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You are listening to Insights at the Edge. Today is a very special episode. Keep listening.
I’m going to begin with a bow. You can’t see me, but I’m bowing to you, and in bowing two things. One, I’d like to thank you for joining me in this special episode of Insights at the Edge, and also I want to make the back of my neck available to you. You could cut my head off, if you wanted to. I want to make myself vulnerable to you and speak from my genuine heart. The team here at Sounds True has been nudging me for quite some time. They’ve been saying, “Tami, you’ve now hosted— how many interviews is it? 300, 400, we’ve crossed the 500 mark. You’ve hosted more than 500 podcasts. It’s time that the audience hears from you.” And I’ve been hemming and hawing a bit, and now I am, well, not exactly standing and delivering, I’m sitting in a chair in the Sounds True studio and sharing my heart, my soul really, with you.
And the question that I want to address in this special episode is: How have I survived hosting 500 of these episodes? And what I mean by “survived” is kept my sanity, such as it is, intact. Often, and many listeners have pointed this out, week-to-week there will be contradictory statements made, statements that are completely opposite to each other. How, as a host, how, as a listener, are we to make sense out of this? And then how are we left navigating our own lives when revered, honored, respected authorities, luminaries, spiritual teachers say not just different things, but actually contradictory things? What are we to make of that? Should we throw it all out? How do we take it all in and then know what is the right way with integrity to lead our lives if authorities are contradicting each other even within one small field, like the field here at Sounds True of experts that we have on Insights at the Edge?
And I think one of the very, very important ideas that has emerged for me that has helped me so much is the idea of embracing paradox, and I want to tell you what I mean by that. That means that two things, or maybe even more things, can be talking about the same thing, saying different things, and be true. They can both be true at the same time. I’m going to give you an example, and this is one that, it’s a little bit charged but it is personally meaningful to me, which is: How do we understand anger and how to work with anger in our own experience?
So I’m someone who has fallen on the side, when it comes to understanding anger, of being, “You know, I think anger can be a gosh darn good thing, and women especially have been told that it’s not OK to get angry, and I don’t believe in that.” As one of the Sounds True authors, Karla McLaren, teaches, we can actually understand anger as an honorable sentry. It’s that rising in us that knows it’s OK to have an honorable boundary in a situation. Go anger, yay anger. OK. There you go.
But, here now on the other side, there are great and respected teachers who will talk about anger as a destructive emotion, as something that can actually poison us on the inside. So for a while I took, inside myself, I didn’t necessarily announce this to listeners of Insights at the Edge, but I had my own personal bias on this topic. I was in the “Yay anger” camp. But then at one point I was interviewing someone who was talking about health concerns, talking about how when we hold on to anger it can actually function like a darkness and a toxic substance in our system, if we don’t let it move through our system, deliver the message that it has for us, and then move out of our system. But if we hold onto it in a self-righteous type of way, or as a invested over time kind of way, our anger can actually be destructive, not just for ourselves and our own health, but in terms of our relationships with other people.
Enter the paradox. It’s clear that anger is both an honorable sentry, and it can be, in certain situations if we’re overly invested and we hang onto it and we chew on it like chewing on worms again and again and again and again and again, it can actually eat us from the inside out. They’re both true.
This is just one example, and quite honestly as I was preparing to give this little micro-episode of Insights at the Edge on Embracing Paradox I thought of 50 paradoxes, and I could have kept going. It reminded me, and look, I don’t really identify with hippy art or anything like that, but I couldn’t help but think of the yin-yang symbol and how the two opposites also have a dot inside each other, how they contain each other. And how when we listen and we think to ourselves, “You know, I really disagree with that,” that is such an important moment, to see the dot of truth in that opposing perspective, or seemingly opposing perspective, and how they actually contain each other, relate to each other.
I’m going to give you another example that’s been really important in understanding the unfolding of the spiritual journey in my own life, and that has to do with the role of effort and effortlessness in the spiritual journey. Sometimes people talk about it as surrender. Do I just surrender? Do I just let go? Or what about discipline? You know, I got to make that chart. I’ve got to meditate 20 minutes a day or else. The heavens will never part for me unless I stick to my schedule.
