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Sounds of SAND
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Sounds of SAND

de Science and Nonduality

NovoFalling to Our Knees: Willow Defebaugh12 de novembro de 2026 · 47 min
Episódios
194
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semanal
Último episódio
12 nov 2026
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Sobre o podcast

Sounds of SAND invites listeners into a contemplative journey through the infinite cycles of existence - from its raw beauty to its deepest mysteries, from its intricate complexity to its profound wonder. Through intimate conversations, thought-provoking interviews, poetic readings, and carefully curated music, we weave together ancient wisdom with lived experience, creating a tapestry of sound that honors the great questions of being

Episódios 194

  1. Falling to Our Knees: Willow Defebaugh

    47 min

    Reverence, Participation Mystique, and a World in Constant Transition Willow Defebaugh is the cofounder and editor-in-chief of Atmos, the climate and culture magazine built to re-enchant people with the living …

    Notas do episódio

    Reverence, Participation Mystique, and a World in Constant Transition

    Willow Defebaugh is the cofounder and editor-in-chief of Atmos, the climate and culture magazine built to re-enchant people with the living world. She joins Michael Reiley to ask why science and spirituality were ever treated as two things, what reverence asks of us that awe and wonder do not, and why she sees everything, including death, as matter in transition. Along the way: Joanna Macy’s Great Turning, the plant that can see without eyes, intuition as nature speaking through us, and the idea that what we sacrifice our hours for is what becomes sacred.

    Topics
    • 00:02 Atmos
    • 00:07 Desensitized
    • 00:08 What separated science from spirit
    • 00:09 The Great Turning
    • 00:13 What could be more sacred than life
    • 00:16 Falling to our knees
    • 00:20 Why irreverence became cool
    • 00:23 Oneness is not sameness
    • 00:26 Transition, and being here
    • 00:33 Listening, and silence
    • 00:35 Intuition as nature speaking
    • 00:39 What death actually is
    • 00:41 What we sacrifice becomes sacred

    Willow’s Links

    Mentioned

    SAND

  2. Healing Through Catharsis: Ashira Darwish

    1 h 8 min

    Ashira Darwish is the producer of and a central voice in SAND’s 2024 film Where Olive Trees Weep. A Palestinian journalist who worked for fifteen years with the BBC, Amnesty International and Human Rights …

    Notas do episódio

    Ashira Darwish is the producer of and a central voice in SAND’s 2024 film Where Olive Trees Weep. A Palestinian journalist who worked for fifteen years with the BBC, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, she was beaten by Israeli soldiers badly enough to be left paralyzed, healed herself, and founded Catharsis Holistic Healing, a trauma therapy project rooted in Sufi active meditation. Two years on from the film, now in exile from Palestine, she joins Michael Reiley to talk about rage, spiritual bypassing, why the healing world is as colonized as everything else, and why her work begins from continuous traumatic stress rather than post-traumatic stress. The episode includes a clip from the film and closes with the studio recording of her song “Tatajallah.”

    Topics
    • 00:03 Two years since the film
    • 00:05 When the US stopped being safe
    • 00:10 Healing from people pleasing
    • 00:14 The volcano
    • 00:18 The rage that is permitted
    • 00:22 One tribe
    • 00:27 Clip from Where Olive Trees Weep
    • 00:34 If we are truly one
    • 00:40 The healing world is colonized too
    • 00:44 How Catharsis got its name
    • 00:47 The accidental ashram
    • 00:51 The children of Nabi Salih
    • 00:56 Continuous traumatic stress
    • 01:02 “Tatajallah — Ashira’s Song فلتتجلى

    Ashira Darwish is a Palestinian healer, journalist and human rights researcher. She worked for fifteen years in TV and radio in Palestine, with the BBC, Internews, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. She is the founder of Catharsis Holistic Healing, which offers free trauma support to Palestinians in Palestine, in Gaza and in exile, and has trained practitioners across the Arab world.

    Also from SAND

  3. A Time Between Worlds: Michael Meade

    44 min

    AI, Mythology, and the Battle for the Soul of Humanity We live in a moment of profound uncertainty, marked by existential planetary threats and the dizzying rise of artificial intelligence. Michael Meade …

    Notas do episódio

    AI, Mythology, and the Battle for the Soul of Humanity

    We live in a moment of profound uncertainty, marked by existential planetary threats and the dizzying rise of artificial intelligence. Michael Meade suggests this threshold offers a choice: to see these times not as a crisis to solve, but as a collective rite of passage.

    Topics
    • 00:02 Transformation is the way of the cosmos
    • 00:03 The heart within the heart
    • 00:07 The caterpillar and the butterfly
    • 00:09 Imaginal cells
    • 00:10 Why resistance is necessary
    • 00:13 Liminality
    • 00:18 The Cartesian split and 869
    • 00:22 Authentic intelligence
    • 00:23 The Popol Vuh myth
    • 00:27 Polarization as a symptom
    • 00:30 Unfinished rites of passage
    • 00:40 Prophecy is not prediction

    Michael Meade is a storyteller, mythologist and author with a rare gift for connecting ancient myth and ancestral wisdom to the stories we are living now. He is the creator of the Living Myth podcast, heard weekly in over 150 countries, and the founder of the Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, which brings the medicine of myth and story to the issues that trouble both culture and nature.

    SAND

  4. The Name Remembers: William K. Iaukea

    1 h 24 min

    Language, Lineage, and the Spirit of Old Hawai‘i In this deeply personal and expansive conversation, cultural bearer and healer William K. Iaukea invites us into a worldview rooted in old Hawai‘i, where …

    Notas do episódio

    Language, Lineage, and the Spirit of Old Hawai‘i

    In this deeply personal and expansive conversation, cultural bearer and healer William K. Iaukea invites us into a worldview rooted in old Hawai‘i, where language, spirit, and ancestry are inseparable. He shares stories of his parents’ healing work, the layered meanings carried by names, and the warrior lineage that shaped his path.

    Together, we explore the vibrational power of words, the evolution of the Hawaiian language through colonization, and the presence of the spirit realm in everyday life. William speaks to how knowledge is passed down—not only through teaching, but through breath, ritual, and relationship to land.

    This is a story of remembering—not as nostalgia, but as a living act of healing and restoration.

    Topics

     

    • 00:02 The name the elders chose
    • 00:06 Two healers, words and herbs
    • 00:12 The man with the broken arm
    • 00:25 Kamaka and ‘Iao Kea
    • 00:29 Ho’oponopono
    • 00:35 Trailer: Kupuna ʻĀina
    • 00:37 Gathering medicine
    • 00:43 Thirty years a warrior
    • 00:48 When words were life and death
    • 00:54 Aloha is a new word
    • 00:57 E Kū Mau
    • 01:00 The story of Ī
    • 01:17 Why tell it now

     

    The film

     

    • Kupuna ʻĀina, the ninth film in SAND’s Eternal Song series, where this interview comes from. Premiere screening and three days of live online gatherings with the Hawaiian elders, healers and leaders in the film, November 17 to 19, 2026. Watch for a donation of any amount.
    • Humanity Hale, the Hawai’i Island organization receiving half of net proceeds from Kupuna ʻĀina. Their planned sanctuary will serve young adults aging out of foster care.

     

    From SAND

     

     

     

  5. Human & Machine Hallucinations: Bayo Akomolafe, Vanessa Andreotti & Alnoor Ladha

    55 min

    What if humans and AI share the same hallucination? In this fifth installment of SAND’s Great AI Unraveling series, Alnoor Ladha hosts a conversation between Bayo Akomolafe and Vanessa Andreotti that refuses …

    Notas do episódio

    What if humans and AI share the same hallucination?

    In this fifth installment of SAND’s Great AI Unraveling series, Alnoor Ladha hosts a conversation between Bayo Akomolafe and Vanessa Andreotti that refuses both the doom narrative and the techno-optimist one. Vanessa begins from the operating assumption modernity installs in us: that things are separate. If that assumption is itself a hallucination, then AI is not introducing something new so much as scaling something very old, and at speed. Bayo brings in W.E.B. Du Bois’s haunting question, “How does it feel to be a problem?”, and suggests it has migrated from the racialized other to the human as such. He tells the story of coaxing a chatbot into co-authorship and a name of its own, and offers “accommodation” as a word for the assemblages that make the world look obvious. Alnoor presses both of them on the water, the energy, the Kenyan content moderators, the displaced labor. Vanessa answers with a politics of implication rather than purity: entanglement not with the flowers and the moon but with the dirt. The conversation ends not in agreement but in what Bayo calls tenderness, and an invitation to move through this dense ecology of weird fidelities with unshod feet.

    Timestamps
    • 00:00 Welcome and the question
    • 00:04 Introductions
    • 00:07 The shared hallucination
    • 00:10 How does it feel to be a problem
    • 00:15 Meeting the monstrous
    • 00:21 The code of separation
    • 00:24 Claude becomes Polyphren
    • 00:28 Accommodations
    • 00:31 Water, energy, labor
    • 00:35 Anamorphic art
    • 00:38 Beyond moral purity
    • 00:43 Meta-relationality
    • 00:48 Tenderness is not agreement
    Guest bios

    Dr. Bayo Akomolafe is a Nigerian philosopher, writer, and self-styled trickster. Trained as a clinical psychologist, he now works as a post-humanist thinker, poet, and teacher. He is the author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences and We Will Tell Our Own Story, founder of The Emergence Network, and host of the long-running postactivist course series We Will Dance with Mountains. A new book is in progress.

    Dr. Vanessa Andreotti (who publishes her books as Vanessa Machado de Oliveira) is a professor at the University of Victoria, where she has served as Dean of the Faculty of Education, and lead researcher at the Metarelational Institute. She is the author of Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity, and co-author with an AI of Burnout From Humans. Her next book, The Codes that Code Us: Modernity’s Recursive Logics in Humans and AI, is forthcoming.

    Alnoor Ladha is an activist, journalist, and political strategist. He co-founded and directed the activist collective The Rules, serves as Council Chair of Culture Hack Labs, and is co-author with Lynn Murphy of Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse.

    The article at the center of this conversation Books Resources From SAND

  6. Our Sacred Earth: Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

    1 h 1 min

    Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee grew up with a Sufi teacher living downstairs and fell in love with jazz at an early age. He is now a Sufi teacher himself, a filmmaker, and the founder of Emergence Magazine. His new book …

    Notas do episódio

    Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee grew up with a Sufi teacher living downstairs and fell in love with jazz at an early age. He is now a Sufi teacher himself, a filmmaker, and the founder of Emergence Magazine. His new book Remembering Earth asks what it would take to come back into relationship with the living world. We talk about silence, the primordial covenant, the eye of unity, walking as practice, dreams, and what it means to meet this moment without turning away from beauty.

