BUDDHIST GEEKS INTERVIEWS TAMI SIMON

PART 1: YOU WILL GET THE DHARMA YOU NEED

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In this episode we speak with Tami Simon -- founder of the spiritual media company Sounds True and senior student of Vajrayana teacher Reggie Ray.  Tami shares us with us the intimate details of her initial meeting with Reggie, and the amazing results that followed. She also describes what she has learned from beginning to teach the dharma to others, while also making a vow to only teach that which she truly knows.

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PART 2: INSIGHTS AT THE EDGE

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We're joined again by Tami Simon -- founder of the spiritual media company Sounds True and senior student of Vajrayana teacher Reggie Ray.  This week we ask her about her new podcast series, Insights at the Edge, where she has been interviewing many of the best spiritual teachers in the world. Jokingly, Tami said that she wanted to name the show, "Grill the Guru." Even though that was a joke, there is some truth in it, and she uses her opportunity with these different teachers to ask them tough questions about their lives.

We also ask her about some of the people that have impacted her the most during her decades of being around, and working with some of the brightest spiritual teachers of our time. She shares stories from some of her favorite luminaries, including Quaker teacher and activist Parker Palmer, Julia Butterfly Hill, Adyashanti, and finally "the living now gate," Eckhart Tolle.  

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PART 1: YOU WILL GET THE DHARMA YOU NEED

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Ryan: Hello Buddhist Geeks, this is Ryan Oelke and we have a special guest in the studio, one who we’ve been dying to interview for quite a while. And Vince Horn is here with me.

Vince: Yeah, we’re here today speaking with my boss. [laughter]

Tami: Exciting.

Ryan: This better be a good interview, buddy! [laughter]

Vince: Yeah, thank you, Tami, for joining us.  

Tami: Yeah if I come out injured or anything then I’ll sue you.  

Vince: No worker’s comp here.  

Ryan: There’s no BG worker’s comp.  

Tami: I believe that.

Vince: Tami is the founder of the company Sounds True, it’s a spiritual media company, or at least that’s how we’ve been talking about it lately. And she’s also a long-time Vajrayana practitioner and teacher -- is that right? You’ve been teaching some retreats lately, yeah?  

Tami: Yeah, I would say a senior teacher within Dharma Ocean.  

Vince: Within Dharma Ocean, which is the spiritual community of Reggie Ray’s?

Tami: Correct.  

Vince: Cool. And we’ve interviewed Reggie Ray.

Ryan: Yeah, that was a wonderful interview.  

Vince: That was fun.

Ryan: And actually one time when Vince and I got to hang out with you, you were telling us this story about how you met Reggie and became a student.  We would love to hear that and go a little bit more into it.

Tami: Sure. So Reggie came to Sounds True to record a series, an audio learning series about 7 years ago on Buddhist tantra. And he came into the studio--it was actually pretty amazing what happened in that he sat down to speak the first session and nothing really happened.

At the time, a friend of mine who was also working at Sounds True named Matt Lacotta was with me. And Reggie was like, “It’s too conceptual a field. Can you get Matt some beers?” This was at ten in the morning.

So we go out and we get a six pack for Matt and he’s like, “You guys need to suspend judgment, if I’m going to be able to do this.” And I’m like, “Well I’m a producer, I’m supposed to have my critical faculties at work but I’m also willing to just kind of wait here patiently.” So it went on and on.

After about two and a half hours, Reggie had actually not yet said a reasonable sentence. And I looked at Matt and Matt had studied with Reggie at the University of Colorado. I’m writing him these notes, like, “Is this going to work? Is Reggie OK? Are you OK?” Because now he’s had four or five beers.

I’m thinking who knows, maybe the program will be canceled. Reggie said, “Hey, can I just take a nap and be alone for a while? Just turn off all the lights, leave me on the couch and give me an hour.”

This is kind of a personal story but it’s amazing and it’s true. Which is I came back down there after about an hour -- and he sat there and we didn’t even know each other. Reggie was actually crying and he said, “I realize the obstacle here, which is I need to give all the royalties away for this program.”

I was like, “I don’t care who you give the royalties to. Can we record now?” [laughter] He was having a big emotional moment. For me it’s like, “OK, just sign right here, we’ll give the royalties away to XYZ organization. Can we start recording?” He’s like, “Yeah, I think we can start now.”

And we sat down and he then recorded three complete, seamless sessions 80 minutes long without Matt or I getting up or leaving the room. And it was amazing and it was the beginning of this audio series. That's the way the program began and we worked together over the course of about a week.

