Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries; community events; classes to start your day and relax in the evening; special weekly live shows—including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question and answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at soundstruefoundation.org. And in advance, thank you for your support.
Hello, Sounds True friends! In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Spring Washam. Spring is a well-known meditation teacher, healer, and visionary leader now based in Atlanta, Georgia. She’s considered a trailblazer when it comes to bringing mindfulness-based meditation practices to diverse communities. She’s the author of the book, A Fierce Heart: Finding Strength, Courage and Wisdom in Any Moment, and also a new book, it’s called The Spirit of Harriet Tubman: Awakening from the Underground. She’s also one of the founding teachers at the East Bay Meditation Center, a member of the Teachers Council at Spirit Rock, and the founder of Lotus Vine Journeys, a one-of-a-kind organization that blends indigenous healing practices with Buddhist wisdom for transformational retreats in South America. Spring, welcome to Insights at the Edge. Welcome.
Spring Washam: I’m so excited. Thank you for having me.
TS: Here at the beginning, and as a way for our audience to get to know you a little bit, can you share with us how you first discovered meditation?
SW: Yeah. When I was younger, I was very drawn to psychology. I think that happens as you grow up, with all these different traumas and experiences. So as a teenager I was very interested in psychology, and I think I always somehow knew that the suffering around me internally, externally, was something to do with our minds. That was a very early thought I had, something’s going on with our thoughts and our thinking. And so as a teenager, I was very interested in understanding my mind. And so that naturally led to a period of exploring different meditation teachers, practices, and lineages. So I started off first with the Paramahansa Yogananda, the whole Autobiography of a Yogi and his whole teachings, and that’s really where I started. I first started practicing there. And then that led me in my early twenties to do a meditation retreat, an insight meditation retreat, which I had no idea when I signed up for this retreat that it was being led by Jack Kornfield, a well-known Buddhist meditation teacher.
And that was my doorway was during—I remember I went to a 10-day retreat in the desert and practicing the sitting meditation and walking meditation, it’s when my mind finally stopped the madness. That was a cooling-off period, and I saw something there that was deeply life changing. And so just after that, I just became a very serious, dedicated practitioner and spent years on retreats and teaching and sitting. And that was just a very foundational piece—the mindfulness, insight practice, and then Buddhist philosophy has always deeply resonated. So they go together.
TS: Now when you say you were on the cushion and your mind stopped and something happened that was deeply life changing, I want to understand more about that. Because I think sometimes people who haven’t been on long meditation retreats, they’re like, “OK, what happened to this person? It was a quote-unquote ‘conversion experience’ or something. People call it an awakening. What was that? How did it change the person?” So help that listener who’s a little bit like, “OK, I don’t really get this.”
SW: Yeah, I had the same thought. It’s like, “Meditation? I don’t understand how sitting down and being quiet is going to help me.” Well, that’s from a very superficial level. But what happened was in my life at that time, I feel like I was in a sort of a spiritual emergency, and with that, your mind feels so out of control. Your thoughts are racing. You believe every thought you think, right? So there’s a lot of anxiety and catastrophizing, and “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. Oh my God, where am I going? I’m lost. What’s happening?” The mind just is in this torrent of confusion and tangles, and I didn’t know if there was an end to that, or there was a stoppage to that, or how to work with that. So most of us are just reeling all the time based on this inner content, which is highly negative and very critical.
And so what happened was during that time when I began to practice learning how to rest in the present moment, right? Learning how to let go of the stream of insanity that was just chitter chattering away incessantly. And I was able to drop into, I guess, it was a kind of observation mode. I had a choice, I didn’t have to follow. There was space between the insanity and somebody observing the insanity. They were no longer married. And so with that, I could develop a skill which is like, “OK, this is happening, these thoughts are here, these emotions are flooding me. OK, how do I work with this? How do I not act it out? How do I not make it worse, but how do I just be with it?”
And that simple directive—just sit with it, hold it, be aware of it, feel it—for me, and many others, we experienced that as revolutionary because we didn’t have a way before. We were just thrown—it’s like being thrown into the water. Well, you’re going to feel different if you have a raft than if you were just out in the—you need something to hold onto. You need something to navigate where you are in your mind. And so I think the enlightenment isn’t what people expect. It’s not this download of information that changes you. It’s a technique of disengaging from the insanity. It’s a strategy. And then when you do it and you think, “Wait, I just did it for five minutes, let me try another five,” the peace that comes from that stillness, from not being on that rollercoaster, or at least experiencing the rollercoaster but more with space, you feel free for the first time. You realize, “Wait, I’m not bound to this.”
And that’s, I think, when people say, “I had an awakening,” they’re really talking about experiencing real peace of mind and that there’s a path and there’s a road, and then they learn how to navigate that road. So I don’t think it’s always what people think. It’s more like what it isn’t. It’s like stepping outside. So that was my experience, I can’t speak for everyone, but having talked to so many people who meditate, often it’s moments of peace that are the enlightenment. It’s not getting something, it’s like releasing your attachment to this insane rollercoaster that’s always taking you on some crazy experience when you’re unaware. So that was my direct experience of what happened there.
