A Path to Enlightenment in the Comfort of Home

Who would have thought a late-night radio show called “Live Nude Dancers” would put Tami Simon on the road to spiritual awareness?

She was a college kid when she hosted the program, a mostly music show. At the time she was studying philosophy at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. That was 15 years ago.

Even then, Simon had a feeling that all the major religions of the world are interrelated. But school wasn’t the place to learn more.

She needed Sri Lanka. Nepal. And after that, the Rockies--America’s counterpart to these mystical lands. In Boulder, she started interviewing spiritual leaders who passed through town for a local public radio station. That paved the way for Sounds True, the mail-order audiotape business Simon started with $5,000 in 1985. Since then, she has made a career of gathering advice from spiritual masters around the world.

The first year, sales totaled $40,000. Last year, they reached $5.1 million, which seems to suggest that Simon has touched a nerve.

“My impression is, people are teaching themselves at home,” she says. “They want practical tools for their own spiritual life. The most popular teachers give techniques that are simple, but difficult to perfect--things people can practice on their own in a five-minute window.”

Now in her 30s, she finds that many of her customers are like her. “I don’t see people of my generation turning to traditional religion,” says Simon, who is Jewish by birth. “Temples and churches can become empty experiences for some people. But there’s an innate desire to find beauty and the perennial truth that is part of every religious tradition.”

To capture a direct, teacher-to-student tone, Simon records her personal conversations with her subjects.

Some of the names in her catalog are familiar: Desmond Tutu and Thomas Moore, Deepak Chopra and Alice Walker. Others, such as Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh of Vietnam, are not as well known in America. In every case, the conversations are meant to achieve one main goal. “Give people the support they need to pray, meditate and find a meaningful connection to divinity,” Simon explains.

She also records workshops on topics from world peace to mind and body medicine, from myth to psychology and the arts. Tapes vary in length; some are singles, others are sets containing as many as six cassettes.

Simon puts her own artistry into the effort. In recording Thomas Moore’s talks on “Soul Life,” she recorded him playing the piano too--a talent even his most avid readers didn’t know about. “The piano improvisations fit into my own, down-home idea about meditation,” says Moore. He compares Simon’s approach to the engaging way that National Public Radio mixes music, natural sound and conversation for interviews.

In the past, Moore says, he only listened to music when he was driving his car. Now, he plays taped conversations with James Hillman, one of his own favorite authors and psychotherapists. “So many people tell me they love to be alone in their car listening to a taped conversation,” he says. “It’s a kind of meditation.”

In “My Life as Myself,” fiction writer Alice Walker compares her work to a prayer. She describes her religious experience, first as a member of the Methodist church and now as a pagan--a term she defines as “a country person” who is in tune with nature.

Walker envisions a pagan ritual for women about to give birth. Songs should be written and sung to praise the women’s courage and affirm their pain. And the setting? “Preferably, in their own houses or some birthing space in nature where there are a lot of women around them,” Walker explains.

Between conversation, Walker pauses to read her own poems on tape. And there is folksy guitar music by Ali Fraka Toure.

In Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Teachings on Love,” he explains Buddhist meditation practices. For example, “mindful breathing” calls for undivided attention to inhaling and exhaling. Between descriptions of basic techniques and the mythic stories he tells to illustrate their power, he sounds a gong, or leads a Buddhist chant.

Simon explains that the gongs, pianos, guitars and poetry readings are essential. “The conversations need to capture the listener’s imagination,” she says. “They have to give people something to take away with them.”

She became interested in the ways people build their unique spiritual awareness while she was launching her own rebellion at school. “In college, when I thought of being a philosophy major, I realized I was interested in the person who has a direct experience of God, not in Aristotle’s theories about God,” she says.

Many of the subjects she tapes also feel part of the mystical tradition, where the goal is personal unity with a higher power--God, nature, or another vast life force.

Sister Nancy Fierro, a Los Angeles-based concert pianist and member of the Sisters of St. Joseph, traveled to Simon’s Boulder studio to record her own piano playing and a conversation about Hildegard of Bingen, the medieval German mystic and composer who wrote the music.

“Tami sees herself as one who wants to bring out the wisdom of the culture,” says Fierro. “She wants to contribute something substantial, but not just what speaks to one religion. She’s the opposite of an agnostic. She’s open to anything that sounds true.”

Letters to Simon’s Sounds True company range from the cordial--”thanks for giving me access to such a wonderful teacher”--to the ecstatic--”I’ve been spontaneously healed listening to this.”

Such outpourings lead Devon Christensen, the company’s creative director, to believe that the teacher-student aspect of the tapes has a near primal appeal. “The wise man or wise woman of the village gives you guidance,” he explains. “You have your questions answered verbally, by people who know more than you do.”

This winter, Simon expanded her business to include musical recordings. She was in Los Angeles recently to introduce the company’s first recording by the Irish singer, Noirin ni Riain, who sings Celtic sacred music.

A Sounds True customer of six years, Dianne Norris of Prescott, Ariz., teaches T’ai Chi at the local community college. She orders new tapes on medicine and natural healing almost every month and lends them to her students. She has spent so much money on her tapes that she plans to put her collection in her will.

“We may not all be able to come together in one place to learn, but people everywhere on a quest for spiritual development are part of a scattered brotherhood and sisterhood,” says Norris, who is in her 60s. “Like a lot of people, I take comfort in listening to these teachers. They keep my own fire stoked.”

(For a catalog, phone [800] 333-9185.)