Tami Simon interviews long-time social change agent and the co-author of Spiritual Politics, Corinne McLaughlin. Corinne explains the coming changes of 2012 in terms of their economic, political, and spiritual significance. She describes the unfolding of a higher evolutionary plan, and the growth in socially responsible businesses and non-adversarial, transpartisan politics. (49 minutes)
The idea of the Akashic Records has endured because it speaks to a quiet intuition many people share: that life holds meaning beyond what is immediately visible. Often described as a spiritual library, the Akashic Records point to a field of awareness where experience, intention, and learning are held together. This understanding invites reflection rather than belief, offering a way to consider life as an unfolding relationship between choice and consciousness.
At Sounds True, we have spent decades preserving and sharing living wisdom from spiritual teachers who speak directly from experience. Since 1985, we have built a library of thousands of teachings focused on consciousness, intuition, healing, and transformation. Our work is grounded in honoring authentic voices and making spiritual insight accessible, relevant, and rooted in real life.
Here, we discuss the akashic records’ meaning, how soul records function as a spiritual library, and how this perspective supports healing, intuition, and conscious living.
The akashic records’ meaning points to a long-standing spiritual understanding that consciousness leaves an imprint. Across ancient Indian philosophy, early mystical Christianity, and modern metaphysical thought, the Akashic Records are described as an energetic field that holds the memory of all experience. This memory is not stored as events alone, but as intention, awareness, and learning.
The term “Akasha” refers to ether or subtle space, the unseen medium through which all form arises. Within this space exists a spiritual library that records the movement of consciousness itself. Every thought, choice, and moment of growth contributes to this field. The records do not function as a ledger of right and wrong. They reflect how awareness evolves through experience.
Understanding the Akashic Records in this way shifts the question from prediction to meaning. Rather than asking what will happen next, the records invite inquiry into why certain patterns repeat and what they are teaching the soul. This approach emphasizes responsibility, compassion, and clarity. The spiritual library exists to support remembrance of purpose, not to define destiny.
The question of what are akashic records are often arises from a desire to understand how individual experience is held within a greater field of awareness. The records describe not only what happens in a life but also how consciousness responds, learns, and evolves through each experience.
Soul records form through lived experience. Every moment of choice, relationship, creativity, and challenge leaves an energetic imprint. These imprints are not judgments or evaluations. They are expressions of awareness meeting circumstance. Over time, they shape recurring themes that reflect what the soul is learning.
Rather than existing as fixed data, soul records remain dynamic. As insight grows and understanding deepens, the energetic quality of past experiences can shift. This is why awareness in the present moment has the capacity to bring resolution to long-standing patterns.
While soul records are personal, they exist within a collective spiritual library. Each individual journey contributes to a shared field of learning. This perspective emphasizes interconnectedness without diminishing personal responsibility.
From this view, the Akashic Records hold both individuality and unity. They show how personal growth supports collective evolution, and how collective awareness shapes individual opportunity.
The Akashic Records are often described as living because they respond to awareness. This spiritual library is not static or frozen in time. It reflects consciousness as it moves, learns, and refines itself through experience.
Unlike historical archives, the Akashic Records evolve as insight deepens. When understanding shifts, the energetic quality of past experience also shifts. This is why engagement with the records emphasizes presence rather than analysis.
Seeing the records as a spiritual library of consciousness reframes personal history. Events are understood as moments of learning rather than defining traits. This perspective supports compassion toward oneself and others while encouraging responsibility for present choices.
Consciousness is the organizing intelligence of the records. Information arises not as facts alone, but as resonance. What is revealed aligns with what is most relevant for growth in the moment.
Practices that support attunement to consciousness can deepen this relationship. How to Read the Akashic Records offers a grounded framework for developing that receptivity with clarity and intention.
Soul records reflect how awareness matures through experience. They show continuity of learning rather than a sequence of disconnected lives. From this perspective, growth unfolds gradually through relationship, challenge, and self-reflection.
Within soul records, patterns appear as recurring themes rather than repeated events. These themes may involve trust, expression, service, or belonging. They surface across time to invite deeper understanding rather than repetition for its own sake.
Recognizing patterns helps shift attention from external circumstances to internal response. Awareness of how one meets experience often reveals more than the experience itself.
The records emphasize choice as the mechanism of evolution. While past experience informs present tendencies, it does not determine outcomes. Awareness creates flexibility.
As consciousness grows, the energetic imprint of earlier experiences softens. This is how transformation occurs within the records. Growth does not erase the past. It integrates it.
One of the most common reasons people ask what akashic records are is a desire for clarity around purpose. The records do not assign meaning. They reveal how meaning is shaped through choice, awareness, and response to life’s circumstances.
Seen this way, purpose is not something to be achieved. It is something that unfolds through participation in life. The Akashic Records emphasize that choice remains available in every moment, regardless of past experience. Awareness of this flexibility is often what brings the greatest sense of alignment.
Akashic healing works through insight rather than intervention. The records reveal how present challenges connect to deeper patterns held within soul records, allowing awareness to soften long-held beliefs. Healing emerges as understanding replaces self-judgment and experience is seen as meaningful rather than limiting.
Working with the records often begins with learning to access them directly. How to Read the Akashic Records provides a structured approach to this process, supporting clarity and discernment in spiritual inquiry. From there, healing can deepen through working with light as a transformative force — Healing with Spiritual Light offers practical tools for channeling that energy in service of personal transformation.
Akashic healing does not exist in isolation from other wisdom traditions. The Power of Shamanism explores how shamanic practices intersect with soul-level healing, expanding the pathways through which insight and release can occur. Grounding this work in the body’s own energy system, Chakra Activation supports the integration of Akashic insights by keeping the energetic body open, balanced, and receptive.
When these practices work together, Akashic healing becomes more than a moment of clarity — it becomes a sustained process of transformation that touches the whole self.
Accessing soul records relies on awareness rather than effort. Inner listening creates the space for subtle insight to arise without force. This process emphasizes presence, sincerity, and openness.
Intuition serves as the primary channel through which soul records are perceived. Insight often appears as felt understanding or quiet knowing rather than clear statements. Trust develops through repeated, grounded engagement.
Clarity increases when attention is steady, and the body is relaxed. Grounded awareness helps distinguish intuitive perception from emotional reaction. Inner listening becomes more reliable when curiosity replaces expectation.
Integrating insights from the Akashic Records happens through daily awareness rather than spiritual practice alone. When understanding gained from the records is brought into ordinary moments, it begins to reshape how choices are made, how relationships are held, and how challenges are met. Integration shows up as greater honesty, clearer boundaries, and a willingness to respond rather than react.
Akashic healing becomes sustainable when insight informs action. Small shifts in perception often lead to meaningful change over time. By returning to awareness in everyday life, the wisdom of the records remains active, supporting alignment between inner understanding and lived experience.
The Akashic Records invite a shift in how meaning is understood. Rather than offering answers to fix or define a life, they reflect awareness back to the soul, revealing patterns, choices, and opportunities for growth. This perspective encourages responsibility without judgment and curiosity without urgency.
Engaging the records as a spiritual library supports a deeper relationship with consciousness itself. Through insight, intuition, and lived integration, the wisdom of the records becomes less about seeking and more about remembering what is already present.
Memory is personal and neurological, shaped by perception and recall. The Akashic Records are understood as an energetic field that reflects awareness beyond the brain, holding meaning rather than recollection.
The records are not tied to a single religion. They appear across spiritual philosophies and mystical traditions, often described in language shaped by culture rather than doctrine.
The records do not function as a predictive system. They reflect tendencies, patterns, and potentials based on awareness and choice, emphasizing responsibility over certainty.
Access is not restricted to a specific group. Engagement depends on intention, clarity, and respect rather than innate ability or spiritual status.
The records highlight free will as central to growth. They show how choice shapes experience rather than presenting a fixed path or outcome.
They are related but not identical. Intuition is the means of perception, while the records are the field of information that intuition engages.
Yes. Insight can bring emotional response, especially when long-held patterns are recognized. This response is often part of integration rather than distress.
They can reflect relational themes and learning, especially where growth, boundaries, or compassion are involved, without assigning blame.
Healthy skepticism can support discernment. Engagement does not require belief, only openness to insight and self-reflection.
It can encourage mindful choice, self-awareness, and a broader view of experience, helping people respond with clarity rather than habit.
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.
Many people begin practicing mindfulness expecting to quiet the mind, but Joseph Goldstein teaches that awareness starts by simply noticing what is happening in the present moment. By observing thoughts, emotions, and sensations without judgment, we can develop a deeper understanding of ourselves and cultivate greater clarity in everyday life.
At Sounds True, we have spent more than four decades sharing the teachings of trusted meditation teachers and spiritual wisdom guides, preserving their authentic voices through books, audio programs, podcasts, and online learning experiences.
In this piece, we’ll discuss Joseph Goldstein’s perspective on mindfulness for beginners, what awareness is, and why it plays an essential role in meditation and daily life.
What is awareness? According to Joseph Goldstein, awareness is the simple capacity to know what is happening in the present moment. It is the quality that notices thoughts without becoming entangled in them and recognizes emotions without immediately reacting.