At one point I remember meeting somebody and within the first 30 seconds, and I’m not exaggerating, this person said to me, “You know, for the past 40 years I’ve been meditating 20 minutes a day, and I just wanted you to know that.” And I was like, “Wow. Somehow, 20 minutes a day, 40 years later, and this person hasn’t connected with the sense of natural space and graciousness and connecting with another person before bragging about her spiritual credentials.”
It made me question if 20 minutes a day is a guarantee of anything, and then in an interview that I was doing for Sounds True with a very esteemed neuroscientist and a researcher, Richie Davidson, Richie was talking about a new book that he’s coauthored with Daniel Goleman called Altered Traits, and he was talking about how if you do enough meditation practice over enough of a period of time, these altered traits can start to appear in your character. You can become more empathic and more loving. And I asked Richie, I said, “What about people who have never meditated? They’ve never done the practice, but they’re incredibly loving and empathic. They seem to have come by it naturally. It’s possible these people could even be people who aren’t well-educated, let alone exposed to spiritual teachings of any kind, but they have some natural open heart. What about that?” And he was like, “Well, of course, that’s true too.” It’s paradoxical.
So this is a big one. People often don’t know, I often don’t know: Is this a time when I need to push, effort, put my shoulder to the wheel, or is this a time to lie back and, as they say in the AA movement, “Let go and let God”? How could these things both be true? Sometimes we need to do something hard, and as much as you can call it “effortless effort” as they say in the Zen tradition, let’s face it, it’s effort. It’s effort, and sometimes we need to literally just drop it all, give it all up, and they’re both true.
I’m going to give you one further example, and, as I said, I could truly go on and on about this, and when you start seeing the world through a paradoxical lens, you’ll be able to go on and on about it, too, and will have this interesting seed of sanity about you that makes you sound like you’re talking in riddles, but I hope you’ll stay with me. And this is the paradox of being a person, an individual person, a “me” right now here.
This is a specific voice coming through at a specific time. I’m recording in a specific place. I’m sitting in a chair in a studio in Boulder, Colorado, and at the same time, and this is one of the interesting discoveries I think that we deepen into the more we listen to spiritual teachers and engage in spiritual practice, we deepen into the huge, endless ocean without shore, of feeling our connection with absolutely everything without a boundary.
And curiously the deeper I’ve gone into the spiritual journey, the more I feel like a unique “me” and the more I feel connected with everything, not separate, not cut off in any way, but part of the fabric of life. It’s paradoxical! And sometimes I feel called to move in, and anchor in whatever feels uniquely true in that moment, and sometimes I feel called to dissolve and experience myself as a selfless self. They’re both true.
So as I mentioned, there’s no end to appreciating paradox. In preparing for this talk, I thought, “I wonder how complex I should make this, or maybe I should keep it simple, just kind of try to make a straight line through. This is my first solo podcast episode. Don’t make it so complex, Tami. Oh, but the simplicity has this glorious beauty, but so does complexity.” I was talking to a friend of mine, and this person was touting the virtues of essentialism and simplicity, and it makes me think of a single flower in a vase and how beautiful that is, and yet I have a great, great love of really complex natural landscapes like a rainforest. There’s something about it. When I’m in a natural environment like that, there’s a type of beauty and awe that makes my jaw, my ‘awe jaw’ drop wide open. I just can’t believe that so many species are all entangled with each other in the few acres that I might be looking at and sitting in. So here we have the paradox of honoring both complexity and simplicity.
I am not going to give any more examples because I think you get it. And leaning into simplicity, I’m going to ask the bottom line question, which is: Where does this leave us? Not just as listeners when we hear something and we think, “Huh, that’s really different than what I previously thought.” Now first of all, that is a very interesting moment for me when that happens. How entrenched am I in a bias? Sometimes I’m pretty entrenched. That’s very interesting. I’m invested. It’s this way, and somebody is telling me, “No, it’s the other way.” What I try to do in those moments is leave my bias aside. I’m not always successful, but could I leave my bias aside and stay open to what might also be true in this other perspective? Could I widen my mind? Could I drop, really, what is a prejudice? It’s some fixation I have, some way that if I stay just in this one view, I think then I’ll feel safe. It’s too much to expand to include both. So those are very interesting moments for me where I know I’m being called to something greater, a greater, open, receptive appreciation. I’m being challenged.