TS: Thank you, very clearly explained. Now, your new book, The Spirit of Harriet Tubman, it’s very interesting, Spring, because the book is, you could say, a combination of some of your study and research about Harriet, but that’s really a small piece of it. The majority of the book, you could say, is quote-unquote “channeled.” There’s some merging, if you will, of the presence of Harriet’s ancestral living spirit as you experience and give voice to it. And I’d love to know about how this first started for you, how it became obvious to you that you were being asked to put this into book form—and this is a big deal.
SW: Yeah, this is a big deal. And first to say, I’m as mystified and still processing my relationship with Harriet Tubman, the spirit of Harriet Tubman, it’s still evolving. So I was as surprised as anyone when all of this started to emerge. And I write about that very frankly. I take the reader on a journey of my own internal understanding of, “What is going on? What is Harriet Tubman—Harriet’s here?” From that, to trying to encapsulate her deepest message for this time. So just to say, I’m still in awe. I guess that’s the word, in awe, and it’s a mystery to me, but it’s unfolding. Yeah, it’s still in the process. That’s why I’m in Georgia, no doubt— [LAUGHS] the stronghold of the revolution right now.
But I write about it a lot in the first chapter. All of this started to happen really the week before George Floyd, in May of 2020, was murdered. And we had this moment in time where it just felt like the tectonic plates underneath which we were all standing were just shifting. There was, for a lot of people, a moment during the summer of 2020 where it was just catalytic change in consciousness. And I feel like with that change, something erupted, something tore apart. I feel that it was the emergence of deep compassion that began to shift. There was an awakening of a blindness. So I think of it as a crack in the matrix, I guess, for lack of a better word. And I feel like Harriet’s spirit flew down in that crack because we’re ready. We’re ready for maybe a message like this. We’re ready to understand our relationship to the world of Spirit, that we are more than what we know, and that the ancestor world is alive. It’s alive like the stars are alive, and the universe, and it’s moving. And so a part of this journey of my own experience with Harriet was also to take readers on a journey that they’re living in a galaxy, a universe that is alive and we are multidimensional beings.
So, some of this was also about bringing that, and then I always say in the first chapter, Harriet rescued me. I was like so many people flowing around during that time going, “Oh my God, I don’t know how to rise to meet this moment.” I had a huge community in Oakland, and everybody was pressing the 9-1-1 button on their phones in their house, and it was like, “Oh my gosh. I have to find some bigger strength in myself to meet my own trauma reaction and then to be some type of leader, to be an inspiration for my community to help us carry this trauma, this pain, this violence in a compassionate way.” So I feel like Harriet rescued me on so many levels. I’m forever gratitude—forever grateful, I have so much gratitude for this relationship, which I’m happy to answer questions about.
TS: Sure, of course. How did her presence first appear to you?
SW: So I write about this a lot in the second chapter. So, the first time was in this very powerful visionary dream experience where I was running for my life and I was being chased, and I remember just feeling and smelling and this intensity—and I was being chased, and I didn’t know where I was or what was happening, but I had this sense of extreme danger, and I was seeing images of slave catchers, Nazis, and then just feeling the chaos. It reminds me of what happened on January 6th. I was seeing that, images of that; being chased, people being hurt, danger. And the next thing I know, I just remember my hands were burning. I was holding onto the back of a rope, and it took me a while to be like, “I’m running, I’m holding onto something. Oh, it’s Harriet Tubman’s dress. I’m holding onto the back of Harriet Tubman’s dress.”
So this is where the relationship really started. I had this experience, then I felt Harriet Tubman’s energy around me every day after that, and every time I would close my eyes, I would see her name, I would see images. I began to feel her. I began to listen to music, and I would dance, and I would feel her holding my hand, and my mind just began to be filled with thoughts and images and conversations. And that’s what the beginning was.
And then I put out a class—remember 2020? We were all—what were we doing? Putting out Zoom classes. So I thought, “Maybe somebody else is thinking about Harriet Tubman or getting these downloads,” and I just put an online class together, The Dharma of Harriet Tubman, and the class went viral. So then I had hundreds of people coming on, and it just led to this deepening relationship.
I’ll pause there, but it just began to feel like every moment Harriet was giving me this energy, and I felt that it was so empowering. It was like, “Well, if Harriet’s here, I could climb Mount Everest.” You have that sense, I think, with a spirit like that. She’s been here before. She knows what’s happening. She’s lived through this. So there was this tremendous comfort; to be connected to her spirit felt so deeply comforting to me.
TS: Do you feel her presence right now as we’re talking about her and having this conversation?
SW: I often feel her presence when we’re evoking her. When it’s the book, where I’m sharing, yes, I’ll often get really hot or I’ll get goosebumps, or my belly—well, I’ll just start shaking a little bit. I’ll feel this rush of energy, and I’m getting used to it. I’m just navigating like, “All right, well, this is a physical somatic experience. OK, Harriet.”
TS: You write about the self-doubt that you had, mostly about your own capacity and your own readiness or worth to be the messenger to really do that, but you don’t really write about having doubts of, was this really a truthful presence of Harriet? You don’t—it seems like you didn’t really question that, you just questioned your own vessel’s capacity. Is that true?
