Sounds True

Sounds True is the great listening post of modern spirituality — the multimedia publisher that has spent four decades recording the world's wisest voices, so the rest of us could hear them. It began in 1985 with almost nothing: a young Tami Simon, a tape recorder, and a tiny studio in Boulder, Colorado, driven by a single conviction — that the spoken teachings of authentic spiritual teachers deserved to be captured with reverence and shared with the world. From that microphone grew one of the most beloved companies in the field: a publisher of more than six thousand audio programmes, books, music recordings, and online courses, with a mission statement of disarming ambition — to wake up the world.

What makes Sounds True singular is its breadth and its ear. Long before mindfulness reached the mainstream, Simon was recording Buddhist nuns and Zen teachers, scientists and mystics, across every authentic tradition: Pema Chödrön, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach, Thich Nhat Hanh, Eckhart Tolle, Adyashanti, Ram Dass — a roster that reads like the modern contemplative canon. Its programmes carried teachers' actual voices — the pauses, the warmth, the silence between words — into cars, kitchens, and headphones everywhere, while its annual Wake Up Festival gathered the community in the Colorado mountains, and Simon's own long-running podcast, Insights at the Edge, became a masterclass in deep spiritual conversation. A pioneering entrepreneur who proved that business itself can be a contemplative path, Simon built a company studied by researchers for its conscious workplace culture — and admired even by the Dalai Lama.

In 2025, Sounds True's publishing catalogues found a global home at Macmillan, while Simon and her team carry the company forward as a direct-to-consumer platform for online learning, events, and digital media — the same mission, four decades on. For seekers, Sounds True remains what it has always been: the label you can trust — the assurance that whichever teacher you press play on, the wisdom is real, the tradition is honoured, and someone with very good ears chose it for you.