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.