Just One Question | Lama Rod Owens: How Can I Receive Love?

November 5, 2026

Just One Question | Lama Rod Owens: How Can I Receive Love?

Lama Rod Owens — November 5, 2026

View Transcript

Giving love comes easy, but can you actually receive it? Lama Rod Owens says most of us flinch at being cared for, even by something as simple as the chair we’re sitting in. In this practice from his book The New Saints, he walks us through what it takes to actually let love in.

Lama Rod Owens, a Black Buddhist Southern Queen, authorized lama in the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, and author of The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors, guides Tami Simon (and all of us listening) through a short meditation on receiving care, drawn straight from the pages of his new book.

In this conversation, Tami and Lama Rod explore:

Feeling supported by the seat or ground beneath you
Recalling a time someone, or something, really loved you
Letting that love move through the body, including the grief it can stir up along the way
Imagining the whole universe wanting you safe, happy, and free
Gently returning to the body and closing the practice

This one’s for anyone who finds it easier to give love than to receive it, which, let’s be honest, is most of us.

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Lama Rod Owens. Find the complete interview in this feed or at https://bit.ly/new-saint

Lama Rod Owens is a “Black Buddhist Southern Queen” who is an authorized lama in the Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism with a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard. He is the coauthor of Radical Dharma and author of Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger. He is the cofounder of Bhumisparsha, a Buddhist spiritual community, and has a gift for reaching diverse audiences with transformative wisdom. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia. For more, see lamarod.com.

Author photo © Jess Benjamin

Posted November 5, 2026

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

See All

podcast

Post Views: 2

Just One Question | Lama Rod Owens: How Can I Receive ...

Lama Rod Owens — November 5, 2026

In this conversation, Tami and Lama Rod explore:

Feeling supported by the seat or ground beneath you
Recalling a time someone, or something, really loved you
Letting that love move through the body, including the grief it can stir up along the way
Imagining the whole universe wanting you safe, happy, and free
Gently returning to the body and closing the practice

This one’s for anyone who finds it easier to give love than to receive it, which, let’s be honest, is most of us.

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Lama Rod Owens. Find the complete interview in this feed or at https://bit.ly/new-saint

podcast

Post Views: 4,898

Seane Corn and Lama Rod Owens: Steady Breath, Steady H...

Lama Rod Owens
Seane Corn — July 8, 2025

How are you doing these days? Exhausted? Heartbroken? Outraged? All of the above? In this era of uncertainty and instability, you may feel like your only choice is to forge ahead and just get through the week. If so, this podcast with two beloved Sounds True authors was created just for YOU. Here, Tami Simon speaks with Seane Corn and Lama Rod Owens to hear their personal insights for navigating our rapidly-changing world from a place of deep connection to our most important values, to the people who give us strength, and to those with whom we may feel hopelessly divided.

Take a deep listen as they share about: Grounding yourself and returning to inner stability; the ongoing integration that’s needed in the post-Pandemic world; trauma, control, surrender, and liberation; honoring the natural cycles of life; dismantling systems of oppression and ushering in the selves we want to become; the power of raw truth; the skillful navigation of our grief, heartbreak, and outrage; becoming a New Saint; holding oneself accountable and continuing to do both your inner and outer work; reclaiming hope; reconnecting to your community of beloveds; the bodhisattva tradition; activism today; showing up instead of giving up; self-elevation and self-validation; 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.

podcast

Post Views: 4,879

Lama Rod Owens: The Path of the New Saint

Lama Rod Owens — November 14, 2023

To be a New Saint is to move into a direct relationship with suffering—our own and that of the world—and make a commitment to disrupt that suffering in any way we can, for as long as it takes. In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with Lama Rod Owens about his trailblazing new book, The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors.

Give a listen to this inspiring conversation on how each one of us can become effective agents of social and spiritual liberation. Tami and Lama Rod discuss awakened care and bodhicitta; partnering with ancestral forces and the unseen world; brokenheartedness and our collective emotional labor; disrupting reactivity; the radical act of choosing joy; experiencing our true home; two traits of a prophet: embodying clarity and telling the truth; the New Saint as an ordinary human being; the practice of receiving love; spiritual warriorship and what it means to “fight within love”; prayers of protection; the commitment to get free from suffering; consenting to the work of being a New Saint; and more.

You Might Also Enjoy

podcast

Post Views: 79

Terri Cole: “Healing the Worthiness Wound”

Terri Cole — November 3, 2026

Terri Cole calls it an invisible wound: the imprint left when a daughter never receives protection, presence, or emotional attunement from her father. This week, Tami Simon talks with Terri Cole—Sounds True’s own Boundary Boss—about her new book, Father Wound, and why even women with loving fathers can carry this wound without ever naming it.

Terri Cole, MSW, LCSW, is a licensed psychotherapist, relationship expert, and best-selling author who has spent nearly three decades helping people break dysfunctional patterns and build healthier relationships with themselves and others. With Sounds True, she is the author of the trilogy that began with Boundary Boss and continued with Too Much: A Guide to Breaking the Cycle of High-Functioning Codependency. Her newest book, Father Wound: Break Unhealthy Patterns to Reclaim Your Worth and Power, examines what happens when a father or father figure is absent, abusive, immature, or simply not emotionally attuned—and why daughters of patriarchy carry a version of this wound no matter what kind of father they had.

