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Tami Simon interviews scientist Carl Johan Calleman, PhD about his unique take on the significance of the Mayan Calendar. He shares with us some of the keystones of his view, including the 9 galactic underworlds and the all-important tree of life. (37 minutes)
Founded Sounds True in 1985 as a multimedia publishing house with a mission to disseminate spiritual wisdom. She hosts a popular weekly podcast called Insights at the Edge, where she has interviewed many of today's leading teachers. Tami lives with her wife, Julie M. Kramer, and their two spoodles, Rasberry and Bula, in Boulder, Colorado.
Photo © Jason Elias
Tami Simon interviews scientist Carl Johan Calleman, PhD about his unique take on the significance of the Mayan Calendar. He shares with us some of the keystones of his view, including the 9 galactic underworlds and the all-important tree of life. (37 minutes)
What if you were never working alone—and neither was anyone you were trying to help?
This week, Tami Simon speaks with Laurie Nealon, an intuitive energy healer, medium, and educator whose work is profiled on the Sounds True podcast Phenomena: The Science and Stories of Energy Healing. Seventeen years ago, Laurie began seeing and hearing those who had passed—not in dreams, but in the middle of her waking life. She resisted it. Then she built a practice around it.
Join Tami and Laurie to explore:
Laurie’s conviction is that none of this is exotic. Everyone, she says, should be trained in energy healing the way everyone is trained in CPR—and everyone has the capacity to open to their own gifts.
Listen now, and find out who else is in the room. →
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 originally aired on Sounds True One.
What would change if healing began not with symptoms, but with the energy beneath them? Alberto Villoldo has spent decades exploring that question, and the answers have shaped some of the most compelling teachings in modern shamanism.
At Sounds True, we have been sharing the voices of respected spiritual teachers since 1985, when our founder Tami Simon set out to preserve the living wisdom of those with something real to offer the world. Today, our library holds more than 3,000 titles spanning audio programs, digital courses, and conversations that meet seekers wherever they are on their path.
This post walks through Villoldo’s core teachings on shamanic healing, the light body, and energy medicine, and how these practices connect to lasting personal growth.
Alberto Villoldo is a medical anthropologist and psychologist who spent years living among indigenous healers in the Andes and the Amazon basin. What he witnessed there reshaped his sense of what healing could be. Shamanic healing holds that our energetic patterns shape our experience just as powerfully as physical ones do.
These traditions teach that recurring emotional struggles, persistent patterns, and illness may have roots in the energetic field surrounding the body. A shamanic healer works beneath the visible wound by tending to memories and imprints. Villoldo’s fieldwork led him to synthesize indigenous Andean and Amazonian wisdom with contemporary frameworks for personal growth, making these teachings accessible to all students.
We have been honored to share his voice alongside many others through our Insights at the Edge Podcast, a weekly conversation series where healers, scientists, and spiritual teachers speak honestly about consciousness, transformation, and the practices that have shaped their lives.
One of the most distinctive ideas in Villoldo’s work is the concept of the light body, an energetic field said to interpenetrate our physical selves. This luminous layer carries the imprints of past experiences, emotional wounds, and inherited patterns that may influence how we feel, respond, and relate to others.
According to Villoldo, energy medicine works with this field. Practitioners learn to identify and clear the imprints fueling recurring challenges, drawing on Andean cosmology, Amazonian healing lineages, and Villoldo’s own background in neuroscience and psychology. What makes this perspective compelling is the shift in agency it invites. Healing becomes something we actively participate in, a relationship we tend rather than an outcome we wait for.
Those drawn to these ideas can continue their journey through our Subtle Energy collection, where teachings on the energetic body and holistic healing are gathered from a wide range of respected voices and traditions.
The wisdom Villoldo draws from spans thousands of years and several distinct indigenous cultures. Andean shamanism carries a rich cosmology centered on the relationship between human consciousness and the natural world. Practitioners work with the four directions, elemental forces, and archetypal energies as partners in the healing process, a view that places us in genuine relationship with something far larger than our individual concerns.