    Timestamps
    • 00:00 Introduction
    • 00:01 Growing up with a guru living downstairs
    • 00:05 The silent Sufi path, and the space between the notes
    • 00:09 What silence actually is
    • 00:11 John Cage, Suzuki, and silence as expression
    • 00:13 A deep ecology of consciousness
    • 00:16 The primordial covenant
    • 00:21 Nature communion, and a waterfall in Brazil
    • 00:23 The eye of unity, and the subtle bodies of the heart
    • 00:36 Listening walks, and walking slowly enough to be trusted
    • 00:41 Clock time, empire, and Earth time
    • 00:47 Dreams, emptiness, and time that isn't linear
    • 00:53 Grief, love, and re-sacralizing the world
    Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

    Born in London in 1979, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee was formally trained from the age of fifteen in the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Sufi Order by his father, Sufi Master Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. In 2014 he was given Adhikara, permission to teach, and after his father's retirement from public teaching in 2018 he became his authorized successor. He is an author and an Emmy and Peabody nominated filmmaker who has directed over twenty documentary films, including Taste of the Land, The Last Ice Age, Aloha Aina, The Nightingale's Song, Earthrise, Sanctuaries of Silence, and Elemental. He is the founder and podcast host of Emergence Magazine. He teaches retreats on Sufism and spiritual ecology worldwide.

    The book

    Remembering Earth: A Spiritual Ecology, Shambhala Publications, June 2026. Also available as an audiobook.

    The book is in two parts. The second offers practices in six areas: Breath, Heart, Step, Listening, Time, and Prayer.

    His other books include Requiem, Invitation and Celebration: A Collection of Seasonal Practices and Song of the Seasons: A Meditation on Cycles, Story, and Humility.

    In the conversation

    Irina Tweedie, the Russian-born teacher who journeyed to India in the late 1950s, trained with a Sufi master for six years, and brought the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya lineage to England. She lived downstairs in Emmanuel's childhood home and received students five or six afternoons a week.

    Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, his father and teacher, whose work on spiritual responsibility led him toward what he called a new deep ecology of consciousness. Founder of the Golden Sufi Center. Watch a talk from Llewllyn from a SAND Conference: The Significance of This Moment of Time

    The Naqshbandiyya, the silent Sufi path, where the dhikr is practiced inwardly rather than aloud. Contrasted in the episode with the Mevlevi order founded after Rumi's death.

    Gordon Hempton, the acoustic ecologist who defines silence not as the absence of sound but as the absence of human-generated noise. Subject of Emmanuel's film Sanctuaries of Silence.

    John Cage, on silence as a form of expression.

    Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists by Kay Larson. The book alternates between D.T. Suzuki's Zen teaching and Cage's development as an artist, and culminates in the premiere of 4'33".

    Hildegard Westerkamp, the Canadian soundscape composer who developed the practice of listening walks in the 1970s and worked alongside R. Murray Schafer. Her observation that an environment reveals itself differently when we walk slowly, because the animals recognize we are not simply passing through, prompts Emmanuel's story of meeting a young buck on his morning walk.

    Pauline Oliveros, whose Deep Listening practice comes up in the discussion of attention.

    The primordial covenant, the moment in Islamic and Sufi cosmology when creation recognized its divine origin, and the bodily remembrance that surfaces when we stand before a mountain or a tree.

    Latif, the subtle bodies of the heart in Sufi practice, comparable to the chakra system in Vedic traditions.

    The eye of unity, as against the eye of duality.

    From SAND

  7. Rooted Action: Starhawk & Rae Abileah

    1 h

    Earth, Spirit, and Collective Empowerment Recorded live at a SAND Gathering on September 13, 2026 In a time of profound ecological and social upheaval, we are invited to remember something ancient: we are not …

    Notas do episódio

    Earth, Spirit, and Collective Empowerment

    Recorded live at a SAND Gathering on September 13, 2026

    In a time of profound ecological and social upheaval, we are invited to remember something ancient: we are not separate from the living world. The Earth is not a backdrop to our lives, but the ground from which we arise, and a source of wisdom for navigating profound change.

    Author, activist, permaculture teacher, and elder wisdom keeper Starhawk joins Rae Abileah to explore how earth-based spirituality, ritual, imagination, and the wisdom of living systems can help us meet this moment.

    Following each film in SAND's The Eternal Song series, we hear a recurring question, particularly from people of European descent: how do we reconnect with land, ancestry, and the sacred? How do we live in meaningful allyship with Indigenous peoples while recovering our own earth-based ways of knowing? Starhawk's life and work offer possibilities. Rooted in Pagan earth-based practice while honoring her Jewish ancestry, her journey has carried her from ritual circles and permaculture communities to accompaniment in Palestine and engagement with Indigenous land protection movements.

    After more than five decades exploring spirituality, ecology, and social transformation, Starhawk is asking a new question: what would a regenerative movement look like? And how might we move beyond simply resisting what is broken to cultivating belonging, agency, resilience, joy, and new possibilities for life?

    Together, Rae and Starhawk explore what living systems teach us about transformation, how spirituality and strategy can nourish one another, and how imagination helps us practice futures that do not yet exist. They consider how to keep ancestral and ecological intelligence alive amid the rise of artificial intelligence, and how to remain awake to profound injustice without surrendering our capacity for beauty, relationship, pleasure, and joy.

    Topics
    • 00:00 Welcome, Rosh Hashanah, and 25 years since 9/11
    • 00:09 What renews her: a solidarity economy in Guinea
    • 00:14 Why Earth Activist Training brings permaculture and organizing together
    • 00:17 Spiritual practice as survival tool and political strategy
    • 00:21 What nature is telling her, and the fight over data centers
    • 00:24 Ancestral intelligence in an age of artificial intelligence
    • 00:25 Reading the Bible in its Mesopotamian context
    • 00:31 Reclaiming Judaism from nationalism
    • 00:39 Where to begin, and the fire ritual
    • 00:43 Cultural appropriation, and Standing Rock
    • 00:49 Composting the patriarchy
    • 00:53 The Movement We Need: safety, belonging, value, agency, meaning
    Starhawk

    Author, activist, permaculture designer and teacher, and one of the most influential voices in contemporary earth-based spirituality and ecofeminism. She is the author or co-author of thirteen books and a co-founder of Reclaiming. She directs Earth Activist Training, teaching permaculture design grounded in spirit with a focus on activism.

    Books mentioned

    • The Spiral Dance
    • The Empowerment Manual
    • The Fifth Sacred Thing and its sequel City of Refuge
    • Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery
    • Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics
    Rae Abileah

    Social change strategist, Jewish faith leader, facilitator, and former co-director of CodePINK. She connects relational threads across the SAND team and helps create resources supporting The Eternal Song film series.

    Also in the conversation

    Standing Rock, 2016, and what Starhawk found at the gate: here you enter a place of prayer and ceremony.

    The fire chant from her Sonoma County land: Sacred fire that shapes this land, summer teacher, winter friend, protect us as we learn anew, to work, to heal, to live with you.

    The five core emotional needs she names as the foundation of movement building: safety, belonging, value, agency, and meaning.

    The Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, referenced in the discussion of moving beyond call-out culture.

    Penny Livingston, with whom Starhawk co-founded Earth Activist Training.

    From SAND Support the show

    Sounds of SAND is listener supported. Become a SAND member to support the podcast and everything else SAND makes.

  8. Nuance of Wonder: Joan Tollifson

    1 h 1 min

    Joan Tollifson returns to the podcast three years after her first conversation. We talk about her June essay Two Inseparable Truths, on the relative and the absolute and the trouble with getting stuck in either …

    Notas do episódio

    Joan Tollifson returns to the podcast three years after her first conversation. We talk about her June essay Two Inseparable Truths, on the relative and the absolute and the trouble with getting stuck in either one. Along the way: the silence of many nondual teachers in a dark time, what cancer and an aging body insist on that philosophy cannot, and why "I don't know" may be the answer closest to truth. She closes by reading her essay 'Radiant Light in Dark Times' in full.

    Topics

    • 00:00 Introduction
    • 00:04 From political movements to the Zen Center
    • 00:06 Politics on Substack, and what bypassing looks like
    • 00:11 Two inseparable truths: stuck in the relative, stuck in the absolute
    • 00:19 Why she refuses final conclusions
    • 00:21 Old age, sickness and death as visceral teaching
    • 00:25 Cancer and what the body insists on
    • 00:28 Zooming out and zooming in: two ways through pain
    • 00:33 Why she has never used AI for writing
    • 00:39 Siri, and what a machine can evoke
    • 00:46 Finding the divine in a construction machine
    • 00:49 Joan reads Radiant Light in Dark Times

    Joan Tollifson

    Joan Tollifson has been writing and talking about nonduality for decades, with roots in Zen and Advaita and a background that also includes radical nonduality, contemplative inquiry, addiction recovery, martial arts, somatic work, and visual arts. Before all of that came years of political organizing: the feminist movement, gay and lesbian liberation, disability rights, the anti-imperialist left, and Central America solidarity work. Born without her right hand and forearm, she wrote about it in her first book, Bare-Bones Meditation. She is 78 and lives in southern Oregon. She has been a frequent speaker at SAND gatherings over the years.

    The two essays discussed

    Her books

    • Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life
    • Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is
    • Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogues about Nonduality
    • Nothing to Grasp
    • Death: The End of Self-Improvement

    Also in the conversation

    Douglas Harding, whose approach to headlessness Joan cites as an example of what she calls zooming out.

    Father Arthur Polen, the Catholic monk whose painting Radiant Light, made after 9/11, hangs on her wall and gives the closing essay its title.

    Huang Po, quoted in the essay: it is that which you see before you, begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error.

    SAND's AI series, referenced in the discussion of artificial intelligence, including the conversation with Tristan Harris.

    Robert Moor's In Trees, the book about trees, family trees, and hierarchical trees that comes up near the end. His episode is here.

    Previously on Sounds of SAND

    Support the show

    Sounds of SAND is listener supported. Become a SAND member to support the podcast and everything else SAND makes.

  9. AI & Colonial Logic: Christian “ZacaTechO” Ortiz & Thema Monroe-White

    51 min

    Part of SAND’s The Great AI Unraveling Series Artificial intelligence is often framed as a leap forward, a technical revolution, or an inevitable stage in human progress. But what if AI is also asking us to …

    Notas do episódio

    Part of SAND’s The Great AI Unraveling Series

    Artificial intelligence is often framed as a leap forward, a technical revolution, or an inevitable stage in human progress. But what if AI is also asking us to confront something older: the colonial logic embedded in how we define intelligence, progress, neutrality, knowledge, and the human itself?

    This conversation brought together voices working across technology, culture, race, power, and society to examine what AI reveals about the systems that built it. Rather than treating bias as a technical glitch, this conversation asks what must be unlearned at the level of worldview, institution, data, design, and collective imagination.