In this conversation, Tami and Terri explore:

How to recognize a father wound even when “my father wasn’t that bad”
Why Terri defines the father wound as, at its root, a worthiness wound
The difference between self-parenting and re-parenting, and what healing your inner child looks like in daily decisions
The “father wound trance”: how old patterns resurface in adult relationships, and how to work with transference instead of being run by it
Mourning the Dream, Terri’s exercise for grieving the father you wished you’d had
Why healing this wound personally is tied to healing patriarchy at a collective, societal level

Who this episode is for: anyone doing inner child work, anyone who keeps finding themselves in the same relationship pattern and wondering why, and anyone ready to ask whether their sense of worth was shaped long before they had any say in it.

Listen now, and start reclaiming your worth. →

This interview originally aired on Sounds True One, where you can enjoy early, ad-free access to episodes of Insights at the Edge: https://join.soundstrue.com/

podcast

Post Views: 95

The Point of Insight | Enter the River

Tami Simon — October 29, 2026

What do Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, a roadside run-in with the law, and conversations with Eckhart Tolle, Caroline Myss, Rob Bell, and Liz Gilbert have in common? In this month’s Point of Insight, Tami Simon follows a single image — the river — through her own life and through the teachers she’s spent twenty years interviewing, and asks what it means to finally stop resisting the current and enter it.

In this Point of Insight, Tami explores:

How Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha first introduced her as a young person to the river as a symbol of timelessness and impermanence
A humbling roadside encounter with a police officer that became an unplanned teaching on the dangers of “self-congratulatory” thinking
Eckhart Tolle’s answer to a question he’s asked often at retreats: how do you know if you’re making progress on the spiritual path?
A practice from Caroline Myss’s new Spiritual Homebase community, viewing a current challenge first through the lens of fear, then through the lens of faith
Author and former megachurch pastor Rob Bell on reframing risk, and why the risk of not taking a risk is often the greater one
Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir, All the Way to the River, her relationship with Rayya Elias, and the “two doors” conversation that changed the course of her life
The Buddhist teaching of the “stream-enterer,” one of the earliest stages of awakening to an impermanent, flowing nature

For anyone standing at the edge of a change, a risk, or an uncertainty they haven’t yet stepped into — press play and enter the river.

And if you’re intrigued by any of the guests mentioned in this episode, be sure to visit soundstrue.com/podcast to find their full episodes of Insights at the Edge.

podcast

Post Views: 6,110

Diane Poole Heller: “The Surprising Superpowers ...

Diane Poole Heller — October 27, 2026

What if the parts of you that feel the most “broken” in relationships are actually superpowers in disguise? Tami Simon speaks with psychologist and attachment expert Dr. Diane Poole Heller about her new book, The Attachment Workbook, and why insecure attachment patterns aren’t flaws to fix, but adaptive responses to understand—and heal.

Dr. Diane Poole Heller is an internationally recognized expert, author, and speaker specializing in adult attachment theory and trauma resolution. A former senior faculty member for Somatic Experiencing International, she studied for decades alongside trauma pioneer Dr. Peter Levine before developing DARE (Dynamic Attachment Re-patterning Experience), a somatic framework for healing insecure attachment. She is the author of The Power of Attachment and, most recently, The Attachment Workbook: Practical Exercises to Understand Your Patterns, Strengthen Connection, and Build Secure Relationships, part of Sounds True’s Inner Workbook series.

In this conversation, Tami and Diane explore:

Why secure attachment is biological—something we’re all wired for, not something only some people get
The hidden “superpowers” of avoidant, ambivalent, and disorganized attachment styles
How attachment wounds get physically trapped in the nervous system, and how the body completes what it couldn’t finish
The near-death experience that redirected Diane’s life’s work toward love and connection
Why healing attachment doesn’t require a partner, and how your relationship with yourself can be the starting point
The research-backed power of repair in relationships, and why learning to apologize well may matter more than never rupturing at all
Practical visualization exercises from The Attachment Workbook, including inviting in an imagined protector and healing the “attachment gaze”

This episode is for anyone who has wondered why connection feels so hard—whether you’re a therapist, a partner, a parent, or simply someone ready to understand your own relational patterns with more compassion.

Listen now to discover why secure attachment isn’t a fixed trait—it’s a skill, and it’s never too late to learn it.

This interview originally aired on Sounds True One, where you can enjoy early, ad-free access to episodes of Insights at the Edge: https://join.soundstrue.com/

Just One Question | Lama Rod Owens: How Can I Receive Love?

Just One Question | Lama Rod Owens: How Can I Receive Love?

Lama Rod Owens — November 5, 2026

900 Episodes and Counting…

Meet Your Host: Tami Simon

Also By Author

Just One Question | Lama Rod Owens: How Can I Receive ...

Seane Corn and Lama Rod Owens: Steady Breath, Steady H...

Lama Rod Owens: The Path of the New Saint

You Might Also Enjoy

Terri Cole: “Healing the Worthiness Wound”

The Point of Insight | Enter the River

Diane Poole Heller: “The Surprising Superpowers ...

Menu

Listen to Sounds True playlists on

Connect With Us