Michelle Wadleigh: "I Demand to Be Me"

“You have to want the freedom more than you want to be right about it.”

That’s what Reverend Dr. Michelle Wadleigh offers to anyone who has tried forgiveness and found that it didn’t take. Not a technique. A decision.

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Wadleigh—ordained minister in Centers for Spiritual Living, retreat facilitator, co-founder of the Planned Happiness Institute, and author of Forgiveness, Shadow Work, and the new Dance Like Nobody’s Watching: The Soul’s Journey to Courage, Authenticity, and Self-Love—about what it actually takes to stop living at the mercy of our own stories.

Join Tami and Michelle to explore:

Why forgiveness practices fail when they skip the body and the subconscious—and what to do instead
How shadow work and forgiveness depend on each other, and why projection drives so much of the divisiveness we see
“Functioning on top of dysfunction”: our addictions to being nice and being liked, and how they train us to dumb ourselves down
The 15 to 20 minutes before sleep, when the mind turns porous—and how Michelle guards that window
Fire walking, cold plunges, and the discovery that fear is a choice rather than an automatic
What it means to demand to be me without excuses—and who, exactly, that demand is addressed to
Why a book about bold self-expression closes with instructions for a solo silent retreat
Presence as a practice, learned while walking beside a dying husband

Michelle speaks throughout from the middle of her own hardest passage, which gives everything she says about buoyancy, beauty, and determination a weight it would not otherwise carry.

Listen now. →

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.

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Kimberly Ann Johnson: “Becoming a Sexual Alchemi...

What if aging isn’t the slow closing of your erotic life, but the doorway into its most alive season?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Kimberly Ann Johnson—sexological body worker, somatic experiencing practitioner, birth doula, and author of the new Sounds True book Erotic Seasons: Tuning In to the Rhythms of Women’s Sexuality and Spirituality—about what she calls erotic sovereignty, and the sentence that closes her book: the female body is its own spiritual path.

Join Tami and Kimberly to explore:

Erotic sovereignty—your relationship to your own life force, and why it stays with you across every season
Why the goal isn’t a more regulated nervous system, but a more responsive one, and what it means to run more charge
The four erotic seasons—maiden, mother, virgin, crone—and the surprising reason virgin comes after mother
Why hormonal transitions are “wet clay”: golden opportunities for repatterning that our culture teaches us to rush past
Menopause as a death rehearsal, and the life review that arrives decades before we expect it
Hot sex and warm sex—widening the range beyond adrenaline, and learning the language of the pause
“Hormones are gods”: the collective endocrine system, and why living intergenerationally may be the original hormone therapy
Becoming a sexual alchemist—arousal as healing energy, and why care is the whole ethic

Whether you are 25 or 75, Kimberly offers a map for meeting your body’s changes as thresholds rather than losses.

Please note: this episode includes candid discussion of sexual abuse and sexual wounding, including Kimberly Ann Johnson’s own experience.

Listen now, and meet your body as the path. →

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The Point of Insight | Our Medicine Lives in the Wound

Tami Simon — September 24, 2026

What if the very thing that wounded you is the source of the medicine you’re here to give?

In this month’s Point of Insight, Tami Simon shares a personal story: minutes before going live with an archetypal astrologer, she was told—correctly, and within seconds—that she carried “the mother of all mother wounds.” That single moment became the culmination of a much longer, gradual unfolding: a lifetime’s worth of “drops,” from a mentor she called the Queen of the Reframe, to an interview with yoga teacher and activist Seane Corn titled “Your Pain Is Your Purpose,” to an email from a business coach whose four simple words reframed everything—your karma is your dharma.

Join Tami as she reflects on:

How a lifelong feeling of not belonging became the soil for a life’s work helping others feel connected
The difference between sudden insight and the slow, gradual “boiling water” of a tipping point
Why real breakthrough requires going all the way through pain, not around it
Joanna Macy’s question—”What breaks your heart?”—and how grief and care become fuel for service
Why “never turn away” may be one of the most important spiritual instructions there is

This is a shorter, solo reflection from Tami—released once a month on the Insights at the Edge feed—on where our deepest wounds and our clearest purpose meet.

Listen now. →

Find the original Insights at the Edge episodes here: “Seane Corn: Your Pain Is Your Purpose“

Just One Question | Pānquetzani: How Do We Honor Our ...

Pānquetzani — September 3, 2026

Tami asks Pānquetzani how she would put words to the devotion she so clearly feels toward her ancestral line. The answer starts in the body. During her first postpartum womb adjustment, Pānquetzani felt an anger release that she is certain wasn’t hers — it was inherited, and it had arrived alongside the gifts.

That’s the premise of her work as a traditional healer of Mesoamerican and Mexican medicine: the gifts and the wounds come together, and tending the wounds is the job. Her ancestors survived colonization and violence, and they didn’t survive it only for themselves. So she owes them reverence — paid not in words but in living. Slowing down. Crying. Dancing. Sensual and sexual pleasure. All the things they may never have had the privilege to do.

Then there’s her son. At fifteen he taught himself metalwork — knives, swords, bows, tools. Pānquetzani showed the work to her eighty-three-year-old grandmother, who said, oh, your grandfather used to do that. A whole family trade back in Mexico, a shop, generations of it, and nobody had ever mentioned it. He found his way back to it because he was given room to follow what he loved.

In this episode:

Why ancestral gifts and ancestral wounds arrive together
Making your life an altar — reverence as something you live rather than something you say
Healing lineages backwards, and telling the dead their suffering wasn’t in vain
What thriving actually means: joy, energy, celebration, and getting your medicine to the people who need it
The inheritance beyond the physical — the energetic, mental, and social resources previous generations went without

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