Sounds True is on Spotify!
Need some tunes for healing and self-compassion? Experience the moving compositions of music guided by the flow of prana from the Sounds True Ultimate Collection!
Some of our featured artists are Jai Uttal, Nawang Khechog, Maneesh de Moor, Bruce Lipton, and Michael Brant DeMaria.
After the stillness of winter and the slow waking of spring, summer is a time for getting up, getting out, and getting our hands on what inspires us the most. Here are some recent Sounds True releases for tapping into a life well lived.
This is a book that celebrates our interconnection with nature and shows how to deeply engage the natural world wherever you live to dramatically improve your health. Clemens G. Arvay presents fascinating research, practical tools and activities,
inspiring stories, and more in this accessible guide to the remarkable benefits of being in nature.
Get it here: https://www.soundstrue.com/store/the-biophilia-effect.html
Human beings are inseparable from the natural world, coevolving with all of life. In order to thrive, we need to nourish this bond. In his latest book, biologist Clemens G. Arvay illuminates the miraculous ways that the human body interprets the living “code” of plants, animals, and our larger natural habitat for healing and sustenance.
Get it here: https://www.soundstrue.com/store/the-healing-code-of-nature.html
“From an ancient perspective, everything—including all natural things, like rocks, flowers, trees, insects, birds, and mammals
—is alive and infused with conscious energy or spirit,” writes Sarah Seidelmann. If you’re one of the many people looking to reconnect with the creativity, wisdom, and vital energy of the natural world, here is a fantastic guide for tapping into the power of animal totems, or “beasties.”
Get it here: https://www.soundstrue.com/store/book-of-beasties.html
“Making your love manifest, transforming your spirit, good heart, and able hands into food is a great undertaking,” writes renowned chef and Zen priest Edward Espe Brown, “one that will nourish you in the doing, in the offering, and in the eating.” With No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice, Brown beautifully blends expert cooking advice with thoughtful reflections on meaning, joy, and life itself.
Get it here: https://www.soundstrue.com/store/no-recipe.html
From the creators of Good Night Yoga and Good Morning Yoga comes a beautifully illustrated city adventure that introduces children to the delights and benefits of partner yoga.
Perfect for teaming up with a friend, sibling, parent, or caregiver, each easy practice shows how cooperation helps us to imagine, move, and have fun in a whole new way.
Includes a back-page guide for parents and caregivers, showing how to do each pose and how to connect them into an easy-to-follow flow.
Get it here: https://www.soundstrue.com/store/yoga-friends.html
What if you could be happier, right now, without radically changing your life? As nationally recognized happiness expert Nataly Kogan teaches, happiness is not a nice feeling or a frivolous extra. It’s a critical, non-negotiable ingredient for living a fulfilling, meaningful, and healthy life—and it’s a skill that we can all learn and improve through practice. In Happier Now, Nataly shares an illuminating, inspiring, and science-based guide to help you build your happier skills and live with more joy, starting now.
Get it here: https://www.soundstrue.com/store/happier-now.html
Have other books you’ve read by the poolside or under a shade tree ended up changing the way you see the world? Tell us about those summer reads that ended up being more than you expected!
Sounds True is on Spotify!
Need some tunes for rest and relaxation? Check out our Singing Bowl Meditation Playlist! A variety of artists who make a soothing mix of infinite rhythms using Tibetan singing bowls. Perfect throughout a meditative practice.
The Integrity Advantage by Kelly Kosow
Are you ready to open up to new levels of self-trust and self-love, to get where you want to go?
You vowed to speak up at work, and then sat silent in the meeting yet again.
You told yourself “this time the diet is going to stick,” only to watch the scale inching up.
You felt that something just wasn’t right about someone that—until you learned the hard way that your instincts were right.
“Every time you bite your tongue,” teaches Kelley Kosow, “you swallow your integrity.”
Before Kelley Kosow was a renowned life coach and CEO, she constantly second-guessed herself, let her “to-do” lists and others steer her dreams and passions, and played it “small and safe.”
