Tami Simon: Welcome to The Point of Insight. Imagine a black night sky, and in it, a point, a tiny star. And now this part gets a little weird. Imagine that light pulls you like a beacon up and through itself. You land someplace new. Somewhere you’ve never been, a different way of being. That’s a point of insight.
For about a decade, I studied somatic meditation, during a period of my life really beginning when I was thirty-nine and coming up to around fifty years of age. And in the study of somatic meditation, you pay quite a lot of attention to what’s happening in our body, and in particular in the subtle flows—what’s happening in our belly and our heart and inside our head, what’s happening at the bottom of our feet and in the palms of our hands, throughout the entire body.
And through somatic meditation, one of the insights, you could say one of the keys—it felt like that, it felt like it was a key on a key ring—went and unlocked, you ready for this, the jail that I felt I was in. And there I was inside a jail. This was a prison of my own thinking and sense of constriction. And my hand reached around the jail bars with this key and, voila, the door. The door is now open. Exit.
So this was the key that I discovered, which is that each of us, in our subtle anatomy, there’s something that’s called the central channel. Maybe you’ve heard about this if you’ve ever studied yoga. I was a meditator, and I didn’t know what it was until someone, the somatic meditation teacher, pointed it out to me. And then I had this sense as I sat in meditation that there was a flow of energy that was coming from below, entering right at the very bottom of my torso, running up in front of the spine all the way up through the top of my head.
Later, as I started interviewing more and more people for Insights at the Edge, I would often be drawn to asking them questions, seeing if they were also aware of this central channel, and why aren’t more people screaming about this from the rooftops? It seemed like such an important discovery for me because in this sense of flow, as I mentioned, there is a sense of freedom, but also inspiration, a feeling of being connected to the earth below and the heavens above.
And what I learned was that many of the spiritual practice traditions actually do reference the central channel. I just hadn’t heard of it. When I was talking to a yoga teacher, Richard Freeman, and we were recording together in the Sounds True studio, The Yoga Matrix, he started talking about how—you ready for this?—the real yoga teacher is the central channel, the sushumna in the yogic tradition. That’s the real, quote-unquote, “guru,” the inner teacher. And I was like, “Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah, that’s the inner teacher.”
And then, working with Qigong master Robert Peng, at one point I said to him, “You know, when you do this exercise that you teach, where the sun energy is coming from one hand and you’re imagining, visualizing lunar moon energy coming from the other hand, and you’re holding it above your head going right into the center of the head”—I go, “Whenever we do that exercise, Robert, it’s like, bam, I suddenly feel fully present and clear.”
And he’s like, “Yeah, it’s opening your central channel, Tami.” Having the energy from the left and the right—the ida and the pingala, in the yoga tradition is what they’re called—going right down into the center.
This discovery for me has been, you could say, a through line in my sense of being upright as a person. And I started looking at different people and seeing in various teachers how an open flow of energy in front of the spine manifested in how they carried themselves, how they sat when they were teaching. And I could see this upright, inspired quality, and this sense that within that channel they were connected to greater forces, cosmic forces, and that we each could cultivate and hone this quality of flow up in front of the spine. You could call it a river of awakening flowing through us.
All right. So there you go. I’m pleased with this. This is terrific. This is a key. It unlocks the door. It creates a sense of grounded knowing, and receiving of inspiration.
And I’m now headed to talk to Lee Harris for a special interview we’re doing on being a light warrior. And Lee Harris is an energy intuitive and channel and musician and super creative force. He had mentioned something that he called the light warrior spine. I was like, “Good, I’m gonna interview Lee Harris about being a light warrior, and I’m gonna make sure to talk to him to get his sense of what is a light spine.”
And of course, you never know what’s gonna happen in these kinds of conversations. And was I looking for confirmation about the power of the central channel? Yes, but I also just wanted to get his take on it and what it meant to him.
And then here we go. He surprised me. He said, “You know, Tami, many years ago, my guides showed me that each of us have—you could see it—an angel behind you, eight to twelve feet tall, that’s pressing up against you, behind you, and that that is available. That sense of guidance and angelic inspiration is available to each of us, and you can call on this angelic presence, the angel behind you.” And he’s like, “Ever since my guides showed me that, it’s informed me in an important way.”
