The One You Feed - How to Discover What Matters Most in Life with Tami Simon

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

In this episode, Tami Simon shares what it means to be true to yourself and how to discover what matters most in work, life, and love. We also discuss… How we all have inherent goodness inside us Realizing there’s no destination in life but an unending journey  Learning to find balance in our internal and outer experiences Understanding that our body’s feedback will indicate when things are out of balance The five keys to living in integrity and being true to ourselves How being supported helps us to have the courage to bridge the gap between knowing and doing Learning to stay open and experience what expanded awareness feels like To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In case you're just recently joining us or however long you've been a listener of the show, you may not realize we have years and years of incredible episodes in our archive. We've had so many wonderful guests that we've decided to handpick one of our favorites that may be new to you, but if not, it's definitely worth another listen. We hope you'll enjoy this episode with Tammy Simon. If my own health is suffering, that's ambition at the cost of the one being that I am wholly responsible for. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like like garbage in,

garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Tammy Simon. She founded Sounds True at the age of 22 with the mission of disseminating spiritual wisdom. As a pioneer in the conscious business movement, she focuses on bringing authenticity and heart into the workplace while honoring multiple bottom lines.

Tammy hosts a popular weekly podcast called Insights at the Edge, where she has interviewed many of today's leading teachers delving deeply into their discoveries and personal experiences on their own journeys. With Sounds True, she has released the new audio program, Being True, What Matters Most in Work, Life, and Love. Hi, Tammy. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. It's an honor. Thank you. Well, it's an honor for me to have you on because I think my first real exposure to a lot of the spiritual ideas that have shaped my life were through Sounds True. I would find these, you know, you put out these wonderful audio programs, and this is probably, you know, I don't know, when did you start the company?

In 1985. All right. This was about 92. Relatively short after you know, I don't know, when did you start the company? In 1985. All right. This was about 92. Relatively short after you started, I would find these at the library. And I, you know, Jack Kornfield and Pema Chodron, and I just loved them. They were such a, you know, such a big part of my introduction into this way of life. So thank you for doing that. Of course. Thanks for being a listener. Thank you. So our show is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of two wolves. So let's start with the parable like we usually do. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness

and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, there's two different levels that I relate to when I hear that parable. The first level is a more obvious level, which is all of the choice points that happen in life when there really does feel, and it could just be in a moment, that there is a fork in the road. And usually it has to do with moments when I feel agitated or triggered in some way. And I

have a choice. I can either respond aggressively or I can stop and breathe and relax and make a choice that could be far more gracious and skillful. And so I encounter choice points like this, and I think most of us do at various points in our life. So that's what the parable means to me at, you could say, a more obvious level. But I wanted to take it a little deeper, if we can, because hearing that this show was called The One You Feed and that we would begin everything and at the core of who I am, there is this natural goodness, you could call it, this inherent love and radiant kindness and goodness, and that it's there if I just relax into it. And there's not actually this, you could say, bad wolf inside me, that it comes forward when there's some kind of triggering thing. But if I can relax and go to what's underneath, that underneath is a core invincible goodness. So I just wanted to say that in response

to the parable. You know, we've had some really interesting discussions around that sort of very topic, because certainly a lot of spiritual teachings, particularly Eastern ones, talk about that original goodness, our Buddha nature. And obviously coming from a Western perspective, we have more of an idea of original sin. And so I always find where people are coming from with that very interesting. So I think from your perspective, what you're saying is that it's the experiences and events that happen to us as we go on through life that cause us to act as, again, it's just a parable. We don't have two wolves inside of us, obviously, but to act in that way, it's not a,

that's not a reflection of any deeper nature of ourselves. It's a reflection of conditioning through the world. Yeah. And that we can relax into, you could say, or fall back into that goodness of our hearts, that that is available to us as an option where the parable is no longer operating. Right. So you just did a audio book that would make sense, given what sounds true is. It's called Being True, What Matters Most in Work, Life, and in Love. And it's fascinating to hear you talk about, I mean, you've talked to, you know, I would probably say all of the major spiritual teachers of, you know, the last 30 years. And so it's really interesting to see kind of what that filters out into in you. And so I thought we could talk about a couple of different areas. start first, because one of the things that you say in there that I think is one of the most important things that I think I'm learning on the journey is that you say, you know, there's no