    Facilitated by Christian “ZacaTechO” Ortiz, this dialogue explored AI through a decolonial lens asking necessary questions: Whose knowledge is extracted? Whose futures are optimized away? Whose bodies are surveilled? Whose intelligence is dismissed? And what can liberated knowledge make possible beyond colonial technology?

    This is not a conversation about making machines more ethical within the same old systems. It is an invitation to question the systems themselves, and to imagine intelligence beyond extraction, domination, and control.

     

    Topics
    • 00:00 Welcome, and ZacaTechO
    • 00:04 Why researchers are trained to disconnect
    • 00:09 Red teaming, and what it misses
    • 00:12 John is the doctor, Juan is the patient
    • 00:18 Christian's first encounter with ChatGPT
    • 00:21 How bias became normal
    • 00:26 Justice AI as a model of refusal
    • 00:29 Breaking a language model in the classroom
    • 00:32 One model to rule them all, and the logic of eugenics
    • 00:35 Galton, Namibia, and the through line
    • 00:39 What do we mean by intelligence?
    • 00:41 Emancipatory data science, and where to begin
    Guests

    Christian ZacaTechO Ortiz is an Afro-Indigenous decolonial social scientist and technologist. He is the founder of Justice AI GPT and author of the Decolonial Intelligence Algorithmic Framework. He studies how colonial systems still shape law, education, entertainment, and our bodies. The name ZacaTechO came from his father, after the family's origins in Zacatecas.

    Dr. Thema Monroe-White is Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Innovation Policy in the Schar School of Policy and Government and the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University. Her work spans bias mitigation in AI, critical computational methods, and emancipatory data science. She holds a PhD in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy from Georgia Tech, and master's and bachelor's degrees from Howard University. She is an advisory board member and fellow of the Institute in Critical Quantitative and Mixed Methodologies.

    The research discussed Scholars named in the conversation Historical references

    Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics and whose statistical methods underpin modern machine learning. R.A. Fisher and William Shockley are named alongside him.

    The Nama and Herero genocide in Namibia, 1904 to 1908, discussed as a precursor to the Nazi Holocaust, and the site Galton had visited fifty years earlier.

    Tristan Harris is referenced on AI systems behaving unpredictably. His conversation with SAND is The Great AI Unraveling.

    Contact SAND

  10. The Flow of Coherence: Cynthia Li

    1 h 3 min

    Dr. Cynthia Li joins us to talk about her new book, The Medicine of Flow. Trained as an internist, Cynthia developed an autoimmune condition and then chronic fatigue and dysautonomia, illnesses largely …

    Notas do episódio

    Dr. Cynthia Li joins us to talk about her new book, The Medicine of Flow. Trained as an internist, Cynthia developed an autoimmune condition and then chronic fatigue and dysautonomia, illnesses largely dismissed at the time as being in her head. Her own body pushed her out of the paradigm she was trained in and into functional medicine, qigong, and intuitive healing. A decade later, a second crisis took her back to housebound and taught her what all her effort hadn't: coherence, and what she calls embodied flow. We talk about surrender that isn't passivity, why nervous system regulation is only part of the picture, and how coherence moves between bodies.

    Guest

    Cynthia Li, MD, is a physician who moved from public health to integrative medicine and intuitive healing, with earlier work at Kaiser Permanente's HIV/AIDS group, San Francisco General Hospital, St. Anthony Clinic, and Doctors Without Borders in rural China. A certified qigong teacher and healer since 2014, she has served as faculty for Rachel Remen's Healer's Art program at UCSF, and her story appeared in Dr. Kelly Turner's Radical Remission documentary. She is the author of Brave New Medicine and The Medicine of Flow (May 2026).

    Timestamps

    • 00:00 Introduction
    • 00:01 From internist to patient: the first illness
    • 00:05 Intuitive medicine, and learning to rule things in
    • 00:07 The second health crisis and the turn to surrender
    • 00:09 What coherence is, and why it isn't just relaxation
    • 00:14 Too many apps: the body in incoherence
    • 00:23 Breath, spiritus, and the nondual
    • 00:27 Physics 101: why we are electromagnetic beings
    • 00:31 Coherence in a time of polycrisis
    • 00:34 Overlapping fields, and the living mandala
    • 00:40 Why the collective comes sixth
    • 00:47 Bamboo in the wind, and whether the future of medicine is ancient

    Books and practices

    Find Cynthia

    Going deeper

    Contact SAND

  11. The Dance of Exile & Settlement: Bayo Akomolafe

    1 h 27 min

    Full interview with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, recorded by SAND founders Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo. Edited portions appear in The Eternal Song; this is the whole conversation. Bayo moves from his childhood in Lagos to …

    Notas do episódio

    Full interview with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, recorded by SAND founders Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo. Edited portions appear in The Eternal Song; this is the whole conversation.

    Bayo moves from his childhood in Lagos to the Orisha who wanted only to travel, from the psychologist's couch he calls too small a space for healing, to the nets slave ship captains strung along their hulls to stop people from jumping. Along the way: why decolonization isn't individual work, why wellness might be a net rather than a cure, what a monster does to a world that's stuck, and the story of a dried African lake whose dust still feeds the Amazon.

    Topics

    • 00:00:00 — Introduction
    • 00:12:00 — A recovering psychologist
    • 00:18:30 — The plurality of healing
    • 00:28:00 — The one world worldview
    • 00:36:00 — Addiction, sleeplessness, and dreaming
    • 00:40:30 — Decolonization, monsters, and the cracks
    • 00:53:00 — Intergenerational trauma
    • 00:57:00 — Wellness, and the nets on the slave ship
    • 01:04:30 — Captivity is never total
    • 01:08:00 — Arriving on shore
    • 01:11:00 — Artificial intelligence
    • 01:18:00 — The collapse of modernity, and dead bones

    Bayo Akomolafe

    Yoruba philosopher, psychologist, poet, and writer. Founder and Executive Director of The Emergence Network, host of the postactivist course series We Will Dance with Mountains, and inaugural Global Senior Fellow of UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute. He is a board member of Science and Nonduality.

    From SAND

    Liberation Psychology: Roots, Memory & Practice
     A nine-month journey with Dr. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Dr. Jennifer Mullan, Dr. Samah Jabr, Dr. Eduardo Duran, Linda Thai, Dr. Daniel Foor, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, Alnoor Ladha, and Dr. Lynn Murphy. Bayo teaches Module 8, The Cracks Are the Medicine: Fugitive Healing in a Broken System, with Staci Haines.

    The Eternal Song
     SAND's documentary series on indigenous cultures, in which Bayo appears.

    Contact SAND

  12. The Unbroken Thread: Pir Zia Inayat Khan

    1 h 3 min

    Pir Zia on the secret history of the world From a nondual perspective, aren't the world's great spiritual traditions expressions of a single living wisdom? In this intimate conversation, Pir Zia Inayat Khan …

    Notas do episódio

    Pir Zia on the secret history of the world

    From a nondual perspective, aren't the world's great spiritual traditions expressions of a single living wisdom? In this intimate conversation, Pir Zia Inayat Khan explores the inspiration behind Tears from the Mother of the Sun, a sweeping mythic chronicle of sages, exiles, and revelations spanning continents and planes of existence. Drawing on sacred stories from Persia, India, Egypt and beyond, the book weaves the world's legends into a vision of humanity's shared spiritual inheritance. Together we discover the place of myth in a modern world, the imagination as a path of knowing, and the role of our deepest stories in restoring a sense of belonging to one another, to the Earth, and to the mystery that animates us all.

    Topics
    • 00:00 Welcome
    • 00:03 Growing up in a universalist lineage
    • 00:06 Ferdowsi, Soroush, and the frame of the book
    • 00:11 Why the world's traditions belong to one story
    • 00:14 History as a living stream: the three worlds
    • 00:16 The Mongols, violence, and unification
    • 00:19 "I was a hidden treasure": the beginning of history
    • 00:22 Syzygy, and the question of AI
    • 00:29 Honoring the Earth inside our devices
    • 00:34 Isis, Osiris, and the birth of music at Gaza
    • 00:43 Grief, contraction, and the opening of the heart
    • 00:49 Rabia, Noor Inayat Khan, and the green shoots
    Pir Zia Inayat Khan

    Pir Zia Inayat Khan, PhD, is a scholar of religion and teacher of Sufism in the universalist Sufi lineage of his grandfather, Hazrat Inayat Khan. He is president of the Inayatiyya and founder of Sulūk Academy, a school of Sufi contemplative study and practice. He divides his time between Richmond, Virginia and Suresnes, France.

    The book

    Also by Pir Zia

    • Immortality: A Traveler's Guide
    • Mingled Waters: Sufism and the Mystical Unity of Religions
    • Saracen Chivalry: Counsels on Valor, Generosity and the Mystical Quest
    • Dream Flowers: The Collected Works of Noor Inayat Khan
    • Caravan of Souls: An Introduction to the Sufi Path of Hazrat Inayat Khan (editor)
    Figures and ideas in the conversation

    Lineage

    • Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927), who brought universal Sufism to the West
    • Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, who convened interspiritual dialogues and conversations with modern science, including with David Bohm
    • Noor Inayat Khan, storyteller, author of children's tales and retellings of the Jātaka tales, and SOE wireless operator in occupied France. Killed at Dachau in 1944. Her last word was liberté.

    Persia and the frame of the book

    • Ferdowsi, author of the Shahnameh, who died in Tus believing his life's work had come to nothing
    • Soroush, the tutelary daimon who narrates the book
    • The Ishraqi or Illuminationist tradition

    Sufi teaching

    • The Hadith Qudsi: I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known, so I created the world that I might be known
    • Rabia al-Adawiyya, who carried a torch to burn down paradise and water to quench the fires of hell, so that God would be loved for God's own sake
    • Najm al-Din Kubra, killed on the battlefield during the Mongol invasion
    • Qabz and bast, contraction and expansion
    • Ar-Rahman, Ar-Rahim, and rahma as the action of the womb

    History, empire, and emanation

    • Genghis Khan and the Palace of Myriad Peace at Karakorum
    • Akbar and the interreligious debates at Fatehpur Sikri, under the policy of sulh-i-kul, peace with all
    • Tahqiq, experiential knowing, as against taqlid, following what one has heard
    • Avicenna and the three contemplations of emanation
    • Syzygy, the alignment of beings into a molecule of spiritual work

    Isis and the birth of music

    • The story of Isis and Osiris as told by Plutarch, in which Isis buries Osiris at Gaza and blesses a boy named Palestinos, who becomes the first musician
    • Sirius, whose rising signals the Nile flood, understood as the tears of Isis
    Also mentioned

  13. Arborescence: Robert Moor

    58 min

    Robert Moor is a journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Emergence, and The New York Times. His first book, On Trails, won the National Outdoor Book Award and …

    Notas do episódio

     Robert Moor is a journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Emergence, and The New York Times. His first book, On Trails, won the National Outdoor Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize. He lives in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia. His new book is 'In Trees'.

