We’re happy to offer you The Healing Pulse, a free download featuring inspiring and and expansive music for healing, relaxation, and contemplation, Includes hand-picked selections from the Sounds True archive, including tracks from our friends Deva Premal, Jai Uttal, Snatam Kaur, Glen Velez, Kimba Arem, John de Kadt, Singh Kaur, and Riley Lee.
Download The Healing Pulse now!
More music from the Sounds True archive…
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 the antidote to a world coming apart isn’t a bigger plan, but a smaller, daily act of devotion?
This week, Tami Simon speaks with Tracee Stanley—teacher of yoga nidra, meditation, and self-inquiry, founder of Empowered Life Circle, and author of the new Sounds True book Living Ritual: Infuse Each Day with Purpose and Spirit—about why ritual may be the most important practice we have during what she calls threshold times.
Join Tami and Tracee to explore:
Tracee also speaks candidly about walking away from a successful film career, and what a surgery taught her about the ego that refuses to let the body rest.
Tracee opens and closes this interview with a short guided ritual you can practice along with.
Listen now, and let something be reshaped. →
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.
Have you ever walked into a room and felt someone else’s sadness settle into your own chest before a single word was spoken? Or left a gathering so depleted that you needed hours alone just to feel like yourself again? You may already know what it means to move through the world as an empath, someone who absorbs other people’s emotions as if they were your own.
For over 40 years, we at Sounds True have been trusted stewards of spiritual education, home to the world’s largest living library of transformational teachings. Our podcast, Insights at the Edge, hosted by founder Tami Simon, has preserved real, unscripted conversations with respected spiritual teachers and healers. Here, Tami sits down with Judith Orloff, MD, a UCLA psychiatrist and leading voice on empathy, whose bestselling books have helped countless sensitive people understand themselves with more compassion.
Together, they trace the inner life of an empath, why sensitivity deserves honoring, and the grounding practices that help you stay open without losing yourself.
Judith opened her conversation with Tami by naming something many sensitive people feel but rarely have language for: the experience of being an emotional sponge. As an empath, you carry the joy and sorrow of those around you in your own body, as though the boundary between their inner world and yours has quietly dissolved. Judith described this as a real and distinct way of being, one that reaches far beyond ordinary sensitivity.
She also drew an important distinction with Tami: there is a difference between learning empathic skills and being a natural empath, wired to take in the emotional weather of every room. For a natural empath, this isn’t an occasional technique. It’s a constant, often unfiltered channel of perception that, without understanding, can lead to exhaustion and overwhelm.
If this sounds familiar, Judith offers something valuable: permission to see your sensitivity not as a flaw, but as a legitimate way of perceiving the world.
Judith sees empathy as far more than an interesting personality trait. In her conversation with Tami, she framed it as something close to medicine, a healing force with the power to touch both the individual carrying it and the relationships and communities that surround them. The path of thriving as an empath begins with recognizing just how much this capacity can offer, once it is met with the right care:
Judith spoke about empathy as something that, when honored rather than suppressed, becomes a source of genuine healing for the person who carries it. Rather than treating sensitivity as an obstacle to push through, she invited listeners to see it as a doorway back to themselves, one that asks for recognition and gentleness rather than resistance.
In her discussion with Tami, Judith described how empathy shapes the quality of our closest connections. When you can truly feel what another person is experiencing, relationships deepen in ways that surface-level understanding never allows. This kind of attunement, she noted, is part of what makes empaths such meaningful presences in other people’s lives.
Judith extended this idea outward, describing empathy as a vital medicine not just for individuals but for communities as a whole. In a world that feels fractured, she suggested that empaths carry a quiet but essential role, helping to knit connection back into relationships and groups that have grown distant or strained.