there there. There's no place that we're getting exactly. Can you talk more about that? Yeah. I mean, I think for a long time, I had the idea that enlightenment was a destination. So, you know, kind of like I'm going someplace, like there's a map and the map is going to take me to a certain lake. You know, I live here in Colorado, so it's beautiful to go hiking up in the mountains. And, you know, when you're hiking and you're on your way to your beautiful mountain lake, there's a focus on getting there. And I think at a certain point, when I actually got it, that there isn't actually, at least this is my experience, there isn't actually a destination that even when you get to the most beautiful spot, and it's filled with this beautiful

water, there's yet another lake you could go to and another lake and another lake and another lake and another lake. And so the point is to actually take the walk as enjoyable step by step. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche has a saying that I quite like, which is when you become a Buddha, or you could say when you become quote unquote enlightened, if you want, that's the beginning of the journey. unending openings and new realizations, new discoveries, and new ways that we can further integrate our experience of infinity and light and subtle knowing into our moment to moment way of living and treating each other. So there's an endless, in my experience, amount to be discovered and an endless depth of integration. And for me, that really changed things. And I stopped so much focusing on being a seeker and instead felt like someone who is

exploring and enjoying. And that's very different orientation. It's almost in that way becomes curiosity for curiosity's sake. I mean, it's the enjoying the learning process and all that along the way. One of the things that we talk a lot on the show about, and I like to ask people because it's one of those paradoxes that I think sits in the center of my life is that we all seem to have this balance of, on one hand, we have some degree of striving, whether that be to go further down the spiritual path, to suffer less, or more material ambitions to build a better company, to change the world. And then we also have this, you know, very clear teaching that says, be where you are, you know, embrace the present, accept the moment. How do

you balance those two sort of desires in your life? Yeah, I think, of course, that's a wonderful question. For me, it has to do with, am I being in touch? You could say attuned or even synchronized with my environment at the time. So it's one thing to get turned on by accomplishing something, by growing our business or starting a new division or doing a certain kind of writing. I mean, that's wonderful, especially when inspirations come and they feel pure in a sense. It's like, oh, something is asking me to do this. I'm turned on. That's great. But are we turned on at the cost of, for example, our relationships with other people in our life and in our environment? If so, that's fishy to me in my own life. So when my partner says, you know, hey, Tammy,

I really need some of your attention. And there's lots of ways that she communicates that. I know that something is out of balance and that I'm not as much just present with exactly what's happening. There's a person in the room who wants me to shut my computer and turn off my iPhone and really sit down and engage with her. engage with her. And it can be the same in a meeting, if there's a sense of pushing, pushing, pushing for a certain outcome, versus slowing down and really letting everyone who has something to say in the room, making space for people to be heard. So to me, it has to do with creating a balance between that inner inspiration and the external environment and what's actually happening and being asked of me in the moment and seeing if there can be a linking up, you could say, with my inner experience and the outer experience so that they're in synchrony. Yeah, that's great. I think that it also gets to what you were, you know, we started off talking about, which is there's no there there. As long as we think that the happiness or what we need is somewhere down the road, then our striving, you know, it does become striving in that sense. Like it'll be better when versus being able to, I think what you said there is, is create more for the joy of creation in some cases and not about what the end result is.

And enjoy each step. Yep. Each step. And each step is a healthy step. And I think that's really important. I know in my own life when the ambition, you could call it, which I don't necessarily see as a bad word. I think there's something called healthy ambition. But if my own health is suffering, that's not healthy ambition.

That's ambition at the cost of the one being that I am wholly responsible for, which is the health of this body. So that there's something fishy happening there. And I think our bodies often give us very immediate feedback about the pace we need to actually live our lives at to be a healthy person. I mean, we get feedback all the time. And so I don't want to say, hey, body, I'm going to push you. Here's another cup of caffeine or here's, you know. No, there's feedback happening that actually I need to slow down. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts?