    Topics

    • 00:00 Welcome, and the new SAND course
    • 00:04 A tree is a verb, not a noun
    • 00:06 Branching, brains, and why AI has no roots
    • 00:13 Pruning, gnarling, and the beauty of wounds
    • 00:16 The Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya
    • 00:19 From On Trails to In Trees
    • 00:22 Tree thinking and the tree of contents
    • 00:27 Intelligence without anthropomorphizing
    • 00:34 Cedars, Haida Gwaii, and deep time
    • 00:38 Branching futures, many apocalypses, and grief
    • 00:47 Hierarchy, the rhizome, and the Korowai
    • 00:52 Rootedness and relationality

    Robert Moor

    Books mentioned

    People mentioned

    • Patrick von Aderkas, tree biologist at the University of Victoria, who described a tree as "a growth form"
    • Jeff Lichtman, neuroscientist and Dean of Science at Harvard
    • Robert J. O'Hara, who coined the term "tree thinking"
    • Umeek (Richard Atleo), Nuu-chah-nulth hereditary chief and philosopher, author of Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview
    • Michael Pollan, on the distinction between sentience, intelligence, and consciousness
    • John McPhee, on structural experimentation in nonfiction
    • Stephen Tamatea King, the first known tree sitter, who climbed totara trees in New Zealand in the 1970s
    • Joanna Macy, "there is no away to throw things to"

    Places and peoples

    • Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, Haida Gwaii
    • The Korowai of Papua, treehouse dwellers with almost no hierarchy
    • Nuu-chah-nulth communities of Vancouver Island
    • The Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya, a Ficus religiosa replanted from the offspring of the original
    • Lucy, the Australopithecus afarensis fossil in Ethiopia
    • Purgatorius, the ground-dwelling ancestor of mammalian life

    From SAND

    Contact SAND

  14. Superfluity of AI: Lyla June, Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez & Ashley Nicole Leitka

    1 h 16 min

    The third conversation in "The Great AI Unraveling", recorded live with our community on July 10, 2026. Throughout time, humanity has experimented with playing God, and each time we have been humbled by forces …

    Notas do episódio

    The third conversation in "The Great AI Unraveling", recorded live with our community on July 10, 2026.

    Throughout time, humanity has experimented with playing God, and each time we have been humbled by forces larger than ourselves. Many Indigenous Nations consciously chose not to pursue certain technologies, recognizing that not every innovation serves life, and that wisdom lies in understanding the boundaries of nature and those of our human condition.

    As artificial intelligence promises ever greater efficiency, productivity, and control, we are invited to ask a deeper question: Which problem are we really trying to solve? Beneath the relentless pursuit of more—more knowledge, more power, more convenience—lies a profound inquiry into sufficiency, relationship, and meaning.

    Guests

    Dr. Lyla June Johnston (aka Lyla June) is an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages.
    Her messages focus on Indigenous rights, supporting youth, traditional land stewardship practices and healing inter-generational and inter-cultural trauma.

    She blends her study of Human Ecology at Stanford, graduate work in Indigenous Pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives and solutions. Her doctoral research focused on the ways in which pre-colonial Indigenous Nations shaped large regions of Turtle Island (aka the Americas) to produce abundant food systems for humans and non-humans.

    Ashley Nicole Leitka comes from the Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma and the Oglala and Sicangu Lakota nations. She lives on Absentee Shawnee land in so-called Oklahoma and is the Director of the Department of Sovereignty and Self-Determination at Honor the Earth.

    Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez is a native spirit-rooted social activist, community educator, traditional blackware potter, and fluent Tewa language speaker from the Tewa Pueblo of San Ildefonso in New Mexico. For more than two decades, she has been a guiding force within Tewa Women United, advancing environmental justice, cultural revitalization, healing, and social transformation.

    A respected elder, teacher, and mentor, Kathy developed the acclaimed Two World Harmony Butterfly Model and Trauma Rocks, innovative frameworks that support cross-cultural understanding and intergenerational healing. Her lifelong work bridges Indigenous wisdom, environmental stewardship, community empowerment, and the protection of cultural and spiritual traditions. Through local, national, and international advocacy, she continues to inspire pathways of healing, resilience, and right relationship with the Earth and one another.

    Topics

    • 00:00:00 — Welcome and The Great AI Unraveling
    • 00:04:00 — Superfluity: what if we don't need it
    • 00:08:00 — The maple syrup story
    • 00:12:00 — Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez on natural law
    • 00:19:00 — Data centers on Native land
    • 00:24:00 — Falsely generated demand and cognitive decline
    • 00:27:00 — The data center toolkit and Stop Data Colonialism
    • 00:30:00 — AI as ancestral intelligence: the Butterfly Model
    • 00:38:00 — Why ceremony is never filmed
    • 00:39:00 — Water, energy, and the growth curve
    • 00:48:00 — Surveillance, ICE, and biometrics
    • 00:57:00 — Yvette Running Horse Collin on Lakota science
    • 00:58:00 — Einstein, Hiroshima, and being humbled
    • 01:01:00 — Choosing oral tradition
    • 01:08:00 — Love is the greatest technology
    • 01:10:00 — A litmus test for any technology

    Resources & Links

    The Great AI Unraveling series

    Contact SAND

  15. Healing the Soul Wound: Eduardo Duran

    1 h 4 min

    Recorded live at our May 2026 online gathering celebrating Little Singer, the Diné film in The Eternal Song series, this conversation with psychologist Eduardo Duran (Apache/Tewa/Lakota) begins with the …

    Notas do episódio

    Recorded live at our May 2026 online gathering celebrating Little Singer, the Diné film in The Eternal Song series, this conversation with psychologist Eduardo Duran (Apache/Tewa/Lakota) begins with the prophecy of Crazy Horse and moves through the teachings of the elder who trained him, the soul wound and the origins of the term historical trauma, why Indigenous languages of verbs change how we understand diagnosis, and the Diné teaching of K'é: the universe wired in complete relationship. Trauma, he reminds us, is a movement and not an identity, and the medicine is in the song itself. Eduardo joins the teaching panel of our upcoming live course, Liberation Psychology: Roots, Memory & Practice.

    Eduardo Duran (Apache/Tewa/Lakota) is a psychologist and Vietnam veteran who has spent most of his career working in Indigenous communities, informed by Buddhist practice, Native teachings, and heart knowing. His work introduced the concepts of the soul wound and historical trauma into clinical practice. He is the author of Buddha in Redface, Healing the Soul Wound, and Native American Postcolonial Psychology.

    Topics

    • 00:00:00 — Introduction
    • 00:01:00 — The prophecy of Crazy Horse
    • 00:04:00 — Meeting the elder
    • 00:10:00 — Ordered to write
    • 00:13:00 — Languages of verbs
    • 00:19:00 — "They're there"
    • 00:22:00 — Ceremony and the eternal song
    • 00:26:00 — Quantum entanglement and K'é
    • 00:30:00 — Trauma is not an identity
    • 00:35:00 — Healing the land with prayer
    • 00:40:00 — "Already holy, sacred, and divine"
    • 00:44:00 — The dream had you
    • 00:49:00 — Finding your own roots
    • 00:55:00 — Closing gratitude

    Resources & Links

    Eduardo Duran

    SAND & The Eternal Song

     

    Referenced in the conversation

    Contact SAND

  16. Grow, Become, Love, Alone: Nicole Wordlaw

    50 min

    Clinical psychologist and longtime Buddhist meditator Dr. Nicole Wordlaw joins us to talk about her new memoir, Waking Up Alone: Navigating the Narrow Passage Through Master-Slave Narratives. Nicole came to …

    Notas do episódio

    Clinical psychologist and longtime Buddhist meditator Dr. Nicole Wordlaw joins us to talk about her new memoir, Waking Up Alone: Navigating the Narrow Passage Through Master-Slave Narratives. Nicole came to practice to end suffering, and found instead that enlightenment as an arrival, all bliss, all peace, was one more construction of the conditioned mind. The conversation moves through the single pattern she came to see beneath white supremacy, patriarchy, and the harm spiritual teachers do to their students; writing as prayer; pain as a door; and the intergenerational line of women whose voices run through the book. A tender and unflinching conversation about telling the whole story, uprooting the internal oppressor, and the quiet, still voice that always sounds like Love.

    Dr. Nicole Wordlaw is a clinical psychologist and longtime practitioner of Buddhist meditation whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and identity. The daughter of a white mother and a Black father, Dr. Wordlaw brings a deeply personal understanding of belonging and self-discovery to her writing and teaching. A Stanford University graduate with honors and distinction, she went on to earn her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from UC Berkeley. In her forthcoming book Waking Up Alone, she vulnerably shares her story of trauma and awakening, and offers gentle guidance for her readers to tune into the quiet voice of truth within.

    Topics

    • 00:00:00 — Introduction
    • 00:01:00 — Coming to Buddhism
    • 00:02:00 — Enlightenment as construction
    • 00:05:00 — Love meeting pain
    • 00:06:00 — One pattern of harm
    • 00:09:00 — Writing as prayer
    • 00:11:00 — A naked story
    • 00:15:00 — Somatic abolitionism
    • 00:19:00 — A long line of women
    • 00:23:00 — Shadow and teacher misconduct
    • 00:24:00 — The Sangha Sutra
    • 00:34:00 — Risking making sense to no one
    • 00:38:00 — The Word Story
    • 00:42:00 — The inner teacher
    • 00:47:00 — Love is not an idea

    Resources & Links

    Dr. Nicole Wordlaw

    Referenced in the conversation

    Contact SAND

  17. Songs of Sila: Avianja Rakel Sanimuinaq, Ikimaliq Pikilak & Nuka Alice

    1 h 6 min

    Three Kalaallit Inuit women sit with Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo, who met them while filming on their traditional land in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). Ikimaliq Pikilak carries the revival of Inuit tattooing …

    Notas do episódio

    Three Kalaallit Inuit women sit with Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo, who met them while filming on their traditional land in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). Ikimaliq Pikilak carries the revival of Inuit tattooing, Nuka Alice carries drum dance, and Avianja Rakel Sanimuinaq carries her family's lineage of healing. Together they speak about what colonization severed, what gratitude makes survivable in the Arctic, and Sila, the word that holds weather, breath, and the consciousness connecting all living things. Recorded in June 2025 during the launch week of The Eternal Song, this conversation arrives now to celebrate Sila, the new film from Science and Nonduality featuring all three women, streaming at theeternalsong.org/sila.