At one point he said to me, “So tell me about your meditation practice.” I and was like, “Well, I’ve been a vipassana meditator and I started out with Goenka in India when I was 21, these ten day intensive retreats. Since then I’ve worked with Thich Nhat Hanh for a while and different things. Basically I’m not very regular, Reggie, to be honest.”

And he’s like, “OK, what’s the practice that you do?” I’m like, “Well basically I follow my breath and I work with physical sensations.” He’s like, “How long have you been doing that Tami?” And I said, “I’ve been doing it off and on not regularly for about you know maybe, it's close to 20 years.” And he said, “OK, are you ready for an additional instruction?” I was like, “Yeah.”

He said, “Here’s the problem. Your mind is actually bigger than your practice.” And it was when he said that, it was a moment for me. He was like, “What you’re doing is you’re bringing your mind back to an object again and again and again. But the natural openness of your mind is actually bigger than your practice so you don’t want to practice. Because why would you put yourself into a smaller space than you are naturally.”

I was like, good point. He was like, “You need to start working with space. So you need to start lifting your attention from the object and letting everything that is happening, all sensations, all inputs be there as well as an object.” He explained it very simply: “You can use the dimmer switch image if you want” which is what I heard as he was talking. So you can have 10 percent of your attention on whatever the object of the meditation is and 90 percent of your attention can be just open and in space.

"And if you’re really calm and not discursive, then just be with everything that’s occurring. You don’t need an object; drop the object."  I was like, oh my God. I’ve recorded 300 programs with meditation teachers and been to how many retreats and nobody had given me this very simple instruction. And it was so simple and so meaningful and so important in terms of changing the way that I worked, just with every single breath.

So I said, “Reggie, can I talk to you a little bit more at the end of this recording session?” And we sat down and my friend Matt said to me, “Tami, look. Reggie teaches Tibetan Buddhism. You’re Miss Universal Everything. He’s not going to work with you as a student. He’s not going to. You need to follow a certain path, blah, blah, blah. And I know you. You’re Miss Mystic of the Trees universalist.”

I said, “Look, I’m allowed to talk to him. He’s been in the studio for a week; I can say whatever I want and see what happens.” So I said, “Here’s the deal, Reggie. Here’s the deal. I don’t want to do a ngöndro.  I don’t want to become a Tibetan Buddhist. But, I need some help. Let’s just get down to it; I need some help. So I’m wondering could I meet with you every once in a while and just report on how the practice is going and get your input?”

And he looked at me and he just said very simply, “Tami, you will get the Dharma you need.” Just that very sentence; a very simple sentence. But at that moment I actually saw the image that I was turning a corner. There was a way that I hadn’t been around that corner before and by turning that corner -- I know this sounds dramatic but this is what I felt -- I would be OK.

It’s like the thing that my life had always been about and the reason I started Sounds True. And what meant the most to me would actually some day be fulfilled. Until that moment he said that “You’ll get the Dharma you need” and I saw the turning of the corner, I think it was a question for me. That was the beginning of my relationship with Reggie.

Ryan: Beautiful, thank you for sharing that.

Vince: Yeah, it’ll be interested in hearing -- because my attention is very wrapped on how things progressed after that. What was it like? Did you start working with him more often and start going on retreats with him or how did that progress your relationship?

Tami: So I went to programs. I went to the Dathün, which is a month-long program that he’s taught every year for the past decade or so. At one of the dathüns I actually saw this vision that he actually could teach the kind of meditation techniques that he teaches outside of the traditional Buddhist framework.

It’s kind of a long story, but the gist of it was my partner in love, Julie, and I proposed to Reggie that he create a curriculum called “Meditating with the Body”, which would take these somatically-based awareness exercises that he teaches and introduce them to people who may or may not be interested in formal training in Tibetan Buddhism.

So we proposed that we create a six-month home study course that has a retreat at the beginning and the end. And so we worked on that together and we became quite close during that process because we went through the thinking of: how do we design a six month training program in the essence of these Tibetan yogic practices for a general audience?

The Meditating with the Body program still continues; it’s going on its sixth year. So meanwhile he and I are working together, becoming closer. He is teaching in various Dathüns about taking refuge.

I said to Reggie, “I’m not sure I can take refuge because that would mean that I was  committing to a specific tradition.” And he said, “Don’t do it unless it’s right for you. Please don’t do it; you’re not called to it, don’t do it.”