His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all.

Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com.

And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'd be interested in understanding what your spiritual practice looks like today, and maybe how that's changed over the years? Yeah, that's an interesting question. Well, there was a period for about a decade, where I did a lot of intensive meditation practice. And that was really between the ages of

39 and 49. Up until the age of 39, I did quite a bit of kind of off and on meditating. And then I met a spiritual teacher named Reggie Ray, who teaches in a Tibetan Buddhist lineage, the lineage of the meditation master that I mentioned previously, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. And when I met Reggie, I developed an incredible hunger for practicing what he calls somatic meditation. So it's a type of meditation practice that's based on deeply dropping into our felt experience in the moment. And it involves a lot of retreat practice, so solitary retreat practice, as well as group retreat trainings. And I did several month-long training programs. And there was this period of my life where I was on some type of meditation retreat, probably eight weeks a year over that 10-year period.

And then at a certain point, going to the group training programs, no longer nourished me in the same kind of way. I started teaching meditation for a period of time. And then I didn't find that that experience and that was because Reggie asked me to I didn't find that really nourished me in the same kind of way as well. And so really my practice at this point has been to take a solitary retreat each year for approximately 10 days as a chance to really just drop everything and be alone and check in with myself. And then I'm exploring integrating the meditative state in daily life and in my work life and my relationship life and that has become my primary focus of late. So less sitting day-to-day in your life meditating and more how can I bring that knowledge to my life as I go about doing it. And taking time in the course also of my daily life,

not so much to formally sit on the cushion, but to spend time being, being quiet, relaxing, not having my cell phone on, staring at the sky, but not as much formal practice on the cushion. I'm just very fascinated by how people who are, you know, really fairly committed to this, you know, to growing spiritually what their practice looks like and how inevitably it does change over time. And how personal it is. And I think that's really important too.

And not to hold ourselves up to other people. And certainly I'm not holding myself up as a model. I'm sharing my personal experience. And I think, you know, I interviewed someone recently, his name's Michael Carroll. And I really liked when I was talking to him about meditation, he's written some books on mindful leadership and waking up in the workplace. But he talked about meditation and spiritual practice in and of itself as being a kind of befriending ourselves. And what does it take to come to the depth of friendship, let's say with another person, and then by analogy with ourselves? And so, you know, it's a never ending process. I mean,

the more time you spend with a friend, the more kinds so, you know, it's a never ending process. I mean, the more time you spend with a friend, the more kinds of experiences you have, the more varied experiences when you travel and you go on trips with that person and you go through the death of their parents. I mean, your friendship deepens in so many ways. And it's the same thing with ourself. And it's not like there's a formula to deepen a friendship with somebody. If anything, you could just say it's being vulnerable, telling the truth, you know, opening your heart and spending time together. So I love that as a metaphor for the journey of meditation, this deep befriending of our experience. That is a lovely analogy. You talk

about living in integrity and you say that there are five keys to living in integrity. Tell us about what those keys are. Yeah. So when I went to create this little audio program, I decided to call it Being True. And I liked that title for lots of reasons. One, obviously, because it's such a great play on sounds true, but also because being true, I think that in many ways, that is the core value that I have as a human being. And what that means to me is that I don't have to be embarrassed about who I am, including my areas of weakness. And that's partially because of what I said at the beginning, because underneath it all, there's this goodness there. And so, you know, I'm not talented at this, or I screwed up at that, or I feel ashamed about that's all

okay. It's okay. And that being true means speaking up and being willing to be seen and being willing to connect. Also, all of that happens to me by, uh, you could say taking off the coverings and being exposed, you know, naked as a metaphor, not literally taken. Right. So this idea, being true. And so to me, this is this core idea you said about being in integrity. And, of course, you know, you can't be true without being in integrity. So when I thought about this overarching idea of being true, I thought of five key ideas that to me have been important.

