Tami Simon

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

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The Point of Insight | Our Medicine Lives in the Wound

Tami Simon — September 24, 2026

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:

How a lifelong feeling of not belonging became the soil for a life’s work helping others feel connected
The difference between sudden insight and the slow, gradual “boiling water” of a tipping point
Why real breakthrough requires going all the way through pain, not around it
Joanna Macy’s question—”What breaks your heart?”—and how grief and care become fuel for service
Why “never turn away” may be one of the most important spiritual instructions there is

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“

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The Point of Insight | “Half Human, Half Mystery...

Tami Simon — August 27, 2026

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:

The central channel as a key that unlocks a prison of constricted thinking
What Richard Freeman and Qigong master Robert Peng each revealed about the inner teacher and the flow between ida and pingala
Energy intuitive Lee Harris and “the angel behind you”—an eight- to twelve-foot presence available to all of us
Why you can’t be a light warrior alone, and what that means for the years ahead
Thomas Moore, Thoreau, and learning to see the transcendent in the people you love
The chrysalis, the goo, and Tami’s obstinate refusal of everyone’s butterfly metaphors
What became possible only when she stopped clawing for something to hold and let herself fall back

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”

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The Point of Insight | Giving Back

Robin Wall Kimmerer
Tami Simon — July 30, 2026

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:

What a transmission is, drawn from her background in meditation and Tibetan Buddhist teachings
The point of reciprocity—what shifts when we truly feel how much the natural world gives us
Why gratitude naturally moves us toward wanting to give something back
A story from teacher Malidoma Somé about speaking directly to the trees
What it means to move from an extractive mindset to one of recognition and care toward the living world around us

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.

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Just One Question | Adyashanti: Is It an Awakening If ...

Adyashanti — October 1, 2026

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:

Why a fleeting shift still counts as a real awakening, even if it doesn’t stick
The two (seemingly contradictory) pieces of advice Adya gives people chasing a past peak experience
How the first awakening can feel like a “freebie,” while everything after asks you to participate consciously
Adya’s own account of the night everything fell away and the still, small voice that told him, “This isn’t all of it. Keep going.”

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?”

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Kimberly Ann Johnson: “Becoming a Sexual Alchemi...

Kimberly Ann Johnson — September 29, 2026

What if aging isn’t the slow closing of your erotic life, but the doorway into its most alive season?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Kimberly Ann Johnson—sexological body worker, somatic experiencing practitioner, birth doula, and author of the new Sounds True book Erotic Seasons: Tuning In to the Rhythms of Women’s Sexuality and Spirituality—about what she calls erotic sovereignty, and the sentence that closes her book: the female body is its own spiritual path.

Join Tami and Kimberly to explore:

Erotic sovereignty—your relationship to your own life force, and why it stays with you across every season
Why the goal isn’t a more regulated nervous system, but a more responsive one, and what it means to run more charge
The four erotic seasons—maiden, mother, virgin, crone—and the surprising reason virgin comes after mother
Why hormonal transitions are “wet clay”: golden opportunities for repatterning that our culture teaches us to rush past
Menopause as a death rehearsal, and the life review that arrives decades before we expect it
Hot sex and warm sex—widening the range beyond adrenaline, and learning the language of the pause
“Hormones are gods”: the collective endocrine system, and why living intergenerationally may be the original hormone therapy
Becoming a sexual alchemist—arousal as healing energy, and why care is the whole ethic

Whether you are 25 or 75, Kimberly offers a map for meeting your body’s changes as thresholds rather than losses.

Please note: this episode includes candid discussion of sexual abuse and sexual wounding, including Kimberly Ann Johnson’s own experience.

Listen now, and meet your body as the path. →

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.

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Just One Question | Geneen Roth: How Do I Work With My...

Geneen Roth — September 17, 2026

There’s the pain of a hard thing happening, and then there’s the voice that shows up afterward to tell you it was your fault. Geneen Roth says those two are not the same — and confusing them is what keeps people stuck for years.

Geneen is the bestselling author of Feeding the Hungry Heart and Women Food and God, and a longtime teacher on how our relationships with food, money, and self-worth run on the same wiring. When she spoke with Tami in 2009, she had just lost thirty years of savings to Bernie Madoff, and the inner critic that followed was loud.

What makes her answer land is how practical it gets. She doesn’t tell you to be nicer to yourself. She describes a sequence — notice, name, and if that isn’t enough, say the cruelty out loud until you can hear what it actually sounds like. This one crossed our desk from the very first Insights at the Edge ever recorded, and we knew we had to bring it back.

In this episode:

The difference between devastation, which is honest, and the raging voice, which Geneen says has no value at all
Why you can’t investigate what went wrong while the critic is running — shame collapses the space where truth could show up
The practice of writing or speaking the voice in “you” terms, so there’s finally a you and an I instead of just one merged verdict
Why Geneen never found the “fight back hard” approach useful, and what she does instead

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Geneen Roth. Listen to the full episode, “No Situation is Unworkable”

Tami Simon

Also By Author

The Point of Insight | Our Medicine Lives in the Wound

The Point of Insight | “Half Human, Half Mystery...

The Point of Insight | Giving Back

You Might Also Enjoy

Just One Question | Adyashanti: Is It an Awakening If ...

Kimberly Ann Johnson: “Becoming a Sexual Alchemi...

Just One Question | Geneen Roth: How Do I Work With My...

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