Then the moment he said, “Don’t do it” I felt like God, I really want to do it. I really, really want to do it. Everybody, all my friends, took refuge and there I was, left out and blah, blah, blah. And then I went and I talked him later. I said, “God, I’m just such a mess. I want to take refuge in the practice but I can’t” because this was so important to me. Maybe the reason this was so important to me is that I was born Jewish and in my family the idea that I would even play when I was six with young boys who were not Jewish, my mom would say, “Why don’t you play with Jewish boys?”

I’m like, “Mom, I don’t ask the guys on the playground whether or not they’re Jewish when I tackle them and I throw the football. It’s not one of the questions. It’s doesn’t even come up.” And so there was just a way that I didn’t want to be ever sort of hemmed in thinking that -- and this is the whole part of the whole idea with Sounds True too, the company that I found--was that there is this universal flow of fresh water that we can access. And it can’t be owned or controlled by anybody.

OK. I’m telling this to Reggie that I want to take refuge obviously in this path and in this practice and that I want to take refuge in him as my teacher, because of our relationship and the love and the sense of devotion that I felt to him.  

And he said, “Well, Tami, when you take refuge in the teacher you’re automatically taking refuge in all three jewels. Any time you take refuge in any of the jewels you’re taking refuge in all three. And we can do a ceremony right here between you and me where you take refuge in the teacher.”

I was like, wow, I love this! I’m getting my like my own private refuge ceremony. [laughter] That appealed to the VIP in me, whatever. So we have the ceremony and this was actually a funny moment because I looked him straight in the eye right before we did it and I said, “You know Reggie, it’s possible that if I kept looking I would find a better teacher.” Like someone who is even better, more realized, whatever.

For whatever reason, I mean what a sort of weird, snarky kind of thing to say but I felt like I needed to say it. That it’s possible, if I kept looking. He just looked at me and said, “Tami, you can do that. But you might also die first.”

I was like, “OK, let’s keep going.” That’s a good response. We’ve cleared the deck here; we’ve both communicated with our hearts, forward we go. You know I could go on and on because actually each step of the way in my relationship with him, there has been a funny story and me as kind of the -- what would I call it? Skeptical and scared and not exactly trusting student. To say that I grilled him is an understatement of all time.

Honestly, from the very beginning it was like, “Oh, you’re being nice to me because you want something from me and you’re giving me extra attention just so I can promote you. I don’t trust that; I don’t trust having a teacher. I went on and on and on.

Reggie was like, “You know Tami, everything is an exchange. There’s always an exchange of energy. Yes I’m giving you attention in a certain kind of way because of what is being exchanged between us.” Even that kind of my paranoia -- I guess that would be the right word -- I was super paranoid from the beginning. It took a long time for our relationship to grow.

Vince: I'd be interested in hearing where you feel now in your relationship; both to Reggie and also kind of your edge in your practice right now.

Tami: Well in my relationship with Reggie, I think I came to a place where I see how he is both my teacher -- and I feel I have a lot to learn from him about the practice. And he is my co-journier in that we’re both serving the same lineage.

And what I mean by co-journier is there are all kinds of ways that we can dialogue about things on a totally mutual, eye-to-eye level. Whether that’s relationships or business or money or challenges in the world or challenges with people. I don’t necessarily, when I'm having this kind of conversation with him, think: Oh he’s my teacher so I can only say certain kinds of things or I can only take his wisdom, I can’t offer mine.

No, it’s mutual exchange. I know a lot about relationships and about business and all kinds of things and I want to bring that into my dynamic with him. I think that’s something he values.

So it’s an interesting relationship in that there is definitely a hierarchical dimension to it but there’s also a total eye-level dimension to it, both. And then, in terms of my practice, I have been doing my ngöndro, the thing of course I said seven years ago that I never wanted to do.

And interestingly what I have found is that I’m often naturally more drawn to more of a Mahamudra style approach to practice. And that means that I am more comfortable doing intensive body work and earth-breathing and central channel work and working with looking directly at the nature of awareness than I am at doing the form-based practice, which is repeating the mantra, etc., etc.

And so what I found is that if I alternate and I follow my own inspiration about that, the practice can stay fresh and interesting and engaged. And if I say “No” I have to do a certain number of malas, etc. in order so that I can you know, Geta Abi Shaka and blah, blah, blah. Then the whole thing just seems stupid to me; it’s flat, it’s ridiculous, it’s dead.

So I have to really trust my own feeling about it. At one point I said to Reggie, “I don’t like working with the text that you wrote.” Because he translated and created a new ngöndro text for his students.