SW: Yeah, that’s a really good observation. Well, for my life, just spending so many years in meditation retreats and having many mystical experiences of different states of consciousness through concentration, I always had this side that could go really deep. And now, when I say really deep, I mean, deep into non-ordinary states of consciousness. I just had that propensity. And so then, when I started working with medicine, the plant medicines in the jungle, I started—and then I spent a year living in a Shipibo village, I saw that I had this ability to connect between these different worlds, the whole plant world. So there was this opening.
But no, it was so real that there was no way that I could doubt the experience. It was like, OK, what I doubted was that anyone else would understand this and that I would be perceived as like, “Oh my God, this woman is crazy. What’s going on? She’s talking to Harriet.” I didn’t doubt my own experience, but yes, I doubted. I questioned Harriet Tubman. I was like, “Harriet, call Ta-Nehisi Coates, call Angela Davis. I am not a theologian. I don’t write papers on Black liberation. I write on healing trauma. What is going on? I’m not your girl. Yeah, this sounds crazy. I think there’s people who are better equipped.”
I definitely had a lot of doubt about this. This is undoubtedly one of our most beloved ancestors, and represents so much to so many people, that to get it wrong was terrifying. I was like, what? That was the terrifying part. I didn’t feel like I was the right person, and Harriet still convinces me, “No, I’m not making mistakes here.”
So just a lot of humility, a tremendous amount, the mystery of the spirit-world ancestors and conversations with ancestors. Yeah, it’s a whole realm. And if you would’ve told me I would write a book about Harriet Tubman, I would’ve laughed a couple of years ago. I wasn’t obsessed with her. I loved Harriet Tubman, who does not love Harriet Tubman? But I didn’t have a fixation or—this was completely out of the blue. I guess that’s a better way to describe it.
TS: For those of us who don’t have an experience of our own, of partnering with an ancestral presence—we’ve never had that experience, but we long for it, and we think that perhaps we could be effective as a human in a partnership like that. What would you suggest?
SW: Well, I think that this is a really important question and inquiry for everybody because we grow up in the West as not understanding that we come from living lineages. We don’t see the world in that way. Most people don’t have an ancestor shrine in their home. Most people don’t cultivate that, they don’t believe it. They just appear here and they think, I am who I am because this is how it is. They don’t realize that they are who they are because of their great-great-great-great-grandmother, or great-great-great-grandfather—that those energies are alive in us, that we know this now through so much DNA and epigenetics, that we’re a stream and we’re affected.
So I think the first thing is to recognize that you come from a living lineage: where your people were born, where they died, their culture, their customs, their dances, their songs.
All of this lives in you. We may be oblivious to it because we grew up in a very scientific way. We see life through one particular lens, and we don’t see that we’re living in the cosmos of tremendous magic and fluidity. And so we have to start by just opening to the idea of it consciously. Like, “Hey, I opened to this idea, and then I could actually begin to collaborate because the veil between this realm and the Spirit world—” or some people put in the language of dimensions from the third dimension to the sixth dimension, that’s another way to describe it. As our minds become less dense, we’re able to hear and interact with these light beings in different ways. So they’re around, hugely active right now for everybody.
TS: You mentioned an ancestral shrine. Tell me more about that, and if someone was inspired to set something like that up, what you might suggest, how would they relate to it in an ongoing way?
SW: Yeah. So anything that you are doing that you are honoring, a shrine is a place that you acknowledge, you honor, and you pay respect, right? So right now I’m in Atlanta and I’m very close to Martin Luther King memorial park, right? I’m a few blocks, walking distance, and when I walk by, I see all of the things that are in enshrined there, from—the speeches often are playing while people are taking tours—that’s a shrine.
So if you have this desire to connect, it might start with a picture of your ancestors, your grandmother, your grandfather. The place where your people are from, maybe a piece of the flag. People often carry dirt back from their homeland, where they are, as a way to remember their language, where they’re from. And we don’t do this to hold on tight, we do this as a way of honoring the truth of, “I’m connected to that, those energies flow in me.” And the beautiful things that our family lineages have done flow in us, and also the difficulties, the traumas flow through us too. We know this.
So starting with building something is just starting with putting something together that feels like your family tree. Maybe you buy a statue that reminds you of your grandmother, something that’s like maybe a big round statue, and you start to talk to them internally as a way of integrating. “Yes, great-great-grandmother, great-great-grandfather, thank you for any suffering. Thank you for your wisdom. And the pieces that are unintegrated—the sorrow, we help to try to let that go. May we forgive, may we heal.” When people go to this—Dr. King’s Memorial Park right here, a lot of them are church people and they’re in prayer. They’re asking for forgiveness. They’re praying for their ancestors who suffered, and also the ancestors who helped to liberate.
The basis of a shrine is a place you go to honor, to respect, and to communicate with, right? Once your ancestors see you have this place, the doors open. They’re like, “OK. Thank you.” Well, next thing you know, you’re talking to grandma, or you’re receiving healing messages or some energy that you need. There’s pieces that they complete for us, they empower us. They give us a certain ground. Maya Angelou used to always say, “I stand as one, but I come with 10,000.” Maya was in touch with her ancestors, and I know they stood with her. You could feel it in the power of her words, in her spoken words. You felt the 10,000 right beside her holding her. So I think that we can access that level of power and courage by opening the door.
