Getting Off the Crazy Train: Living a Soul-Directed Life

September 20, 2022

Getting Off the Crazy Train: Living a Soul-Directed Life

Cheryl Richardson September 20, 2022

For decades, New York Times bestselling author Cheryl Richardson has been renowned as a self-care coach for professionals and other high achievers. But when she entered her elder years, life surprised her. All of her many achievements became less important than a new landscape of joys and aspirations that began emerging. “The journey through midlife and beyond,” Cheryl says, “is a shift from less ego to more soul.” In this uplifting episode, she joins host Tami Simon to share practical insights for anyone, at any “calendar age,” to move beyond outer accomplishments and approval, and nurture a deeper life of pleasure and purpose.

Cheryl Richardson is a New York Times bestselling author and self-care expert whose books include Take Time for Your Life, The Art of Extreme Self-Care, and her latest, Waking Up in Winter: In Search of What Really Matters at Midlife. Her work has been covered on Good Morning America, the Today Show, CBS This Morning, and many more. She was team leader for the Lifestyle Makeover Series on The Oprah Winfrey Show and joined Ms. Winfrey on the “Live Your Best Life” nationwide tour. 

For more, visit cherylrichardson.com.

Author photo © Rayaon Assignment

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.

Meet Your Host: Tami Simon

Founded Sounds True in 1985 as a multimedia publishing house with a mission to disseminate spiritual wisdom. She hosts a popular weekly podcast called Insights at the Edge, where she has interviewed many of today's leading teachers. Tami lives with her wife, Julie M. Kramer, and their two spoodles, Rasberry and Bula, in Boulder, Colorado.

Photo © Jason Elias

Also By Author

Getting Off the Crazy Train: Living a Soul-Directed Li...

For decades, New York Times bestselling author Cheryl Richardson has been renowned as a self-care coach for professionals and other high achievers. But when she entered her elder years, life surprised her. All of her many achievements became less important than a new landscape of joys and aspirations that began emerging. “The journey through midlife and beyond,” Cheryl says, “is a shift from less ego to more soul.” In this uplifting episode, she joins host Tami Simon to share practical insights for anyone, at any “calendar age,” to move beyond outer accomplishments and approval, and nurture a deeper life of pleasure and purpose.

You Might Also Enjoy

Get ready to live the Magick every day

You will attract Magick into your day when you see everything and every place as alive and in constant communication with you.

A Box of Magick: A Guided Journey to Crafting a Magickal Life through Witchcraft, Ritual Herbalism and Spellcrafting is a bold invitation to activate the deepest part of yourself with two magickal guides―myself, and my Elder Wiccan High Priestess and mentor Connie DeMasters.

At the onset of the 2020 pandemic, fifteen years after Connie’s passing, I received a literal box of Magick on my doorstep―23 pounds of my mentor’s rituals, hymns, spells, charts, astrology, and more. Help from beyond the veil materialized exactly when I needed strong arms around me and the Magick of hope.

At first, I was overwhelmed with this honor and the exclusive peek into my mentor’s instruction and teachings until I heard Connie say, “Tell them about us.” Afterall, Magick is crafted through the relationships and intentions we carry in our heart.

A Box of Magick inspires you to accept and honor our Divine Essence, develop abiding self-love, and stand with a sword of personal truth held ready. It demonstrates how an inspired mentor can help us make the connections between the messages, omens, and signs and our life choices and opportunities. Stories help us apply magickal insights to our own experiences and allow the lessons to settle deep into our bones. Rituals evoke the innate knowledge that Magick lives within us.

Thirteen illustrations depict setting up sacred space and altar, working with elementals, divination, archetypes, gods and goddesses, shadow work, universal influences, circle magick, spellcrafting and coming out of the broom closet—empowered and ready to live the Magick every day.

This book is a tribute to the power within us all and the Magick makers whose shoulders we stand upon. We are never alone on our Witchcraft journey. We can all learn the cosmic language of energy and vibration in nature and throughout the universe.