It’s a beautiful text and I said the tradition of the siddhas, which our living is a continuity practice lineage of the siddas of India; they didn't go around with pages and repeat words from their teacher that were written on a sheet of paper. They practiced from inside out, organically. And I go "I just can't do it." And he just looked at me and said "don't work with the text." And I was like "what?" And he said "you don't have to."  Once again, the moment he said "you don't have to," I was like "oh, I kind of like that text; I may bring it out sometimes." The moment that I was free to relate to it the way I wanted to relate to it, and so now when I sit down to practice the text is there, and I may or may not look at it. That may not be what happens. I may not even do my ngöndro practice. I may just sit. Or I may lay down for a while and really focus on just relaxing and undoing my body, because I have been so wound up that I actually can't even begin practicing in a genuine way. Cause I need an hour just to undo. So I think for me the edge is that it has to be real. It has to not be coming from the outside in. It has to be coming from the inside out. Or else for me it doesn't feel like I'm practicing with the devoted heart; it feels like I am being some kind of good student or something. And I'm not really interested in that.

Vince: So it sound like there's some sort of intuitive element inside you that's guiding the thing.

Tami: Completely. I mean intuitive is a good word, but it's even more like making love. Which I don't know if you want to call that intuitive -- it's instinctual, it's totally felt, it's that you go a little bit and you get feedback. And you go a little bit more, and you breathe. And you wait for the waves to come through and tell you what to do next. I mean it's like that.

Vince: What would you say the fruit of this past several years of working with Reggie and finally turning that corner in some way? What have you felt the fruit of that has been?

Tami: Sure. well recently I was teaching a retreat on Salt Spring Island which is north of Vancouver. and somebody asked me this question -- “don't tell me about the aspiration of your practice” -- often when people I talk about what their aspirations are. “Tell me what it's actually done.” I thought “Why would I tell you about the aspiration? Of course I want to tell you about how I am actually experiencing it. Well, to make it a slightly long answer to say, first of all there are two thing: one I talked a little bit about my relationship with Reggie, and the love and the sense of him extending an arm to me and me taking it, and that human connection that has been so inspiring to me.

But then the second thing that has been the key element for me at this particular path over the last seven years has been that's it's been totally body based, somatically based. So the way I just described practice as a kind of making love with space, making love with reality. For me I think that was what I needed for my meditation practice to explode with fire. Because, before that, and the image I had was just like a haystack going up in fire as I try to describe this to you, I think before that it was more like I was just inching along, or something like that, but there was never a sense an organic, unfolding, supercharged process happening. Which is what I felt. And I think the reason for me is that both of these elements -- the love element and the relational element, and the body approach have been what I needed.

And part of it is I spent a lot of time at Sounds True, being a publisher and business person, thinking and solving problems. And yet the greatest intelligence that I have, for me at least, is somatically received. That's really where I first of all connect to something that has no boundaries between me and it. So if I am not connected to the feeling of being totally supported by the earth and the chair below me -- if there's some sense that I'm separate from that, then I can’t really practice meditation. And I think I didn’t really know that before. So I was practicing as a person perched on the Earth and through these Tibetan yogic exercises, I started practicing as an extension of the vibration of space and earth. That’s sort of the beginning point of the practice, then it started unfolding, unfolding, unfolding.

So I feel like what the practice has given me, to finally answer your, is more of myself. And what I mean by that is there is a way to access an infinite field of potentiality that then can come through this particular being and express itself in the world in a way that’s natural, confident and loving. And it’s more myself but I don’t even know what that is and I don’t care. It’s not like anything. It’s just an expression of beingness that does have a uniqueness to it.

I’m so much more available to it and it’s zooming through me, moving through me, kicking my ass.

Ryan: I don’t know 100 percent but just from talking to Vince is that you very much obviously, including your practice, dig the Vajrayana and find it extremely helpful for you. Maybe for you to talk about how you see the Vajrayana--I guess it’s stepping a little bit away from your…

Tami: I’m going to answer your question obliquely.  

Ryan: Sure.

Tami: Because when Reggie said to me -- this was a couple years ago. What happened was I said, “OK Reggie, how can I help you?” Which is a question I’ve asked him repeatedly over the years. What can I do to be of service, whatever.

And he said at a certain point, “The only thing you can do at this point Tami is to teach.” He’s like, “I can help you more and you can grow more and you can help me more if you’ll start teaching."

I said, “You know Reggie, I haven’t read that many books on Buddhism and I don’t even know if I understand the Vagriana.” And I said, “You want to recommend some books for me to read so when people ask me hard questions, blah, blah, blah.” This was a few years ago.

He said, “First of all, you’ll learn more from teaching then you will from reading. You can read a whole book and you can get one good idea but when you teach, you’ll learn so much.”