And here’s when the point of insight happened. As we were talking, suddenly—I’m talking to Lee, and I think this happens when a teacher is in a certain state, it travels like a spark from one person to another, it just jumps. Whoop, spark jumps. The positive moving of a positive contagious element. It’s like, boom. So there I felt the angel behind me pressing up against me, and I felt myself, like, in that moment—and I said this in the interview—I go, “I feel a little bit like, at this moment, like a hybrid. Part regular human, and then there are these wings happening. What’s going on? How are these wings suddenly… I’ve become like a mythological creature in the midst of this interview. This is really getting interesting.”
And then Lee continued and said you can’t really be a quote-unquote light warrior—and the conversation was all around the time that we’re in now, right here in 2026 and moving forward into 2027 and beyond, and how light warriors are playing, that’s us, that’s us, a role in humanity’s evolution at this time—you can’t really be a light warrior and think of yourself as a separate human being that’s not connected to these empowering forces of light that are partnering and working with us, and are part of the larger interconnected web that we are all connected to. That’s actually what it means to be a light warrior.
And the reason this was an important point of insight for me is that somehow, when I had first proposed this title, being a light warrior, I kinda saw myself—I mean, truth be told, I saw myself as, like, a human being, being brave and courageous and bringing in light, and wanting to be effective and on purpose at this time, and wanting to make a contribution. And when he said that you can’t really be effective as a light warrior without this sense of online, operational connectivity operating through you, something shifted. And I felt as if those wings, even if they can’t be seen, not only were always available to me, pressing from behind, this angelic force, but that I needed—you ready for this?—to fall back into that support more and more and more, and to let it press upon me.
Now, a few months later, I’m interviewing Thomas Moore, and we’re talking about his new book, The Cure at Walden Pond, and the many writings of Henry David Thoreau that he read and metabolized in order to talk about Thoreau’s contribution to our human evolution at this particular time. And he talks about how Thoreau instructed us to see what’s transcendent in each human we look at, in addition to their humanity—that transcendent part of the human—and that as human beings, we always carry both our human nature and this mysterious transcendent nature.
And as I was listening to Thomas Moore describe this, I suddenly started reflecting and seeing before me many of the people that I love. My wife, some of my closest friends, many of the authors I work with, many of my coworkers. And I suddenly saw them, too, as these hybrid beings, if you will. Part human and part something I can only say is a mystery. Part mystery. Part mysterious nature. And how that mysterious nature was some aspect of them that I just love, and that I knew would actually go beyond the physical death of their human body. I could see it. I could suddenly see, “Oh, that’s the transcendent of them.” And how each person appeared to me, as I was seeing them in their hybrid nature, as these tremendously powerful and free hybrid beings.
So here we are, recognizing in ourselves, falling back, feeling the support of what Lee called the angel behind us. In my case, feeling almost like there’s this coming together of those wings with my human person.
And I know this gets kind of, you know, metaphoric and freaky, and I’m gonna take it even one step further, which is: I went through a very dark period not all that long ago, and in it, there was a sense that my old identity was being stripped away. And of course, people said, “Oh, you’re in the chrysalis. You’re in the goo phase, where everything becomes goo, where you don’t have your identity anymore, just like the caterpillar that goes into its chrysalis and dissolves. And don’t worry, you’re gonna come out the other side, and you’re gonna be a butterfly.”
And, you know, basically I was like, “Really? You’re gonna throw a butterfly metaphor at me right now?” Like, “Shut up. Just shut up.” And then I decided to type in, “How many caterpillars turn into goo and actually don’t make it?” They don’t make it. And I had no idea what number I would get—and I realize this is all just a metaphor, but let’s keep going—twenty to forty percent of them don’t come out as butterflies.
And so when people were like, “Oh, I know you’re going through a dark time,” I was like, “Twenty to forty percent of the caterpillars don’t come out as butterflies. They die.” So I kept saying that to people, like I was an obstinate teenager or something.
And then at a certain point, I was like, “Tam, you just have to stop this. It’s not helpful. It’s not helping you. It’s not helping other people. You’re turning into a curmudgeon. You’re going through a dark time, but let’s see what happens. Let’s just see what happens.”
And isn’t that interesting, that it was so hard, so hard, that I became an obstinate teenager, and then at a certain point I let go of that, and I leaned back, ’cause I didn’t really have a choice except to fall back and trust and see what might happen. Stripped away of holding on to whatever I could claw and hold on to—that’s when the transcendent part of me got stronger. When I really just allowed that to happen, and this hybrid birth took on a much greater expression in my own life, it was only really through a deep type of falling back, we could say, into the arms of an angelic presence.
That hybrid humans are we, am I? It’s something now that I feel can be celebrated, and that I’m so happy to share with you as a Point of Insight.
