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“… I was very well loved by my family and had a very good education and maybe from the outside looked like a fairly happy and well-adjusted person, on the inside, there was this huge sense of a crevasse between what I was really thinking about and caring about and being able to find people to talk to… Sounds True was a response to the loneliness that I felt, because I wanted to talk about really deep spiritual questions I had… It was more this aching sense of what is going on here?... What is actually happening? And will anybody talk to me about that?...

I went to Swarthmore College… and in my sophomore year, I met… Gunapala Dharmasiri. He was from Sri Lanka and he was teaching a course on “Existentialism and Buddhism.” He actually taught all of the students how to meditate. So that was my first introduction to meditation. And what happened to me in that sophomore year was that I started looking at everything else that was happening in academia through a lens of a critique of first-person experience, meditation experience, and things started looking stranger and stranger, hence my exit from college and my travels in Sri Lanka, India, and Nepal, where I deeply became engaged in the practice of meditation. There was something in me that had gotten lit on fire that I had to follow and that took me away from academic study and I ended up coming to Boulder, Colorado, because I wanted to look deeply at the question of the psychology of meditation. And the place that I could study that was at Naropa University, so that’s what brought me out to Colorado...

Prayer is a really, really essential way that I relate to the world… My prayer was, “God, I’m willing to do your work. Please show me what it is.” And the wording of that was quite careful. The willing word was the most important word because I didn’t want whatever work that I did in the world to be willful. I didn’t want it to be something I was pushing. At the same time, I didn’t want to be will-less…

28 years ago, something like meditation was considered something that Hare Krishnas or people in cults were engaged in. It was certainly not part of our vocabulary, our mainstream vocabulary. The word mindfulness wasn’t part of our vocabulary. Yoga was just kind of beginning… So that was all off the map and instead it was, oh, people who are fresh back from India and are wearing weird robes and carrying beads are interested in this kind of thing….

I had the opportunity to witness spiritual teachers at their best, when they’re teaching, when they’re open, when they’re communicating what they care the most about and, in a sense, when they’re in their biggest most expanded selves. But then I also had the opportunity to work with those same teachers during a contract negotiation or during a disappointment about a mis-print on the back cover of a book or a missed publicity opportunity or all kinds of things that happen in the world of publishing.

And one of the things that I’ve really taken a lot of curiosity about is how complicated human beings are in terms of this same person can deliver some of the most beautiful teachings in one way and really be quite challenged in certain kinds of relationships, in certain kinds of communication dynamics, and how to understand all of that and how we can all get more real about that and get behind the curtain, if you will. Because I think when we do that, we stop having this idealization about what the spiritual process of transformation is and about who spiritual teachers are. And when we drop some of that idealization, we can actually start embracing all of our selves more and it allows us to soften in the way that we look at ourselves and it equalizes the fact and lets us see that we’re all on a journey of evolution and development…

In my own path, I follow where the goods are, where the energy is, where the intensity is, where I think I can really learn and grow. And I met a teacher who came in to record a series on Buddhist tantra. I realized that he could help me with my meditation practice in a way that I really needed… This was Reggie Ray who studied for many years with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a meditation teacher from Tibet and the founder of Naropa University. And yet I’ve continued to believe that there’s no one recipe and no one path that is the “way.” God forbid. Everybody has to be willing to tell ourselves the truth…

I gave a talk at a woman’s event and afterwards somebody came up to me, “Can I tell you what the most important part of your talk was?” “It was when you paused. What was happening?” Then I paused again and I tried to remember. And Reggie, one of the things that he said to me, “where’s the emptiness in this?”… That’s when new life and fresh ideas can come through us and into the situation. I think that’s a lot actually where humor comes from too… because there’s a Swiss cheese-like quality, if you will, to the way that they are in the moment. There’s this openness, these gaps, these holes. And I think that’s actually a way that we can be in situations and then we become actually this conduit for fresh ideas that are responsive — wholly responsive to the situation at hand…

I think one of the questions, we have to ask ourselves is why were certain teachings held secret or private and was it for the benefit of the students or was it for the benefit of some other agenda of some kind. I also think we have to recognize that, in the time that we’re in… there’s a readiness to hear certain ideas… I think a lot of teachings are “self-secret.”… I’m talking about emptiness… “What the heck is she talking about? I have absolutely no idea. What is this? I just don’t get it.” So it’s not like there’s any harm in offering, teachings that people might not understand…

I’m a human being who wants to give and live in integrity and have enough money to support my life and to live a sustainable and beautiful and abundant life. How do I do all that? They were never separate to begin with, so I’m not linking them… So… how does that happen in a business? I think it’s having realistic goals for the business, not taking investment money into the company that has a different agenda than what I just described because then there would be a different set of drivers. You know, right now there’s 85 employees at Sounds True. We’ve been in business for almost three decades, and we took it on as an experiment and it’s still an experiment…

I think in a lot of the meditation training I’ve done, there’s been an emphasis more on a type of boot camp approach. You know, that’s been tremendously useful in learning to sit in meditation for long periods of time, and it’s been so useful in terms of this tolerating of difficult physical experiences and being able to sit with it and eventually see that it will pass…

One of the ways that we hold ourselves back from the fullness of life is that we keep ourselves bound up and unavailable for unbridled pleasure and that really celebration is one of the ways that we can break out of often our standard way of being which can often be quite tight and quite held in and repressed, if you will. That having this opportunity to let that go and actually say, you know, it’s safe for me to be with other people and declare my love of life and my love of the open and expressed human heart, that that can actually push us into new places beyond our regular boundaries…

That’s what I think spiritual friendship can be about. I think that’s what deep listening to the lives of great teachers and mystics. There’s this quality where we, even across the centuries, we connect. Our hearts connect, and it’s like they’re still available. Their teachings and ideas are still available. And I know, for me, that’s what makes my heart feel connected in the world.”

~ TAMI SIMON founded Sounds True in 1985 as a multimedia publishing house with a mission to disseminate spiritual wisdom. She hosts a popular weekly podcast called Insights at the Edge, where she has interviewed many of today's leading teachers. Tami lives with her partner, Julie Kramer, and their Spoodle, Raspberry, in Boulder, Colorado.

“I have taken vows. Two important ones are ‘The Refuge Vow’ –making the commitment that my ‘true home’ is awareness and not the world of thinking and conceptuality and ‘The Bodhisattva Vow’ which is a vow to be of service to all beings. I think of myself more as a ‘meditator’ than as a ‘Buddhist’ per se, and as a meditator what this means to me is that I am always returning to awareness as my home.”