TS: And the shrine, just to make sure I understand correctly, has potentially members of my own family biographical lineage, but it could also be figures that I’ve found inspiring from any time in history, yeah?
SW: Absolutely. Because everybody is our ancestor. We have the blood ancestor, but at the end of the day, we go back and back and back and back, it’s one family tree. But yes, on your personal shrine, it’s whatever evokes that feeling for you of connection. Maybe someone is from Nigeria and they have a Nigerian statue representing the homeland, your primordial ancestors. You’ll find in your way with a shrine—maybe you’re out walking and you find a beautiful shell and it reminds you of the beach in south of France or reminds you of the waters in the Caribbean, and you put it on your ancestral offering. You make an offering. You can also make offerings of incense and flowers and water.
And shrines are alive. They’re portals, they’re channels, they’re alive like any altar is alive. You put a picture of Bhagawan Nityananda on your altar, you’re going to feel the spirit of that being. Anything you put on your altar is a place of connection, potentially. I’m calling this energy in. I’m asking for the wisdom of that. So connecting to our ancestors, I think, is incredibly important, and I guess the word for me is “nourishing.” It fortifies something in us.
TS: Just to share, right before this conversation, I had a meeting with a group of people at Sounds True that work on our foundation, the Sounds True Foundation. And we just had a few minutes of silence before the meeting started, and I was fresh from being with your writing on the spirit of Harriet Tubman, and I was just tuning in, like what are the ancestral spirit forms that want to partner with the Sounds True Foundation? And I noticed even just asking that question and holding the space for it, it felt—to use your word—“fortifying.” It felt empowering. And I’d love to know how the work you’ve done with Harriet Tubman has fortified and changed and empowered you.
SW: Yeah, well, I think it’s a beautiful question. I think this fortification feeling, it’s a feeling of, we’re not alone. That we’re not alone in our vision of creating a better world. Ultimately, what Sounds True is trying to do is contribute to humanity. We have this need to make a contribution, and what a beautiful place to come out of. Sometimes intentions get kind of wacky, but our hearts are looking to make a contribution to humanity, to better the world. And so I think when we have that mindset, and we have the prayer that we want to activate the unseen world for support—because Harriet Tubman was always in dialogue with her higher power, a higher power, whatever you want to call that. There’s a thousand names for it, from God to [INAUDIBLE], all of these are names for this intelligence.
And so the fortification comes because what we are invested in right now with humanity is very serious, and we actually do need, to make this turn, the help of the unseen world. They were helping Harriet, they helped Dr. King, they helped every bodhisattva throughout time. And so we’re activating—we’re turning on a bigger smoke signal here than just our fireplace, we’re activating deep prayers. And this is fortifying because I believe when you ask, the universe shows up. We have that feeling of being taken care of. Everything is on time, that I can meet this moment. Harriet’s belief in me gave me a belief in me. A deeper belief like, “OK, I can do this. I can move to Georgia and start a revolution in the middle of an election that’s going to be violent. OK, I’m not going to run the other direction.” What Harriet gave me was the strength to say, “Turn toward the storm. Turn toward it, I know it’s painful. I know there’s all these old painful wounds on all sides.”
So Harriet’s belief in me actually translated into my belief in myself, and I think that’s what Harriet was good at. I have no doubt when she was conducting on the Underground, people didn’t believe they could ever make it, and she gave them that strength of being like, “Oh yeah, you can make it. You’re going to make it.” And I think that with this particular spirit, I believe that Harriet Tubman’s energy of this courage and the strength is the transmission that she has delivering. “You’re not alone, I’m with you. I’ll conduct you. I will get you there, but you got to also do your part, which is to get up and leave the plantation and walk,” which is the battle.
So I feel like that is the biggest transmission: that I’m bigger than what I know—not bigger in the ego sense, but I have more capacity and strength. But we’re only tested with courage when we’re tested with courage. It can’t be analytical, we have to actually have some skin in the game.
TS: Yeah. For sure.
SW: So that’s the biggest area I feel like her belief in me has given me a belief in me.
TS: When you say Harriet Tubman, Dr. Martin Luther King, they were supported by the unseen world. How do you know that?
SW: Well, Harriet talked about it quite openly, that she was in a constant dialogue with her higher power. It was just—her whole life she was listening to a different channel, and moving based on the information that she was being provided on her channel. She was getting direct downloads and she was moving on those downloads. She was in communication, all of that. Her whole life was just incredibly intuitive, and she was just listening to a different channel— especially at that time where everyone else was on one, Harriet Tubman was on another one. We can see that.
The reason I say Dr. King was, [is] because also he was so prophetic, in his speeches of seeing beyond what we could see. Rather, he gives—the last speech of his life is the mountaintop, one of them. And also the day before he dies, he’s prophesizing, I am not going to make it through the violence of this.