In terms of how we navigate, is it possible to actually be so free that we could entertain any perspective, and try to appreciate it and understand it on its own terms for its own merits, before we judge and compare and say it has to fit into the paradigm we’re bringing? Can we not bring a prefixed paradigm to the experience of receiving a teaching from someone, but can we actually be wildly open?
One of the teachings that’s been very influential for me is a book that was written more than three decades ago by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche called Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, and I think when people hear that sometimes they think that spiritual materialism means listening to 500 podcasts or buying tons of books or, you know, it’s some materialistic act of commerce. But really the way I understand cutting through spiritual materialism is not taking an idea, even a wise spiritual teaching, and making it our personal territory. Not setting up camp there and putting stakes in the ground like we live there. We don’t use wisdom as a way to pump ourselves up and give us something to stand on. In fact, there never really is anything to stand on. It’s more like flying in space, being without any solid reference point because that reference point will turn out to be paradoxical if we inquire deeply. It’s being willing to be that dynamic, that fluid, that free in our own being.
So how do we navigate, then, if we can’t have a list of dos and don’ts? “Anger is always bad.” “Anger is always good.” “Being connected with your individual power is always good.” “Being connected with unitive consciousness is always good.” If it’s not like that, if there are no dos and don’ts we can carry in our back pocket, what are we left with?
A few months ago I interviewed a woman named Miranda Macpherson, and she’s the author of a book called The Way of Grace. I loved the question that she brings forward in her life to help her navigate day to day in practical ways and also on the spiritual path, and the question that she offers is: “What’s needed now?” Pretty simple. I’m sure we’ll find some complexity in it if we want to. See, I’m telling you this stuff. It becomes like a bad kind of paradox joke thing. I mean, honestly. What’s needed now? And sometimes we know. We just know. What’s needed now is I need to speak my truth about the honorable boundary I need to have, so that this anger moves through me. What’s needed now? I just need to let this go. What’s needed now? I need to make a schedule, gosh darn it. I need to count calories. What’s needed now, really? Sometimes we know, and when we do, there’s an inner clarity. We know what’s needed.
But what about when we don’t know? And of course that happens. We ask that question. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s needed. What’s actually needed? That is a great time to wait. I was talking to A. H. Almaas the other day, interviewing him related to a new Sounds True online course on presence, and one of the questions I said to him is I said, “You know … ” A. H. Almaas is his pen name. His actual name is Hameed Ali. He’s the founder of The Diamond Approach. And I said, “Hameed, many spiritual traditions tout the value of not knowing, letting yourself go to that place where it’s not this nor that, it’s both this and that, I don’t know. What do you think about that?”
And Hameed said something to the effect of, “Not knowing is, of course, a wonderful, open place to be, where we drop our traditional conceptual categories. And then what opens is a type of knowing that comes from being, the being in us, not the preconceived ideas, not the lists of dos and don’ts, not the inherited beliefs that we’ve taken and then anchored down in the ground and said, ‘This is where I live.’ No, not that kind of knowing, but the knowing from being says, ‘In this very moment, I can feel, sense, know what’s needed now.’ ”
And in that sense, I think one of the most beautiful paradoxes—now, I told you I wasn’t going to bring any more forward and here I’m doing it but I can just say, “Well, that’s paradoxical, isn’t it?”—is how being gives birth to becoming. So when we don’t know what the next becoming is, what we’re called to next, what would be true for us next, we can rest in our being. Which is just a type of resting in a felt appreciation of aliveness, of the buzz of you. We can rest in that, and it gives birth to something. There’s an imperative, embedded within, that comes forward, and that’s our becoming and that’s actually what’s needed now. And I’ll venture to say that the deeper we can rest in our being, the more clear and sure and confident we are in our becoming.
In my experience, as we embrace paradox, as we’re willing to go through a doorway of uncertainty… You know, Pema Chödrön has that great book, Comfortable With Uncertainty. If we can actually become comfortable with it, which means we can sit in our own ambivalence, we can sit in our own, “Huh, really? I’m not sure about that.” And we can stay with it as we become comfortable with uncertainty. In my experience, a deeper way forward that’s true for us comes on board where we’ve learned from other people, but we own in a sense our own power, our own decision making. Nobody is always right, and equally and just as interestingly, nobody is always wrong! Now, that’s really interesting.
