One of the most important aspects of awakening, says Dr. Ann Marie Chiasson, is the opening of the heart. The heart is a floodgate which, when open, enables the world’s great mystical teachings and realizations to pour through.
Here, Ann Marie guides you through a short, heart-centering meditation, which you can practice daily, or anytime you wish to access the mystery and intelligence that is your own heart.
One of the most important aspects of awakening, says Dr. Ann Marie Chiasson, is the opening of the heart. The heart is a floodgate which, when open, enables the world’s great mystical teachings and realizations to pour through.
Here, Ann Marie guides you through a short, heart-centering meditation, which you can practice daily, or anytime you wish to access the mystery and intelligence that is your own heart.
What is spiritual awakening? Author, respected energy healer, and medical doctor Ann Marie Chiasson speaks of the journey as waking up to the reality that “we’re all in a flow together.” Rather than perceiving reality through the lens of what we want, we begin to see things as they are, which releases a tremendous amount of energy in our lives. Filmed live at The Wake Up Festival, Dr. Chiasson describes her experience of awakening and its implications in our lives.
We at Sounds True are committed to exploring the many faces and facets of awakening, and would love to hear from you as to your experience and understanding. Perhaps it is the case that there are 7 billion doorways into awakening, one for each human heart.
Tami Simon speaks with Dr. Ann Marie Chiasson, who incorporates integrative family medicine with energy healing. Dr. Chiasson is Canadian board-certified in family practice and has a private integrative and energy medicine practice in Tucson, AZ. With Sounds True, she has created several audio programs, a home study course, an online training program, and her new book, Energy Healing: The Essentials for Self-Care. In this interview, Dr. Chiasson speaks about allowing energy to flow into the body through assemblage points. She also talks about sacred touch, leads us in a heart center meditation, and explains what it means to access a unified field of energy through all three dan tians. (70 minutes)
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.
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Most people come to meditation looking for a break, a few quiet minutes away from a world that rarely slows down on its own. Reverend angel Kyodo williams spends much of this conversation gently taking apart that assumption, suggesting that real stillness was never about leaving the world behind at all. It’s a small shift in framing that ends up changing everything about how the rest of her teaching lands.
Rev. angel is an ordained Zen priest, activist, and founder of the Center for Transformative Change, recognized as the world’s second female Zen teacher of African descent and the author of Being Black and Radical Dharma.
Sounds True has featured her teaching across our Meditation Summit and A Year of Mindfulness precisely because she refuses to separate inner practice from outer justice, treating the two as a single continuous act rather than competing priorities. What follows traces her case for a warrior spirit built on presence rather than escape, and the meditation practice she offers as its foundation.
Rev. angel opens by naming something many practitioners feel but rarely say aloud: the pull toward meditation often comes wrapped in a longing to retreat from an overwhelming world. She doesn’t dismiss that longing, but she does redirect it, suggesting that genuine practice engages our inner fullness rather than fleeing from outer noise. What looks like withdrawal from the outside, she argues, is closer to a deepening than a departure, a distinction that reframes the entire purpose of sitting down to practice in the first place.
Rev. angel developed a specific meditation practice she calls Effort and Release after years spent working alongside people doing demanding social change work. The practice blends deliberate effort with intentional letting go, addressing a pattern she noticed constantly among activists and organizers: a strong pull toward doing, accomplishing, and pushing that rarely leaves room for rest. She describes meditation and social change as inseparable, since the way a person relates to their own mind directly shapes what they find themselves willing to engage with in the wider world.
Hear the complete teaching in her episode, Reverend angel Kyodo williams: Warrior Spirit
A central thread running through Rev. Angel’s teaching rejects any hard line between internal awareness and external action. She describes our self-talk, the noise level of our minds, and our capacity for presence as directly shaping how we show up for others and what we find acceptable in the wider world. This isn’t a metaphor for her; it’s closer to a working principle behind everything she teaches, from meditation instruction to movement strategy.
