Michael A. Singer: The Pain That Ends All Pain

July 21, 2026

Michael A. Singer: The Pain That Ends All Pain

Michael Singer — July 21, 2026

View Transcript

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.

Insights at the Edge is supported by Magic Hour, whose ceremonial teas carry more presence, beauty, and ritual into ordinary days. Magic Hour draws its leaves and botanicals from regenerative small farms around the world, in blends made to nourish the body and open the mind.

Explore their teas, matchas, and herbal rituals at clubmagichour.com. Get 20% off your first order with the code TRUE.

Michael A. Singer is author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Untethered Soul and the New York Times bestsellers The Surrender Experiment and Living Untethered, all of which are published worldwide. He had a deep inner awakening in 1971 while working on his doctorate in economics and went into seclusion to focus on yoga and meditation. In 1975, he founded Temple of the Universe, a now long-established yoga and meditation center where people of any religion or set of beliefs can come together to experience inner peace. Along with his nearly five decades of spiritual teaching, Singer has made major contributions in the areas of business, education, health care, and environmental protection. Discover more here.

Author photo © Timothy Davis

Posted July 21, 2026

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

Products By Author

The Untethered Soul Lecture Series Collection

Audio

Starting at: $104.99

Living from a Place of Surrender

Three Monthly Payments

Starting at: $55.00

Songs of the Untethered Soul

Audio

Starting at: $11.89

Also By Author

See All

podcast

Post Views: 345

E214: Letting Go of Yourself and Seeing the Miracle of...

Michael Singer — September 7, 2026

Every moment of existence is an extraordinary miracle, but you filter that miracle through the likes, dislikes, fears, and expectations developed through your past experiences. By resisting what you don’t like and clinging to what you do, you build a personal self that judges the present and struggles to make the outside world conform to your preferences. The spiritual path is to stop resisting reality, release what you have stored inside, and allow every experience to pass through you until consciousness is free to experience life with peace, openness, and equanimity.

podcast

Post Views: 415

E213: God Beyond the Mind

Michael Singer — September 3, 2026

God is not to be seen as merely a personal wish-fulfilling entity but the universal consciousness and creative force that exists as everything in creation, including ourselves. We lose our connection when our consciousness identifies with our ego, clings to past experiences, and tries to make life conform to our personal preferences. Spiritual growth comes through accepting reality, letting go of attachment and resistance, and rediscovering our true identity as the divine consciousness that is one with all creation.

podcast

Post Views: 435

E212: Living Every Moment as Its Own Reward

Michael Singer — August 31, 2026

The Bhagavad Gita teaches that you should engage fully in life while renouncing any attachment to the results of your actions. Expectations, personal motives, and the desire to control outcomes create stress, fear, jealousy, and dissatisfaction, whereas acting simply for the joy of serving and expressing your highest self brings freedom and peace. When every moment becomes complete in itself, life is no longer about getting what you want, but about experiencing the fullness of living.

You Might Also Enjoy

podcast

Post Views: 32

Thomas Moore: “Curing Our Cultural Lostness̶...

Thomas Moore — September 8, 2026

Thoreau said he wasn’t paddling the Assabet River—he was on the Ganges. Was he being poetic, or was he seeing something we’ve lost the capacity to see?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Thomas Moore—bestselling author of Care of the Soul, Dark Nights of the Soul, and Ageless Soul—about his new book, The Cure at Walden Pond: A Guide to Recovering Our Humanity. At 85, Moore offers a reading of Thoreau that upends the one most of us were taught: not a naturalist cataloguing the woods, but a mystic looking for what he called the divine “lurking” there.

Join Tami and Thomas to explore:

Living daimonically: the guiding presence the Greeks called a daimon and the Romans called a genius—and how to tell it from your own ego agenda
Why Moore left the monastery after 13 years on the strength of a single morning’s clarity
“We are half human, half angel”—and what changes when you look at the people in your life through that lens
Musical time, Bach, and why playing the piano every day has made Moore think differently about dying
Why “the ultimate secret is to show the world who you are”—and why humiliation may be closer to the soul than confidence
Thoreau’s dark night: holding his brother as he died, and what it teaches about grief you never get over
The chapter called “Be Cold and Hungry,” and why the storms belong

Tami presses Moore on the parts she finds hard to swallow—and his answers are the heart of this episode.

Listen now, and find the cure. →

podcast

Post Views: 124

The Point of Insight | “Half Human, Half Mystery...

Tami Simon — August 27, 2026

Somewhere between the human being you know yourself to be and something you can only call mystery—that’s where this one lands.

In this Point of Insight, Tami Simon follows a thread that runs through decades of her own practice and hundreds of conversations on Insights at the Edge. It begins with somatic meditation and the discovery of the central channel—the flow of energy in front of the spine that yoga calls the sushumna, and that Richard Freeman once told her is the real yoga teacher. It arrives, years later, at a moment mid-interview when Tami felt something press up against her back and realized she had become, in her words, part regular human and part something with wings.

Follow along as Tami explores:

The central channel as a key that unlocks a prison of constricted thinking
What Richard Freeman and Qigong master Robert Peng each revealed about the inner teacher and the flow between ida and pingala
Energy intuitive Lee Harris and “the angel behind you”—an eight- to twelve-foot presence available to all of us
Why you can’t be a light warrior alone, and what that means for the years ahead
Thomas Moore, Thoreau, and learning to see the transcendent in the people you love
The chrysalis, the goo, and Tami’s obstinate refusal of everyone’s butterfly metaphors
What became possible only when she stopped clawing for something to hold and let herself fall back

For anyone in a stripped-down season, or anyone who has sensed there’s more to them than the person they can see in the mirror, this is an invitation to stop bracing—and lean into the support that’s already pressing against your back.

Listen now. →

Find the original Insights at the Edge episodes here:
Lee Harris, “Be a Future Human and Find the New”
Richard Freeman, “Living Yoga”
Robert Peng, “The Master Key: Awakening the Four Golden Wheels”

podcast

Post Views: 3,950

Rob Bell: “The Risk of Not Becoming More YouR...

Rob Bell — August 18, 2026

What if not doing the thing is the riskier choice?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Rob Bell—New York Times bestselling author of 14 books and plays, host of The RobCast, and a former pastor—about what he calls his civilian phase. Rob left the role years ago. What surprised him was how long the role stayed with him afterward: “We leave an external form, and then over the years, the form begins to leave us.”

This is an unusually candid conversation. Tami goes first, admitting she didn’t feel free to fully reveal herself until she had economic security—and Rob meets her there without a tidy answer.

Join Tami and Rob to explore:

Why he doesn’t believe in risk versus no risk—only in risk management, and which risk is actually smaller
The “answer man” conditioning of a job that expected crisp soundbites about the deepest human questions—and what it did to his nervous system
Hiding in plain sight: how public visibility can be its own kind of concealment
The abyss, the void, the fallow field—learning to stop fighting the empty seasons
“And then I kept going”: the phrase that came out of pandemic sessions, and why people can’t see their own resilience
What shifted when a plant medicine experience dropped his head into his heart
Toxic positivity, a lineage that didn’t know what to do with pain, and the son who taught him it’s okay to be sad
Why a birch tree scatters 250 million seeds and doesn’t seem worried about efficiency
His father’s dementia, temporariness, and the strange way mortality heightens aliveness

Rob will lead an immersive workshop, The Ongoing Creation of Your Life, at Omega Institute, August 30–September 4.

Listen now and hear what it costs to keep standing at a distance from your own life. →