And I saw this recently in Salt Spring. It was kind of like I was teaching myself about meditation. It was weird, meaning, first of all, I couldn’t prepare which was very awkward and strange. I’ve worked with all these different authors who have come to record programs at Sounds True. I’m like, “Can I see your outline? Let’s go over it. Is this a really logically put together curriculum? Oh my God this person doesn’t have a full left brain--you know my business card should say, “Left brain for hire”.

Here I am going to teach my first residential retreat and I don’t even have a note written and I can’t. Like something in me just couldn’t, so I had to go, I had to sit on the cushion not knowing what the heck we were going to do or what I was going to say. Sit in the energy field of the lineage that I had lit up and invoked and trust that something would happen that would be beneficial.

And all kinds of things happened and I listened to what I said and I learned stuff as I was talking. So anyway, in answer to your question, part of what Reggie said to me was, “Tami, teach from your own experience. What makes a good teacher is somebody who talks from their own experience.”

I made a vow that I would only teach what I knew from my own experience. I would never say anything, I would never answer a question if I didn’t know the answer to that question. I would just speak from what I knew from my own seeing.

Ryan: That’s awesome. When I read the stories from of the siddhas everything you said: the intuition, the lovemaking, the speaking what you know--that’s what the Vajrayana seems like to me. So that’s beautiful.

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PART 2: INSIGHTS AT THE EDGE

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Vince: So, Tami, you recently started interviewing a bunch of spiritual teachers, luminaries, authors, and this project you are calling Insights at the Edge, and currently it’s in podcast form.  So, each week there is a new interview out, and you have been interviewing people like Jack Kornfield, Parker Palmer, your teacher Reggie [Ray], Tara Brach, you recently interviewed.  So, you have been interviewing a lot of really interesting people, and you have been asking them tough questions, you have been asking them about their edge.    

Tami: Well, I wanted to call the series Grill the Guru, but...

Vince: God, that’s great.

Tami: ...since it’s Sounds True, I’d like to now bring it back.   So we’re...

Vince: Grill the Guru.

Tami: Yes.

Vince: That’s a good title, though.

Tami: Ok, well, you can use it.  Ryan: OK.  I just bought the URL.  

Tami: OK.

Vince: So, I wanted to hear a little about the vision or intention behind the Insights at the Edge podcast.  You kind of, already…

Tami: Yes.

Vince: …touched in on it.

Tami: Well, it’s actually not to be adversarial or grilling in that kind of way, but it’s more to sort of find out what do people know from their own experience when they are not prepared, when they haven’t -- when they’re not giving you their stick.  And so, that’s what I am interested in, and part of it is in, you know, all these years at Sounds True, publishing all these different teachers, part of my original impetus, when I was 21 and started the company, was I wanted to find out who is for real.  Are you for real a spiritual teacher?  I mean you come up, you talk, blah, blah, blah, but I want to meet you in the bathroom, if I can, or in the hallway or I want to know what your wife or partner thinks about you; or I want to see what it’s like at 2:00 a.m. when you have a nightmare and you can’t sleep, what do you do, how do you handle it?  I want to know how the practice that you are talking about how you present -- what’s that really like?  And so I’ve, you know, thought about different ways of, you know, I’ve spent my career kicking the tire -- we could use that as a metaphor--or sniffing, the you know what, the tush of all these different teachers, just trying to find out what does it smell like from that end; do you know what I mean?   

And so, in the sense the podcast interview series is really a natural outgrowth of a lot of my original motivation at Sounds True, which is to learn and grow, really, and by finding out what people know.  It’s as interesting finding out what they know as what they don’t know, meaning what they don’t know, oh, OK, so that’s a gap in that person’s book.  What do they know, and you know, what I found in each interview is that people know things, and they have jewels and those jewels are the takeaway that are offered to other people.  You can even really find their jewels better by talking to them and stripping away the hype.  What’s the real jewel that this person really knows in their blood?   

Vince: What are some of the jewels you have run across so far in your…

Tami: Yeah.     

Vince: …talking to these teachers?

Tami: There have been a couple of moments that have moved me the most.  I’d say the first was with Terry Tempest Williams.  She was recording at Sounds True the audio version of her new book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, and she was describing what it was like as a barefoot poet in Rwanda, and looking at these mass graves, and her experience in how she could see an opening of compassion in the world through being there with these other women, people from all over the world who came to report on the experience of barefoot poets.  And I looked at her and I said, what eyes are you looking through that give you the kind of image as an information; and when the moment when I said that to her, what eyes, she just -- her eyes just started tearing and crying.   