What we tolerate in the world outside us, she suggests, tends to trace directly back to what we’ve grown accustomed to tolerating within our own minds first, which is why she treats internal clarity as a precondition for meaningful external change rather than a separate, optional pursuit.
The phrase “warrior spirit,” drawn from her earlier book Being Black, describes something quite different from combativeness or aggression directed outward at the world. For Rev. Angel, this spirit is built on truth-telling and responsibility, a foundation for genuine happiness rather than a posture of defensiveness. It asks practitioners to stay engaged with difficulty, including the difficulty of racism, patriarchy, and other inherited harms, rather than looking away or numbing out. This framing has resonated widely since the book’s original publication, offering readers across many backgrounds a way to hold fearlessness and tenderness together rather than treating them as opposites.
Rev. angel has spent more than fifteen years shaping what she calls Transformative Social Change, a field built on the belief that lasting justice work requires equally serious inner work. She resists treating meditation as a private escape hatch separate from activism, instead framing contemplative practice as fuel for sustained, clear-eyed engagement with collective harm. Burnout among organizers, in her view, often stems from skipping this inner dimension entirely, treating stillness as optional rather than structural to the work itself. She has described this field as one she helped name and shape, watching it grow from a personal conviction into a recognized approach embraced across activist and spiritual communities alike.
Rev. Angel’s later book, Radical Dharma, co-written with Lama Rod Owens and Jasmine Syedullah, extends this same warrior spirit into a direct examination of race, love, and liberation within Buddhist communities themselves. The book argues that spiritual communities are not exempt from the patterns of harm found elsewhere in society, and that genuine awakening has to include an honest reckoning with those patterns rather than a spiritual bypass around them. This willingness to hold institutions, including her own tradition, accountable runs consistently through everything she teaches, from her earliest writing through her more recent contributions to Sounds True’s programming.
Reverend angel Kyodo williams doesn’t offer meditation as a rest stop from the world’s demands. She offers it as a training ground for staying present with those demands without losing ourselves inside them. That distinction, subtle but significant, may be exactly what separates spiritual bypass from spiritual maturity, and it’s the thread that ties her meditation teaching to her justice work without contradiction. Listeners who come looking for a quick escape often leave with something more durable instead: a practice for staying rooted precisely where things are hardest.
Sounds True continues sharing her teaching because our mission to wake up the world has never meant looking away from what’s hardest to face, and few teachers hold that tension as steadily as she does. Her books and audio programs remain in our library for anyone ready to bring the same steadiness into their own life and work.
She is an ordained Zen priest, activist, author, and founder of the Center for Transformative Change.
Her books include Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace and Radical Dharma.
A meditation method blending deliberate effort with intentional letting go, developed for activists and organizers.
No, her ideas on presence and inner work apply to anyone navigating stress, urgency, or burnout in daily life.
A fearless, truth-telling posture grounded in responsibility and grace, not aggression or combativeness.
Yes, she has appeared in Sounds True’s Meditation Summit and A Year of Mindfulness series.
An organization she founded connecting inner personal work with large-scale social transformation.
Explore our Insights at the Edge Podcast for further interviews on mindfulness, justice, and social engagement.
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.
What happens when the world around you feels like it has lost its grip on truth, and you’re left wondering how to hold onto faith anyway? That question sits at the heart of the exchange between Tami Simon and Iyanla Vanzant, one of the most trusted voices in personal empowerment today.
Over 40 years, we at Sounds True have been devoted to bringing you the living wisdom of teachers like Iyanla Vanzant, an author of five New York Times bestsellers and a familiar face to millions as the host of Iyanla: Fix My Life. As the world’s largest living library of transformational teachings, and home to Tami Simon’s Insights at the Edge, we exist to preserve these conversations in their true, unscripted form.
What Iyanla and Tami uncovered reaches into territory many of us have been quietly longing to name: intimacy with the divine, the erosion of trust and integrity, and the calling that shapes who you really are.