So he had this prophetic way of having seen the future, in a way, and did a great deal of good. And just his own spiritual teachings of his own relationship to his spirituality. And I think this is also a piece of what we’re bringing is, we can’t bring activism in right now void of a connection to love, void of a connection to the higher power, void of having any connection to those who have come before us. We have to activate that, we need them.
TS: When you think about partnering with spirit beings, with ancestral presences, tell me what you know about the partnership, how it works. Are we equal partners? Who’s calling the shots? What’s our part? What’s their part?
SW: Yeah, that’s such an interesting question. Well, OK, so I’ve only really had this experience with Harriet Tubman, so I only can really speak on that. I think maybe I’ve had many partnerships, but nothing as elaborate as we’re agreeing to write this book and we’re on the journey together. With the spirit world, they are looking for conduits for wisdom. They’re looking to collaborate with those who can channel the power and the messages. So because they don’t have a body, they’re relating to us, because usually there’s a task that they would like to be completed. There’s something that they’re asking for, right? There’s a specific thing. “I would like help with this, to help translate this, to help—.” You know, Harriet was very specific. “I want a book about my heart. I want a book for right now. I don’t need another historical book; those are being written. They have been written, others will write about them. But I want something that speaks to this other part of my being, that I’m alive, and you help me tell the story of that, Spring.”
So I think all of these, they’re very polite, they’re very respectful. They’re like, “We have a deal.” Very much like how you would negotiate a contract with someone. “Here’s what you’re going to do, here’s what I’m going to do.” It’s all very polite. You can not do it, if you don’t want to. But the caveat with that is most of them will tell you, “This is part of your liberation now. You came to deliver this, you came to do this, and now I’m going to help you, or here’s the next stage of it.”
So I feel like it’s not like you don’t have free will; you do. But with Harriet, I knew I was going to write this book, and I knew it would be hard. I was willing to say yes to it because I wanted to. So you have free will. You are not just beaten up by spirits. You can get in that situation, but you just have to set a boundary, like anywhere else. You have boundaries with this world. Just like I have a boundary when I’m walking in the park or someone’s approaching in a weird way, I move out of the way. I have boundaries.
So these are relationships that are about usually a very sacred task, and it’s usually deeply involved with the benefit of others, compassion, and bringing something out that needs to be brought out. And only you may have that particular skill, or you might be the person at the moment. But I think it’s all different.
But that’s all I can say about my—so far, Harriet’s given me this task, but I have a feeling there will be others. Moving to Atlanta, I’m like, all right, we’re all—starting a spirit underground church. The tasks are growing now, Tami. [LAUGHS]
TS: What kind of surrender do you feel was asked of you?
SW: Well, I think the first level is surrendering to blocking out the historical wounds that Harriet’s life depicts. Harriet’s life is a liberation and a heartbreak story. And there was a part of me that I didn’t want to go through fully into the darkest part of American history. Even though we talked about slavery and we talked about all these things, but just to go through it and to read accounts of the Underground archives and the records, and to study the laws and what was happening. It was a part of me that had to surrender to go through that. A part of me that didn’t want to read and understand the Civil War, and to relive it and to sit with it, and to feel it in my body. So that was the first surrender. To surrender, to be willing to go through the pain of history and the wounds of what happened.
TS: That’s big, Spring. That’s big, Spring. That’s a big one. That’s big.
SW: Yeah. That was probably the biggest part. I fought that. I mean, this was 2020, it was all around. It was like, “No, you gotta go deeper into it. And I did for two years. I felt like I was in graduate school with Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass; just studied so much to understand what her life was like in that moment in time, what the true battles were.
So, that was the first level, which was very hard and very challenging. The second was surrendering to doing a certain amount of really hard work. Surrendering my days to it, to research, to writing, to allowing myself to be this channel, knowing that there’s going to be suffering and there’s going to be liberation here, and I’m going to have to feel all of that. And it’s not resolved, actually; it’s just this wound. And surrendering to doing it, to saying yes, and then to showing up for the actual labor that’s involved in some of these tasks. Some of these ancestor collaborations might involve hard work. It might involve establishing something or setting something up, or getting close to something that we don’t want to be close to.
So that was a surrender, and then surrendering—I knew once I ended the book on the last page, that the journey was beginning. I think shutting it, it’s like, “OK, I’m done, Harriet! Goodbye!” It’s like, no, I’m going to be talking about Harriet Tubman for the rest of my life, I’m committed to that. So it’s just also surrendering your will, what you think your plan—what you think you’re here for is different than what the universe says you’re here for. So it’s like letting go of your own agenda.
TS: One thing I think is really interesting that you said was the hard work, the labor component, and I’ve been thinking about that a lot because I think sometimes people from the outside, when they think about the spiritual journey, are like, “Oh yeah, great. Glad you’re living in a cream puff pile or something, and a cloud bank. You’ve entered the cloud bank.” And I think, “God, if you actually knew,” and I have this desire to articulate more and help people understand more about what’s often asked and the work involved. I wonder if you have anything to say about that specifically?
