The Core Of Belonging

September 14, 2021

The Core of Belonging

Rev. angel Kyodo Williams — September 14, 2021

View Transcript

Rev. angel Kyodo williams is an author, activist, Zen priest, and founder of the organization Transformative Change, which centers on the link between inner work, wholeness, and social transformation at scale. With Sounds True, Rev. angel has created a new six-part audio series called Belonging: From Fear to Freedom on the Path to True Community. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Rev. angel about how society shapes our sense of belonging, and what it means to take back our power to belong. They discuss how embodied belonging transcends that which our entire sense of self and reality is based upon, and offers us a deep awareness of our essential truth. Tami and Rev. angel also touch on: forgiveness as a healing self-practice, the meaning of true community, and how growing comfortable in our own skin gives us the capacity to heal, enact conscious change, and belong in any environment.

Rev. angel Kyodo williams, the "change angel," is a Zen priest, author, and founder of the organization Transformative Change. Her work centers on the essential link between inner work, wholeness, and social transformation and how we leverage love on behalf of justice for people and the planet at scale.

A social visionary and leading voice for transformative social change, she is the author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace, and coauthor, with Lama Rod Owens and Jasmine Syedullah, of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation.

Her work engages at the root, field, and resource levels of social transformation. She is also a queer feminist, who understands how to use suffering as a path to liberation.

Rev. angel speaks, consults, and coaches as an interventionist of old paradigms, and designs programs and training that disrupt the patterns that hinder love and justice. She has served on boards, and has both taught and lectured widely across lines of faith and action including at the Omega Women's Leadership Center, the historic Rankin Chapel at Howard University, Authentic Leadership, and Mind and Life Institutes.

Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the On Being podcast, the Washington Post, Ms., and Essence.

Rev. angel notes, "Love and Justice are not two. Without inner change, there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters." She was made for these times.

Learn more at angelkyodowilliams.com.

Author photo © Christine Alicino

Posted September 14, 2021

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

Products By Author

The People's Inauguration

Online Course

Starting at: $197.00

Belonging

Audio

Starting at: $44.09

The Wisdom of the Body Summit

Online Course

Starting at: $447.00

Also By Author

See All

podcast

Post Views: 109

Just One Question | Rev angel Kyodo williams: How Do W...

Rev. angel Kyodo Williams — August 6, 2026

Reverend angel Kyodo williams has spent decades bridging Zen practice and social change, and she doesn’t offer the version of spirituality where relief is waiting somewhere down the road. She told Tami Simon that our joy lives at the center of our suffering, and Tami, to her credit, pushed back. Really? Right in the middle of my deep suffering and the world’s deep suffering?

Reverend angel’s answer is why this segment felt so powerful and transformative to us. She argues we’ve been handed a spiritual life that lives in a box: well-maintained, kept in good order, scheduled for Tuesday evenings from 6:30 to 8:30. Real practice, she says, pulls the lens all the way back to take in a whole life: the trauma, the history, the parts we’ve been trained to walk around. And when we refuse to touch our own suffering, we don’t contain it. We leave it behind us like roadkill, in how we treat each other and in what we let stand: patriarchy, racism, xenophobia.

In this episode:

Why “radical” means whole rather than extreme, and what a complete dharma asks of us
The cold-water method—entering your suffering ankle-deep, then further
What joy actually is, and why it isn’t an ice cream cone in the middle of the mess
The question Reverend angel keeps returning to in her own practice: where have I not yet looked?
Why fearlessness isn’t something you choose, but something that surfaces once the path is clear

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Reverend angel Kyodo williams. Find the complete interview here: Reverend angel Kyodo williams: Warrior Spirit.

podcast

Post Views: 19,208

The Core of Belonging

Rev. angel Kyodo Williams — September 14, 2021

podcast

Post Views: 1,488

Reverend angel Kyodo williams: Warrior Spirit

Rev. angel Kyodo Williams — January 24, 2017

Reverend angel Kyodo williams is an activist, master trainer, founder of the Center for Transformative Change, and the acclaimed author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace and Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation. Rev. angel will be a featured presenter on Sounds True’s upcoming A Year of Mindfulness program—a unique yearlong series of monthly talks given by a group of meditation teachers from a diverse background of traditions. In this episode of Insights at the Edge—adapted from an earlier presentation given by Rev. angel during Sounds True’s online Meditation Summit—she and Tami Simon speak on the sense of retreat that attracts many to mindfulness, even when it is an engagement with our inner fullness that is meditation’s most valuable gift. Rev. angel discusses the cultivation of a “warrior spirit” that enriches and empowers our interactions with the world. Finally, Rev. angel offers a meditation practice on these themes called “Effort and Release.” (47 minutes)

You Might Also Enjoy

podcast

Post Views: 4,242

Michelle Cassandra Johnson: “Invocations and Spe...

— October 13, 2026

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.

podcast

Post Views: 167

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

Adyashanti — October 1, 2026

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?”

podcast

Post Views: 4,806

Tracee Stanley: What We Need in These Threshold Times

— September 22, 2026

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. →

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

The Core of Belonging

The Core of Belonging

Rev. angel Kyodo Williams — September 14, 2021

900 Episodes and Counting…

Meet Your Host: Tami Simon

Products By Author

The People's Inauguration

Belonging

The Wisdom of the Body Summit

Also By Author

Just One Question | Rev angel Kyodo williams: How Do W...

The Core of Belonging

Reverend angel Kyodo williams: Warrior Spirit

You Might Also Enjoy

Michelle Cassandra Johnson: “Invocations and Spe...

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

Tracee Stanley: What We Need in These Threshold Times

Menu

Listen to Sounds True playlists on

Connect With Us