Shamanic healing asks us to become active participants in our own growth. Villoldo speaks of the importance of shifting the energetic stories we carry, going deeper than surface circumstances. When the root pattern changes, the outer experience tends to follow. Practices that support this path include:
Alberto Villoldo founded the Four Winds Society in the 1980s to preserve and pass on the wisdom he received from Andean and Amazonian elders. The organization offers training in energy medicine and shamanic healing to students from many different backgrounds.
Their guiding values include honoring the sacredness of life and respecting the cultural origins of these traditions. Students are trained in technique as well as the ethical responsibility that comes with this kind of work.Central to the Four Winds curriculum is the Munay Ki rites, nine traditional initiations drawn from Andean shamanic lineages. The word “munay” in Quechua carries the combined meaning of love and will. Each rite is transmitted heart to heart between teacher and student.
These themes resonate with many of the teachings we gather through our Spirituality & Awakening collection, where many paths come together in service of greater consciousness.
A shamanic perspective holds that healing belongs in everyday life, woven through small choices and simple moments.
Begin the day with a few quiet minutes, ideally seated in a calm, dedicated space or with feet on the earth. Shamanic traditions speak of connecting to the natural world as an anchor for energetic balance. Even five minutes of conscious breath can shift the quality of the day ahead and help you move with greater presence from the very first hour.
Gratitude runs deeper than a fleeting mood. From a shamanic view, it actively shifts the quality of the energetic field we move through the day. Starting or ending the day with genuine appreciation for the body, for those we love, for simple beauty, changes how we relate to life at a fundamental level.
Shamanic healing encourages meeting challenges with curiosity. Asking “what is this experience here to show me?” transforms daily life into a practice of ongoing growth and self-knowing, a small but powerful reframe that accumulates into real change.
At Sounds True, we are proud to bring voices like Alberto Villoldo’s to this community alongside many other respected teachers, including Jack Kornfield, Pema Chödrön, and others featured through our All Teachers & Authors page.
Alberto Villoldo’s teachings remind us that healing is an ongoing journey. Shamanic healing, the light body, and energy medicine are accessible to anyone willing to engage with them, carrying an invitation extended across thousands of years: a call to remember that we are more than our symptoms, more than our stories, and far more capable of transformation than we may have believed.
At Sounds True, we are honored to walk alongside teachers who carry this kind of wisdom and to share it with seekers at every stage of their path.
Alberto Villoldo is best known for his work as a medical anthropologist, psychologist, and teacher of shamanic healing. His teachings combine indigenous wisdom with contemporary perspectives on personal growth and well-being.
Shamanic healing focuses on restoring energetic and spiritual balance alongside physical and emotional well-being. It is intended to complement personal growth rather than replace professional medical care.
The concept of the light body appears in several spiritual traditions, although Alberto Villoldo teaches it through the lens of Andean and Amazonian shamanic practices and energy medicine.
Many teachers, including Alberto Villoldo, believe that energy medicine practices can be learned through study, guidance, and consistent practice. Some techniques are suitable for beginners, while others require more advanced training.
The Munay Ki rites are a series of traditional initiations that are intended to support spiritual growth, deepen self-awareness, and strengthen one’s connection with nature and compassionate living.
Many people incorporate energy medicine through meditation, mindful breathing, gratitude practices, visualization, or spending intentional time in nature as part of their daily spiritual 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.
The soul has always had a geography. Long before modern psychology gave us language for the inner life, mystics like Teresa of Ávila were already drawing maps. Her vision of the soul as a many-roomed castle remains one of the most honest and courageous frameworks ever offered to anyone willing to look inward. Caroline Myss brings that vision into the present, making it available to anyone ready to take their spiritual life seriously.
At Sounds True, we have spent decades bringing together the world’s most trusted voices in spiritual growth, contemplative practice, and inner transformation. We know what genuine teaching looks like, and this is it.
In this piece, we’ll examine Teresa of Ávila’s interior castle framework, how Caroline Myss applies it to modern spiritual life, and why her insights on grace, self-examination, and the soul’s inner architecture continue to resonate with seekers everywhere.
