Sounds True: Producer's Pick

We know that our lives will involve some degree of suffering. But we know that we can also experience happiness and joy. The question is, what are we waiting for? In this edition of Producer’s Pick, Matthieu Ricard discusses the importance of cultivating the conditions for joy and happiness and how happiness can become a guiding force to transform our relationships and prevent us from falling into despair and hopelessness.

“I always look forward to recording with Sandra Ingerman,” says Sounds True producer Mitchell Clute, “because I find her teachings so powerful and personally transformative. Her new audio learning program, Shamanic Visioning, really opens up a new world of shamanic practice, using journeying techniques to explore our soul’s destiny and teaching us how to fully express our soul’s potential. The result is a program that guides us in embodying and manifesting the deepest wishes of spirit in order to transform ourselves, our community, and our planet.” In this selection, Sandra talks about how we can overcome our fears and pessimism as we dream our deepest wishes into being, and offers a journey to release blocks to our creative potential.

The play of sunlight through leaves . . . the songs of the wind . . . the arc of a brush stroke on paper. To be awake, reflects Jack Kornfield, is to discover the beauty hidden in all things—and to express that beauty ourselves. “The thing that resonated with me most in Jack’s new program, Turn Toward the Beautiful: Creativity as a Path of Liberation,” says Sounds True producer Randy Roark, “is the realization that the greatest impediment to our creativity is the false sense of certainty we so often seek, our desire to ‘solve’ life like it’s a problem.” In this excerpt, Jack explores how we can reclaim our childlike attitude of wonder, attuning ourselves to the beauty that often passes us by unnoticed.

With characteristic joy and humor, Chloë Goodchild teaches that one of our greatest tools for self-expression, healing, and spiritual insight resides within us: our own naked voice. As Sounds True producer Mitchell Clute says, “I loved working with Chloë on Awakening Through Sound, and hearing her insights about how we can unlock the hidden potential of the voice and bring out our natural creativity and intuition in all areas of life.” In this selection, Chloë gives an overview of the journey to finding your authentic voice and sounding from the source, and explores how the practices in this program can be applied every day.

Jack Angelo, author of the book and companion audio program Distant Healing, teaches that there is a direct link between our hands and our hearts. Our hands, he explains, can always reveal what we’re feeling in our hearts. In this edition of Producer’s Pick, Randy Roark shares four simple exercises presented by Jack Angelo to help us activate the subtle sensory mechanism within our hands. These are foundational distant healing exercises that Jack has used personally and taught to his students for more than 30 years.

In “The Shift of the Ages,” bestselling author and independent researcher Gregg Braden explores the potential for a dramatic shift in human consciousness that may already be well underway. Gregg discusses a universal impulse that he has found in the lives of people all over the world: the sense that something is awakening from deep within that will radically change our view of the world and our roles in it.

Author and professor of philosophy Ashok Gangadean suggests that there is an emerging global wisdom arising from a synthesis of Eastern and Western traditions. In his audio course Awakening the Global Mind, Ashok shows how we can use the power of language to rewrite our own linguistic operating system with a new spiritual grammar, helping us move from “ego-mental” thinking to the universal consciousness he calls Logos. As Sounds True producer Mitchell Clute says, “Ashok’s cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary approach combines a philosopher’s mind with a mystic’s soul.” In this selection, Ashok explores how we can begin to move into an integrated, unified view of life.

“I’ve recorded several programs now with Lynne McTaggart,” says Sounds True producer Mitchell Clute. “She brings the same qualities to her audio programs that readers find in her bestselling books The Field and The Intention Experiment—an integrity, rigor, and attention to detail that are the hallmark of good journalism. But she doesn’t stop there. Lynne goes on to show how we might apply cutting-edge science in our own lives, so these insights from the quantum world can inform our day-to-day choices and actions.” In this selection from her audio course Living with Intention, Lynne discusses the relationships between mind, brain, and thought, and shares what studies say about how meditation changes us.

