering guide to creating what she calls “wholehearted friendships.”
Enjoy this conversation that’s filled with insights and strategies you’ll find especially helpful in our isolated, hyper-fluid society. Tami and Anna discuss: the increasing ambiguity of 21st-century friendships; the false promise of social media; the core elements of a successful friendship strategy; memorial friendships vs. active friendships; Jacuzzi friends, bathtub friends, and pool friends; three main causes of friendship breakups; the three requirements—consistency, positivity, and vulnerability; choosing people with whom you can share meaning; the characteristics of wholehearted friendship; and more.
Donna Eden and David Feinstein, PhD: The Power—and P...
Tapping is a simple form of energy psychology that can help you transform difficult emotions; overcome addiction, anxiety, or depression; change self-defeating habits; and more. Today, there are more than 175 peer-reviewed scientific studies supporting its efficacy. Yet despite 20 years of growing evidence, many people remain skeptical. In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with the authors of the new book Tapping—Donna Eden and Dr. David Feinstein—about why the technique works and how to practice it successfully.
Listen in to this exciting, illuminating conversation on: energy medicine and the subfield of energy psychology; Thought Field Therapy and Emotional Freedom Techniques; how tapping produces such incredibly fast results; auras and chakras; acupressure points and piezoelectricity; the acceptance statement and other tapping protocols; breaking the cycle of inner judgment and negativity; the deep and authentic personal work tapping requires; subjective units of distress (SUDs) and the affect bridge; obstacles to change and psychological reversals; tapping as a tool for trauma healing; 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 with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
Ep 6: The H-Word
When it comes to the state of our world, the concept of hope can feel elusive. Joanna teaches Jess that the future may be uncertain, but that means that there’s still room for something beautiful to happen. This episode offers insights into embracing uncertainty, cultivating joyousness, and understanding the intricate interplay between hope, courage, and action.
In this episode:
- “Active hope” is about acting in service of the future we hope for
- Whenever Jess asks about hope, Joanna talks instead about courage
- When hope eludes us, courage and our devotion to life remain steadfast
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.
Customer Favorites
James Finley: Breathing God
Tami Simon speaks with Jim Finley, a master of the Christian contemplative way and a renowned retreat leader. Jim left home at the age of 18 and studied at the Abbey of Gethsemani with Thomas Merton for six years. He’s a clinical psychologist in Santa Monica, California, and the author of Christian Meditation and the book The Contemplative Heart, as well as the Sounds True audio learning programs Christian Meditation, Thomas Merton’s Path to the Palace of Nowhere, and along with medical intuitive Caroline Myss, the audio program Transforming Trauma. Jim discusses embracing our brokenness and the attitude of nonjudgmental compassion, the value of spontaneous moments of meditative awareness, and false perceptions about the practice of meditation. (56 minutes)
Healing Trauma
Tami Simon speaks with Peter Levine, an expert on treating stress and trauma, with over 45 years of experience in the field. He is the author of several Sounds True programs including the book/CD Healing Trauma, and an audio program designed to help guide children through traumatic events called It Won’t Hurt Forever. On September 20, 2010, Peter will be presenting Healing Trauma a course designed to teach you how to release energy from traumatic episodes and restore harmony and balance in the body. Peter speaks about his body-based approach to trauma, trauma’s connection to stress, and offers some advice on how to deal with trauma. (60 minutes)
Your original face
There is a famous Zen koan that asks, “What is your original face, the face you had before you were born?”
Whenever I have heard this koan, my first response is, “I have no idea how to answer that.” And of course, that is the purpose of a Zen koan, to confound the thinking mind and in so doing, wake us up to a deeper form of knowing.
One thing I have noticed is that the more I am able to sit in that not knowing state, to rest in a sense of “just being”, the more I can relax and feel what, if anything, is needed next. It is not a conceptual process; it is more like a listening. And from that listening, originality emerges (“original” meaning “from the origin” or “from the source”).
Waking up is not about copying anyone or anything. It can’t be. Because as soon as we are mimicking something, we are recycling someone else’s experience. We are one step removed from the source; we are no longer rooted in our own moment-to-moment revelatory experience.
My basic point here is that the more we discover our own Original Face, the face we had before we were born, the more confident we become in expressing ourselves in unique ways. In a sense, great spiritual teachers feel to me like great “artists of the spirit.” And like an inspired musician, poet, or painter, a spiritual artist knows that he or she must spend time in the space of not knowing and then trust the melodies, visions, words, and guidance that come through.
Sometimes people say to me that they are afraid of spiritual awakening because they are afraid of being erased, afraid that they will turn into a paste of nothingness. What I have found is that the more we drop the sense of being separate and disconnected, the more we tune to the underlying, unifying “hum” of being, the more we become plugged in to a current that begins to animate our life. And sometimes, the life force expresses through us in pretty outrageous ways. We take chances. We speak from our heart. We become a mystery to ourselves and a creative force in the world.
To take this even further, what if the more we discover our Original Face, the more our one-and-only physical face starts to express the love and beauty of the cosmos in unusual and distinctive ways? Abraham Lincoln is attributed with saying “Every man over 40 is responsible for his face.” I take this to mean that each one of us has a responsibility for the love and kindness and warmth and openness that our face communicates. What if the quality in our eyes, the shape of our mouth, the openness of our forehead, and even the character of our nose, is a direct expression of our capacity to know and rest in being?
At Sounds True, we often refer to the Wake Up Festival as a celebration of the “many faces of awakening.” And I love that phrase. I look forward to seeing each and every person’s one and only original face this August in the Rocky Mountains.