Fortunately, we had a video camera at the time too so it’s an audio podcast but we were able to capture some of these on video.  And, you know, it’s interesting actually because what that reminds me of is how often the most important things I have learned interviewing people haven’t been the things they’ve said; they have been little things I’ve observed.  I mean, for example, when I had the chance to interview Thich Nhat Hanh, and this a while ago, before we started the interview it was time for breakfast because I came a little early and blah, blah, blah and it took him about maybe five minutes to peel the banana, and it was the most beautiful relationship I have ever seen of a person to a banana for breakfast.  And I learned more from that than I did the entire two-hour interview that we did; I’ll never forget the way he looked at the banana before he peeled it, the way he took the first -- you know, and he was not performing for me, he was just eating his banana, you know.

Vince: So, I understand, you actually started Sounds True doing an interview series on KGNU; that’s, kind of, like where it started.  

Tami: Yes, in a sense.  I mean, I would say it started with dropping out of Swarthmore College and realizing that I couldn’t follow and learn what I wanted to learn in an academic setting; and I went to India for a year, and when I came back and then started Sounds True here in Boulder, really what I was wanting was to continue the education that I felt I couldn’t get in a traditional academic environment, and what I discovered was that the best way for me to learn was to have a dialogue with somebody.  And that -- yes, I could read their books, blah, blah, blah, but something happened when I engaged one-on-one with somebody that I could learn all kinds of things, and I just like -- it’s just like, just tell it to me, just tell me, and I could learn so much by the language that they used, as I just mentioned, by visual cues that I was receiving, by the tone of their voice, by -- how they worked with space or didn’t -- did they talk like this and just keep going about -- I mean I learned something about how their mind worked or versus the way people pause even in a sentence or before they ask a question.  And so, for me, interviewing people and starting Sounds True was all this desire to really feed myself with the kind of learning I needed and in the process, be of service to other people thinking there must be some percentage of the world that learns in a similar way, I hope, and, you know, I got to find a way to support myself, support my learning habit.  I am sure you have a -- can relate to that Vince…

Vince: Sure.

Tami: …and Ryan, as people who work on these kinds of projects, you know, it’s like this is what I want to do and is there any way I can serve other people, at the same time make enough money from it to keep it going.  So, that was the original inspiration behind Sounds True, 24 years ago, and then to have a podcast series now because you know, as you know you have been consulting with us and helping us develop our podcast…

Vince: Right.

Tami: …series, meaning with the internet and its capacity, this is the way to reach so many people for Sounds True to be able to offer the best of our relationship with these high level authors for free.  That’s the realization of a dream for me.  I mean we’ve spent the last couple of decades plus creating really wonderful programs and charging people for them because that was what our business model was, and as I said, we have to -- have to remain self-sustaining.  But then coming into a time where actually having a free podcast will benefit the company from a marketing standpoint and then we can put out this kind of really good Dharma for free is so fulfilling and wonderful.  

Vince: Yes, yes, and you are coming back, kind of, to the roots.

Tami: Totally.

Vince: Yes.  And you can find Insights at the Edge at:

http://www.soundstrue.com/podcast

And it occurred to me, I was listening to you speak to Parker Palmer on the way to work and I realized, wow, Tami has really been exposed to so much spiritual wisdom over the past few decades, and it would be really interesting to ask her, what are some of the things she has been -- the authors, resources, teachings that she has been most, kind of, impacted by, most blown away by -- it would be interesting for those people out there that are on the spiritual path to kind of get Tami’s, kind of, top picks or resources, what had been most significant to you or you have seen that had been most significant to others.

Tami: Sure.

Vince: Yes, can you share that?

Tami: I can share what comes to mind.

Vince: Yes, please.

Tami: So, you mentioned Parker Palmer, and I would like to bring him up because like what’s Parker Palmer doing being talked about on Buddhist Geeks?

Vince: Right.

Tami: And at the end of my last conversation with him, he said something interesting.  He said, you know, you and I can have good conversations because we have just enough in common and just enough not in common to have an interesting conversation.  I mean there is a part where he and I really connect, and then he has got a whole world of social action, kind of, Quaker concern and all kinds of things that I -- it’s not that I am not interested, I just don’t have that much to talk to him about.  But what I saw in him was somebody that through intense experiences of depression, clinical depression, what he said is that at first, he saw the darkness in his life and he saw himself as darkness, but then he actually “became the dark.”  