SW: Yeah, I think that you’re so right on that, people have no idea. I remember Chögyam Trungpa used to write in some of his books. He would tell people, just go home, you’re not serious. You have no idea what you’re asking for when you say “I want to awaken.” I mean, this is messy business. And I think that some of our communities, the advertising of the spiritual life really influences that. We see these skinny blonde girls blissing out in pictures and we think, “Oh, yes!” And I know what it looks like on retreat. People are walking around, they have old sweatpants on, tissues falling out of their pockets. They’re reconciling their life. It’s a reckoning, to sit down with your mind and feel what’s really going on and to look at the places that were deeply unconscious. This is labor.
I’ve been misunderstood my whole life about my spiritual practices, even when I was very young. I remember at 23, I went on my first three-month retreat; nobody understood me. They all thought I was going on some vacation. That was the hardest three months of my life. I wept, I cried. I mean, this was a blood sport. This was not some, “Oh, I’m checking out.” This was the check-in; this was the hospital. This was, “Let’s get down to looking at the tangles here.”
And so I just want to say that the marketing of spiritual liberation is the opposite of what spiritual—the real walk, the real work involved, it means opening every door in your heart. It means looking at everything—what you do, how you live, where you suffer. It’s not a sweet, cloudy—I wish I could get on an elevator and go to the top floor and walk out and that I’m done. But it doesn’t! [LAUGHS] I’m sorry, friends, we’ve been sold a false narrative. Get ready to get your shovels out, and know that to really awaken, you have to let go. And that is the hardest thing for us. And to let go means to go in, and it means to examine. And that work, I honor and bow to everyone doing that level because it’s not easy. You’ve got to have a fierce heart, to see yourself and to see the confusion there. So try to let go of the spiritual marketing, because that’s just not reality.
TS: I just want to say, Spring, I’m really enjoying this conversation.
SW: Oh, good!
TS: Just want to take a moment to say how much I’m loving speaking with you. What do you mean by a fierce heart?
SW: Well, a fierce heart—when I was coming up with that book title, and now that word “fierce” is used so much and Beyoncé has a fierce song, and everyone’s fierce. But I think for me, what it means is to have a heart that can hold all of the beauty of this life—the joy and the laughter and the community and the travel and the world, the physical world, sights and smells and sounds. But also to hold the depth of like, this is really hard being alive, there is pain involved in this, and there’s loss and there’s confusion.
And the fierce heart, in my mind, is the ability that we develop a capacity to hold that deep with compassion. We can hold it, but not always with compassion. So how do we become empathetic to all of the suffering and not react with this hatred and aversion? And so the fierce hearts asking something of us. It’s asking, “Hey, this big pile of tangles and anger and rage, you know what? You got to be with it and you got to feel empathy.” So, for me, that’s the depth of work right now. Can I empathize with this? Can I feel this? And it’s challenging.
TS: Well, you mentioned that part of your journey with Harriet Tubman involved you going into the deep pain of America’s history, including the slave trade, and then everything that happened with Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad and the number of deaths, the violence against slaves. I mean, on and on. And you describe it vividly in the book, The Spirit of Harriet Tubman. How in your own process did you come to bring a compassionate heart to those experiences, instead of simply a broken or outraged heart?
SW: Yeah, because—that question is so beautiful, and it’s one a lot of people have because they can’t reconcile the heartbreak. It’s so heartbreaking, and I feel like Harriet pulled that out of me. There’s different to think about slavery and then to read a narrative, an actual narrative written down in the 1800s, and to go, my God, this is someone’s account. It gets a lot more real. Or with 2020, we had to see the murder of somebody up close to get it, to feel it. And it’s hard because it does evoke a rage, an outrage when we see injustice on such a widespread level. And it’s hard to hold that. And I agree with people who are often very angry and very upset, but it’s like, “OK, let’s transform this,” right? Because the heart can’t just keep holding on. The heart’s natural movement is to letting go and empathy.
So to see anger and hatred as the delusions of the mind has given me more space. I’m not mad at this person who is carrying a flag and trying to harm people, it’s really the sorrow of rage and anger when it is let loose, right? It’s let loose these delusions that create this suffering where we actually want to harm other beings. So I actually do have a lot of compassion for those who wake up in the morning and their joy is to harm someone else that day. What a horrific mind state.
And that’s where I go with it. To wake up every day to plot and plan the demise of other beings, instead of being like, “I’m going to contribute to better humanity.” Like, wow—actually, that mindset does give me compassion. So I empathize with it that beings are really lost in this.
They’re lost in this rage and they’re listening to their minds. And when your mind is out of control and it’s telling you stories of survival and it’s convincing you—the ego is so enraged, it does create a sadness in me. It’s like, oh. And I also understand, “Oh, people are listening to their thoughts.” My God, they’re so violent, most people’s thoughts.
So the empathy for me is still an ongoing piece. Coming to the South, wanting to stand up for what I believe is right, the ways of being this new community that’s emerging—whether we call it the Rainbow Tribe or whatever, something’s emerging that’s a lot more inclusive. And the best thing I can do is just keep empathizing when I get triggered by the rage or I feel afraid, I just keep coming back.