And the first is recognizing that there's only one of me, that I'm not a copycat. I can't therefore follow a recipe, not any recipe from any great spiritual teacher. So I can't say I'm going to be true the way Eckhart Tolle is true. I can't be true the way Pema Chodron is true. I can learn from these people, but I'm not them, and they're not me. And they don't have the same DNA that I have from my family background, the same early experiences, or potentially the same sacred function in the world. They have different sacred functions. So this idea that we're one of a kind is a very important idea to me, and it allows us to go in and trust our own

experience. We have to trust our own experience. It has to be the ultimate authority in our lives, because there's only one of us. And then the second idea is how important it is to take away all of the reference points. So we learn so much from listening to podcasts and reading great books, but at the end of the day, can we actually sit in the darkness? Can we actually receive and have our own mysterious connection to something like the source of being? So that to me is the second. And I think that's what this befriending process or meditation training enables us to do is to sit without a reference point. Would you say that part of that is moving from an intellectual understanding of some of these concepts into an experience of them? Well, it has to be because any intellectual

anything is a reference point, right? It's like, oh, I studied this thing. And so therefore, you're kind of tied to it. And then your experience is secondhand. What I mean by letting go of a reference point is that you're actually in some kind of mysterious, energetic space that you can barely name. I mean, we give words to it, but the words come later. There's truly a mysterious sense of being, and you can sit in that space. I mean, the analogies that are classically given are things like the night sky or the open blue sky or the ocean itself. I mean, it's the sense of an ocean of beingness. And so resting in that and being okay with that.

And, you know, sometimes people just call it the void. And that works for me. I like that. Being, because there's nothing in it that you can say, oh, I'm going to take my cue from that. So, yes, it's moving away from intellectualism, which is taking our cues from all of these other statements that other people have made, or things that we experienced some other time in our life in the past. No, it's like right now, what's happening in that empty space, knowing that I myself am unprecedented, and I need to see what that empty space wants of me. What is actually coming through as a genuine spark of

inspiration. And then the third point is that we receive instructions. That's my experience, is that in that empty space, there's a sense of being given some kind of divine guidance, if you will. And it feels like divine guidance. You could simply say, oh, I get it. Now I get what's true for me, what's an integrity for me. And then we have to listen to what that is. And, you know, to be honest with you, I don't remember the progression of the five steps exactly, but the point is that we hear the guidance, whatever it is, in my case, I hear it, or we know it, We hear the guidance, whatever it is. In my case, I hear it or we know it and we sense it.

And it may or may not be big and glamorous. It might be really small, like call this person and apologize for something. Or, you know, very simple. Listen to someone. It could be simple. And then we have to have the courage to do it. And that's a big step. Because I think a lot of people get instructions, but they don't follow through. And maybe they don't follow through because they're not convinced they're

going to make enough money if they follow through on it, or it's too risky, or it means having some structure in your life radically change like your job or your relationship. But we have to have the courage to follow through. It might mean speaking truth to power, all kinds of things that can be extremely scary, but we have to follow through on the instructions we're given and then live with the consequences. Does meditating feel like a chore, another to-do list item to check off, or perhaps it's even fallen off the list entirely? If you sense that meditating regularly would benefit you, but you struggle to find a sustainable

place for it in your schedule, I can help. There are reasons people struggle with creating and maintaining a meditation practice, and it isn't because meditation isn't right for them. In my free guide, The Top 5 Reasons You Can't Seem to Stick with a Meditation Practice and How to Build One That Lasts, I teach you why it can be a struggle to build a meditation practice that lasts and the small fixes that can have a big impact when it comes to getting you where you want to be with meditating regularly. Go to OneYouFeed.net and sign up for this free guide right on our homepage. What are ways that you have found to help you to get that courage?

Because that is one of those, I think I agree with you, I think there can often be a real gap there, but it can be a challenging gap to overcome. Yeah, I mean, in my own life, I think having people in my life who I know really love me for who I am. Even if I bomb on stage, do I have the courage to do this or that? I know that there's going to be this inner circle in my life that just loves me for the true, innocent, good human that I am, that's been incredibly important to me and has helped me step out in all kinds of ways. So feeling supported, I'm supported. And, you know,

people may find support in different ways, whether it's a support group or whatever that might be. But I think we all need support. We need to know we're loved. Yeah, that's been, I think, one of the big learnings from this show for me that has come up over and over and over again. And I don't know that I recognize the importance of it until I started doing the show was that that role of support and connection and other people. I think I spent a lot of time thinking the spiritual journey was about going within, which I think is part of it. But, and you talk about this also, it's not just that, it's also about our outward connections.

