Tami Simon: The Quest for True Wisdom

Victor Fuhrman: You refer to being kind to ourselves as an advanced practice. Why advanced?

Tami Simon: It’s advanced, I think because it’s hard, it’s hard. It’s, it’s not, it’s not an easy thing to do. So, I think maybe a simpler kind of practice might be, you know, I’m simply going to rest and be present, and I’ll be present even with all the ways that I’m cruel to myself. I mean, that’s a start, but I think that it’s more, uh, challenging. So, I think that’s why I use the word advanced to make a strong commitment that when those types of judgments of ourselves come up, we have taken a strong stance that says, “I will turn towards myself with the same kind of loving eyes, loving, warmth, unconditional embrace that I would turn towards my dearest friend.” My dearest friend in the whole world, the person I treasure, I’m going to turn towards myself and befriend myself and befriend pain that I might be feeling and anguish.

In Buddhism, there’s this teaching that when we’re experiencing pain, that can be called the first arrow. It’s an arrow that has struck us, and we’re bleeding in a certain way. It doesn’t feel good. It’s terrible. But then often what we’ll do is take a second arrow, and we’ll put it into ourselves and say, Angie, shouldn’t be feeling that way. Do you know? So instead, instead of inserting a second arrow, and this is the advanced part, we say, oh, you’re suffering. Right, now, all human beings suffer. Let me love you. Let me take care of you. Let me nurture you. Let me hold you. This will pass.

Victor Fuhrman: Growing up in the 1950s and sixties, without going into many details, I was wire into the concept that you take care of everyone else sometimes at the cost of taking care of yourself. And I remember in 1970, hearing the booty blues come out with an album called the question of balance. And in the song question, Justin Hayward has a lyric that says when you stop and think about it, you won’t believe it’s true. That all the love you’ve been giving has all been meant for you. And that turned me around.

How has the mission of Sounds True changed since its inception, and what are the core values?

Tami Simon: Well, our mission to disseminate spiritual wisdom, the original three words that I heard, that’s still our mission today. And I would say our mission hasn’t changed. It expanded its deepened. There’s a different language sometimes. What is spiritual wisdom? There are a lot of different perspectives. Suppose it doesn’t translate into how we live our life, how we treat our body in terms of our health, how we organize as a society in terms of our respect, for all kinds of differences and upholding justice, then in my view. In that case, it’s not real spiritual wisdom, but that phrase spiritual wisdom is open to many different perspectives, levels, and interpretations. We welcome that. So, our mission is the same. God knows we’ve experimented with lots of other formats. Sometimes I say by whatever media necessary. So, you know, we started with audio, we moved into books, video, online, learning, etc.

So, the format keeps changing, but the mission is the same in terms of our core values. There are several, the two that I’ll bring forward for our conversation, and the first is being of service. The core of what the company is about is to serve this spiritual awakening in our time and its expression in the world. It Sounds True. The people that flourish are the people who have that kind of appetite to be of service. It fills something in their soul. The second core value that I’ll briefly touch on has to do with authentic connection. That’s important to me that it permeates the entire way we operate as a company.

Victor Fuhrman: You Tami, in the 36 years, since the founding of Sounds True, more than 800 spoken word, audio and music, recordings, books, multimedia learning resources, and online educational programs have been published. Are there any that stand out for you?

Tami Simon: Oh, my Victor, you’ve now asked me an impossible question. Oh my, I don’t even know where to start. Most recently, we recorded a series with Carolyn mace called the great transformation. And that was very helpful in understanding this time that we’re in and the evolutionary journey from her perspective that we’re collectively making from a species that is shifting from the love of power to the power of love. And that’s a shift we’re going to have to make for us to emerge as an intact human species and the decades to come. So that series was very influential and helpful to me. I just listened to a program that we recorded a couple of years ago, and I had one of those moments where I fell in love with Sounds True all over again. It was so great. I listened to a series by James Hollis, an 81-year-old Jungian analyst, and it’s called a life of meaning.

And I just, I loved his reflections on mortality on what matters most. He shared his mantra in the series that I like, which is he travels from his apartment and an elevator down to get into his car. And he says, this, the first thing he, and this is just James Hollis talking to himself. The first thing he says is shut up. And when he says that to himself, he says, stop complaining, just stop complaining. You’ve got so much going for you in your life—so many, uh, opportunities. So many blessings, shut up. Then the second part of his mantra is to suit up, like pull it together, you know, pull yourself together, suit up for the day you’re going to contribute. You’re going to be generative. You’re going to offer yourself to other people. And then the last part is to show up. So, I just love that.

Shut up, suit up, show up, uh, from James Hollis, and the whole series is brilliant and beautiful. Uh, so that’s a recent listen. When I think of the classics, the programs from Sounds True have meant the most. To me, there’s a series by Adyashanti that’s called the end of your world, uncensored straight talk on the nature of enlightenment. And I remember listening to that series, and it was one of the first times anyone had ever spoken so clearly about the disappearance of the separate sense of self in the inner landscape and how that changes a person. So anyway, those are some of the ones that come to me top of mind, as we’re talking,

Victor Fuhrman: Has the market for wisdom and spiritual materials changed since the onset of the pandemic?

Tami Simon: Well, I think we’ve seen an acceleration in all kinds of, and this is obvious, but all kinds of online delivered learning. So, whether that’s online courses, whether, that’s people who are, uh, using, um, online coaching for exercise or emotional coaching or anything, so that, that has been, there’s been a huge, I think, online acceleration delivery since the pandemic has started.

Victor Fuhrman: You had shared a quote from Herman Hess that you read when you were 16 and had a profound effect on you. Would you share that with us, please?

Tami Simon: Yeah. It’s the inscription at the beginning of the book, Damian and Herman Hess write: I only wanted to live according to the promptings of my true heart. ”

Why was that so very difficult? And I think as a young person, I knew that I was attracted to people of the same gender, and yet it was something that I didn’t feel I could be public about. I also knew that I learned differently than other people, that I was more of an experiential learner than anything else. And there are other ways that I felt like an outsider as a young person, I was asking questions, and things were important to me that didn’t seem important to other people, and the things that were important to other people weren’t important to me. So, there I was as an outsider, and I remember reading that quote and thinking to myself, I want to be true to the promptings of my own heart.

And this is tricky. It isn’t easy to be different from the other people in my family. And different from the academic framework that I was engaged in and finding my best sense of resonance and connection in books, like Damian.

That was a thread being true to the promptings of my heart that have run throughout my whole life. It ran through my life when I left academia and left Swarthmore college. When I claimed to be very public as a lesbian and talked about my wife, I decided to run Sounds True based on multiple bottom lines back in 1985. When I started thinking about this and writing about it way before there was an introduction of ideas like people, planet and profits, or conscious capitalism, there was no articulation. Still, I knew inside of myself that I was interested in running a business differently.

Continue to Page 3 of the interview with Tami Simon