Inspired by the groundbreaking principles of her renowned mentor Debbie Ford, who hand-picked Kelley to be her successor, The Integrity Advantage is Kelley’s step-by-step guide for facing the fear, shame, and false beliefs that cause us to lose our way.
Through life-changing insights, true stories, and proven strategies, this book will show you how to live on your own terms—according to you—from the inside out.
As modern women, we’re taught that we can do it all, have it all, and be it all. While this freedom is beautiful, it’s also exhausting. Being a “worn-out woman” is now so common that we think feeling tired all the time is normal. According to Karen Brody, feeling this exhausted is not normal—and it’s holding us back. In Daring to Rest, Brody comes to the rescue with a 40-day program to help you reclaim rest and access your most powerful, authentic self through yoga nidra, a meditative practice that guides you into one of the deepest states of relaxation imaginable.
It’s time to lie down and begin the journey to waking up
Breathe and Be by Anna Emilia Laitinen and Kate Coombs
Teaching mindfulness helps kids learn to stay calm, regulate their emotions, and appreciate the world around them. With Breathe and Be, author Kate Coombs and illustrator Anna Emilia Laitinen team up to present a book of poetry and art for young readers to make mindfulness easy, natural, and beautiful. Here is a book sure to delight parents and kids alike, blending lovingly illustrated nature imagery with elegant verse about living with awareness and inner peace.
Leopard Warrior by John Lockley
A Teaching Memoir That Crosses the Barriers Between Worlds
A shaman is one who has learned to move between two worlds: our physical reality and the realm of spirits. For John Lockley, shamanic training also meant learning to cross the immense divide of race and culture in South Africa.
As a medic drafted into the South African military in 1990, John Lockley had a powerful dream. “Even though I am a white man of Irish and English descent, I knew in my bones that I had received my calling to become a sangoma, a traditional South African shaman,” John writes. “I felt blessed by the ancient spirit of Africa, and I knew that I had started on a journey filled with magic and danger.” His path took him from the hills of South Korea, where he trained as a student under Zen Master Su Bong, to the rural African landscape of the Eastern Cape and the world of the sangoma mystic healers, where he found his teacher in the medicine woman called MaMngwev
Things That Join the Sea and the Sky by Mark Nepo
A Reader for Navigating the Depths of Our Lives
The Universe holds us and tosses us about, only to hold us again. With Things That Join the Sea and the Sky, Mark Nepo brings us a compelling treasury of short prose reflections to turn to when struggling to keep our heads above water, and to breathe into all of our sorrows and joys.
Inspired by his own journal writing across 15 years, this book shares with us some of Mark’s most personal work. Many passages arise from accounts of his own life events—moments of “sinking and being lifted”—and the insights they yielded. Through these passages, we’re encouraged to navigate our own currents of sea and sky, and to discover something fundamental yet elusive: How, simply, to be here.
To be enjoyed in many ways—individually, by topic, or as an unfolding sequence—Things That Join the Sea and the Sky presents 145 contemplations gathered into 17 themes, each intended to illuminate specific situations.
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:
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. →
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.
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:
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“
Bayo Akomolafe invites us to consider what can happen when urgency gives way to slowing down and healing. His conversation with Tami Simon reflects on sanctuary, grief, ancestry, and finding different ways to meet times of change.
At Sounds True, spiritual wisdom and transformational teachings have been shared since 1985, connecting seekers with respected teachers through books, audio, courses, events, and podcasts.
In this piece, Bayo Akomolafe: Let Us Make Sanctuary and its reflections on sanctuary, slowing down and healing, grief, and ancestry will be discussed.
Born in Nigeria and shaped by Yoruba teachings as well as Western academia, Bayo Akomolafe brings an unconventional perspective to questions of crisis and social change.
In our conversation, Bayo Akomolafe: Let Us Make Sanctuary, he speaks with Tami Simon about sanctuary as a place where slowing down and healing can happen. Their discussion moves through ancestry, grief, trauma, spiritual contemplation, and the crossroads at which familiar ways of responding may no longer be sufficient.