Knowing what it means to be an empath is only the beginning. Judith and Tami also spent real time on the practical side of this conversation, the everyday tools that help you stay steady when the world around you feels overwhelming. Sensitivity without support can tip quickly into exhaustion. With that in mind, Judith offered several grounding tools for empath self care as you move through a world that can feel loud and demanding:
Judith spoke about grounding as an essential, ongoing practice for empaths rather than something reserved for moments of crisis. Staying connected to your own body and breath throughout the day helps create a kind of internal steadiness, so you’re less likely to be pulled entirely into the emotional current of everyone around you.
A recurring theme in Judith’s conversation with Tami was the importance of boundaries. For empaths, saying no is not unkind. It’s an act of self-respect that protects your energy so you can show up fully for the people and situations that matter most, rather than depleting yourself for everyone who asks.
Judith was clear that self-care is foundational for empaths. Without regular time to recover and replenish, sensitivity can quickly tip into overwhelm. She encouraged listeners to treat rest and quiet as essential parts of a sustainable, thriving life, not indulgences to fit in when there’s time left over.
What emerges most clearly from this conversation is a simple but freeing idea: your sensitivity was never something to fix. Judith Orloff’s conversation with Tami Simon offers a gentler way of understanding what it means to move through the world feeling everything so fully, and a reminder that a fuller, steadier life as an empath is possible once you learn to honor your own nervous system as carefully as you honor everyone else’s.
We invite you to spend time with the full depth of this exchange. Listen to Judith Orloff on How to Thrive as an Empath to take in the warmth and nuance that only a real, unscripted conversation can carry. Our online courses offer more ways to deepen this work alongside teachers who know this path from the inside.
Judith Orloff describes an empath as someone who doesn’t just sympathize with others’ emotions but absorbs them, often feeling them in their own body as though the feelings were their own.
Judith draws a clear distinction between people learning empathic skills and natural empaths, who are wired from the start to take in the emotional atmosphere of every room, making their sensitivity a constant part of daily life.
Because empaths absorb emotions as their own, spending time around intense feelings, whether joyful or difficult, can leave them depleted in a way that others may not experience in the same situations.
Judith’s conversation with Tami offers real encouragement here, showing that with grounding, boundaries, and consistent self-care, empaths can move from feeling overwhelmed to feeling genuinely at home in their sensitivity.
Judith describes empathy as a kind of medicine, one that deepens personal connections and helps knit communities back together, especially in a world that can often feel disconnected.
Boundaries are essential, not optional. Judith emphasizes that a loving no is an act of self-respect that protects an empath’s energy so they can show up fully for what matters most.
Our online courses offer more ways to explore this kind of work, and our Sounds True One membership connects you with a wider community learning alongside teachers just like her.
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.
Andrea Gibson did not write about mortality from a safe distance. Colorado’s 2023–25 Poet Laureate spoke with Sounds True founder Tami Simon while living with cancer, and Sounds True later shared the conversation again as an encore after Gibson’s passing.
Great poets tend to expand our view of ourselves, of each other, and of the wider universe we share, and Sounds True has spent four decades making room for voices willing to speak this honestly.
In this piece, we look at what Gibson taught about softening rather than pushing, what poetry offered as a container for grief, and what it looked like to keep showing up for a cause while loosening one’s grip on the outcome.
What emerged was not wisdom delivered from a place of having already arrived, but a real-time account of learning to love a life that was actively slipping away, told with a rare mix of humor, ache, and clarity.
Hear the full conversation in Andrea Gibson on Facing Mortality and Being Adored by the Universe, recorded as part of our Insights at the Edge series.
A phrase that anchors much of this conversation, trying softer instead of harder, captures something Gibson circled back to again and again. Illness stripped away the option of pushing through discomfort the way Gibson once might have. What replaced it was a different relationship to effort itself, one built on relaxation rather than force, and one that felt genuinely earned rather than borrowed from a wellness slogan.
For Gibson, poetry and grief were never separate disciplines. Writing became the place where sorrow could be witnessed rather than managed, and the poem “Acceptance Speech After Setting the World Record in Goosebumps,” read aloud during the episode, shows this directly. Rather than resolving grief into something tidy, Gibson’s poems tend to sit within it, finding unexpected tenderness there instead of rushing toward comfort or closure, a quality that has resonated with readers facing their own losses.