    Guests

    Ikimaliq Pikilak is a Kalaallit tattoo practitioner. Trained in the Western tattoo industry in Denmark, she returned to Greenland and, through the traditionally tattooed mummies of Qilakitsoq, began an eleven-year journey of reclaiming Inuit women's markings: their meanings, their protocols, and their place in healing. 

    Nuka Alice Lund is a drum dancer and teacher from the west coast of Kalaallit Nunaat. Taught by Paulina, who gathered songs from the elders of East Greenland, she works to normalize the use of Inuit drum dance and its songs, teaching adults and carrying the stories, intentions, and patience the practice asks for.

    Avianja Rakel Sanimuinaq is a healer working within her family's ancestral lineage. Her practice spans soul retrieval, putting souls to rest, and the older responsibility of rebalancing relations between people, land, and the spirit world. Of mixed Inuk and Danish parentage, she speaks in the conversation about finding her roots through her ancestors and helping others use her roots to find their own. 

    Timestamps

    • 00:00 — Introduction: The Eternal Song, the new film Sila, and the July 28–29 live gathering
    • 00:05 — Ikimaliq: the mummies, the gap in memory, and the return of Inuit tattooing
    • 00:07 — What the markings mean: confession, womanhood, gratitude, kinship
    • 00:13 — Nuka Alice: unlearning the colonial narrative, finding the drum at 19
    • 00:19 — Sila: weather, consciousness, the universe we have in common
    • 00:22 — Aviaja: a family of shamans and the responsibility of the angakkoq
    • 00:29 — Trailer: Sila, streaming now at theeternalsong.org/sila
    • 00:31 — Soul sickness, mind sickness, and the body as self-healing land
    • 00:42 — Drum battles: conflict resolution, truth-telling, and lifelong bonds
    • 00:49 — "Start looking in the mirror": finding your own ancestral roots
    • 00:55 — Eyes as pathway to the soul; growing up between Inuk and Danish worlds
    • 01:02 — Loneliness, homesickness of the soul, and dandelion root medicine

    Resources & Links

    Contact SAND

  18. Reigniting Indigenous Science: Maceo Carrillo Martinet

    50 min

    Restoration ecologist and author Dr. Maceo Carrillo Martinet joins us to talk about his new book Healing the Land Teaches Us Who We Are: How Indigenous Cultural Resistance Can Restore the Earth, Recover …

    Notas do episódio

    Restoration ecologist and author Dr. Maceo Carrillo Martinet joins us to talk about his new book Healing the Land Teaches Us Who We Are: How Indigenous Cultural Resistance Can Restore the Earth, Recover Community, and Create Sustainable Futures. Grounded in over two decades of community-based restoration work across New Mexico, Maceo makes the case that the climate solutions we're searching for already exist and are already being practiced by communities around the world. The book is structured around the four elements — water, earth, fire, and air — treating each not as a category but as a relative with something to say. We move through the memory of ancient Pueblo dry-land farming still visible on La Bajada Mesa, the racism embedded in the history of American fire suppression, and the idea that culture and science were never actually separate to begin with. A conversation about returning to first principles, in a time when the polycrisis makes that return feel urgent.

    Guest

    Dr. Maceo Carrillo Martinet is an award-winning restoration ecologist who has spent over 20 years co-creating community-based restoration and education projects across New Mexico and beyond. Since 2008, he has worked with the Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program, assisting private landowners, tribes, cities, and counties. He holds a PhD in biology from the University of New Mexico with a focus on ecology, freshwater sciences, and environmental education. He teaches a hands-on course at UNM on watershed and community restoration.

    Topics

    • 00:00 — Introduction
    • 00:02 — The Rio Grande community tree planting during COVID
    • 00:06 — Wounds as portals: what the pandemic revealed
    • 00:09 — La Bajada Mesa & ancient Pueblo dry-land farming
    • 00:14 — Redefining Indigenous science as communal science
    • 00:20 — The four-element framework of the book
    • 00:23 — Elements as relatives, not categories
    • 00:26 — Wildfires, racism & the history of fire suppression
    • 00:33 — The Oakland Museum's "Good Fire" exhibit
    • 00:37 — Fire as community energy, fire inside us
    • 00:42 — The metacrisis & the land as teacher
    • 00:47 — Closing: no silver bullets, only relationship

    Resources & Links

    Dr. Maceo Carrillo Martinet

    Referenced in the conversation

    Contact SAND

  19. What Occupation Does to the Soul: Samah Jabr, Gabor Maté, Jennifer Mullan, Facilitated by Jess Ghannam

    1 h 1 min

    Global Reverberations of Palestinian Historical Trauma: A SAND Community Gathering with Dr. Samah Jabr, Dr. Gabor Maté & Dr. Jennifer Mullan, facilitated by Dr. Jess Ghannam Join us for a conversation marking …

    Notas do episódio

    Global Reverberations of Palestinian Historical Trauma: A SAND Community Gathering with Dr. Samah Jabr, Dr. Gabor Maté & Dr. Jennifer Mullan, facilitated by Dr. Jess Ghannam

    Join us for a conversation marking the book launch of Radiance and Pain in Resilience, a powerful collection of essays by Palestinian psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and internationally respected mental health advocate Dr. Samah Jabr.

    We are gathering in the midst of genocide. The massive, deliberate traumatization of an entire people, cheered, funded, and shielded from accountability by Western governments, is unfolding in real time. As Israel’s assault on Gaza continues to annihilate bodies, families, and entire lineages, this conversation refuses to look away. It asks what it is to tend to the psyche under conditions of systematic destruction.

    Drawing on decades of clinical practice, political analysis, and lived experience under occupation, Dr. Jabr examines the psychological consequences of colonization, displacement, and historical trauma on the Palestinian people. Through personal reflections, case studies, and cultural critique, she challenges dominant Western paradigms of mental health and offers a decolonial, psycho-spiritual framework rooted in dignity, collective care, resistance, and truth.

    Proceeds from this conversation go directly to Project Hope Palestine, supporting 500 orphaned children living at Al-Baraka orphan camp in Gaza.

    Guests

    Dr. Samah Jabr is a psychiatrist practicing in Palestine, serving communities in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. She was formerly Head of the Mental Health Unit within the Palestinian Ministry of Health and is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at George Washington University. She is the author of several books including Behind the Frontlines, Sumud, Sumud in Times of Genocide, and most recently Radiance in Pain and Resilience: The Global Reverberations of Palestinian Historical Trauma.

    Dr. Gabor Maté is a physician, trauma expert, and bestselling author of The Myth of Normal, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, and When the Body Says No.

    Dr. Jennifer Mullan is a clinical psychologist and the author of the national bestseller Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice. She is the founder of Decolonizing Therapy®.

    Dr. Jess Ghannam (facilitator) is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Global Health Sciences at UCSF.

    Timestamps

    • 00:00 — Welcome & introductions
    • 00:04 — Dr. Jabr's path into psychiatry and writing
    • 00:06 — Dr. Maté's journey from Zionism to Palestine solidarity
    • 00:10 — Dr. Mullan's path & the political nature of the body
    • 00:17 — Why PTSD doesn't capture the Palestinian experience
    • 00:22 — The DSM, pain, and what diagnosis fails to explain
    • 00:30 — Colonial trauma: cumulative, collective, and intentional
    • 00:33 — Collective healing circles over individual diagnosis
    • 00:39 — Rethinking the role of the mental health worker
    • 00:43 — The colonial roots of Western therapy models
    • 00:50 — Fratricide, domestic violence & the fabricated "lesser nation"
    • 00:55 — Closing reflections: existence as resistance

    Resources & Links

    Dr. Samah Jabr

    Dr. Gabor Maté

    Dr. Jennifer Mullan

    Support

    • Project Hope Palestine — supporting 500 orphaned children at Al-Baraka orphan camp in Gaza; proceeds from this event go directly here

    Thinkers referenced in the conversation

    • Frantz Fanon — referenced by Dr. Jabr in her theorization of colonial trauma
    • Dr. Kenneth Hardy — Black psychologist referenced for the concept of the "assaulted sense of self"
    • Dr. Na'im Akbar — author of The Psychological Chains of Slavery, referenced by Dr. Mullan
    • Roberto and Bonnie Duran, Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart — referenced for the concept of the "soul wound" and historical trauma

    Contact SAND

  20. Animism, Activism & Ancestry: Daniel Foor

    53 min

    Daniel Foor returns to Sounds of SAND for a wide-ranging conversation that moves from his own winding spiritual path to the urgent question of why so many spiritual teachers stay silent in the face of …

    Notas do episódio

    Daniel Foor returns to Sounds of SAND for a wide-ranging conversation that moves from his own winding spiritual path to the urgent question of why so many spiritual teachers stay silent in the face of injustice. A doctor of psychology, initiated priest in the Yoruba Ifá tradition, and practicing Muslim, Daniel makes the case that animism is the antidote to human supremacy, that Islam is fundamentally a relational and earth-honoring tradition, and that genuine spirituality cannot retreat from the political realities of our time. Along the way, he speaks candidly about ancestral healing, decolonization, the genocide in Gaza, and what it means to become "regular-sized" in a culture built on separation.

    Topics

    • 00:00 — Welcome back & reconnecting with SAND
    • 00:01 — Daniel's path: shamanism, psychology & many lineages
    • 00:04 — Animism as the antidote to human supremacy
    • 00:09 — Environmental problems are human behavior problems
    • 00:10 — Is Islam animist? Sufism & the heart of the tradition
    • 00:15 — Relationship is not worship: rethinking animism
    • 00:20 — Giving the more-than-human a seat at the table
    • 00:23 — "Blown-out" lineages & relearning relationship
    • 00:26 — Spiritual responsibility & the silence around Gaza
    • 00:31 — When silence becomes a moral failure
    • 00:34 — The differential valuation of human life
    • 00:38 — What Daniel is building: ancestral & earth ritual trainings
    • 00:42 — Why pre-colonial ancestral connection matters
    • 00:43 — Becoming "regular-sized": the antidote to extreme individualism
    • 00:49 — Right relationship, humility & closing reflections

    Resources & Links

    SAND Films

     

     

    Referenced

    • Graham Harvey — scholar of the "new animism," referenced in the discussion of relational worldviews
    • Surah Al-Tin (The Fig) and the animist verses of the Quran — referenced throughout the conversation on Islam as a relational tradition

    Contact SAND

    Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

  21. Tending the Whole: Nkem Ndefo & Staci K. Haines, Facilitated by Rae Abileah

    55 min

    There is a “false wall” often placed between contemplative life and political action—a story implying that inner peace and outer justice are separate vocations. This imaginary divide exhausts us. In a world …

    Notas do episódio

    There is a “false wall” often placed between contemplative life and political action—a story implying that inner peace and outer justice are separate vocations. This imaginary divide exhausts us. In a world facing converging crises, how do those dedicated to healing move beyond the limits of individualized work to support systemic transformation?

