Frank Ostaseki: “I’m Allergic to the Notion of a Good Death”

What truly matters when we face the end of life? After decades of sitting at the bedside of hundreds of dying people, Frank Ostaseski has distilled the deepest human concerns into two essential questions: Am I loved? Have I loved well?

This week on Insights at the Edge, Tami welcomes Frank Ostaseski—co-founder of America’s first Buddhist hospice, the Zen Hospice Project, founder of the Metta Institute, and author of The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully. Frank brings extraordinary wisdom from his pioneering work in compassionate end-of-life care, along with profound personal insights from his own encounters with heart surgery, strokes, and the transformative vulnerability of being “on the other side of the sheets.”

Join Tami and Frank to explore:

The two essential questions that arise when facing death—and what they reveal about living fully now
Why emotional flexibility is the true condition for healing and transformation
How to meet our own fear and pain without abandoning ourselves or others
The practice of “allowing” as a path to both wisdom and compassion
What happens in the dying process: surrender, reconstitution, and coming home
Why Frank is allergic to the notion of a “good death”
The indestructible love that emerges when we keep our hearts open through pain
How to practice dying by paying attention to everyday endings

This conversation is for anyone grappling with loss, change, or the fundamental questions of existence—offering not prescriptive answers, but the profound medicine of honest presence and the recognition that our vulnerability itself is one of our most beautiful human qualities.

For more with Frank Ostaseski:

Year to Live Course (Spirit Rock Meditation Center)

Spirit of Service (Upaya Zen Center)

Awareness in Action: The Role of Love (Upaya Zen Center, Frank Ostaseski & Sharon Salzberg)

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.

Phenomena Finale: Not a Machine but a Flame [Takeover]

— July 24, 2026

What is the “energy” in energy healing? Healers channel it. Patients reach for it. Ancient healing traditions built entire systems around it, and modern researchers are working to study it. But what is energy, biologically, physically, measurably…but also spiritually, and how does it move through the body to influence health and healing?

In this special feed takeover, we’re bringing you the season finale of Phenomena: The Science and Stories of Energy Healing, in which host Ivy Ross brings together three renowned scientists whose visions, taken together, begin to answer that question:

Martin Picard, PhD, of Columbia University, has spent his career studying mitochondria, the body’s cellular power sources, and has found them far more connected to our inner experience and consciousness than biomedicine ever assumed, and likely far more central to how we heal.
Richard Hammerschlag, PhD, co-authored the paper that helped define the modern science of the biofield: the organizing fields of energy and information that operate within the body and extend outward from it, echoing the nested qi fields of older healing traditions.
Neil Theise, MD, of NYU, helped identify the interstitium, a major recent discovery of a fluid-filled network running throughout the body that may explain how signals fundamental to health and healing actually travel.

Together, these three voices offer a compelling, deeply human vision of the body and mind not as a machine, but as a dynamic energetic ecosystem.

To close out the season, Ivy and researcher Meredith Sprengel also welcome special guest Jonathan Cohen, co-creator and executive producer of Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown, to help land these big ideas about energy, healing, and life.

This episode marks the finale of Phenomena‘s first season. To continue the journey and explore the full docuseries, visit phenomenahealing.com. →

Just One Question | Osho Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: How Ca...

When we heard Osho Zenju Earthlyn Manuel share her story of a terrifying night she couldn’t breathe, it was eerily similar to a personal experience—and helpful too. We knew we had to share this moment from her conversation with Tami Simon on Insights at the Edge, in which she tells the story of the night she nearly died from a severe anaphylactic reaction and how she got through it not by searching for light at the end of the tunnel, but by staying present with the darkness itself.

Zenju, a poet and ordained Zen Buddhist priest, challenges the instinct most of us have to fear darkness, rush out of it, or wait for a gift on the other side. Instead, she describes an experience of profound non-struggle — a moment of near-death where she wasn’t afraid, didn’t fight, and somehow found a way to keep breathing by trusting her body completely.

Key themes from this episode:

Why darkness — and even light — may be far more unknown and unknowable than we assume
How struggling against a frightening experience can make it worse, while staying present with it can be transformative
A firsthand account of surviving a full-blown anaphylactic shock without fear
Rethinking our cultural instinct to rush ourselves and others out of difficult emotional or physical states
Why “the absence of light” might be less about despair and more about a different kind of awakening

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Zenju Earthlyn Manuel “Opening to Darkness,” which is also the title of her book. 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.

Michael A. Singer: The Pain That Ends All Pain

What if the pain you’ve been avoiding is actually the thing that could set you free?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Michael A. Singer, beloved wisdom teacher, founder of the Temple of the Universe, and author of The Untethered Soul, The Surrender Experiment, Living Untethered, and his newest book, Wisdom Untethered: The Time for Questions. Drawn from 1,200 reader questions distilled into 200 essential ones, the conversation keeps returning to a single teaching Michael once received from a saint: “It’s the pain that ends all pain.”

Join Tami and Michael to explore:

Why “letting go” is an inner practice, not spiritual bypassing or passivity
What samskaras are, and why blocked energy, not memory, is the real source of inner darkness
Why the willingness to feel disturbance, rather than suppress it, is the actual path of purification
The practice of “falling behind” resistance, and other techniques for letting stuck energy move and release
The difference between preferences and fears, and why the Buddha named preference as the root of suffering
How to face real-world injustice with clarity instead of ego-driven reactivity
Why the true motive of spiritual practice is simply to let go of what’s in the way

Whether you’ve read The Untethered Soul a dozen times or are new to Michael’s teachings, this conversation offers both the practical tools and the felt experience of what it means to stop blocking the shakti that’s already flowing within you.

Listen now, and discover why the pain you’ve been running from might be exactly what ends it. →

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.

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