As awareness deepens, we become less swept up in the constant pull of mental activity and more capable of responding to life’s challenges with steadiness. Many of these teachings come alive through honest, open conversation. On the Insights at the Edge Podcast, teachers explore awareness, presence, and the nature of mind in ways that feel grounded and accessible, whether you’re new to practice or have been sitting for years.
A common misconception about mindfulness is that you need to achieve a particular state before the practice can work. Goldstein offers a different entry point. Mindfulness for beginners starts exactly where you are: with thoughts, emotions, sensations, and even distractions.
The practice doesn’t ask you to create ideal conditions. Observing whatever is already present with openness and curiosity is the practice. Every time the mind wanders and attention gently returns, something shifts, and each return strengthens awareness without any need for self-criticism.
This shift in orientation, from achieving something to observing something, is what makes Goldstein’s approach genuinely approachable. The Meditation & Mindfulness collection at Sounds True gathers teachings and programs designed to walk alongside you through exactly this kind of practice.
Insight meditation is the practice of observing experience closely enough to see how the mind actually works. Practitioners learn to pay careful attention to ordinary moments rather than searching for extraordinary states. Through that attention, habitual patterns of attachment, resistance, and distraction begin to surface, revealing themselves as teachers in their own right.
As insight meditation deepens, moments of clear seeing become more frequent. These insights emerge through direct observation rather than analysis, and they cultivate both wisdom and compassion alongside each other.
Vipassana meditation, also known as insight meditation, focuses on careful observation of the changing nature of thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations. Goldstein describes this as coming to know the impermanent character of every experience from the inside out, through direct sensation rather than concept alone.
Our Insight Meditation course brings this practice to life through world-class teachers in a structured, at-home retreat format that mirrors the depth of an in-person intensive. Participants learn traditional Vipassana meditation as the Buddha first taught it, passed through an unbroken lineage spanning more than 2,600 years.
Mindfulness basics don’t require a cushion or a dedicated timer to take root. Breathing, walking, eating, and listening all become opportunities for awareness when approached with honest attention. Each time the mind wanders and gently returns, that return strengthens the practice, no self-criticism required. A few ways to weave mindfulness basics into everyday moments:
A simple routine can anchor mindfulness basics in the rhythm of any workday. Begin each morning with five minutes of quiet sitting before opening a screen. Notice whatever is present without trying to change it. Move through morning tasks one at a time, returning attention when distractions arise. At midday, step away from your desk for a short walk and pay attention to the sensations of each step.
Readers who want to go deeper will find a range of structured programs from experienced practitioners across traditions in our online courses. The All Teachers & Authors page connects you to a wide community of voices, including teachers like Joseph Goldstein, spanning every stage of practice.
Mindfulness begins with a willingness to pay attention, and that willingness is already in you. Joseph Goldstein’s teachings invite every practitioner, new or longtime, to trust this simple capacity and return to it again and again. Through insight meditation, Vipassana meditation, and the small, consistent moments of daily awareness, practice becomes a way of living.
At Sounds True, our mission has always been to bring wisdom like this within reach. We believe every person carries the capacity for presence. Our work is simply to help you hear it.
Yes. His teachings are rooted in the Theravada Buddhist tradition while presenting mindfulness principles in a way that is accessible to people from diverse backgrounds and belief systems.
No. His teachings are designed for practitioners at all levels, offering practical guidance that beginners can apply while also providing depth for experienced meditators.
Even a few minutes of consistent daily practice is enough. Building a regular habit is generally more valuable than practicing for long periods only occasionally.
Yes. Mindfulness can be practiced during everyday activities such as walking, eating, working, or having conversations by intentionally bringing attention to the present moment.
Meditation often makes mental activity easier to recognize because you are intentionally observing the mind instead of becoming absorbed in its constant stream of thoughts.
Mindfulness can help create a pause between an event and your reaction, making it easier to respond with greater calm, perspective, and intention.
The experience varies from person to person. Some people notice greater calm and focus after only a few sessions, while bigger changes often develop through regular, long-term practice.
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.
In speaking with a friend this morning, I was reminded of the great bias in our culture toward the light and away from the darkness. When we meet with a friend who is depressed, introverted, shut down, or otherwise not beaming and joyful, we become quite convinced, quite quickly, that something is wrong. We scramble to put them back together, to remind them of all the gifts in their life, to let them know everything will be better soon. Of course this is natural. But much of this also arises out of our own discomfort and anxiety around the darkness, and all that is unresolved within us. Perhaps as little ones it was not safe to feel these feelings, not to mention express them.
