Shelah Marie Your Mess Is Your Power

Too many Black women are living other people’s stories for their lives, making themselves smaller to serve other people or society’s expectations. Shelah Marie is here to inform us that we can break free from cultural restrictions and our self-imposed barriers and unabashedly be who we really are, including our imperfections, our growth areas, our unacknowledged successes, and everything in between. In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with Shelah Marie about her new book, Unruly, an empowering work that gives you full permission and practical support in fully being yourself.

Tune in now as Tami and Shelah discuss: how specificity leads to universality; embracing our inner contradictions; the gifts of self-investigation; how many things can be true at the same time; the practice of writing a self-acceptance letter; ritual and celebration; performing true; “main character” energy; owning your mess; vulnerability and the courage to “show your seams”; becoming friends with yourself; the crooked room metaphor for the experience of being a Black woman; personal accountability and self-compassion; the Serious Daydreaming practice; 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.

Shelah Marie: Your Mess Is Your Power

Shelah Marie — November 5, 2024

Rob Bell: “The Risk of Not Becoming More YouR...

Rob Bell — August 18, 2026

What if not doing the thing is the riskier choice?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Rob Bell—New York Times bestselling author of 14 books and plays, host of The RobCast, and a former pastor—about what he calls his civilian phase. Rob left the role years ago. What surprised him was how long the role stayed with him afterward: “We leave an external form, and then over the years, the form begins to leave us.”

This is an unusually candid conversation. Tami goes first, admitting she didn’t feel free to fully reveal herself until she had economic security—and Rob meets her there without a tidy answer.

Join Tami and Rob to explore:

Why he doesn’t believe in risk versus no risk—only in risk management, and which risk is actually smaller
The “answer man” conditioning of a job that expected crisp soundbites about the deepest human questions—and what it did to his nervous system
Hiding in plain sight: how public visibility can be its own kind of concealment
The abyss, the void, the fallow field—learning to stop fighting the empty seasons
“And then I kept going”: the phrase that came out of pandemic sessions, and why people can’t see their own resilience
What shifted when a plant medicine experience dropped his head into his heart
Toxic positivity, a lineage that didn’t know what to do with pain, and the son who taught him it’s okay to be sad
Why a birch tree scatters 250 million seeds and doesn’t seem worried about efficiency
His father’s dementia, temporariness, and the strange way mortality heightens aliveness

Rob will lead an immersive workshop, The Ongoing Creation of Your Life, at Omega Institute, August 30–September 4.

Listen now and hear what it costs to keep standing at a distance from your own life. →

This conversation offers genuine transmission, not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together, and originally aired on Sounds True One.

Just One Question | James Hollis: Why Am I Here?

James Hollis — August 13, 2026

Tami came to Living with Borrowed Dust wanting to talk about the abyss — the chapter that held her attention most. James Hollis offers Heidegger’s framing of it: not the pit that swallows you, but the openness of being.

Then he does something guests rarely do here. He takes the question back. The abyss opens, he says, every time we ask a truly radical question — radical from radix, root — and there is none more radical than “Why am I here?”

He answers it from inside a hospital bed. Two serious spinal surgeries, real doubt about whether he’d come through, and what he describes feeling is not despair but something closer to adventure. He thanked his surgeon on the way into the operating room. Fear is normal, he says, and anxiety is real — but neither one has to be the thing that decides how you live.

In this episode:

Heidegger’s abyss as the openness of being, and how that reframe exposed Hollis’s own defenses
The patterns we build against the unknown: power over small things, staying out of harm’s way, narcissistic inflation
Why mortality is the one statistic with no uncertainty in it, and what that should free us to do
Keep walking — if you’re in the middle of the forest, you’re halfway through
Dignity over pride, and the one thing nobody can take from you unless you give it away

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with James Hollis. Find the complete interview in this feed or at soundstrue.com

Just One Question | Rev angel Kyodo williams: How Do W...

Reverend angel Kyodo williams has spent decades bridging Zen practice and social change, and she doesn’t offer the version of spirituality where relief is waiting somewhere down the road. She told Tami Simon that our joy lives at the center of our suffering, and Tami, to her credit, pushed back. Really? Right in the middle of my deep suffering and the world’s deep suffering?

Reverend angel’s answer is why this segment felt so powerful and transformative to us. She argues we’ve been handed a spiritual life that lives in a box: well-maintained, kept in good order, scheduled for Tuesday evenings from 6:30 to 8:30. Real practice, she says, pulls the lens all the way back to take in a whole life: the trauma, the history, the parts we’ve been trained to walk around. And when we refuse to touch our own suffering, we don’t contain it. We leave it behind us like roadkill, in how we treat each other and in what we let stand: patriarchy, racism, xenophobia.

In this episode:

Why “radical” means whole rather than extreme, and what a complete dharma asks of us
The cold-water method—entering your suffering ankle-deep, then further
What joy actually is, and why it isn’t an ice cream cone in the middle of the mess
The question Reverend angel keeps returning to in her own practice: where have I not yet looked?
Why fearlessness isn’t something you choose, but something that surfaces once the path is clear

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Reverend angel Kyodo williams. Find the complete interview here: Reverend angel Kyodo williams: Warrior Spirit.