And this is also where the ancestor world gives me a lot of strength because they’ve been here, they’ve walked the path. Harriet gives me strength. She did it. She was here. She was on the battleground. She lived through the whole—so I think also we can take a lot of refuge in the ancestors. I know they fought, they died. We will fight, we will die. And so it’s just seeing it as sickness and healing, not personal. That helps depersonalize it from the person in front of you; it’s just the energy that’s tormenting them.
TS: Now, you mentioned that these ancestral presences can come with an unfinished task of some kind, and they’re seeking human partnership to help them complete the task. What would you say is the task that Harriet Tubman is wanting to complete with her partnership with you?
SW: Well, the book has only come out for the last couple of months, the book is new. And so I think one of the tasks that Harriet is asking me for is that she wants to connect to people. Her power is enormous in the spirit world, and she wants to grow the underground abolitionist spiritual movement again, kind of reunite and fortify people. There’s people who are standing up and it’s going to take a lot of courage right now for people to—I guess, the political problems in the United States and around the world, they’re serious right now, the fighting.
And so we need an icon right now. We’re a leaderless movement. So to have a spiritual icon, someone who can help us traverse this area. Rather we’re in a process of massive deconstruction. There’s something shifting. Something’s cracking. We all feel it. Whether it’s the 9-1-1 of the planet and it’s the violence, and we’re all feeling this pressure cooker. And Harriet lived through that.
So I think one of her messages and tasks for me is, “Help me connect to people and I will fortify them.” It’s like she’s a deity, like Guanyin. You need compassion? Where do you go? You call—knock on Guanyin’s door. “Guanyin, give me some compassion. I ran out.” Well, I think Harriet Tubman, in a way, she’s back as kind of like a deity over this deep wound. There’s this wound at the corner of the foundation—it’s not the corners, it’s the foundation of the United States. And I think that Harriet can offer a lot of internal resourcing, strength, faith, all these qualities that we are going to get through this time. She exemplifies the suffering of that, therefore, she exemplifies the medicine of that. She lived the whole thing—born a slave, died a free woman on her own land. She’s been through every stage of this. So I think that in one way, Harriet’s task is like, “Help me connect to people.” My hope for you, Tami, is that after—now you’ve talked to Harriet, now you’re off, right? You’re off to your own creation, right? [LAUGHS]
TS: Well, your book is a very powerful introduction to her living presence. Five feet tall, 100 pounds. But it’s clear in the book that there is huge, huge, huge, huge power in this presence, that small body like that. So it’s amazing actually what you—
SW: I know. It is so amazing. Thank you. I’m so glad you got a chance to read it.
TS: Yeah. OK, there’s one more thing I’d like to talk to you about, which is, you mentioned earlier in our conversation a little bit about your work with plant medicine and how it’s dramatically impacted you and helped you with this spirit connectivity—piercing the veil, if you will. Tell me how your plant medicine experiences have impacted the healing of trauma in your own life, and if you have any recommendations for people who are unsure if this is a direction that’s going to be healing for them.
SW: Yeah. So I am writing a third book about this right now, about the plant medicine, and it’s so popular right now. So, some people are like, “Oh, no, now they’re going to talk about that.” It is very popular right now, plant medicine, psychedelics. I was just at this MAPS conference where there was 13,000 people in Denver—so many therapists, so many people caring deeply about wanting to contribute to ending the insanity that we’re experiencing. How do we stop? How do we get better? How do we really change? How do we become happier?
So my plant medicine came directly out of intense trauma, and this was in 2007. That word, trauma, was still like, “Trauma? What do you mean, trauma?” It was like we were in the dark ages as insight meditation teachers. And yeah, I fell apart on a three-month intensive doing this concentration, and I think it just had all this unresolved childhood suffering, which I thought I had resolved it.
That’s always the humor of the spiritual path; I thought I worked it out! Well, back again, and it was back with a vengeance. I didn’t know what was happening, and I left the retreat a little early, destabilized, and I kept thinking, “You need a shamanic intervention.” That’s all the words that kept coming to my mind—like something has to go deeper here.
And so that’s what happened. I was introduced to it from a dear friend of mine who’s a clinical psychologist, who had been secretly working with it for a year in and out of Hawaii and said, “I’m getting a lot of benefit from trauma, my childhood trauma.” And I was like, “OK, I want to work on that, because somehow I’m falling apart in a really disassociated way,” which is common. So I was having all these trauma reactions that I didn’t fully understand.
So that’s what led me to working with the plant medicine. I went to one ceremony in the mountains in northern California, and in that one night, I learned more about myself than I had in years. And that led me to being so fascinated that I immediately went to Peru because I wanted to do it in the Amazon. That was a very, very important—at the roots. I wanted to understand, what are these plants and how is this happening? It was just a new world of being so curious.
And that started years of me living in Peru, studying with Shipibo. I was working with indigenous Shipibo women, I felt safest with them. And I started doing huge amounts of clearing old trauma. Trauma lives in not only the body, but the mind—our emotional body and our light body. You could clear it on a mental level, but it’s still alive on the physical. We know this now.
People are moving away from maybe traditional therapy and using more somatics.
So, my first years of working with plant medicine was in secret because it was so controversial. I was a teacher at Spirit Rock and leading—I was never talking about it publicly, but I would go spend a month, two months, a year in the jungle, and I was getting so much better. I was working out the deep knots of my family tree, and I still am. And when you have a lot and you’re born into really difficult situations, it takes a long time. But the plant medicine was such an accelerator.
