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enlighten, awaken,
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We’ve been sharing transformational ideas through podcasts for decades, keeping the sound at the heart of Sounds True. Today we bring you even more shows and perspectives, all with the same love and fearless embrace of the unknown you’ve come to expect.
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Meet Your Host Tami Simon
Founded Sounds True in 1985 as a multimedia publishing house with a mission to disseminate spiritual wisdom. She hosts a popular weekly podcast called Insights at the Edge, where she has interviewed many of today's leading teachers. Tami lives with her wife, Julie M. Kramer, and their two spoodles, Rasberry and Bula, in Boulder, Colorado.
Author photo © Jason Elias
Most Recent
Just One Question | Gabor Maté: What Keeps Me from Be...
Why do some of the most hardened people—lifers on death row, people who’ve killed—turn out to be, underneath it all, remarkably sensitive? Physician and trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté has spent decades working with addicts and prisoners, and he’s found a pattern that upends how we usually think about cruelty and compassion.
Dr. Gabor Maté is a physician and bestselling author whose work on trauma and addiction has shaped how millions understand pain, illness, and healing. He’s the author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, When the Body Says No, Scattered Minds, and, with his son Daniel, The Myth of Normal.
In this conversation, Tami and Gabor explore:
- Why compassion is wired into us from birth and what shuts it down
- The neuroscience of care, drawing on affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp’s research on emotional systems
- What Gabor has witnessed firsthand working with lifers and people on death row
- The difference between “orchid” and “dandelion” temperaments, and why high sensitivity can become either a liability or a gift
- Why genes linked to addiction may really be genes for sensitivity
This one’s for anyone trying to understand the roots of cruelty, or working through their own compassion fatigue; toward others, or toward themselves.
Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Gabor Maté titled “Gabor Maté: Healing Principles to Embody in a Traumatized World”
E225: Becoming Comfortable with Discomfort
You are not your heart or mind but the conscious being who is experiencing them. Psychological disturbance results from resisting uncomfortable experiences and storing those impressions inside. Rather than asking the disturbed mind to solve the problems it created, learn through meditation and daily practice to step back, allow thoughts and feelings to pass through, and become comfortable with temporary discomfort. By practicing with life’s small frustrations and gradually embracing greater challenges, you clear the mind, open the heart, and discover that you can peacefully handle whatever reality brings.
© Sounds True Inc. Episodes: © 2026 Michael A. Singer. All Rights Reserved.
Michelle Cassandra Johnson: “Invocations and Spe...
What are we actually being protected from—and how do we call in the support we need to stay grounded, whole, and connected to ourselves?
This week, Tami Simon speaks with Michelle Cassandra Johnson—author, mystic, activist, spiritual director, and racial equity educator—about her new book, You Are Protected: Invoking Spiritual Support to Sustain Your Energy. Drawing on ancestral wisdom, archetypes, elemental energies, and spell work, Michelle offers a grounded, practical vision of protection—not as armor against the world, but as a way of staying rooted in our own center.
Join Tami and Michelle to explore:
- What we’re really protected from, and why protection isn’t about building walls
- Naming malevolent energies—from collective distraction to war and disconnection
- How to call on ancestors, archetypes, and elemental energies (mountains, trees, water) for support
- The practice of “spiritual hygiene,” and why it matters as much as physical or mental hygiene
- How to cast a simple protection spell using salt—no cauldron required
- Creating a sigil: turning an intention into a symbol you can charge and work with
- Michelle’s own birth story, and why she calls a traumatic beginning “auspicious”
- Calling in collective protection for our human family during a precarious time
Whether you keep a cauldron of your own or have never cast a spell in your life, this conversation offers real tools—and real permission—to protect your energy, tend your spirit, and stay open-hearted even in difficult times.
Listen now, and find your own way toward protection. →
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.
