Emptying Out

    —
March 10, 2015

Emptying Out

k.d. lang — March 10, 2015

k.d. lang is not only a multi-Grammy®-winning singer, songwriter, and producer—she’s also an active proponent for LGBTQ issues, animal rights, and international recognition of the Tibetan diaspora. Recorded live at 2014’s Wake Up Festival in Estes Park, Colorado, this special edition of Insights at the Edge is a frank and inspiring conversation between k.d. and Tami Simon. They speak on the origin of k.d.’s current spiritual journey and how her motivation is to “make an offering to the benefit of all beings.” Tami and k.d. also discuss the difference between the discipline of spiritual practice and the discipline needed for her art. Finally, they talk about the voice as a living, breathing entity, as well as what it means to k.d. to have faith. (35 minutes)

Photo of ()\

In 2010, k.d. lang marked the 25th anniversary of her recording debut with Recollection, a career retrospective. To date, lang has won eight JUNO awards. She has also been honored with four Grammy awards, a BRIT, an AMA, a VMA, and four awards from GLAAD. In 1996, she received Canada's highest civilian honor, the Order of Canada. In 2013, she was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. She has appeared alongside such musical luminaries as Tony Bennett, Roy Orbison, Bonnie Raitt, Elton John, and Loretta Lynn. lang has also contributed to numerous soundtracks, and has appeared in films and television shows. In February of 2014, k.d. lang made her Broadway debut in After Midnight, at the Brooks Atkinson Theater in New York City.

"She's the best singer of her generation," said Tony Bennett, who has frequently toured with lang since their 2002Wonderful World duets album. She is renowned for her live shows, prompting the New York Times' Stephen Holden to observe: "Few singers command such perfection of pitch. Her voice, at once beautiful and unadorned and softened with a veil of smoke, invariably hits the middle of a note and remains there."

900 Episodes 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

Each week on Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon interviews leading voices in the Mind/Body/Spirit space about a vast spectrum of fascinating ideas. Since 2009, Tami and her guests have been exploring the edge of understanding, nearly 1,000 episodes on the honest work of change, including spiritual discovery, awakening, intuition, purpose, trauma, and grief.

Photo © Jason Elias

Also By Author

Emptying Out

k.d. lang is not only a multi-Grammy®-winning singer, songwriter, and producer—she’s also an active proponent for LGBTQ issues, animal rights, and international recognition of the Tibetan diaspora. Recorded live at 2014’s Wake Up Festival in Estes Park, Colorado, this special edition of Insights at the Edge is a frank and inspiring conversation between k.d. and Tami Simon. They speak on the origin of k.d.’s current spiritual journey and how her motivation is to “make an offering to the benefit of all beings.” Tami and k.d. also discuss the difference between the discipline of spiritual practice and the discipline needed for her art. Finally, they talk about the voice as a living, breathing entity, as well as what it means to k.d. to have faith. (35 minutes)

You Might Also Enjoy

Michelle Cassandra Johnson: “Invocations and Spe...

What are we actually being protected from—and how do we call in the support we need to stay grounded, whole, and connected to ourselves?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Michelle Cassandra Johnson—author, mystic, activist, spiritual director, and racial equity educator—about her new book, You Are Protected: Invoking Spiritual Support to Sustain Your Energy. Drawing on ancestral wisdom, archetypes, elemental energies, and spell work, Michelle offers a grounded, practical vision of protection—not as armor against the world, but as a way of staying rooted in our own center.

Join Tami and Michelle to explore:

  • What we’re really protected from, and why protection isn’t about building walls
  • Naming malevolent energies—from collective distraction to war and disconnection
  • How to call on ancestors, archetypes, and elemental energies (mountains, trees, water) for support
  • The practice of “spiritual hygiene,” and why it matters as much as physical or mental hygiene
  • How to cast a simple protection spell using salt—no cauldron required
  • Creating a sigil: turning an intention into a symbol you can charge and work with
  • Michelle’s own birth story, and why she calls a traumatic beginning “auspicious”
  • Calling in collective protection for our human family during a precarious time

Whether you keep a cauldron of your own or have never cast a spell in your life, this conversation offers real tools—and real permission—to protect your energy, tend your spirit, and stay open-hearted even in difficult times.

Listen now, and find your own way toward protection. →

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.

Get a FREE month of membership at https://bit.ly/STOne-Free-Month.

Just One Question | Adyashanti: Is It an Awakening If ...

Is a spiritual awakening only real if it completely rearranges your life? That’s the question Tami Simon puts to Adyashanti in this episode, and his answer digs into something a lot of seekers wrestle with: the gap between a powerful glimpse of clarity and the ongoing work of actually living from it.

Adya, the American-born teacher behind books like The End of Your World and Falling into Grace, walks through why those temporary tastes of awakening are real, even when they fade, and offers a surprisingly practical way to hold onto what they revealed without grasping at them. Then he does something rare: he tells the story of his own first major awakening, a moment he describes as feeling like a nuclear explosion going off inside him.

Here’s what we cover:

  • Why a fleeting shift still counts as a real awakening, even if it doesn’t stick
  • The two (seemingly contradictory) pieces of advice Adya gives people chasing a past peak experience
  • How the first awakening can feel like a “freebie,” while everything after asks you to participate consciously
  • Adya’s own account of the night everything fell away and the still, small voice that told him, “This isn’t all of it. Keep going.”

And there’s so much more. Listen to the entire conversation from this Insights At the Edge episode, “Waking Up: What Does It Really Mean?” 

Tracee Stanley: What We Need in These Threshold Times

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:

  • The threshold question at the heart of ritual: what within me is dying, and what is waiting to be born?
  • Why devotion, not discipline, is the doorway—and how to weave practice through an ordinary householder’s day without shame
  • Tracee’s shard of light in Cape Town, and the years it took to find language for it
  • The body as shrine: the origins of yoga nidra in nyasa, the ancient practice of anointing the body as a divine temple
  • Earth dreaming—lying on the land and letting the land dream through you
  • Her reframe of the four Purusharthas, turning prosperity into support and pleasure into relationship
  • Sankalpa as a vow that leads to dharma, not a manifestation wish list
  • The analog cocoon and the night school: reclaiming sleep and dream time from the phone
  • Why enlightenment may be less a permanent state than a moment available in the space between two breaths

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.

Get a FREE month of membership at https://bit.ly/STOne-Free-Month.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *