The Core Of Belonging

September 14, 2021

The Core of Belonging

Rev. angel Kyodo Williams — September 14, 2021

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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

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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.

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The Core of Belonging

Rev. angel Kyodo Williams — September 14, 2021

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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)

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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?”

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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. →

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.

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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. →

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

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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

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

Tracee Stanley: What We Need in These Threshold Times

Thomas Moore: “Curing Our Cultural Lostness̶...

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