At the heart of what Iyanla Vanzant shares is something many of us long for but rarely name aloud: an intimate, ongoing relationship with God. A living connection you return to daily, the way you would a trusted friend. This is where everything else begins.
Iyanla Vanzant reminds us that faith is lived, returned to moment by moment, a practice built most steadily through the very times when doubt feels easier than trust. That distinction matters more than it might first appear. Trying times reveal whether your faith is a story you tell about yourself or a relationship you live inside, moment by moment, choice by choice.
We invite you to sit with that difference for a moment. Where in your life are you being asked to move from believing in something to actually leaning into it, even when the outcome is not yet clear, and even when trust feels like the harder path?
Beyond the personal work of faith, Iyanla Vanzant and Tami Simon turn their attention outward to something both women see slipping away in modern life. It is a quiet loss, the kind that shows up in small daily interactions long before it becomes a headline. Their conversation names three specific casualties worth sitting with:
Iyanla Vanzant speaks to integrity as something deeper than simply telling the truth. The alignment between what you say, what you believe, and how you show up in the world each day. When that alignment breaks down, even in small ways, something essential within a community begins to quietly erode. A person who values honesty but withholds difficult truths from the people they love is already living out of alignment.
Accountability emerges as a value that seems increasingly rare: the willingness to own your actions and their consequences without deflecting or minimizing what happened. Iyanla Vanzant and Tami Simon reflect on what it costs a society when people stop holding themselves responsible to one another and to the truth. When accountability disappears from daily life, trust erodes alongside it, and the small moments of honesty that rebuild it become more vital.
Perhaps most tender is their reflection on trust itself. Iyanla Vanzant speaks to how trust, once assumed as a baseline of human connection, now feels harder to extend and even harder to earn back. That raises an honest question about what it truly takes to rebuild something so foundational to how we relate.
The exchange moves toward something deeply personal: the idea that every person carries a calling that is theirs alone to discover. Iyanla Vanzant and Tami Simon treat this as a truth available to anyone willing to sit with it. Three related threads open from there:
What stays with you is a felt sense of what it means to live honestly, with yourself, with the divine, and with the people around you. Iyanla Vanzant and Tami Simon remind us that faith in difficult times is about staying in relationship with something larger than the moment you are in, even when that moment feels unresolved. The quiet challenge they leave us with is this: notice where integrity, accountability, and trust have faded in your own life, and consider what living in closer alignment with your true calling might look like.
The teachings Iyanla Vanzant brings forward are part of a larger body of work we have been honored to carry for over 40 years. At Sounds True, we believe that wisdom shared becomes wisdom lived. Wherever these ideas meet something real in you, we encourage you to keep going. Our courses, community, and programs are here to hold you as you do.
Iyanla Vanzant is an author and television host known for five New York Times bestsellers and her role as host of Iyanla: Fix My Life, along with several audio programs created with Sounds True.
This episode is a conversation between Iyanla Vanzant and Tami Simon exploring intimacy with the divine, fading values like trust and integrity, and the unique calling that shapes your most authentic self.
Iyanla Vanzant reminds us that faith is not something you simply have but something you practice daily, especially when life gives you every reason to doubt and lose your footing.
Iyanla Vanzant and Tami Simon reflect on these values as ones quietly fading from modern life, and what is lost personally and collectively when we stop holding each other accountable.
Iyanla Vanzant teaches that your calling is uncovered through living in truth with yourself, not invented from scratch. Our online courses offer structured paths for going deeper into this kind of work.
For Iyanla Vanzant, intimacy with the divine means a living, ongoing connection you return to daily, much like a trusted friendship, rather than a distant faith reserved only for hard times.
You can hear the full episode on Insights at the Edge, and find more conversations like it through Sounds True One, our community membership for ongoing teachings.
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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6 comments on The Heart Center Meditation
lovely/thanks!
Thank very much! 🙂
Thank you very much ! 🙂
Simple and powerful and direct. Thanks!
Felt my energy shift to a calmer ‘warmer’ place. Thank you.
Thanks, Matt! xxx