Not easy—people think it’s easy. Let me clarify this really quickly, because, say you’re on your spiritual path and then there’s a crossroads, and they say, “You could take a shortcut. It’s going to be the hardest walk, straight up the side of this mountain, you’re going to be hanging on for dear life, but you’re going to get there in one day. Or you can stay on the path you’re going, you get to the same place, but this could take a couple of years, but there’s no danger involved. You’re going at your own pace.”
So that’s what is presented with medicine. You’re going to scale this up, you might even fall a couple of times. There’s no guarantee, but you’re going to get there. That’s what we’re offered with, at this moment.
TS: What from your experience was the danger?
SW: Well, with all plant medicines—I have videos about this—you have the set, and your setting, your intention, and your own preparation, it creates a dangerous or an awakened situation. You have to know who you’re with. Who is the maestro? Who is this community? I’m about to open up the deepest places in my being. These people, are they worthy of holding it? Are they operating with—do they have healing powers? You don’t want to put yourself in a situation where others are unprepared for whatever arises, because that can be dangerous because it’s so powerful, some of these plant medicines. So being safe in your setting, and also being prepared in yourself to really go in and do some really deep inner work.
TS: Now, you mentioned clearing trauma, and I think most people were tracking in terms of the physical body and the emotional body. And then you also said the light body. Tell me a little bit about that, what the light body is and how trauma leaves our light body.
SW: This is a really important piece, because often this is the piece that is the most beneficial to work with plant medicine, because it can go that deep into your light body level. And so when we talk about our light body, we could talk about prana, we could talk about chi. Your light body—when you have light body work, that’s when we get Reiki, or even acupuncture works on your meridian lines in your light body. So sometimes people—we come, we have chronic pain, we don’t know what’s the origin. So many people come with these disorders that Western medicine cannot treat—autoimmune, sleeping disorders, “Half my body, I can’t move it, nobody knows why. I’m totally numb.” These are things where I would call it would be a problem with our light body. The trauma is still stuck somewhere in the system, so the chi isn’t flowing.
And in Tibetan practices, yogis have to work with this all the time. You can even get a disorder called [INAUDIBLE]. It’s a air disorder. Basically, the energy is not flowing the way it should flow. We know when our prana is flowing right? We’re like, “Ah, OK, good. Here we are.” But when it’s not, we feel like, “I can’t move my neck.” We feel the block.
So a lot of our deepest traumas, they’re still in the light body. It reminds me of fingerprints left behind. Somebody leaves the house, they wiped everything with tiny little fingerprints. Well, that’s enough to get you fully locked up, right? You’re there. So it’s like the bigger things have come out, but there’s a fingerprint left in the light body, and that’s the last level of healing in my mind. So I talk a lot about this with plant medicine, different levels where people are healing on. So the light body is a very important one, obviously.
TS: All right, Spring, a final question for you. You mentioned a couple of times that you’re in Atlanta; this is new, you’ve moved to Atlanta. What’s your sense of the importance of now being your next set of operating instructions happening from Atlanta, Georgia?
SW: Yeah, I mean, I first wanted to say I want all the listeners to really consider sending a lot of prayers to Atlanta. Atlanta, I felt like it’s become a front line of some kind of movement, but now I’m very sure it’s a front line. Just the fact that there’s people being arrested here by—a lot of these Black judicial freedom fighters are prosecuting crimes here, and there’s a lot of energy of the ancestor world and [AUDIO CUT OUT] up and freedom and liberation and farming and use of land. So there’s a lot going on in Atlanta, just energetically. it feels like a forefront of a liberatory movement is galvanizing here.
And so for me, what I want to do is just be that spiritual abolitionist, teaching meditation, teaching embodiment, bringing the spirit of Harriet Tubman in. Remembering Dr. King’s message, that we cannot descend into madness and violence right now, as much as we want to or as much as people are inciting that. That there has to be—we rely on this soul force, that there’s some great turning happening. Atlanta might be this battleground, but it’s a symbol of something. It’s a stronghold of resistance here. From the government, from the—the preacher Ralph, I forget his last name—Abernathy—the senator from Georgia, is also Dr. King’s church. He’s the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist. There’s something going on here. And so to just feel that.
And I’m bringing Harriet, the ancestor world, the work I’m doing with Lama Rod and his new book, The New Saints. I love it. And it’s to be real, that’s what we’re trying to build here is a new saint movement. And you don’t have to be beautiful and perfect. This is not about the spiritual cloud, this is down to it. And so that’s where I’m being called to do here. And I’m going to set up a—we’re going to rent out a place in Atlanta, start teaching meditation, healing, giving talks. So all of that, it’s a new build, a new building period for me.
TS: Spring Washam, so inspired by your deep inner work and your clear voice. Thank you so, so very much.
SW: Ah, thank you so much, Tami. This has been a real honor for me.
TS: Author of The Spirit of Harriet Tubman: Awakening from the Underground. Sounds True: waking up the world. Thanks for being with us.
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