What are you paying attention to—and is it the life you actually want to be living?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Cody Cook-Parrott—writer, artist, movement practitioner, and author of the new Sounds True book The Practice of Attention: Cultivating Presence in a Distracted World—about what it takes to reclaim focus in an age engineered to steal it.

Cody’s path to this book wasn’t theoretical. It began with their own Instagram addiction, a recovery from alcohol, and the growing realization that fractured attention isn’t just an inconvenience—it’s a creative crisis. What emerged is a deeply personal and practical guide to getting back to yourself.

Join Tami and Cody to explore:

• The attention audit: a simple, powerful practice for noticing where your time and energy actually go
• Why social media addiction and alcohol addiction can mirror each other—and what “zero” looks like as a choice
• Structure with softness: building devotional creative habits that flex without breaking
• Agency over urgency—and why that principle is especially vital for neurodivergent and queer creators
• The emotional car: how to bring difficult inner parts along for the ride without letting them take the wheel
• Consistency over intensity: why a 25-minute Pomodoro session beats an eight-hour grind
• What’s really driving the urge to distract—and how asking “what am I avoiding?” changes everything
• Why attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer

Whether you’re a creative trying to protect your focus or someone who’s quietly wondered what you’d make if you could actually sit with yourself, Cody offers both the tools and the permission to begin.

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.