When editing the new Jack Kornfield audio course Transmission: Receiving the Living Wisdom of Spiritual Teachers, Sounds True producer Randy Roark collected a number of Jack’s most insightful and illuminating talks about the benefits and perils of the student-teacher relationship. “Out of all the great stories about teachers like Ajahn Chah, Dipa Ma, and Chögyam Trungpa,” says Randy, “there was one that stood out the most to me, and that I knew would make a great selection for this week’s Producer’s Pick.” In this excerpt, Jack tells a story of a meeting where Western teachers spoke to the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. Something extraordinary happened that day when the women got up to address the Dalai Lama—and revealed that the greatest transmission can sometimes happen when the teacher becomes the student.

“Every time I listen to this talk from Thich Nhat Hanh,” says Sounds True producer Stephen Lessard, “I’m transported back to the extraordinary retreat in Estes Park where we made this recording. Even though there were nearly a thousand people in the room, you could’ve heard a pin drop. That energy of deep attention shows up through the entire program.” The recording became an audio program called Body and Mind Are One, and in this selection, Thich Nhat Hanh shares an exquisitely beautiful message about what it means to be present for others—and how our presence is the most precious gift we can offer.

“Lorin Roche is not your usual meditation teacher,” says Sounds True producer Mitchell Clute. “He brings a playful, curious, sensuous, and open attitude to a practice that can often feel cool and detached. His approach includes and embraces everything, welcoming the richness of our lives into meditative practice.” Lorin’s embodied practice for befriending your own experience is a radically different way to meditate. In this selection from his audio program Meditation for Yoga Lovers, you’ll experience Lorin’s joyous, adventurous take on meditative awareness as he guides you to bring your own unique strengths and talents to your practice—and invites you to say “yes” to everything in your experience.

Can there really be an answer to the key point of dispute in the culture wars—the existence of God? Sounds True producer Mitchell Clute was impressed to discover a teacher willing to take this question head-on with clarity, open-mindedness, and a deep respect for both sides of the argument. In his latest audio program, The Future of Spirituality, philosopher Ken Wilber took the bold stance that the question can be definitively answered. In this audio clip, he explains how the contemplative traditions do indeed provide proofs for God that hold up to the standards of scientific inquiry.

One of the greatest challenges for parents that Dr. Brené Brown has uncovered in both her research and personal life is our need to be our child’s friend. We think this is a way to express our love and respect—but it ends up having the opposite effect. Sounds True producer Stephen Lessard chose this excerpt from Brené’s audio course The Gifts of Imperfect Parenting because it offers profound and practical guidance not only about how we can create firm and loving boundaries for our children, but how we should react when they inevitably test these limits. The boundaries we set for young children help them become adults who are willing to dare, take chances, live wholehearted lives, and build true, mature friendships with their parents when they are grown.

Most of us are very tough on ourselves. We feel a genuine desire to feel compassion for others, but we’re afraid that if we begin to feel that same compassion for ourselves that we’ll become self-centered, soft, or even stop thinking about others at all. But in this excerpt from the audio course Self-Compassion Step-By-Step, selected by Sounds True producer Randy Roark, Dr. Kristin Neff explains how self-compassion and self-criticism affect our minds and bodies, and explains why the quality of the compassion that we can give to others is often dependent upon giving ourselves the benefits of self-compassion first.

Wouldn’t life be great if we didn’t have any conflicts, disappointments, suffering, illness, or death? We often act from an unexamined belief that our life would be perfect if we could avoid everything we don’t like. Yet Dr. Tara Brach teaches that by trying to avoid our pain, we often miss what is most beautiful in life—and why it is beautiful. In this excerpt from the audio program Meditations for Emotional Healing, selected by Sounds True producer Randy Roark, Tara explores the practice of surrendering to life exactly as it is. It is in this state of presence, she says, that we can find what’s better than a life without suffering—life itself, in all of its beauty and richness, sadness and loss, filled with mystery and wonder, just the way it is.