Laurel Parnell: "The Evolution from EMDR to Multidimensional Integrative Healing"

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What if some of what we’re carrying was never ours to begin with?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Laurel Parnell—psychologist, longtime spiritual practitioner, and a leading innovator in EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing). Laurel developed attachment-focused EMDR and resource tapping, and now, in her new book with Sounds True, Releasing What Isn’t Yours: Living from Your True Self Through Multidimensional Integrative Healing, she introduces her most far-reaching approach yet—one born out of the devastating loss of her son.

Join Tami and Laurel to explore:

How EMDR works, and why bilateral stimulation—whether eye movements, tapping, or sound—seems to unlock the brain’s natural healing system
The difference between EMDR and resource tapping, and how each supports transformation
Why Laurel came to believe that trauma work can open a portal to other dimensions
Missing and attached soul parts, spirit release work, and how to sense what isn’t yours
A profound, real-time account of guiding a soul’s crossing at Esalen, and its connection to the region’s Indigenous history
Why Laurel sees Western psychotherapy as, in some ways, colonized—and what other healing traditions have to teach it
The image of a multidimensional mycelium network of light and love that connects all beings

This is a candid, moving conversation about grief, the limits of what evidence-based therapy can explain, and the courage it takes to follow where healing actually leads.

Listen now to explore the evolving edge of trauma healing. →

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 it originally aired on Sounds True One.

Get a FREE month of membership at https://bit.ly/STOne-Free-Month.

Just One Question | Lissa Rankin: Can Healing Our Trau...

Lissa Rankin — October 8, 2026

Physician Lissa Rankin says trauma doesn’t just live in the mind; it can trigger measurable physical disease, from autoimmune conditions to chronic illness that conventional medicine can’t explain. But her most provocative claim is the reverse: that healing the nervous system may be the missing piece in reversing illnesses that have resisted every other treatment.

Dr. Rankin, a physician and author of Sacred Medicine and the New York Times bestseller Mind Over Medicine, has spent years studying the link between the nervous system and self-healing, including polyvagal theory and the ventral vagal branch of the vagus nerve. In this conversation with Tami Simon, she widens the definition of trauma well beyond childhood wounds to include systemic racism, environmental toxins, and the everyday stress of simply living in the world today.

In this conversation, Tami and Lissa explore:

Why Dr. Rankin believes trauma and chronic illness are intrinsically connected
How polyvagal theory and the vagus nerve point to a physical mechanism for healing
Why “developmental trauma” can affect even people who had privileged childhoods
How collective traumas — like systemic racism and white-body supremacy — show up in the body
Why treating trauma isn’t a guarantee of cure, but can still open the door to real healing

This episode is for anyone who has tried everything to heal a chronic or life-threatening illness and wants to understand what role the nervous system might play.

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Lissa Rankin, “Is There a Holy Grail of Healing?”

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. →

Get a FREE month of membership at https://bit.ly/STOne-Free-Month.

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“