This approach offers something rare: permission to let a poem remain unresolved, because life itself often remains unresolved. Gibson never treated grief as a problem waiting for a solution, but as a companion worth genuinely listening to.
The episode’s title borrows Gibson’s own language for a shift in perception that arrived alongside the diagnosis: a felt sense of being cherished by existence itself, not despite the illness but somehow through it. This was not framed as denial or spiritual bypassing. Gibson spoke openly about fear and about the ordinary difficulty of staying present with an uncertain future, refusing to perform a peace that wasn’t fully felt.
Gibson described this shift as something closer to surrender than achievement, a letting go of the need to control how the story ended in exchange for a fuller experience of what was happening right now.
Gibson’s decades of work in queer, disability, and social justice movements gave the conversation another dimension: how does a lifelong activist hold hope when illness limits what the body can do? Gibson didn’t retreat from these questions, instead treating illness as another lens for examining how change actually happens. Several threads run through this part of the discussion:
Much of this conversation returns to self-love, not as an indulgent afterthought but as something Gibson treated as foundational work. Loving the self fully, Gibson suggested, is inseparable from loving the whole world, since the way we treat our own fear and fragility often mirrors how we treat everyone else’s. This wasn’t offered as a tidy affirmation but as ongoing practice, revisited daily and never fully finished, especially on days when self-compassion felt hardest to access.
Gibson resisted the idea that joy has to wait for circumstances to improve. Even amid a serious diagnosis, Gibson described locating genuine joy inside small, present moments rather than deferring it to some future recovery. This wasn’t forced positivity; Gibson was candid about fear and grief throughout the conversation. The joy Gibson described lived alongside difficulty, not instead of it, which is part of what makes this teaching feel honest rather than aspirational, and part of why it has stayed with so many listeners since.
Throughout the conversation, Gibson returns to authenticity as the single most important quality in creative work. Writing that performs certainty or polish, in Gibson’s view, tends to ring hollow, while writing that admits confusion and fear invites readers closer rather than pushing them away. This belief shaped Gibson’s entire body of work, long before illness entered the picture, and it became even more pronounced once every page carried real stakes.
Sounds True has always believed spiritual teaching lands hardest when it comes from an unscripted, honest voice rather than a polished script. Gibson’s conversation with Tami embodies that belief completely, offering listeners a chance to sit with mortality alongside someone who was living it in real time rather than theorizing from a comfortable distance. That kind of transmission is rare, and it’s part of why this episode has continued to reach new listeners well beyond its original air date.
Andrea Gibson left behind a body of work that refuses to separate beauty from difficulty, and this conversation captures that refusal in its most direct form. At Sounds True, our mission has always been to wake up the world, and Gibson’s willingness to stay tender in the face of mortality is exactly the kind of courage that mission was built to honor. Their words remain in our library for anyone who needs company in facing what feels unfaceable, today or on a harder day ahead, and their voice continues to offer that company long after the recording ended.
Andrea Gibson was Colorado’s 2023–25 Poet Laureate, celebrated for poetry on love, identity, and social justice.
The conversation with Tami Simon originally aired in 2023 and was later shared again as an encore.
Gibson reads “Acceptance Speech After Setting the World Record in Goosebumps” during the conversation.
Sounds True continues sharing Gibson’s recorded conversations and reflections through our podcast archives.
This conversation appears on Insights at the Edge, hosted by Sounds True founder Tami Simon.
Many listeners facing illness find comfort in Gibson’s honesty about fear, softness, and staying present.
Visit our Self-Compassion collection for related titles and programs from other Sounds True authors.
Yes, related conversations and resources appear throughout our Relationships and Spirituality & Awakening collections.
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.
© 2024 Sounds True. All rights reserved.