As I’ve of late been reviewing the podcasts of Insights at the Edge, I’ve been identifying a single takeaway in the emails we send out from SoundsTrue.com. We’re calling it “Tami’s Takeaway,” and it’s interesting because I’ve wanted to say, “OK, that was an hour of interesting conversation. What was the takeaway? What was the one idea?” This person, in my experience, wasn’t necessarily always right, but they weren’t always wrong either. There was something there that I can take, and then I can bring that in to my own life, into my own field of being. And let it be there and let it inform me and let it educate me, and it will become, then, part of me moving forward.
I remember a teaching I learned from Eckhart Tolle. We were talking about X, Y, Z person, blah, blah, blah, and he said, “You know, Tami, a person is not one thing. They’re not always like this or always like that. They are made of multitudes. We can’t just label people in only one way. That would be, I think, not honoring the complexity of who we are and of who other people are.” So when we listen to a teaching, can we find our own takeaway? Maybe in this little talk after 500 episodes of interviewing teachers on Insights at the Edge, this talk on embracing paradox, there’ll be one takeaway for you, one thing I’ve said that actually resonates and matters, means something to you. Please take it. Take it. Put it into your heart, let it live there. And discard what didn’t. That’s your right. That’s your power. And you don’t have to trash me completely in the process. Just take your takeaway.
Now, there’s one more topic that relates to this idea of embracing paradox that I want to talk to you about before we conclude this special episode of Insights at the Edge, and it’s actually a very difficult and complex topic, and I would go so far as to say it is a painful topic. It’s a painful paradox that I find hard to accept, and it’s been true my entire life as the publisher at Sounds True, which is: How can we understand what’s going on when there are spiritual teachers, healers who are truly illuminated in one way, they bring forward so many gifts, they’re so brilliant and helpful, and at the same time, it’s true? Both of these things are true.
Their bright light and helpfulness, it’s true. And at the same time they can engage in harmful actions, actions that take advantage of vulnerable students. How can both of these things be true? Is this also, like all of the other paradoxes, something I need to come to accept as a truth? Or do I say, “Yes, it’s a fact. And I stand for something in the face of it, which is, even though it’s true, not on my watch. Not on Insights at the Edge, not at Sounds True”?
So this is something I wrestle with as an interview host, as a publisher, as a student, and as a leader. It’s a deep soul wrestling for me to understand this coexistence of beautiful, bright, shining dharmic light and strange, destructive behavior coexisting.
Recently again I was talking to Hameed, who writes under the penname A. H. Almaas, and we were talking about various spiritual teachers in history who in his estimation have embodied this painful combination: bright light, destructive action. And at a certain point I said to him, “You know, Hameed, I’m not interested, really, at the end of the day, in what these historical figures have done and how to understand it, and even in a certain sense how to understand the contemporary landscape. What I’m really interested in is: How will I, how will our listeners, how will you, how will we not fall into that trap? How will we not have parts of us that are split off that act in terrible ways while we sit and identify and feel good about our bright light and these other parts of us stay untransformed? How will that not be our destiny?”
And his answer was very profound, and I want to share it with you. His answer in a nutshell was, “Just like enlightenment is endless,” meaning there’s more we can discover if we never set up camp anywhere, and these are my words. His words were, “Just like enlightenment is endless, there are always new discoveries to be made.” Delusion is also endless, and if we know that, if we know our delusion, my delusion, your delusion is also endless, then we’ll continue to work on ourselves. We’ll continue to learn. I’ll continue to host 500 more Sounds True Insights at the Edge episodes, because I want to keep learning. I want to keep facing pockets of ignorance, so that endless enlightenment, endless discovery, endless illumination can be possible when we always accept the humble truth that there are ways that we need to grow and learn.
Well, enlightenment might be endless, but good news, this micro-episode of Insights at the Edge is coming to an end, paradoxically so. SoundsTrue.com, waking up the world.