I don’t want to try to sentimentalize or make it seem easy the process that he went through; in fact, part of what he and I talked about is why some people go through -- who go through those kinds of depressions kill themselves and other people don’t, and now, he doesn’t know the answer to that because his depression was that debilitating, but what he learned from that experience was unbelievable to me and what I felt being with him since he knows what it means to be the dark, was that I could say anything.  There was the complete space from my emotional experience like I was with one of the greatest spiritual teachers of all time, and hear somebody who is involved in political reform and you know, helping educators with his books the courage to teach and the courage to lead, and yet because of his experience with clinical depression, I mean, what I said to him is being with you is like sitting next to a fire, a fire being so warm, it’s so accepting, it’s so transfixing and part of what it made me start thinking about is it relates a little bit to your question about Sounds True authors in general is how people can be initiated into spiritual reality, into the boundlessness of space, into the boundlessness of our essential identity through all kinds of things.  I mean, for Parker it was depression.

But let’s think of another person here that I have worked with at Sounds True, just briefly, it was never a very popular program, although it’s an incredible program, Julia Butterfly Hill who, we created a program about her experiences sitting in Luna, the tree.  She was initiated into the healing nature of reality through her love affair with a tree.  Amazing.   

And then someone who I interviewed recently, Geneen Roth who previously I would have said, well, you know, I don’t really have food problem, she is the food lady, she helps people who sit in front of the refrigerator, take five breads and close the refrigerator and sit down, you know, blah, blah, blah, but she has gone just through this experience and is writing a new book called Losing Everything, about how she lost all of her life’s savings, 30 years of life’s savings, during the Maydoff scandal, and how that experience of total loss initiated her.   

OK, so there’s different things that can initiate people; and the thing is when you meet somebody who has been that blown open, regardless of what the catalyst was, for me, at least, I can resonate with that, I can feel that when I am with them or even just speaking to them over the phone.  What I can feel is that they have gone under and then under and then further under until whole floor fell open into boundlessness, that their experience has taken them that deep, and they can show it to you.   

Now, somebody who I have had really profound experiences with is Adyashanti who is a wonderful, sort of, post-Zen teacher, and many people are finding him interesting, and he helped me a lot talking with him, being with him.  I actually felt that being with him there were sort of bandages around my heart, and just through the course of our time together those bandages were pulled off, you know, like gauge strips, so he just kept, he wasn’t really doing anything, he was just being himself.  It was funny that the night before I went to interview him, I had a dream and in the dream, you know, we had an exchange, and he said you seem to be blah, blah, blah.  I couldn’t really sleep, so, it was sort of a dream, sort of not.  And then eight hours later, we're interviewing, we take a break and he says the exact same thing that he said to me in the dream.  And that...

Vince: Trippy.

Tami: It was trippy, yes.  And I find him a really, really, really helpful teacher.  Now, interestingly, I, in my own path, am working with a body-based practice approach which we talked about through Tibetan yoga and that’s really important to me, and the way Adyashanti teaches meditation, and Sounds True has published programs on it, which is more just sort of allow everything to be as it is and then inquire into your experience.  That approach, I don’t think would work for me.  I mean, I have tried it and I try it, and may be I just don’t know, and I have talked to Adyashanti about this, how to inquire deeply enough, what happens for me as if I am not rooting my practice at a somatic level, I can just kind of spin off a bit.  So, I need something physical to keep going back to.  So, in my own practice I wouldn’t be able to say Adya the way you teach is my path but being around him and talking to him, I think, he has a nuclear effect on people because of his own level of realization.

Vince: Just to highlight one author that you talked about recently in a meeting, Eckhart Tolle, you spent some time with him recently on PBS special, and you said sitting with him was, kind of, like sitting next to a nuclear reactor, that you were having some tripped-out visions and experiences and...

Tami: Oh my God.  Well, Eckhart, I mean, I call him the “now gate”, the living now gate.  And actually I was telling Reggie about Eckhart and my experiences with him, and he said, oh, Eckhart is like a hole in the universe.  And I said, yes, pretty accurate way to put it.  And I do think he, kind of, feels that way, and you know it’s interesting when he tells the story of his own awakening.  He tells it very briefly at the beginning of The Power of Now, here he was suicidally depressed and said, “I can’t stand myself”, and then had the thought, “who is the I who can’t stand myself; are there two of me or one of me?”  I can’t stand myself, he tells the story and then he heard a voice that said, resist nothing, and the next he morning awoke to the sound of the bird, and the bird chirping sounded to him like it was inside of him, not outside of him.  

So, that’s kind of the way that he tells the story but the way that I interpreted it, it was like a vacuum hose that came down from the galaxies or something, and when you heard resist nothing, it created the hole in the universe that is now the “now gate” of Eckhart Tolle.  So, yeah, he is so unique and unusual, and what an unusual destiny he has in terms of… I mean, over 40 million people have downloaded his, the series that Oprah did him with online.  I mean, this is amazing, you know, 6 million copies plus… I mean that's just anywhere 10 million copies of all of his books in print, just in the English language, 30-40 languages translated all over the world. He is known all over the world.  

We are actually launching something with Eckhart’s teachings, caused Eckhart Tolle TV, which launches on July 1st.  And interestingly, people from over 33 different countries have signed up to subscribe to Eckhart Tolle TV, because of the interest in him world-wide. Anyway, so yes, being around Eckhart… yeah, I mean the first time I went to interview him, I think this is kind of, just talk about weird, hey this is Buddhist Geeks, so the word Karma is one of the most popular search words you have on your transcriptions…

Vince: Sure

Tami: …so weird Karma which is, we created the time to do the interview. We set it up about six months in advance. He’s not very famous right now, but I still think, “wow, this is cool. I’m really being given a boon to get to interview him.” That’s great! And, here I am, I’m in Vancouver, and the morning that the interview is scheduled is September 11th, 2001. I wake up to a phone call, “turn on your TV, can you believe what’s happening?” And I call Eckhart’s office, and I say, I presume you don’t want to do the interview today. And his business manager says, “No Eckhart really wants to do the interview today.”  

Then so here Eckhart and I are talking for three hours on the morning of September 11, 2001. And at first when I came to meet him, and I had never spent any time in person with him, he said “why don’t we meditate before we start.” And I was like “sounds great”.  So I’m setting there. First of all I am just so relieved that we are going to get to sit.  And we are just staring at each other ten or so feet away, and that was when all the walls started melting. They started dripping with color and melting. The room started turning. There wasn’t really a floor or ceiling. And I was like okay great, I hope I’m not going to have to like, say anything, [laughter] you know.  

And the good news is I didn’t have to say much because I asked him one question, which is “What do you make of this day of what has happened?” And, he proceeded to talk for about 90 minutes in response to that one question. And here is the moment I thought later in the interview, which is I was asking him about the experience of dying.  He just looked at me and he said “I’m already dead.” But here’s the interesting thing. When he said that, I saw this cross of light blast right through him, and sort of explode onto the room. And I was like, the dude is already dead…  

Vince: Wow

Tami: …In a certain kind of way.  

Vince: In part I wanted to ask Eckhart because “Power of Now” was one of the first kind of spiritual books I picked up and it just kind of blew me away. Reading it, I remember just at certain points, just weeping, thinking “this guy knows what he is talking about. There is something really important here.” It’s so amazing that he has touched that many people, who presumably have had similar responses to his writing, and teaching.

Tami: Well, interestingly, before he got on Opera. And this is the phenomena of him getting on Opera and selling this number of books, yeah he was popular, but it’s only a little over a year old.  

Vince: Right

Tami: So you know, for the last, five to eight years, he has been talking about what he calls the flowering of human consciousness. And he uses this metaphor that at one point that earth was covered with plants, but there were no flowers. There was just green. I don’t really know if this is true, because I don’t know very much about biological debate, but let’s presume that it was true.

Yeah. And then there was one flower that arose someplace on the earth. And before we know it there were more and more and more.  And there were flowers on all different parts of the earth that had the right climate to support it. But at one point there were no flowers. There were just a couple. So he talks about early enlightened teachers like Buddha, and Christ and other teachers as early flowers, but that now here, in the beginning of the 21st century, were going through a flowering of human consciousness.

And he believes that lots and lots of people will be experiencing a spiritual awakening. And enlightenment in our lifetime in a way that is completely unprecedented. And I remember saying to him, “I like so much of your work, I like you, you’re a ‘now gate’. But I just don’t believe this thing about the flowering of human consciousness. I’ve been working my you know what tushy off, for how many years. There’s a certain number small group of niche people who are interested. Look we have a small business, it’s just not, come on, I mean until we can even elect a decent president in the United States, how can we even talk about the flowering of human consciousness?”

And then January, the beginning of last year, it happened for me actually on the same evening, which is I got a call from his office telling me that Oprah had chosen his book, A New Earth, as the book of the year, her pick for the year. And, that she was going to be doing this first online webinar ever with him. It was later that evening, that happened during the day, was when Obama won the Iowa Caucus. I was listening to it on my computer at three in the morning, his acceptance speech. I actually just started weeping on my keyboard, thinking, “is it possible, that things this good could be happening?”  Even if it’s not like a full flowering, even if it’s just a little budding of human consciousness, this is incredible!