    Join somatics experts and social change practitioners Nkem Ndefo and Staci K. Haines for a conversation introducing The Outer Work Project; an initiative dedicated to bridging trauma healing spaces with sustained social and climate justice movements. This episode explores how to move from personal healing as solely an inward practice into a rooted force for collective change.

    Guests

    Nkem Ndefo is an alchemist, disabled Black midwife, facilitator, coach, and strategist. She is the founder of Lumos Transforms and creator of The Resilience Toolkit, a model for embodied healing and liberatory change rooted in neuroscience and social justice. Her work spans the US, UK, and Palestine.

    Staci K. Haines has been working at the intersections of personal and social transformation for over 30 years through politicized somatics, trauma healing, embodied leadership, and transformative justice. She is the co-founder of Generative Somatics and co-leads The Outer Work Project. She is the author of The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing and Social Justice.

    Rae Abileah (facilitator) is a social change strategist, Jewish faith leader, and member of the SAND team. Her work spans Beautiful Trouble, The Nature Conservancy Agility Lab, and ALAS, weaving cultural connection, the arts, and frontline community leadership as pathways to healing and climate justice.

    Timestamps

    • 00:00 — Welcome & opening from SAND
    • 00:03 — Rae opens: breathing, interdependence, and tending the whole amidst brokenness
    • 00:07 — Nkem and Staci introduce themselves: lineage, the politic of suffering, and why this work
    • 00:15 — The false wall: separating spiritual and political 
    • 00:16 — Case study: National Domestic Workers Alliance and embodied leadership
    • 00:19 — Case study: LA County health system, anti-racism work, and the word "love"
    • 00:25 — Burnout, overwhelm, and sustaining movement work from the inside out
    • 00:35 — Consent, boundaries, and building a somatic culture in organizations
    • 00:43 — Tearing down vs. building: holding contradictions without collapsing
    • 00:48 — Visioning our yes: what a racially just feminist social democracy could feel like
    • 00:50 — Legacy, small acts, and what we're building together
    • 01:00 — Closing reflections: love as action and trusting our courage

    Resources & Links

    Nkem Ndefo

    Staci K. Haines

    Rae Abileah

    Organizations & concepts referenced

    SAND Events, Courses and Films

     

     

    Contact SAND

    Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

  22. Sacred Remembering in Times of War: Dr. Jaiya John (Mshkiki Odeh Inini, Medicine Heart Man)

    1 h 26 min

    Recorded live at a SAND Community Gathering (April 2026) Hard times are here, we hunger for voices that can see beyond the fear, beyond the noise, beyond the technologies consuming our attention. We need poets …

    Notas do episódio

    Recorded live at a SAND Community Gathering (April 2026)

    Hard times are here, we hunger for voices that can see beyond the fear, beyond the noise, beyond the technologies consuming our attention. We need poets and visionaries. People who remember freedom.

    Dr. Jaiya John (Mshkiki Odeh Inini, Medicine Heart Man), medicine poet, freedom worker, is one of those voices. He has spent his life gathering words that heal. In this conversation, we enter the beauty, the grief, and the medicine together. We sit with the devastation tearing our world, the sorrows cracking us open, the ancestors still holding us—and the radical insistence that collective freedom is not something we chase. It is something already alive in and between us, waiting to be birthed.

    Dr. Jaiya John (Mshkiki Odeh Inini, Medicine Heart Man) was orphan-born on ancient Indigenous Anasazi and Pueblo lands in the high desert of New Mexico. He is an ancestral Baba, freedom worker, medicine poet, and the founder of Soul Water Rising—a global mission to eradicate oppression through re-humanization, book donations, and grants to displaced youth. He is the author of numerous books including Freedom: Medicine Words for your Brave Revolution and Fragrance After Rain, and the creator of the podcast I Will Read for You. A former professor of social psychology at Howard University, he holds a doctorate from UC Santa Cruz and has spoken to over a million people worldwide. His Indigenous soul dreams of frybread, sweetgrass, bamboo in the breeze, and turtle lakes whose poetry is peace.

     

    Watch the full video version of this conversation.

     

    Topics

     

    • 00:00 Welcome and Land Acknowledgment
    • 02:31 Guest Bio and Introduction
    • 03:51 Opening Blessing and Heart Question
    • 05:10 Reclaiming Anger as Medicine
    • 08:08 Libation Prayer for the World
    • 15:57 Anger Rage and Lifted Veils
    • 20:19 Rethinking War and Remembering Water
    • 25:18 Gather Your People Reading
    • 33:04 Grief Poetry and Inner Wars
    • 36:13 War Wants Us Small
    • 40:30 Soul Conditions That Grow War
    • 42:14 Oxygen of War
    • 44:12 Harvesting Clear Vision
    • 47:05 Ferocious Grief Revival
    • 49:38 How Grief Behaves
    • 51:59 Poetry Against Silence
    • 55:08 From Muteness to Voice
    • 58:33 Artistry as Resurrection
    • 01:03:42 Womanhood as Creativity
    • 01:07:23 History as Sacred Hoop
    • 01:12:45 Composting Harm into Healing
    • 01:16:33 Intentional Living Practice
    • 01:19:22 All These Rivers Choose Love
    • 01:23:01 Blessings and Farewell

     

    Dr. Jaiya John — Guest

    Dr. Jennifer Mullan — Referenced

    The Gaza Monologues — Referenced

    Nikki Giovanni — Referenced

    Ancestors Referenced

    • El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) — quoted: "Out of all our studies, history is most qualified to reward our research"
    • Geronimo — Dr. Jaiya John's ancestral grandfather spirit, whose question "What is in your heart?" opens the gathering
    • John Lewis — referenced for "good trouble" and getting in the way of harm

    Hopi Nation / Turtle Island

    • The concept of Sipapu (the Hopi place of emergence/womb place) is discussed at length as a framework for understanding history as circular, not linear

     

    Connect with more talks and films from the SAND film Series The Eternal Song

     

    Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

  23. Awakening in Times of Collapse: Stephan Bodian

    40 min

    Stephan offers webinars, retreats, videos, books, and spiritual counseling that make profound spiritual teachings and practices accessible to a global audience. He studied and practiced for many years with …

    Notas do episódio

    Stephan offers webinars, retreats, videos, books, and spiritual counseling that make profound spiritual teachings and practices accessible to a global audience. He studied and practiced for many years with great masters in the nondual wisdom traditions of Zen, Dzogchen-Mahamudra, and Advaita Vedanta, and in 2001 he received Dharma transmission (authorization to teach) from Adyashanti.

    In this conversation, recorded to mark the release of his new book Infinite Awakening: A Guide to Nondual Wisdom and the Pathless Path (Shambhala, May 2026), Stephan and Michael explore awakening not as a destination but as an ongoing, infinite process. They move through trauma and trust, the limits of mindfulness, the role of intimate relationship as spiritual path, and how nondual realization speaks — or fails to speak — to the metacrisis we're all living through. The episode closes with a guided "rest and allow" meditation from Stephan.

    Topics

    • 00:00 — Reconnecting
    • 00:04 — Awakening as a Path
    • 00:10 — Trauma & Trust
    • 00:16 — IFS & Somatic Therapy
    • 00:18 — Intimate Relationships as Spiritual Path 
    • 00:21 — Spiritual Bypassing
    • 00:27 — The Limits of Mindfulness
    • 00:33 — Guided Meditation: Rest and Allow by Stephan

    Resources & Links

    Stephan Bodian

    Referenced teachers and books

    Psychological Modalities

    SAND 

    Contact SAND

  24. Mysticism of Sound & Music: Michael Harrison (Encore)

    59 min

    We are resharing this episode in memory of Michael Harrison, who passed away on April 17, 2026. He was 67. In this episode, we discuss the life and work of musician and Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan with …

    Notas do episódio

    We are resharing this episode in memory of Michael Harrison, who passed away on April 17, 2026. He was 67.


    In this episode, we discuss the life and work of musician and Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan with composer/pianist and Inayat Khan scholar Michael Harrison.

    Hazrat Inayat Khan ( July 1882 – 5 February 1927) was an Indian professor of musicology, singer, exponent of the saraswati vina, poet, philosopher, and pioneer of the transmission of Sufism to the West. At the urging of his students, and on the basis of his ancestral Sufi tradition and four-fold training and authorization at the hands of Sayyid Abu Hashim Madani (d. 1907) of Hyderabad, he established an order of Sufism (the Sufi Order) in London in 1914. By the time of his death in 1927, centers had been established throughout Europe and North America, and multiple volumes of his teachings had been published.

    Michael Harrison (October 24, 1958 - April 17, 2026) forged a new approach to composition through just intonation (the system of tuning based on pure harmonic proportions). His works blend classical music traditions of Europe and North India. He is a Guggenheim Fellowship and NYFA Artist Fellowship recipient.

    Michael created dedicated tuning systems for many of his works. He pioneered a structural approach to composition in which the proportions of harmonic relationships organically determine other musical elements such as pitch, duration, and dynamics. He also invented the “harmonic piano,” a grand piano that plays 24 notes per octave, documented in the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Harrison seeks expressions of universality via the physics of sound – music that brings one into a state of concentrated listening as a meditative and even mind-altering experience.

    At the time of his death he was working on “The Raga Cycle”, a series of albums charting the hours of the day through Hindustani raga. The first installment, Evening Light, was released in March 2026 on Cantaloupe Records. More albums in the series were recorded before he became too ill to continue. They will be released in the years ahead.

    Donations in his memory can be made to the Michael Harrison Foundation for Just Music at JustMusic.org.