Sanctuary, as it emerges in this conversation, is closely connected to the practice of slowing down. Akomolafe challenges the idea that a pause simply helps us recover enough energy to keep moving in the same direction.
Instead, slowing down can create space for deeper inquiry. It gives us an opportunity to question where we are going, what has shaped that direction, and what other possibilities might become visible when forward movement is no longer our only priority.
Urgent circumstances often create pressure to respond immediately. Akomolafe offers another possibility: slowing down and healing can become part of how we meet a crisis rather than something postponed until the crisis has passed.
This kind of slowing asks for attention. It makes room for questions that can be difficult to hear amid constant movement and gives us time to reconsider the paths we have inherited.
Akomolafe also draws attention to our relationships with those who came before us. The conversation considers the African spiritual practice of pouring drink to the earth as an expression of indebtedness to ancestors and to everything that makes life possible.
From this perspective, sanctuary is relational. Slowing down and healing can involve remembering the connections that hold us and recognizing that our lives do not exist independently of the people, histories, and living world around us.
The image of standing at a crossroads runs through Akomolafe’s reflections. He suggests that the ground beneath familiar assumptions is shifting, creating conditions in which what once went unsaid may become possible to speak and understand.
Slowing down gives us time to remain with that uncertainty. Rather than rushing toward a familiar answer, we can pay attention to what a changing landscape might reveal.
Grief also has a meaningful place in Akomolafe’s understanding of sanctuary. His conversation with Simon considers grief in relation to activism, along with the possibility of approaching sites of historical trauma as places for spiritual contemplation and renewed connection with loss and tragedy.
To make sanctuary, then, can mean creating room to stay present with experiences we might otherwise hurry past. Akomolafe’s invitation asks us to consider what becomes possible when we slow down enough to listen, grieve, question our direction, and encounter the world from another place.
Bayo Akomolafe’s invitation to make sanctuary encourages us to reconsider our relationship with urgency, grief, and change. Through slowing down and healing, we can create space to listen more deeply, honor our connections, and remain open to possibilities that may emerge when we pause.
Bayo Akomolafe is a thinker, writer, speaker, and trained clinical psychologist whose work engages questions of social change, spirituality, community, and the ways people respond to challenging circumstances.
Bayo Akomolafe speaks with Sounds True founder Tami Simon. Their conversation brings his ideas into a reflective exchange centered on sanctuary, change, grief, and spiritual inquiry.
Akomolafe’s perspective is informed in part by Yoruba teachings and his Nigerian background, alongside his experience with Western academic thought. These influences contribute to his distinctive approach to spirituality and social questions.
Ancestry provides a way to consider our relationship with those who came before us. Akomolafe speaks about practices that acknowledge indebtedness to ancestors and the many relationships that make our lives possible.
Akomolafe considers how spiritual contemplation can inform our relationship with activism. Rather than treating inner reflection and collective concerns as entirely separate, his perspective creates room for them to meet.
Historical trauma offers an opportunity to consider how places marked by suffering might be approached differently. Akomolafe reflects on visiting such sites as spaces for contemplation and engagement with histories of loss.
The crossroads represents a place where established directions may become uncertain and different possibilities can emerge. It provides a useful image for considering periods of cultural and personal transition.
The conversation recognizes that individual lives are shaped by relationships, histories, ancestors, communities, and the living world. This perspective invites a broader understanding of how people belong to one another and their surroundings.
No. The conversation can speak to both longtime spiritual seekers and people who are newly curious about contemplative ideas. Sounds True shares teachings in an accessible, heart-led way for people at different points in their learning journeys.
You can listen to the full Bayo Akomolafe: Let Us Make Sanctuary podcast conversation through Sounds True.
Michelle Cassandra Johnson is an author, activist, spiritual teacher, racial equity consultant, and intuitive healer. She is the author of six books, including Skill in Action and Finding Refuge. Amy Burtaine is a leadership coach and racial equity trainer. With Robin DiAngelo, she is the coauthor of The Facilitator's Guide for White Affinity Groups. For more, visit https://www.michellecjohnson.com/wisdom-of-the-hive.
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