Will Johnson believes that body is the greatest source of spiritual wisdom. Though we tend to be trained to “live from the neck up” in our culture, many profound teachings tell us that when we get out of our heads and into our body, we open the door to presence, happiness, and awakening. When recording […]

In the summer of 1974, inside a balmy Boulder, Colorado, warehouse that served as the main hall of the fledgling Naropa Institute, a young teacher called Ram Dass gave a talk that went to become legendary. This talk covered the Bhagavad Gita, Ram Dass’ experiences on the spiritual journey, and the issues of the time—but […]

When it came time for the Buddha to distill all his teachings on the path to nirvana and the liberation from suffering, he created the Satpatthana Sutta. Joseph Goldstein, one of America’s most respected Buddhist scholars and teachers, delved into the wisdom of each passage of the Sutta over the course of 47 lectures. Sounds […]

Of all the gifts that come with age, perhaps the greatest is this: as we grow older, we grow more fully into our true identity. This is one of the central lessons that Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés offers in her landmark audio series,The Dangerous Old Woman. As Sounds True’s publisher Tami Simon recorded the second […]

How long does it take to become spiritually awakened? Does it take hundreds of hours of dedicated meditation—or can it really happen in an instant? When Tami Simon recorded Adyashanti’s new audio learning course Falling into Grace, she asked him to shed light on this enduring puzzle of awakening. Adya’s response was more than she […]

In Western medicine, healing is about addressing problems in the body or mind. In Native American medicine, it is our story that we must learn to heal. This is the underlying premise of what Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona calls “Narrative Medicine.” When recording Dr. Mehl-Madrona’s new audio learning course The Spirit of Healing, Sounds True producer […]

We often think of meditation as a technique, as something that we do. But what if meditation is as much about “undoing ourselves” as it is about “doing” a specific practice?  When editing Pema Chödrön’s new program Natural Awareness, producer Tami Simon was struck by the teaching on what Pema calls “non-meditation”—an approach to meditation […]

If there is such a thing as enlightenment or liberation from ego, why are all the most advanced spiritual teachers so personally different from each other? This was a question that had been confusing Sounds True producer Randy Roark for some time—until Jack Kornfield provided the answer. In this excerpt from The Jewel of Liberation, […]

When does our experience of meditation start? Is it when we settle down on the cushion for the first time—or does meditation truly begin when we connect with a state of expansive consciousness that we may have only glimpsed before? When recording Sally Kempton’s audio training program Beginning Meditation, Sounds True producer Mitchell Clute was […]

Much of our suffering comes from a persistent sense that we somehow “wrong,” that we don’t belong in this world. Meditation teacher and psychotherapist Dr. Tara Brach calls this the “Trance of Unworthiness,” a state of mind that is reinforced by the overt and subtle conditioning we receive over the course of our lives. In […]