Enjoy this interview with Sounds True CEO and Founder, Tami Simon, on how she took her love of spiritual wisdom and turned it into an award-winning publishing company. Produced by our friends at The Good Life Project.
Learn more about Tami’s teaching schedule and her podcast series, Insights at the Edge here.
Tami Simon started Sounds True at the age of 22 with a dream and a tape recorder. Though she had no experience running a business and only a vague idea of what she wanted the company to be, Tami had her guiding principle strongly in place: to disseminate spiritual wisdom. Over its 36-year history, Sounds True has grown into a multimedia publisher that has produced over 6,000 titles, has been included twice in the Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing companies, and is North America’s leading publisher of spoken-word spiritual teachings.
One of the world’s very first organizations to focus on multiple bottom lines as part of its founding mandate, Sounds True has expanded steadily over the years while staying true to its original mission. Partnering with the leading spiritual teachers of our time, Sounds True now has a successful book publishing program (distributed by Macmillan) and has grown to produce events, certification programs, and transformational online learning experiences.
Tami hosts the popular Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge, which has now been downloaded more than 20 million times. She is also the founder of the Sounds True Foundation, which is dedicated to bringing spiritual education to people who would otherwise not have access. She lives in Boulder, Colorado, and in British Columbia with her wife, Julie Kramer, and their two spoodles, Raspberry and Bula.
Author photo © Jason Elias
What if the very thing that wounded you is the source of the medicine you’re here to give?
In this month’s Point of Insight, Tami Simon shares a personal story: minutes before going live with an archetypal astrologer, she was told—correctly, and within seconds—that she carried “the mother of all mother wounds.” That single moment became the culmination of a much longer, gradual unfolding: a lifetime’s worth of “drops,” from a mentor she called the Queen of the Reframe, to an interview with yoga teacher and activist Seane Corn titled “Your Pain Is Your Purpose,” to an email from a business coach whose four simple words reframed everything—your karma is your dharma.
Join Tami as she reflects on:
This is a shorter, solo reflection from Tami—released once a month on the Insights at the Edge feed—on where our deepest wounds and our clearest purpose meet.
Listen now. →
Find the original Insights at the Edge episodes here: “Seane Corn: Your Pain Is Your Purpose“
Somewhere between the human being you know yourself to be and something you can only call mystery—that’s where this one lands.
In this Point of Insight, Tami Simon follows a thread that runs through decades of her own practice and hundreds of conversations on Insights at the Edge. It begins with somatic meditation and the discovery of the central channel—the flow of energy in front of the spine that yoga calls the sushumna, and that Richard Freeman once told her is the real yoga teacher. It arrives, years later, at a moment mid-interview when Tami felt something press up against her back and realized she had become, in her words, part regular human and part something with wings.
Follow along as Tami explores:
For anyone in a stripped-down season, or anyone who has sensed there’s more to them than the person they can see in the mirror, this is an invitation to stop bracing—and lean into the support that’s already pressing against your back.
Listen now. →
Find the original Insights at the Edge episodes here:
Lee Harris, “Be a Future Human and Find the New”
Richard Freeman, “Living Yoga”
Robert Peng, “The Master Key: Awakening the Four Golden Wheels”
What happens when a book doesn’t just inform you, but transmits something to you?
Welcome to The Point of Insight, a new monthly segment of Insights at the Edge where Tami Simon speaks directly to listeners about an insight that has stayed with her, often sparked by a conversation from the show’s archive. In this first episode, Tami reflects on preparing to interview ethnobotanist and Braiding Sweetgrass author Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. While reading Kimmerer’s work, Tami describes receiving what she calls a transmission, a sudden, embodied recognition of how generously the natural world gives to us, and how rarely we pause to receive it.
Join Tami to explore:
This is an intimate, unscripted reflection, not a scripted teaching, but Tami thinking out loud about a moment that changed her, and an invitation for you to notice what the natural world may be offering you, too.
Listen now, and consider: what is being given to you, and what might you give back?
Find the original interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer here.
What are we actually being protected from—and how do we call in the support we need to stay grounded, whole, and connected to ourselves?
This week, Tami Simon speaks with Michelle Cassandra Johnson—author, mystic, activist, spiritual director, and racial equity educator—about her new book, You Are Protected: Invoking Spiritual Support to Sustain Your Energy. Drawing on ancestral wisdom, archetypes, elemental energies, and spell work, Michelle offers a grounded, practical vision of protection—not as armor against the world, but as a way of staying rooted in our own center.
Join Tami and Michelle to explore:
Whether you keep a cauldron of your own or have never cast a spell in your life, this conversation offers real tools—and real permission—to protect your energy, tend your spirit, and stay open-hearted even in difficult times.
Listen now, and find your own way toward protection. →
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.
Get a FREE month of membership at https://bit.ly/STOne-Free-Month.
Is a spiritual awakening only real if it completely rearranges your life? That’s the question Tami Simon puts to Adyashanti in this episode, 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, the American-born teacher behind books like The End of Your World and Falling into Grace, walks through why those temporary tastes of awakening are real, even when they fade, and offers a surprisingly practical way to hold onto what they revealed without grasping at them. Then he does something rare: he tells the story of his own first major awakening, a moment he describes as feeling like a nuclear explosion going off inside him.
Here’s what we cover:
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?”
What if the antidote to a world coming apart isn’t a bigger plan, but a smaller, daily act of devotion?
This week, Tami Simon speaks with Tracee Stanley—teacher of yoga nidra, meditation, and self-inquiry, founder of Empowered Life Circle, and author of the new Sounds True book Living Ritual: Infuse Each Day with Purpose and Spirit—about why ritual may be the most important practice we have during what she calls threshold times.
Join Tami and Tracee to explore:
Tracee also speaks candidly about walking away from a successful film career, and what a surgery taught her about the ego that refuses to let the body rest.
Tracee opens and closes this interview with a short guided ritual you can practice along with.
Listen now, and let something be reshaped. →
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.
Get a FREE month of membership at https://bit.ly/STOne-Free-Month.
© 2024 Sounds True. All rights reserved.
One comment on “Tami Simon on Spiritual Entrepreneurship”
I saw this interview some time ago and was very moved by Tami’s “frankness” and her approach to running a (very successful) business in this modern time. It was quite an inspirational and hopeful look at a way to “do business” and maintain a spiritual life core and felt to me like a wholesome and healthful way to engage with your occupation in tandem with your spiritual life so that they aren’t really two different contradictory things. This approach really seems to bond and meld what seems to be two disparate streams (making money to live -well, or live a “pure” spiritual life) in an effortlessly practical, inclusive and more rounded way. I helped smooth some frustrations I’ve had about work life and spiritual life… Thanks Tami for so candidly sharing.