Sounds True: Insights at the Edge

Latest Episodes:

Beatrice Chestnut: "Going Deeper with the Enneagram” Oct 20, 2026

Show notes

What if the type you've been typing yourself as isn't the whole story? Tami Simon sits down with Enneagram pioneer Beatrice Chestnut to mark the re-release of her classic guide, The Complete Enneagram, and to ask why facing our shadow, not avoiding it, is the real path to waking up.

Beatrice Chestnut, PhD, is a global expert, researcher, and educator on the Enneagram. She holds a PhD in communication studies and a master's degree in clinical psychology, and is a licensed psychotherapist, coach, and business consultant based in San Francisco. She is the author of several acclaimed books on the Enneagram, including the newly re-released edition of The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge, widely considered a classic in Enneagram literature.

In this conversation, Tami and Beatrice explore:

The difference between personality (the protective "false self" formed in childhood) and our essential, true nature
Why each of the nine Enneagram types has its own distinct shadow challenge to confront and integrate
The 27 subtypes, and why Beatrice believes they matter far more than Enneagram "wings"
How the connecting lines, or arrows, reveal each type's specific growth pathway — and why the order matters
What each type looks like at its highest, most evolved expression
Why more people may be ready to "wake up" to who they really are now than ever before

This episode is for anyone who's taken an Enneagram test and wondered what to do next, as well as therapists, coaches, and longtime students of the system looking to go deeper with the subtypes.

Listen now to discover your own path to greater self-knowledge. →

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.

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Just One Question | Gabor Maté: What Keeps Me from Being More Compassionate? Oct 15, 2026

Show notes

Why do some of the most hardened people—lifers on death row, people who've killed—turn out to be, underneath it all, remarkably sensitive? Physician and trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté has spent decades working with addicts and prisoners, and he's found a pattern that upends how we usually think about cruelty and compassion.

Dr. Gabor Maté is a physician and bestselling author whose work on trauma and addiction has shaped how millions understand pain, illness, and healing. He's the author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, When the Body Says No, Scattered Minds, and, with his son Daniel, The Myth of Normal.

In this conversation, Tami and Gabor explore:

Why compassion is wired into us from birth — and what shuts it down
The neuroscience of care, drawing on affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp's research on emotional systems
What Gabor has witnessed firsthand working with lifers and people on death row
The difference between "orchid" and "dandelion" temperaments, and why high sensitivity can become either a liability or a gift
Why genes linked to addiction may really be genes for sensitivity

This one's for anyone trying to understand the roots of cruelty, or working through their own compassion fatigue—toward others, or toward themselves.

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Gabor Maté titled “Gabor Maté: Healing Principles to Embody in a Traumatized World”: https://bit.ly/insights-gabor-mate

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Michelle Cassandra Johnson: "Invocations and Spellwork for Support and Protection" Oct 13, 2026

Show notes

Tami Simon speaks with author, mystic, and racial equity educator Michelle Cassandra Johnson about her new book, You Are Protected. Together they explore malevolent energies, calling on ancestors and archetypes for spiritual support, the practice of spiritual hygiene, and how spells work, sigils, and simple rituals like salt can help us stay grounded, protected, and connected to our own energy amid a turbulent time.

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Just One Question | Lissa Rankin: Can Healing Our Trauma Heal Our Bodies? Oct 08, 2026

Show notes

Physician Lissa Rankin says trauma doesn't just live in the mind, it can trigger measurable physical disease, from autoimmune conditions to chronic illness that conventional medicine can't explain. But her most provocative claim is the reverse: that healing the nervous system may be the missing piece in reversing illnesses that have resisted every other treatment.

Dr. Rankin, a physician and author of Sacred Medicine and the New York Times bestseller Mind Over Medicine, has spent years studying the link between the nervous system and self-healing, including polyvagal theory and the ventral vagal branch of the vagus nerve. In this conversation with Tami Simon, she widens the definition of trauma well beyond childhood wounds to include systemic racism, environmental toxins, and the everyday stress of simply living in the world today.

In this conversation, Tami and Lissa explore:

Why Dr. Rankin believes trauma and chronic illness are intrinsically connected
How polyvagal theory and the vagus nerve point to a physical mechanism for healing
Why "developmental trauma" can affect even people who had privileged childhoods
How collective traumas — like systemic racism and white-body supremacy — show up in the body
Why treating trauma isn't a guarantee of cure, but can still open the door to real healing

This episode is for anyone who has tried everything to heal a chronic or life-threatening illness and wants to understand what role the nervous system might play.

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Lissa Rankin, "Is There a Holy Grail of Healing?" https://bit.ly/lissa-rankin

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Laurel Parnell: "The Evolution from EMDR to Multidimensional Integrative Healing" Oct 06, 2026

Show notes

Psychologist Laurel Parnell, a pioneer of EMDR and the creator of resource tapping, speaks with Tami Simon about her boldest evolution yet: multidimensional integrative healing. Forged in the wake of profound personal loss, this new approach draws on spirit release work, ancestral healing, and cross-cultural wisdom to ask what happens when trauma therapy meets the mystery of what isn't fully ours to carry.

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Just One Question | Adyashanti: Is It an Awakening If It Doesn't Change My Whole Life? Oct 01, 2026

Show notes

Is a spiritual awakening only real if it completely rearranges your life? That's the question Tami Simon puts to Adyashanti in this episode of Just One Question, 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 also shares his own journey of awakening in a fascinating look at what awakening can look—and feel—like.

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?” at https://bit.ly/adyashanti-waking-up

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Kimberly Ann Johnson: "Becoming a Sexual Alchemist" Sep 29, 2026

Show notes

What if aging isn't the end of your erotic life, but its deepening? Tami Simon speaks with somatic sex educator Kimberly Ann Johnson, author of Erotic Seasons, about erotic sovereignty, why the female body is its own spiritual path, and how the thresholds of menstruation, birth, and menopause carry built-in rites of passage most of us were never taught to honor.

Please note: this episode includes candid discussion of sexual abuse and sexual wounding, including Kimberly Ann Johnson's own experience.

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The Point of Insight | Our Medicine Lives in the Wound Sep 24, 2026

Show notes

An archetypal astrologer once named Tami Simon's deepest wound in the first thirty seconds of a live interview. In this month's Point of Insight, Tami traces how that moment—layered onto decades of "drops" from therapy, friendship, and interviews with teachers like Seane Corn and Joanna Macy—revealed a single truth: our karma becomes our dharma, and our medicine lives inside the wound.

Find the original Insights at the Edge episode, "Seane Corn: Your Pain Is Your Purpose," here: https://bit.ly/seane-corn

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Tracee Stanley: What We Need in These Threshold Times Sep 22, 2026

Show notes

We are devoted to our phones, but not to much that is real. Tami Simon speaks with yoga nidra teacher Tracee Stanley—author of the new book Living Ritual—about ritual as an antidote to distraction and loneliness, the practice of asking what within us is dying and what is waiting to be born, and how devotion becomes the one thing we can count on.

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Just One Question | Geneen Roth: How Do I Work With My Hateful Voice? Sep 17, 2026

Show notes

Let’s hop in our time machine and head back to the very first episode of Insights at the Edge, with Tami Simon interviewing Geneen Roth in 2009. Geneen, who’s also been on Insights as recently as this year, was fresh off losing decades of savings in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. Tami asked her how to work with the voice that says “you idiot!” Geneen's answer separates honest grief from self-cruelty, and gives you something to actually do about it. Seventeen years later, it still lands.

(86 words)

Listen to the full episode,“No Situation is Unworkable” → https://bit.ly/geneen

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