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Tara Brach: Choosing to Love in Perilous Times


What if the bravest thing you can do right now is refusing to close your heart?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Tara Brach—beloved meditation teacher, clinical psychologist, and bestselling author of Radical Acceptance and Trusting the Gold—about her new inner workbook with Sounds True, The Courageous Heart: Choosing to Love in Perilous Times. At a moment when so many people feel pulled between despair and action, Tara offers a grounded path through both.

Join Tami and Tara to explore:

  • How to stay spiritually engaged—without burning out or spiritually bypassing the reality of suffering
  • The bodhisattva path as a living practice: what it means to be an “awakening being” in ordinary, everyday life
  • Why grief is often covered over by anger—and how moving through grief unlocks the capacity for love and action
  • The RAIN practice (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture) for working with armoring, fear, and excruciating pain in the heart
  • The shift from head space to heart space—and a brief guided meditation to experience it directly
  • How aspiration becomes the fuel for the spiritual path—and why Tara “sandwiches” her day with it
  • The practice of seeing basic goodness in others—including stories of Father Gregory Boyle and John Lewis that illuminate how this changes everything
  • What to do when you feel alone, disconnected, and uncertain where to start

Whether you’re overwhelmed by current events or searching for a more engaged and openhearted way to meet this moment, Tara Brach offers both the courage and the practical tools to begin.

Listen now and choose to love. →

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. Originally aired on Sounds True One.

E192: Waking Up to Witness Consciousness

Spiritual awakening begins when a person realizes they are the witness of the mind rather than the mind itself. This awakening evolves as one objectively notices the inner voice and realizes how it creates suffering by resisting reality, fearing painful experiences, and clinging to pleasurable ones. Through witnessing, practicing surrender, and learning to relax through emotional disturbances, one gradually becomes centered, loving, and free to align with the natural flow of life.

© Sounds True Inc. Episodes: © 2026 Michael A. Singer. All Rights Reserved.

Just One Question | Thích Nhất Hạnh: What Is the ...


What if the root cause of every social problem — starvation, ecological destruction, violence — wasn’t a broken system or a corrupt institution, but a collective state of unawareness? And what if the most powerful act of social change available to you today happened in your own mind?

That’s the territory Tami Simon explores in this remarkable exchange with Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master who founded Plum Village, pioneered engaged Buddhism, and became one of the most influential spiritual teachers of the twentieth century. Recorded more than two decades ago beneath a willow tree, this conversation feels astonishingly present.

Thích Nhất Hạnh’s answer to Tami’s question doesn’t point outward to policy or protest — it points inward, then ripples out. Individual awakening, he says, is collective awakening. Your practice is social action. Your light is contagious.

What you’ll hear in this exchange:

  • Why individual mindfulness practice is inseparable from social transformation
  • How collective enlightenment spreads — and how it already has, in ways we don’t always recognize
  • The role artists, teachers, economists, and politicians all play in the work of awakening
  • How to stay rooted in hope — and action — without being swallowed by despair

This is a short clip, but it carries the full weight of a lifetime of practice and teaching. It may change how you think about what you’re doing every time you sit down to meditate.

This clip is taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Thích Nhất Hạnh. Find the complete interview in this feed or at soundstrue.com.

This episode is sponsored by Omega Institute, a global gathering hub for lifelong learning and spiritual exploration. Omega offers weekend workshops, special events, rest and rejuvenation retreats, professional training, online learning, and more. Discover what calls to you at eomega.org/true.

E191: Living Inside—The Spiritual Science of Learnin...

We live as the inner experiencer of both sensory reality and internally created thoughts and emotions. Inner suffering comes not from the world itself but from our resistance to experiences. By clinging to what we like and resisting what we dislike, we create desires and fears that shape the ego and distort how we perceive reality. Spiritual growth comes through learning to relax through difficult experiences, letting emotional energy pass instead of suppressing it, and gradually becoming capable of handling life without dependence on external conditions. Only then can we be free enough to act from love rather than self-interest and raise the energy around us.

© Sounds True Inc. Episodes: © 2026 Michael A. Singer. All Rights Reserved.

Lodro Rinzler: Basic Goodness in a World on Fire


How do you hold true to your convictions to be good in a world that’s on fire?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Lodro Rinzler—Buddhist meditation teacher, founder of the Basic Goodness Collective, and author of seven books including the international bestseller The Buddha Walks into a Bar—about his new book, You Are Good. You Are Enough: Free Yourself from the Trap of Doubt and Return to Basic Goodness. Together, they move through the book’s three arcs: seeing the goodness in ourselves, in others, and in society itself.

Join Tami and Lodro to explore:

  • The concept of basic goodness—what it actually means, where it comes from in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and why you don’t have to be a Buddhist to recognize it in yourself
  • How capitalism profits from the lie of not-enoughness—and what it would mean to collectively stop believing it
  • The “trap of doubt”: that insidious inner voice that keeps us striving, comparing, and withholding self-acceptance
  • How to extend compassion toward people who drive us crazy—including world-threatening politicians—without excusing harm or collapsing into Pollyanna thinking
  • The parrot and the forest fire: a jataka tale about what it means to name what’s broken and show up anyway
  • Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s teaching that seeing the phenomenal world as sacred is “the first and last practice of all”
  • A closing guided meditation to help listeners touch basic goodness in their own direct experience

Whether you’ve been carrying shame for decades or are simply exhausted by a world that feels on fire, Lodro offers something rare: not a pep talk, but a genuine shift in view.

Listen now and find your way back to what was always there. →

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. Originally aired on Sounds True One.

E190: The Seat of Consciousness—Freedom Beyond the E...

You are not your thoughts, emotions, preferences, or psychological patterns—you are the consciousness that is aware of them. Suffering comes from holding onto experiences, building an ego out of what you could not handle, and then trying to manipulate life so you never feel discomfort again. Spiritual liberation comes through remaining established in the seat of consciousness, letting experiences pass through without resistance, and eventually dissolving the separate self back into universal consciousness.

© Sounds True Inc. Episodes: © 2026 Michael A. Singer. All Rights Reserved.