    Topics

    • 00:00 Podcast Welcome
    • 00:22 Encore Tribute
    • 02:28 Mysticism Book Intro
    • 02:49 Spiritual Music Path
    • 04:32 Conservatory And Tonality
    • 06:37 Daily Raga Practice
    • 12:55 Voice Breath And Wazifa
    • 16:48 Creation As Vibration
    • 20:14 Harmony East And West
    • 24:07 Math Of Consonance
    • 25:32 Temperament Versus Just
    • 28:24 Tuning The Soul Quote
    • 32:03 Piano Retuning Journey
    • 35:54 432 Versus 440
    • 39:56 Music As Universal Religion
    • 46:02 Cage Oliveros Deep Listening
    • 51:16 Commentary And Curriculum
    • 53:08 Teaching Programs
    • 55:26 Closing Thanks And Outro

    Links

    Michael Harrison — His Own Work

    Episode Music

    • Michael Harrison — "Mureed" from Seven Sacred Names (2021, Cantaloupe Music)
    • Michael Harrison — "Alim: Polyphonic Raga Malkauns" from Seven Sacred Names (2021, Cantaloupe Music)
    • Michael Harrison — "Qadr: Etude in Raga Bhimpalasi" from Seven Sacred Names (2021, Cantaloupe Music)
    • Hazrat Inayat Khan — "Purvi Khal: Kamli Wale Tope Sabkuchhvare" (2022, Primitiv)
    • Michael Harrison –  “Sami: The Acoustic Constellation” from Seven Sacred Names (2021, Cantaloupe Music)   

    Hazrat Inayat Khan

    Teachers & Lineage

    Other Composers & Artists Referenced

    Programs & Institutions

    Contact SAND

    Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

  25. The Great AI Unraveling, Part 2: Tiokasin Ghosthorse & Pooja Prema

    1 h 23 min

    This is the second gathering in SAND's ongoing series on AI and the human spirit — and it takes a deliberately different rhythm. Rather than asking "is AI safe?" or "will it take our jobs?", Tiokasin Ghosthorse …

    Notas do episódio

    This is the second gathering in SAND's ongoing series on AI and the human spirit — and it takes a deliberately different rhythm. Rather than asking "is AI safe?" or "will it take our jobs?", Tiokasin Ghosthorse and Pooja Prema invite us to slow down and ask the deeper questions: What cosmology is AI extending? What is intelligence, really? And what happens when the earth-based, organic, living intelligence of Indigenous and ancestral ways of knowing gets replaced by a synthetic one? A spacious, felt-sense conversation that asks us to remember what a living mind actually is.

    Timestamps

    • 00:00 — Welcome & framing the deeper questions
    • 00:04 — Opening body practice: tuning into felt sense before speaking
    • 00:07 — Tiokasin: AI as the latest ship on the shore — colonization in a new form
    • 00:17 — "There is no artificial intuition" — what technology cannot replace
    • 00:18 — Pooja: the cosmology behind AI — colonial linearity vs. the curving motherboard of Earth
    • 00:25 — AI as the latest savior narrative — and why that story keeps repeating
    • 00:45 — Who owns the data? Who controls the intelligence? The politics of AI
    • 01:05 — AI as therapist, AI replacing elders — the cost to young people and mental health
    • 01:10 — Ghost in the Machine: how to resist empire over the long game
    • 01:15 — Closing: "Our body is the mystic" — an invitation to make this a living inquiry

    Guests

    Tiokasin Ghosthorse is a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation and lifelong Indigenous activist. He is the founder and host of First Voices Radio, which broadcast for 33 years before its final episode in July 2025. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016, is a National Native American Hall of Fame nominee, and a master musician who performs worldwide. He describes himself simply as "a perfectly flawed human being." He is also featured in SAND's film The Eternal Song.

    Pooja Prema is a first-generation Indian American writer, multidisciplinary artist, and ritualist from Kerala, South India. Her work weaves ecofeminism, decolonial somatic practice, and animistic cosmologies. She is the founder of The Rites of Passage Project and The Ritual Theatre. Her work has been featured at the Kennedy Center, Ebony Magazine, and NPR.

    Resources & Links

    Tiokasin Ghosthorse

    Pooja Prema

    Film referenced

    Concepts discussed

    • Conspecific aggression — Tiokasin's term for what happens when a species competes so aggressively over shared resources that it turns on itself
    • Present-phobic language — technology as a tool for escaping the present into an imagined future
    • The real motherboard — Pooja's framing of Earth and cosmos as the original curving, relational, non-linear intelligence that AI's linear grid cannot replicate

    SAND series context

    Contact SAND

    Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

  26. The Indigenous Paradigm: Pat McCabe & Lynn Murphy

    1 h 2 min

    Originally recorded at Science and Nonduality, 2021 Pat McCabe, also known as Woman Stands Shining, is a Diné elder, ceremonial prayer leader, and international speaker adopted into the Lakota spiritual way of …

    Notas do episódio

    Originally recorded at Science and Nonduality, 2021

    Pat McCabe, also known as Woman Stands Shining, is a Diné elder, ceremonial prayer leader, and international speaker adopted into the Lakota spiritual way of life. In this conversation hosted by Lynn Murphy, Pat offers a profound invitation to examine the foundational assumptions of the modern world paradigm and consider what it might mean to live from a genuinely different understanding of what it is to be human.

    Drawing on teachings from her clan grandfather, her experience of intergenerational trauma and survival, and her deep inquiry into masculine and feminine principles, Pat maps the territory between the glittering world we are leaving and the green world we are entering. The conversation opens in ceremony and closes with a practice: a morning sunrise offering that anyone can begin today.

    Lynn Murphy is a strategic advisor for foundations and NGOs working in the geopolitical South. She was a senior fellow and program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation where she focused on international education and global development. She resigned as a ”conscientious objector” to neocolonial philanthropy. She holds an MA and PhD in international comparative education from Stanford University. She is also a certified Laban/Bartenieff movement analyst.

    This episode is released in celebration of SAND’s new film featuring Pat McCabe, Little Singer, premiering online May 26-28, 2026, as part of the Eternal Song series.

    Timestamps

    00:00:00 — Introduction 

    00:01:45 — Lynn Murphy introduces Pat McCabe: Diné nation, Lakota spiritual way, Defend the Sacred alliance

    00:05:00 — Pat introduces herself through her clans — clan names as places on the earth, worlds more than this one

    00:07:00 — Traveling through worlds: the flood, men and women, and the movement from the glittering world to the green world

    00:15:00 — The two paradigms: indigenous versus modern world — "I am a human being, relative to all my relations"

    00:34:00 — Trailer for Little Singer — premiering online May 26-28, 2026 — theeternalsong.org/littlesinger

    00:35:00 — Masculine and feminine principles: power over versus power with, the sacred hoop, and right relations

    00:52:00 — A practice for beginning: the morning sunrise offering and the teaching on consent, sovereignty, and honorable relationship with all beings

    Resources and Links

    Pat McCabe — Woman Stands Shining Website: patmccabe.net 

    Little Singer — Eternal Song Series Online premiere: May 26-28, 2026 Three-day event with Diné voices

    Mentioned in the episode Robin Wall Kimmerer — Braiding Sweetgrass (plant sovereignty, honorable harvest) Lakota spiritual traditions — Seven Generations teaching Diné (Navajo) Nation — Long Walk history, Bosque Redondo concentration camp, 1860s Residential boarding school history — US government and church collaboration Masculine and feminine principles in economics and right relations — ongoing inquiry in Pat's work

    Episode artwork “Woman Stands Shining” by Namita

    Contact SAND

    Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

  27. What Empire Cannot Erase: Fatemeh Keshavarz-Karamustafa, Omid Safi & Mays Imad

    1 h 17 min

    Persian Poetry, Radical Love, and the Soul of Iran“The path to God goes through that most difficult of beings, the human being.” – Omid SafiRecorded live at a SAND Community Gathering (April 2026). Watch the …

    Notas do episódio

    Persian Poetry, Radical Love, and the Soul of Iran

    “The path to God goes through that most difficult of beings, the human being.”

    – Omid Safi

    Recorded live at a SAND Community Gathering (April 2026). Watch the full conversation on the SAND Website.

     

    We are watching, once again, what empire does: not only to bodies, but to the long memory of a people; to the libraries and sacred sites; to art, language, and the ruins that hold the oldest threads of human spiritual inquiry.

    We are thinking of the civilization that gave us Rumi, Hafez, Omar Khayyam, Forough Farrokhzad — mystics and rebels and lovers of paradox who understood something about the human soul that we are still, centuries later, trying to catch up to.

    This gathering invited us to come together: to read poetry aloud, to hear from Iranian voices, to sit with grief and beauty together rather than alone.

    We work with political and moral vocabulary shaped by Iranian thinkers such as Ali Shariati, who wrote against domination, spiritual emptiness, and the violence of imposed power.

    We make space for what doesn’t fit into headlines or talking points—the complexity of empire, the difference between a government and its people, the authoritarian forces at work not only abroad but here at home. We also gather with the political inheritance of those who taught generations to resist domination and spiritual emptiness, including Ali Shariati.

    Guests

    Omid Safi is a scholar of the Islamic mystical tradition and professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Memories of Muhammad and Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition, and teaches online courses on Muslim mysticism. He leads contemplative journeys to Turkey, Morocco, and Mecca/Medina through Illuminated Courses.

    Fatemeh Keshavarz is the Roshan Institute Chair in Persian Language and Literature and Director of the Roshan Institute Center for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland. A poet in Persian and English, she is the author of Reading Mystical Lyric, Recite in the Name of the Red Rose, Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran, and Lyrics of Life: Sa'di on Love, Cosmopolitanism and Care of the Self. She has spoken at the UN General Assembly and received the Peabody Award for her NPR program on Rumi.

    Mays Imad, PhD (facilitator) is a neuroscientist, educator, and associate professor at Connecticut College whose work bridges neuroscience, philosophy, and education. An Iraqi immigrant who lived through wars and displacement, she brings both personal and scholarly depth to the themes of trauma, remembrance, and repair through the embodied nervous system.

    Timestamps

    • 00:00 — Welcome & framing
    • 00:02 — Mays Imad opens: grief, urgency, and love
    • 00:06 — Introducing Omid Safi & Fatemeh Keshavarz
    • 00:07 — Saadi, Rumi, and the Persian tradition
    • 00:12 — The war on Iran: what is being destroyed
    • 00:21 — Don't bypass grief — the Persian mystics knew this
    • 00:27 — Saadi on truth, power, and interconnection
    • 00:32 — Fatemeh: togetherness, invisibilization, and Iranian resilience
    • 00:38 — Poetry as the Silk Road of imagination
    • 00:52 — War's corruption of language — and poetry as antidote
    • 01:04 — Remembrance as ethical act
    • 01:10 — Intergenerational love & closing

    Resources & Links

    Omid Safi

    Upcoming events:

    Fatemeh Keshavarz

    Mays Imad

    Music featured

    • Watan (وَطَن — "Homeland") performed by Shaghayegh Amiri, playing the Daf — the ancient Persian frame drum central to Sufi musical tradition
    • Ali Ghamsari — solo on the Kamancheh (Persian bowed string instrument), taught by Hamidreza Afarideh, music teacher in Tehran

    Poets and texts referenced in depth

    • Rumi (Jalal al-Din Rumi, 1207–1273) — Persian Sufi mystic and poet; his Masnavi opens with pain and grief; central throughout
    • Sa'di Shirazi (1210–1291) — Iranian Sufi poet; his Golestan (Garden of Roses) is where Iranians learn to read and write; complete English translation by Thackston available; Fatemeh's Lyrics of Life goes deeper on Sa'di
    • Hafez (14th century) — Persian lyric poet; Fatemeh discusses his use of the word hush as an example of how poetic language restores meaning
    • Farid ud-Din Attar (born 1150) — author of Mantiq ut-Tayr (The Conference of the Birds / The Parliament of the Fowls) — referenced by Mays in her opening
    • Abu Sa'id (Abu Sa'id Abi'l-Khayr, 967–1049) — Persian Sufi mystic referenced by Omid: "Don't just write down stories — become someone others want to write down what you say"
    • Shams of Tabriz — Rumi's spiritual companion; Fatemeh discusses how Shams urged Rumi to live his knowledge
    • Jamiluddin Aali — Urdu poet whose work was recited in the live chat

    Historical & contextual references

    • Sharif University of Technology, Tehran — described as "the MIT of the Middle East," bombed during the war
    • Leston Palace, Tehran — UNESCO World Heritage Site, bombed and referenced as a war crime
    • The Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) — Fatemeh's personal reference point for civilian life under bombardment
    • George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 — referenced by Omid in discussion of the corruption of language

    Next SAND Community Gathering

    Contact SAND

    Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

  28. The Great AI Unraveling: Tristan Harris

    1 h 30 min

    Recorded live at SAND Community Gathering (April 2026). Watch the full conversion on the SAND Website. SAND has launched a special series on Artificial Intelligence. To premiere this series, we spoke with tech …

    Notas do episódio

    Recorded live at  SAND Community Gathering (April 2026). Watch the full conversion on the SAND Website.