It is possible the kindest thing we can offer to our precious friend is to sit in the darkness with them, so that they know that we are fully here with them; we do not need to remove them from the darkness, we do not need them to “heal,” “transform,” be happy or awaken – we will love them as they are. We resist the temptation to project our unlived life upon them.
Love is the totality, it is whole, it is raging and alive in the darkness, shining brightly in its own way. Within this darkness, this sadness, this grief, this existential aloneness is something very real, breaking through the dream of partiality. There is a richness here, something is happening, but what that is does not support conventional egoic process; nor does it support our cultural fantasy of a life of invulnerability. Here, everything is alive, everything is path, everything is God. God is not only the joy and sweetness, but comes at times as Kali to reorder your world. We can hold hands with our friend and look at Kali together and finally see what she has to say.
Nearly every spiritual tradition has a practice of generosity and giving. We call it Dana in some traditions, Caritas in Christianity, Tzedekah in Judaism, alms or communal sharing in others, or in the United States, “The Holiday Season” stretching onward from Black Friday through the New Year. These spiritual (and commercial) practices existed long before the term “positive psychology,” but the principles overlap significantly. We know now that making a practice of kindness and generosity leads to physical and mental health and social and spiritual benefits.
In families, children are often in the “getting” role, while adults are in the “giving role,” but how can we encourage that spirit of generosity in the next generation?
We are wired to be generous, and both neuroscience and well-worn clichés tells us we feel more joy in giving than in receiving. However, our consumer culture tells us the opposite, that getting will make us feel better. These messages run counter to the spiritual and scientific wisdom showing health and happiness come more through giving than getting. Just imagine if our society received just as many messages urging us to give than get, if people camped outside stores for days just to donate to the latest charity.
Among the many benefits, generosity also builds trust between people. Studies show that the giver’s brain regions associated with trust and connection light up, fostering optimism, reducing depression, and creating healthy attachments, showing us why cultures develop practices related to gift-giving. The benefits even extend to just witnessing an act of generosity.
So how can we encourage generosity our families? Here are a few ideas to consider.
Looking for more great reads?
Excerpted from Raising Resilience by Christopher Willard, Pysd.
Christopher Willard, Psyd, is a clinical psychologist and consultant specializing in bringing mindfulness into education and psychotherapy. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, teaches at Harvard Medical Schools, and leads workshops worldwide. For more, visit drchristopherwillard.com.
The holiday season can be a joyous and fun time for many, and a sad or lonely time for others. But regardless of how this season sits, it is almost always a time of increased stress and overwhelm.
With these simple steps, you can cut down your own stress and find peace of mind.
With clarity about your values, you will be able to decide what you are going to say ‘yes’ to and what you are going to say ‘no’ to with greater ease and grace. If you want to feel peaceful? Say no to the four parties on one day. If you want to feel energetic? Put your phone down and go to bed on time. If you want to keep your immune system healthy? Go easy on the sugar and alcohol and make healthy food choices.
Studies show that volunteering is good for your own stress level—as long as your motivation is for the benefit of others and not yourself. Find an organization you think is doing great work and carve out some time to help.
With the onslaught of parties and events, visitors and responsibilities, it’s easy to get into more than we can reasonably handle. Don’t be afraid to say ‘no.’ My favorite tip for this is to tell people, when they ask me for something, is to say that “I’m not 100% sure if that can work for me; I’ll send you an email by tomorrow end of day to let you know.” That gives you a chance to actually consider whether it is something you really want to do, and also makes it a little easier to let people down gently.
Dr. Samantha Brody, author of Overcoming Overwhelm, is a naturopathic physician and acupuncturist and founder of Evergreen Natural Health Center in Portland, Oregon. Licensed as a primary care provider with extensive training and experience in both complementary and Western medicine, she has worked with over 30,000 patients and clients in the past twenty years. Her mission is to empower people to address the stress in their lives and help them to make changes that are in alignment with their personal health goals and values. She holds a doctoral degree in naturopathic medicine and a master’s degree in oriental medicine from the National University of Natural Medicine. She is a sought-after international speaker who educates lay and professional audiences on the issues of stress and health. Dr. Samantha writes for a variety of publications and has been quoted extensively in books and media outlets including the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, HuffPost, and Shape. Learn more at drsamantha.com.
The community here at Sounds True wishes you a lovely holiday season! We are happy to collaborate with some of our Sounds True authors to offer you wisdom and practices as we move into this time together; please enjoy this blog series for your holiday season.
To help encourage you and your loved ones to explore new possibilities this holiday season, we’re offering 40% off nearly all of our programs, books, and courses sitewide. May you find the wisdom to light your way.
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