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Customer Favorites
Melissa Brown: Nourishing Your Nervous System
When was the last time you felt truly relaxed, present, and at peace with everything going on in your life and in our world? In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with Melissa Brown about her new audio learning program, Nourishing Your Nervous System, and how we can begin to empower ourselves to choose the state of regulation over dysregulation. Give a listen to this practical and inspiring discussion of the ventral vagal branch of the parasympathetic nervous system—and how we can access it for calm, joy, and vitality; co-regulation with others as a means to move out of dorsal depression; productive thinking versus rumination and other forms of unhealthy thinking; the elongated breath as a tool for shifting out of sympathetic arousal (or the “fight, flight, freeze” response); improving your “vagal tone”; doom-scrolling, binge-watching, and other ways we distract ourselves from what we don’t want to feel—and how we can learn to hold a state of vitality and a state of tension at the same time; the psoas muscles and their connection to nervous system activation; the benefits of “constructive rest pose”; “fixed action patterns” and how the psoas muscles store trauma; attuning to your heart; and more.
Joanna Macy: We Belong: Hope, Choice, and Our Relation...
Dr. Joanna Macy is an ecophilosopher, activist, and Buddhist scholar who has been at the forefront of movements for social justice and environmentalism for more than five decades. She founded the Work That Reconnects Network and has written many books, including World as Lover, World as Self. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Joanna about hope in times of chaos and dissolution, as well as how hope is something we do rather than just feel. Joanna and Tami discuss apathy as a refusal to face the inevitability of suffering and why the state of the environment can be especially heartbreaking. Finally, Tami and Joanna talk about our relationship with the earth as a natural birthright—one that is actually the source of all our energy and joy.
Elizabeth Stanley: Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness
Elizabeth Stanley is a Georgetown University professor and the creator of Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT)®, an approach taught to thousands in civilian and military high stress environments. A U.S. Army veteran with service in Asia and Europe, she holds degrees from Yale, Harvard, and MIT. She is the author of the book, Widen the Window: Training Your Brain and Body to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma. In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with Elizabeth Stanley about her 8-session online course, Mindfulness-Based Mind Fitness Training: A Trauma-Sensitive Online Course to Build Resilience and Thrive During Stress. They also discuss why MMFT is a practice we can all benefit from; the value of expanding our “window of tolerance”; the relationship between personal agency and trauma; the “thinking” brain versus the “survival” brain; when stress becomes trauma; the importance of recovery from stressful situations; and more.
Timeless Classics
Lance Allred: The New Alpha Male
Lance Allred is a former NBA player (who was the first legally deaf player in the league), public speaker, and author. With Sounds True, he has published The New Alpha Male: How to Win the Game When the Rules Are Changing. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Lance about the experiences he had in professional sports that led him to reevaluate what it means to be a man in contemporary society. Lance explains how his upbringing in a rural, polygamous commune informed his original ideas about masculinity, highlighting the subconscious assumptions about money and power that affect American men’s self-worth. Tami and Lance also discuss the roles of emotional vulnerability and surrender in the lives of modern men. Finally, they talk about the principle of perseverance and the increasingly urgent need for all cultures to reexamine their assumptions and core values.(63 minutes)
Micah Mortali: Rewilding
Micah Mortali is the director of the Kripalu School, a certified yoga teacher, and a longtime wilderness guide. With Sounds True, he has published Rewilding: Meditations, Practices, and Skills for Awakening in Nature. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Micah about humanity’s growing disconnection from the earth and how “rewilding” can help slow that trend. They talk about rewilding both as individuals and as part of whole ecosystems. Micah also shares the story of an intense, revelatory trail encounter with a bear and comments on the “species loneliness” of urban environments. Mulling the sense of grief they have for humankind’s effects on the environment, Tami and Micah consider how modern people can grapple with being in exile from the natural world. Finally, they discuss the barriers many have to reentering nature, as well as ways to initiate your own rewilding experience no matter where you are.(64 minutes)
Christian Conte: Healing Conflict: Listen, Validate, a...
Christian Conte, PhD, is a mental health specialist and leading authority on anger management. With Sounds True, Christian has published Walking Through Anger: A New Design for Confronting Conflict in an Emotionally Charged World. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon talks with Christian about his Yield Theory of emotional management, focusing on the process of “listen, validate, explore options.” Christian explains the events that led to his interest in anger management, as well as the origins of Yield Theory. He emphasizes the importance of meeting others where they are, giving them the opportunity to drain anger’s charge from their limbic system. Christian and Tami discuss why it’s necessary to cultivate humility and how Yield Theory might be applied to our currently divisive culture. Finally, they speak on “the cartoon world” that angry responses often create, as well as the importance of watching what we add to our minds.(63 minutes)