Teresa of Ávila was a 16th-century Spanish mystic whose writing continues to speak to the deepest parts of the human soul. In Entering the Castle, Caroline Myss draws on Teresa’s timeless map to guide modern seekers through the layered chambers of the self. Here is what that journey looks like:
Teresa envisioned the soul as a magnificent castle with many rooms, each representing a different level of spiritual depth. Britannica describes The Interior Castle as among the most widely read spiritual writings ever produced, recognized as a masterpiece on the progress of the soul toward God. Moving through these chambers means moving closer to the divine presence at the center. The further inward you go, the more clearly you begin to see yourself.
Not every room feels welcoming. Some chambers hold our fears, wounds, and the parts of ourselves we have long pushed aside. Teresa’s map does not let us skip those rooms. True spiritual growth, she teaches, asks us to enter them anyway.
Centuries after Teresa wrote her teachings, the soul’s architecture remains the same. Her vision is not a relic of the past, nor a curiosity meant only for scholars of mysticism. For anyone seeking genuine self-knowledge, her map offers a structured, sacred path that holds up across time and tradition. Research confirms that contemplative practices, including prayer and inward reflection, produce measurable benefits for both psychological and physical wellbeing through identifiable biological and psychological pathways (Frontiers in Psychology, 2024).
Caroline Myss has spent decades studying the relationship between human energy, illness, and the soul’s deeper callings. Her course on the science of medical intuition offers a deeper look at how these dynamics unfold. Her work opened a doorway into understanding how unexamined wounds and unresolved patterns can shape our physical and spiritual well-being. Here is how she connects these threads:
Myss teaches that our biography becomes our biology. The emotional and spiritual weight we carry does not stay invisible forever. She shows how patterns of thought, grief, and unhealed pain can eventually surface in the body as symptoms that ask for our attention, making the inner life impossible to ignore. Stanford research across three global cohorts found that consistent contemplative practice is positively associated with multiple dimensions of well-being, lending weight to the deeper connection between inner life and outer health (PLOS ONE, 2022). Engage with our energy healing resources for further teaching on this connection.
Grace moves through us when we choose self-honesty over self-protection. It becomes available the moment we stop negotiating with our wounds and start taking genuine responsibility for the energy we bring into our lives and relationships. The Subtle Body Online Training Program examines this energetic dimension in greater depth.
Teresa of Avila understood that looking inward with honesty takes real courage. Myss carries that same conviction into her modern teachings. Sitting with your own reflection, without judgment but without flinching, is one of the most demanding and most rewarding spiritual practices any seeker can take on. For teachings on developing that capacity, see Powerful Beyond Measure.
The teachings of Teresa of Ávila, brought to life by Caroline Myss, remind us that the most meaningful journey we will ever take is the one that leads us back to ourselves. Entering the castle is not about escaping the world. It is about learning to meet it from a place of deeper clarity, honesty, and inner stillness. The rooms within us hold both our struggles and our greatest strengths.
What makes this path so enduring is its invitation to be fully human while reaching toward something greater. Whether you are new to spiritual practice or have walked this road for years, the interior castle meditation offers a way home that never expires. At Sounds True, we believe that teachings like these exist to be lived, not just studied, and that every sincere step inward counts.
Myss was drawn to Teresa’s ability to map the soul’s interior life in a way that speaks directly to the struggles and longings of modern spiritual seekers.
While Teresa of Ávila was a Catholic mystic, Myss presents her framework in a way that welcomes people from all spiritual backgrounds and traditions.
The interior castle is not a linear program with a fixed timeline; it is a lifelong practice of returning inward with greater honesty each time.
Absolutely, as Myss presents these teachings in accessible language that meets seekers exactly where they are, regardless of prior spiritual experience.
Prayer in Teresa’s model is less about recitation and more about cultivating a direct, intimate conversation with the divine at the center of the soul.
Rather than focusing solely on psychological healing, this approach treats the soul as the primary site of transformation and growth.
She consistently points to honest self-reflection and the willingness to sit with discomfort as the most essential daily practices a seeker can develop.
Spiritual maturity, in her view, is the capacity to take full responsibility for one’s choices, energy, and the impact they have on others.
Yes, because the castle’s inner rooms offer a sacred container for processing pain that purely rational or clinical approaches often cannot reach.
Teresa’s structure gently exposes the ego’s grip at each chamber, inviting the seeker to loosen attachment to self-image as they move deeper inward.
Sources:
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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