What Magick could you create if you joined the cosmic conversation?

Bright Blessings,

Jamie Della


Jamie Della is a priestess, healer, Xicana witch, and creativity mentor. She is the author of nine books, including most recently The Book of Spells: The Magick of Witchcraft, and is the author of the Herbal Journeys column in Witches & Pagans magazine. Learn more at jamiedella.com.

A Path to Embodied Nonduality

We find ourselves in a time that is rich with paths toward spiritual awakening, especially that pinnacle of awakening called “nonduality.”

The Fullness of the Ground is my contribution to that abundance. It describes in detail the lived experience of nondual realization.

In the book, I offer a series of gentle attunement practices, called the Realization Process, for uncovering and knowing ourselves as a fundamental, undivided dimension of consciousness, pervading our whole body and environment. Pervading our body, fundamental consciousness is experienced as the authentic ground of our individual being. Pervading our body and environment, it is the basis of our oneness with everyone and everything around us. This means that we become whole as individuals at the same time as we transcend our individuality and experience unity with our surroundings.

As a longtime spiritual teacher and psychotherapist, I feel that there is not enough emphasis in some of the nonduality teachings about how this realization enriches our lives. I have been particularly concerned about teachings that encourage people to disconnect from themselves as individuals or to suppress their emotional responses to the world around them. In this book, I instead offer a path to nondual realization that is deeply embodied and that matures us as individuals, at the same time that it opens us to self–other oneness. Far from erasing us as individuals, nondual realization enhances our experience of our own unique existence. It deepens all of our human capacities, including our ability to feel, to think, and to enjoy our lives. It can help heal and enhance our relationships with other people by enabling us to experience deep contact with others without losing inward contact with ourselves.

Central to the method in this book is the important difference between being aware of the body and inhabiting the body. So I often begin with this simple exercise for experiencing this distinction:

Sit upright with your hands in your lap.

Take a moment to become aware of your hands. You may notice how warm or cold they are or how tense or relaxed they are. This is becoming aware of your hands.

Now enter into your hands. Experience yourself as present, living within your hands. This is inhabiting your hands.

You can go on to inhabiting different parts of your body and, finally, your body as a whole. See if you can feel present everywhere within your body, rather than aware of it from the outside.

In the Realization Process, we go through several steps, taking around 30 minutes, to reach this next part. But, for a very shortened version, if you can feel that you are living within your body, then next find the space outside of your body, the space in your environment.

Let yourself experience that the space inside and outside of your body is the same undivided space. Without leaving your body, experience that the space that pervades your body also pervades your whole environment. This is the spacious expanse of fundamental consciousness.

Judith Blackstone, PhD

Judith Blackstone, PhD, is a psychotherapist and innovative teacher in contemporary spirituality. She developed the Realization Process®, an embodied approach to personal and relational healing and nondual realization. She is the author of Trauma and the Unbound Body, Belonging Here, The Intimate Life, The Enlightenment Process, and The Empathic Ground.

Tami Simon: Being a Spiritual Entrepreneur

A magazine article about Sounds True founder Tami Simon referred to her as a “spiritual entrepreneur.” At first, Tami wasn’t sure about the label. Yet over time, she came to appreciate and embrace it. Today, the art of spiritual entrepreneurship is a central facet of Sounds True’s Inner MBA® program. 

In this host-only episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami shares her thoughts and feelings about what it means to lead a company dedicated to the well-being of its employees as equally as it is to business success. For anyone looking to bridge their innermost values with how they make a living, Tami reveals seven principles of the spiritual entrepreneur, with insightful guidance on honoring the voice of the heart; leading with presence; why relationships need to come first; creating a culture of care, engagement, and well-being; alternating between high performance and good rest; how to embrace challenges as growth opportunities; claiming our personal agency and doing the work of “cleaning up”; business as a means to address real social needs; maintaining trust in the unfolding process; making a commitment to “lift each other up” in the way we do business; recognizing our interdependence; and more.

>
Share via
Copy link
Powered by Social Snap