Sounds True: Insights at the Edge

Lama Rod Owens, a Black Buddhist Southern Queen, authorized Tibetan Buddhist lama, and author of The New Saints, leads a tender practice on receiving love. He explores feeling supported by the ground, remembering care from people or beings who loved you, and allowing love to reach neglected places. The meditation expands into universal belonging, safety, and gently returning to the body.

Terri Cole, licensed psychotherapist, relationship expert, and bestselling author, explores the invisible “father wound” and its impact on worthiness. She discusses emotional neglect, people-pleasing, over-functioning, and repeating unavailable relationship patterns. Topics include self-parenting, transference, grieving the father you wished for, recognizing healthy love, and linking personal healing with collective change.

A river becomes a guide through change, uncertainty, and spiritual awakening. Tami Simon reflects on Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, a humbling traffic stop, and wisdom from Eckhart Tolle, Caroline Myss, Rob Bell, and Elizabeth Gilbert. Along the way, she explores measuring spiritual progress, choosing faith over fear, embracing creative risk, and stepping through the door of the unknown.

Dr. Diane Poole Heller, psychologist and attachment trauma expert, explores the hidden strengths within avoidant, anxious, and disorganized patterns. She shares how a near-death experience shaped her mission, how the nervous system stores unfinished relational pain, and why secure attachment can be cultivated through self-work, visualization, embodied practices, and meaningful repair.

Jeffrey Rutstein, a clinical psychologist and somatic psychotherapist, explores whether our nervous systems begin with inherited patterns. He shares how childhood anxiety led him to yoga, breathwork, meditation, and Zen. The conversation examines self-blame, shifting defensive states, and why temperament is not destiny.

Beatrice Chestnut, a pioneering Enneagram researcher, author, and psychotherapist, explores the system as a map from protective personality to deeper self-knowledge. They discuss shadow work, the nine types, 27 instinctual subtypes, wings, and arrow lines. Chestnut also shares her personal discovery of Type Two patterns and how recognizing blind spots can open a path toward greater wholeness and awakening.

Gabor Maté, physician, author, and trauma and addiction expert, explores what happens when compassion meets pain. He discusses the hidden sensitivity beneath criminal cruelty, how childhood trauma can shut down our caring nature, and why some sensitive people thrive while others turn to addiction. A compelling look at vulnerability, resilience, and the roots of compassion.

Michelle Cassandra Johnson, author, mystic, and racial equity educator, explores spiritual protection in turbulent times. She discusses malevolent energies, ancestors, archetypes, intuition, and the more-than-human world. Discover protective circles, spiritual hygiene, salt rituals, sigils, and spellwork, alongside reflections on ancestral healing, premonitions, collective care, and transforming suffering into purpose.

Lissa Rankin, physician, author of Sacred Medicine, and bestselling writer of Mind Over Medicine, explores the body’s relationship with trauma. She discusses chronic illness, polyvagal theory, the vagus nerve, and developmental trauma. The conversation also examines environmental toxins, systemic racism, collective stress, and how nervous-system healing might create new possibilities for recovery.

Laurel Parnell, psychologist, spiritual practitioner, and EMDR pioneer, explores her evolution from trauma therapy to multidimensional integrative healing. She discusses resource tapping, ancestral and spirit work, grief, energetic sovereignty, and integrating spiritual or psychedelic experiences into daily life. The conversation also examines cross-cultural wisdom, psychotherapy’s limitations, and the mysterious connections linking personal healing with a larger web of love.