And I mean, I feel that my marriage with my partner, Julie, we've been together for 15 years, really the center of my life. And it's a very loving and rich and ever deepening relationship and one that keeps opening my heart. And from that place, I feel I have the resources to do all kinds of things. I don't know if I would feel as supported in my heart to be as vulnerable, et cetera, if I didn't feel that that was my home base. So I think one of the things that anybody who talked to you would want to know is, you know, to hear about these experiences with the various spiritual teachers that you've met. And I'd be curious in what are some of the major ones that stick out to you? I'm sure there you could, we could go with this for hours, but what are a couple of the major ones that, that really stick with you?

Oh my. Yeah. You know, just yesterday here, it sounds true for the first time in our company's history, we had Eckhart Tolle in the building and we were doing some filming with him and he was in front of the camera. So he was about five feet away from the camera lens. And I was sitting right there, you know, just three feet away from him directing this small video shoot we were doing. And what I felt was a field of infinite light, and that there was not a single thought form in the room. So we just sat for a few minutes before he started speaking. And I think that experience, and I've felt something like that, but different with many different spiritual teachers. And that Eckhart has an incredibly bright, infinite light field, energy field around him that's thoughtless. And I think being in that energy field, that actually that has been probably the most

instructive lesson, if you will, that I've learned from working with teachers more than this word or that word or anything. It's more as I've allowed myself to just relax. And, you know, sometimes I'll say to the cells in my body, hey, could you like try to pick up on what's going on over there? Like just you, you guys pick it up. I'm not going to think about it. I'm not going to try to process this because when we're with people, and we open up, so if we open all the pores on our skin, such that it's almost like our body's made of a spongy, porous material, and we're with someone, just like grandfather clocks will start beating in the same beat, grandfather clocks will start beating in the same beat, the basic theory of resonance,

we can start feeling what they feel like and what expanded awareness feels like. And we can start catching on to it in a feeling way. So I think that by illustration is probably the biggest lesson I've learned from having the chance to be with many great teachers. One of the things that I'm always curious about is you've got these great spiritual teachers and yet they're also human beings. And I'm always fascinated about, you know, what is, what is their experience? And again, this is not, this is a very vague sort of wide question. It's hard to be very specific, but it's always like, think people say, like, you know, does the Dalai Lama have bad days? You know, does Eckhart Tolle have bad days? Do people or a bad mood?

Or is there a period of time where they're feeling irritated? And I think that's a question that's always interesting, you know, from the outside to look at. Because I sometimes think we might hold ourselves to standards that aren't real. Yeah. As you know, I host a podcast series called insights at the edge and I'm always asking people those kinds of questions. So I'm often wanting to know from people, you know, uh, do you, you know, what's your challenging aspect of your life? What really throws you down? And how do you work with it now? And how is that different from before? And I can't give you a standard answer. than others. But I do think that not putting people up on pedestals and remembering that all of us are on some kind of journey of growing and discovering new things and deepening and working out our relationships. I haven't met anybody who isn't learning and growing in some way.

And I think many people, more and more, I think the zeitgeist is shifting, that people feel more just like, yeah, let me tell you what's going on. This is the area of my life that is currently challenging for me. And I hear that more and more and people being more and more vulnerable about that. Excellent. Well, Tammy, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Thanks for your new work being true. We'll have links to it on the website as well as links to Sounds True. I mean, everybody should visit Sounds True. There's more wonderful materials there than you could consume in a lifetime probably. And thank you for the work that you've been doing for all this time, putting this stuff out into the world. Thank you. What a great podcast you have. I really enjoyed being with you.

Thank you. Thank you. Take care. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to

life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts.