Cody Cook-Parrott: Attention is a Creative Act

What are you paying attention to—and is it the life you actually want to be living?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Cody Cook-Parrott—writer, artist, movement practitioner, and author of the new Sounds True book The Practice of Attention: Cultivating Presence in a Distracted World—about what it takes to reclaim focus in an age engineered to steal it.

Cody’s path to this book wasn’t theoretical. It began with their own Instagram addiction, a recovery from alcohol, and the growing realization that fractured attention isn’t just an inconvenience—it’s a creative crisis. What emerged is a deeply personal and practical guide to getting back to yourself.

Join Tami and Cody to explore:

The attention audit: a simple, powerful practice for noticing where your time and energy actually go
Why social media addiction and alcohol addiction can mirror each other—and what “zero” looks like as a choice
Structure with softness: building devotional creative habits that flex without breaking
Agency over urgency—and why that principle is especially vital for neurodivergent and queer creators
The emotional car: how to bring difficult inner parts along for the ride without letting them take the wheel
Consistency over intensity: why a 25-minute Pomodoro session beats an eight-hour grind
What’s really driving the urge to distract—and how asking “what am I avoiding?” changes everything
Why attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer

Whether you’re a creative trying to protect your focus or someone who’s quietly wondered what you’d make if you could actually sit with yourself, Cody offers both the tools and the permission to begin.

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. Originally aired on Sounds True One.

Just One Question | Lama Rod Owens: How Can I Receive ...

Giving love comes easy, but can you actually receive it? Lama Rod Owens says most of us flinch at being cared for, even by something as simple as the chair we’re sitting in. In this practice from his book The New Saints, he walks us through what it takes to actually let love in.

Lama Rod Owens, a Black Buddhist Southern Queen, authorized lama in the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, and author of The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors, guides Tami Simon (and all of us listening) through a short meditation on receiving care, drawn straight from the pages of his new book.

In this conversation, Tami and Lama Rod explore:

Feeling supported by the seat or ground beneath you
Recalling a time someone, or something, really loved you
Letting that love move through the body, including the grief it can stir up along the way
Imagining the whole universe wanting you safe, happy, and free
Gently returning to the body and closing the practice

This one’s for anyone who finds it easier to give love than to receive it, which, let’s be honest, is most of us.

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Lama Rod Owens. Find the complete interview in this feed or at https://bit.ly/new-saint

Terri Cole: “Healing the Worthiness Wound”

Terri Cole — November 3, 2026

Terri Cole calls it an invisible wound: the imprint left when a daughter never receives protection, presence, or emotional attunement from her father. This week, Tami Simon talks with Terri Cole—Sounds True’s own Boundary Boss—about her new book, Father Wound, and why even women with loving fathers can carry this wound without ever naming it.

Terri Cole, MSW, LCSW, is a licensed psychotherapist, relationship expert, and best-selling author who has spent nearly three decades helping people break dysfunctional patterns and build healthier relationships with themselves and others. With Sounds True, she is the author of the trilogy that began with Boundary Boss and continued with Too Much: A Guide to Breaking the Cycle of High-Functioning Codependency. Her newest book, Father Wound: Break Unhealthy Patterns to Reclaim Your Worth and Power, examines what happens when a father or father figure is absent, abusive, immature, or simply not emotionally attuned—and why daughters of patriarchy carry a version of this wound no matter what kind of father they had.

In this conversation, Tami and Terri explore:

How to recognize a father wound even when “my father wasn’t that bad”
Why Terri defines the father wound as, at its root, a worthiness wound
The difference between self-parenting and re-parenting, and what healing your inner child looks like in daily decisions
The “father wound trance”: how old patterns resurface in adult relationships, and how to work with transference instead of being run by it
Mourning the Dream, Terri’s exercise for grieving the father you wished you’d had
Why healing this wound personally is tied to healing patriarchy at a collective, societal level

Who this episode is for: anyone doing inner child work, anyone who keeps finding themselves in the same relationship pattern and wondering why, and anyone ready to ask whether their sense of worth was shaped long before they had any say in it.

Listen now, and start reclaiming your worth. →

This interview originally aired on Sounds True One, where you can enjoy early, ad-free access to episodes of Insights at the Edge: https://join.soundstrue.com/

The Point of Insight | Enter the River

Tami Simon — October 29, 2026

What do Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, a roadside run-in with the law, and conversations with Eckhart Tolle, Caroline Myss, Rob Bell, and Liz Gilbert have in common? In this month’s Point of Insight, Tami Simon follows a single image — the river — through her own life and through the teachers she’s spent twenty years interviewing, and asks what it means to finally stop resisting the current and enter it.

In this Point of Insight, Tami explores:

How Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha first introduced her as a young person to the river as a symbol of timelessness and impermanence
A humbling roadside encounter with a police officer that became an unplanned teaching on the dangers of “self-congratulatory” thinking
Eckhart Tolle’s answer to a question he’s asked often at retreats: how do you know if you’re making progress on the spiritual path?
A practice from Caroline Myss’s new Spiritual Homebase community, viewing a current challenge first through the lens of fear, then through the lens of faith
Author and former megachurch pastor Rob Bell on reframing risk, and why the risk of not taking a risk is often the greater one
Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir, All the Way to the River, her relationship with Rayya Elias, and the “two doors” conversation that changed the course of her life
The Buddhist teaching of the “stream-enterer,” one of the earliest stages of awakening to an impermanent, flowing nature

For anyone standing at the edge of a change, a risk, or an uncertainty they haven’t yet stepped into — press play and enter the river.

And if you’re intrigued by any of the guests mentioned in this episode, be sure to visit soundstrue.com/podcast to find their full episodes of Insights at the Edge.