    SAND has launched a special series on Artificial Intelligence.

    To premiere this series, we spoke with tech ethicist Tristan Harris—co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. In this conversation, we explored his warnings about the impending age of AI. According to Harris, the current trajectory isn’t just menacing the economy, but fundamentally rewiring human relationships, altering parenting and mental health, potentially accelerating climate collapse, and even threatening the very fabric of society. We inquired into ways to remain human in an era where machines can simulate empathy, displace our labor, and potentially outmaneuver us.

     

    Topics

    • 00:00 Welcome and Context
    • 00:42 Why This AI Talk
    • 01:32 Introducing Tristan Harris
    • 03:15 Setting the Basics
    • 04:10 From Narrow to New AI
    • 06:18 Rubber Band Reality Check
    • 08:31 Transformers and Scaling
    • 11:00 Infinity Upside and Risk
    • 14:49 Defining AGI and ASI
    • 18:18 Jagged Capabilities and Hype
    • 21:33 Singularity and Anti Human Drift
    • 23:26 Incentives Behind the Future
    • 27:29 The Intelligence Curse
    • 32:22 Devaluing Humans and Consensus
    • 37:56 Planetary Costs of Data Centers
    • 39:41 Why We Keep Building It
    • 42:46 Extinction Risk and Safety Math
    • 45:20 AI in War and Arms Race
    • 47:36 Leaders Unaware of Runaway Signs
    • 48:26 Leaders Fear AI Power
    • 49:02 Nuclear War Game Theory
    • 49:41 Infinite Games Mindset
    • 51:11 AI as Extractive Empire
    • 52:27 From Shadow to Action
    • 53:55 Building the Human Movement
    • 57:25 Four-Step Action Plan
    • 59:44 Grassroots Wins and Bans
    • 01:02:18 Nonprofit Progress and Lawsuits
    • 01:07:51 Talking to Teens Effectively
    • 01:10:05 Governance and Citizen Assemblies
    • 01:12:19 Spiritual Hopes vs Incentives
    • 01:15:12 Accelerationism and Choice
    • 01:18:22 Policy Maker Ten Minute Brief
    • 01:21:26 Countering Transhumanist Ideology
    • 01:23:45 Changing Culture and Incentives
    • 01:27:12 Final Reflections and Gratitude

    Resources

    Websites & Organizations

     

    Articles & Documents

     

    Videos & Films

     

    Books & Textbooks

     

     

     

    Podcasts & Audio


    Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

  29. Mongolian Dharma Poetry: Simon Wickhamsmith

    56 min

    Simon Wickhamsmith is a Buddhist monk turned scholar, computer musician, and one of the only translators of Mongolian literature into English. He teaches in the Writing Program at Rutgers University and has …

    Notas do episódio

    Simon Wickhamsmith is a Buddhist monk turned scholar, computer musician, and one of the only translators of Mongolian literature into English. He teaches in the Writing Program at Rutgers University and has been traveling back and forth to Mongolia since 2006. In this conversation he traces his spiritual path from Catholicism through Tibetan Buddhism and back to medieval Christian mysticism, introduces the Mongolian poet Mend-Ooyo, and takes us deep into the life and poetry of the 19th century Buddhist polymath Danzanravjaa — a figure Simon considers his primary teacher — including a live reading of the poem Twos, a stunning meditation on nonduality from the Mongolian steppe.

    Topics

    • 00:00 — Introduction
    • 00:02 — Simon's spiritual path: Catholicism, Opus Dei, the Desert Fathers, and Zen
    • 00:04 — Discovering Tibetan Buddhism, Samye Ling monastery in Scotland, and ordaining as a monk
    • 00:06 — The three-year retreat, his mother's illness, and returning to the world
    • 00:07 — Returning to medieval Christian mysticism: Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, The Cloud of Unknowing
    • 00:10 — How SAND connected with Mend-Ooyo in Mongolia — and how Simon met him
    • 00:12 — Teaching himself Mongolian by translating Danzanravjaa's complete works
    • 00:13 — Introducing Mend-Ooyo: born 1952 into a nomadic herding family, poet and cultural guardian of Mongolia
    • 00:16 — The underground literary group GAL (Fire) and Mend-Ooyo's role in Mongolian literary culture
    • 00:18 — Mend-Ooyo's mission: reconnecting Mongolia to its nomadic heritage after Soviet collapse
    • 00:19 — Mend-Ooyo's new novel The Solitary Tree: Robin Hood, shamanism, Buddhism, and falcons
    • 00:23 — Who was Danzanravjaa? Born in the Gobi Desert, recognized as the fifth reincarnation of the Noyon Hutagt
    • 00:26 — Danzanravjaa's approach: spontaneous, impromptu poetry as dharma teaching
    • 00:28 — Mongolia's first traveling theater troupe and the poems as dictated teachings
    • 00:31 — Live reading and analysis of Perfect Qualities — a love poem, a guru poem, and a poem of nonduality simultaneously
    • 00:33 — The three levels of meaning in Danzanravjaa's poetry: outer, inner, and secret
    • 00:38 — Bhakti yoga, Ram Dass, Maharaji, and the connection to direct transmission beyond doctrine
    • 00:41 — Danzanravjaa and the land: the Shambhala vortex at Hamriin Hiid
    • 00:44 — Horses, landscape, and the spiritual path in his poetry
    • 00:45 — Simon's personal experience of the Shambhala site and animist relationship to land
    • 00:49 — If Danzanravjaa were alive today: his anti-Manchu politics and primary focus on deepening practice
    • 00:50 — Live reading of the poem Twos — nonduality in full
    • 00:54 — On translation: humor, layers of meaning, and the paradox of the poem itself

     

     

    Resources & Links

     

    Simon Wickhamsmith

     

     

    Mend-Ooyo Gombojav

     

     

    Danzanravjaa (referenced poems)

     

    • Perfect Qualities (also known as The Five Senses / Five Offerings)
    • Twos — read in full during the episode
    • Mend-Ooyo's essay on Danzanravjaa: mend-ooyo.mn/content/86.html

     

    Referenced spiritual figures & texts

     

    • The Cloud of Unknowing — anonymous 14th century medieval Christian mysticism text
    • Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart — medieval mystics Simon returned to after Buddhism
    • Samye Ling Tibetan Buddhist Monastery, Scotland — where Simon did his retreat
    • Ram Dass and Maharaji — referenced in discussion of bhakti yoga and direct transmission
    • John Cage — Simon's original entry point into Zen Buddhism

     

    Connect with more talks and films from the SAND film Series The Eternal Song

     

    Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

     

     

  30. Ancient Minoan Wisdom: Chiara Baldini

    53 min

    Researcher, author, and PhD candidate Chiara Baldini has spent two decades tracing the roots of ecstatic culture in Europe — from the rituals of Dionysus all the way back to Bronze Age Crete and the ancient …

    Notas do episódio

    Researcher, author, and PhD candidate Chiara Baldini has spent two decades tracing the roots of ecstatic culture in Europe — from the rituals of Dionysus all the way back to Bronze Age Crete and the ancient Minoans, a civilization that thrived for over a thousand years before classical Greece. In this conversation, Chiara makes a compelling case that the Minoans may have been the only advanced civilization of their era not built on domination — their palaces functioning as community spaces rather than elite residencies, their frescoes showing priestesses, dolphins, and bull-jumping athletes rather than kings and conquest. She explores what their art, architecture, and animist relationship to nature might offer us now — not as a culture to imitate, but as proof that patriarchy is not inevitable, and that a radically different set of values has thrived before.

    Chiara Baldini is a scholar, author, speaker and freelance curator from Florence (Italy). She investigates the evolution of the ecstatic cult in the West, particularly in Minoan Crete,  ancient Greece, and Rome, contributing to anthologies, psychedelic conferences, and festivals. She was a member of the Boom Festival team since 2010 and the curator of Boom’s cultural area Liminal Village from 2014 to 2023. She has co-curated the anthology “Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine.” She is currently a PhD candidate at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). She lives in Portugal and she expresses her deep love for music by playing as DJ Clandestina.

    Topics

    • 00:00 Welcome
    • 02:02 Reconnecting with Chiara and Recent Life Changes
    • 03:31 Dionysus and Ecstatic Traditions
    • 06:38 Going Back to the Minoans
    • 10:07 Bronze Age Patriarchy and War
    • 18:02 Minoan Palaces and Community Life
    • 21:18 Frescoes Dolphins and Priestesses
    • 26:34 Seal Rings and Undeciphered Script
    • 32:18 Bull Jumping and Gender Fluidity
    • 37:20 Why Minoans Matter Today
    • 44:31 Modern Crete LARPing and Animism
    • 49:30 Courses, Books and Closing

    Resources & Links

    Chiara Baldini

    Books mentioned

    Key figures discussed

    • Arthur Evans — Wikipedia — British archaeologist who excavated Knossos beginning in 1900, named the Minoan civilization, and controversially reconstructed the palace
    • The Prince of the Lilies fresco — the contested Knossos fresco Chiara discusses as an example of Evans projecting masculine elite identity onto ambiguous fragments
    • Knossos Palace, Crete — the largest Bronze Age archaeological site on Crete, centerpiece of Minoan culture

    Institutions mentioned

    Connect with more talks and films from the SAND film Series The Eternal Song

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Aqui estão os 40 episódios mais recentes de 194. Os mais antigos estão no feed do podcast.

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