David Whyte: Being at the Frontier of Your Identity

    —
April 23, 2013

David Whyte: Being at the Frontier of Your Identity

David Whyte April 23, 2013

Tami Simon speaks with David Whyte, a passionate speaker, poet, and author of four Sounds True audio programs, including Clear Mind, Wild Heart and What to Remember When Waking: The Disciplines of an Everyday Life. In this rebroadcast of one of the most popular Insights at the Edge interviews, Tami speaks with David about how each of our lives unfolds as a great conversation with reality, which is the source of originality. David also shares some of his poetry, and explores how our innate sense of exile is actually a core human competency, how vulnerability enhances our perception, and what it might mean to tap into the invisible support that is always available to us. (61 minutes)

David Whyte grew up with a strong, imaginative influence from his Irish mother among the hills and valleys of his father’s Yorkshire. He now makes his home in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The author of twelve books of poetry and four books of prose, David Whyte holds a degree in marine zoology and has traveled extensively, including living and working as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands and leading anthropological and natural history expeditions in the Andes, Amazon, and Himalaya. He brings this wealth of experience to his poetry, lectures, and workshops. David’s life as a poet has created a readership and listenership in three normally mutually exclusive areas: the literate world of readings that most poets inhabit, the psychological and theological worlds of philosophical inquiry, and the world of vocation, work, and organizational leadership.

Author photo © Bodi Hallett

Listen to Tami Simon's in-depth audio podcast interview with David Whyte:
Being at the Frontier of Your Identity »

600 Podcasts and Counting…

Subscribe to Insights at the Edge to hear all of Tami’s interviews (transcripts available too!), featuring Eckhart Tolle, Caroline Myss, Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Adyashanti, and many more.

Meet Your Host: Tami Simon

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

Also By Author

David Whyte: Everything Is an Invitation

A good poem, says David Whyte, is revelatory; it takes hold of us and surprises us with new understanding. David Whyte is the bestselling author of ten books of poetry, three works of prose, and the celebrated Sounds True audio program What to Remember When Waking

In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with David about his writing career, his creative approach to leadership, and the conversation with life to which we are all constantly invited. Tami and David discuss the willingness to have courageous conversations; the generativity of “a well-felt sadness”; reframing regret; the seven steps of invitational leadership; “robust vulnerability” and choosing the path we really care about; anguish, anxiety, and being OK with the unknown; letting go; “apprenticing ourselves to our own disappearance”; and more.

Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.

David Whyte: Being at the Frontier of Your Identity

Tami Simon speaks with David Whyte, a passionate speaker, poet, and author of four Sounds True audio programs, including Clear Mind, Wild Heart and What to Remember When Waking: The Disciplines of an Everyday Life. In this rebroadcast of one of the most popular Insights at the Edge interviews, Tami speaks with David about how each of our lives unfolds as a great conversation with reality, which is the source of originality. David also shares some of his poetry, and explores how our innate sense of exile is actually a core human competency, how vulnerability enhances our perception, and what it might mean to tap into the invisible support that is always available to us. (61 minutes)

You Might Also Enjoy

Just One Question | Shamini Jain: How Can You Heal Fro...

There’s an elephant in the room anytime someone talks about energy healing, an elephant named Placebo. 

For most of us, placebo means you got the sugar pill. It means whatever’s happening is all in your mind, not in your body. That’s even what Tami thought when she sat down to talk with award-winning researcher in psychoneuroimmunology and trained clinical psychologist Shamini Jain, PhD, in 2023. 

But here’s the thing—placebo isn’t the thing science needs to control for and throw out. It’s the measurable evidence of what our bodies do on their own, and Shamini makes the case with research most of us have never heard about.

In this episode:

  • The open-label placebo studies where patients are told outright they’re receiving a placebo—and improve anyway
  • The four elements Shamini says show up in every healing encounter: expectation, conditioning, relationship, and meaning and ritual
  • Why placebo-controlled surgery trials should make all of us ask harder questions
  • What the antidepressant data actually says—and why “we work” may be the better takeaway than “the drugs don’t”

Mallory and Chris have spent the past year and a half working on a podcast about energy healing (Phenomena) and Sounds True is offering—right now—an immersion course on energy healing featuring Shamini Jain as well as Robert Peng and Laurie Nealon…so now felt like the perfect time to bring this conversation back. And maybe rename that elephant for good.

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Shamini Jain.

Laurie Nealon: “Energy Healing with Help From the Ot...

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:

  • What Laurie actually perceives when someone who has died “appears”—and how she learned to filter it
  • Integrated Energy Therapy (IET), attunement, and why she calls the practitioner a facilitator rather than a healer
  • The “spiritual support group”: angels, guides, ascended masters, and loved ones she says fill the room during a session
  • A guided practice—rolling the energy—you can do in two minutes before you get out of bed
  • The screen technique: how to stay open to love without carrying everyone else’s journey
  • Why “lightening someone’s load” may actually dishonor their path
  • Entity energy, imprints, and what clearing a block really means
  • Tami’s hardest question: what about the people who did everything right and still died?
  • A closing prayer Laurie offers for every listener

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.

Phenomena: The Science & Stories of Energy Healin...


At one of the world’s most respected cancer research institutions, scientists are bringing energy healers into controlled experiments—and getting results they can’t fully explain.

In this special feed takeover, Insights at the Edge presents the debut episode of Phenomena: The Science and Stories of Energy Healing, a new six-part Sounds True podcast hosted by Ivy Ross. Phenomena explores the emerging science behind energy healing with rigorous curiosity, compelling personal stories, and an open mind. You can learn more about the podcast at phenomenahealing.com

In this first episode, Ivy introduces us to Dr. Lorenzo Cohen, director of MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Integrative Medicine Program, whose team has spent years measuring what biofield therapy—energy healing—does to pancreatic cancer cells in the laboratory. What they found is measurable, replicable, and difficult to explain: biofield therapy slows cancer’s ability to spread at the genetic level.

Listen to explore:

  • What MD Anderson researchers discovered when energy healers worked with pancreatic cancer cells—and why the results surprised even the scientists
  • How biofield therapy reduced cancer cell invasiveness and migration in multiple studies, with multiple healers and rigorous controls
  • The story of Mojdeh, a cancer patient who worked with energy healer John Lavack before surgery—and what her surgeon found in the operating room
  • The Bengston Cycling Method: what it is, and why it may be affecting the body’s ability to heal at the cellular level
  • Why the absence of a known mechanism doesn’t undercut the data—and what conventional medicine gets wrong about healing

This isn’t a story about belief. It’s about what happens when serious scientists ask a question that deserves a serious answer.

Listen now to Phenomena on Insights at the Edge, and be sure to subscribe on your preferred podcast platform for all episodes of Phenomena, coming every other week through July.