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Sounds of SAND: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Science and Nonduality
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
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- Yesterday47 min
Falling to Our Knees: Willow Defebaugh
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 Atmos The Overview The Nature Of Mentioned The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change by Sherri Mitchell, source of the line “oneness is not the same as sameness” The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoe Schlanger Songs of Gaia SAND Podcast episode with Monica Gagliano Our Sacred Earth SAND Podcast episode with Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee SAND The Eternal Song Become a SAND member
- 1 weeks ago1h 8m
Healing Through Catharsis: Ashira Darwish
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. ashirapremrachana.com Catharsis Holistic Healing in Palestine, including how therapists and volunteers can apply THE RAMALLAH SESSIONS 06 Tatajallah Ashira s Song فلتتجلى Where Olive Trees Weep, SAND’s 2024 film. Proceeds support olive tree planting in Palestine, humanitarian aid in Gaza, and trauma healing in Palestinian communities. Also from SAND What Keeps Us Human, an online gathering of conversations, healing and music about Gaza, 20 December 2026, with Ashira among the featured presenters. Have We Gone Too Far with Trauma? with Catherine Liu, 4 December 2026 Liberation Psychology: Roots, Memory & Practice Support this Podcast by becoming a SAND member
- 2 weeks ago43 min
A Time Between Worlds: Michael Meade
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. Living Myth podcast The Heart of Transformation by Michael Meade. SAND The Eternal Song Become a SAND member
- 3 weeks ago1h 23m
The Name Remembers: William K. Iaukea
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. The Eternal Song, the full thirteen film series 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 The Eternal Song Become a SAND member
- Oct 15, 202654 min
Human & Machine Hallucinations: Bayo Akomolafe, Vanessa Andreotti & Alnoor Ladha
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. bayoakomolafe.net The Emergence Network We Will Dance with Mountains and other offerings 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. UVic faculty profile Substack burnoutfromhumans.net 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. Author page at Daraja Press Transition Resource Circle The article at the center of this conversation What If Humans and AI Share the Same Hallucination? by Vanessa Andreotti. Books Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Outgrowing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira <a href="https://decolonialfuturesnet.wordpress.com/wp-content/u
- Oct 8, 20261h 0m
Our Sacred Earth: Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
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. Emergence Magazine Go Project Films Sanctuaries of Silence, his film with acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton Wikipedia Remembering Earth: A Spiritual Ecology Retreat, Monastère de Ségriès, Haute-Provence, France — November 1-4, 2026 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 Co
- Sep 24, 20261h 0m
Rooted Action: Starhawk & Rae Abileah
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. starhawk.org Starhawk's Substack, where she is writing The Movement We Need chapter by chapter The Movement We Need<span style="font-weight: 40
- Sep 17, 20261h 0m
Nuance of Wonder: Joan Tollifson
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, why she has never used AI, and why "I don't know" may be the answer closest to true. 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 Why she doesn't name names, 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 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. joantollifson.com Right Now, Just As It Is on Substack Her list of recommended books The two essays discussed Two Inseparable Truths, June 20, 2026. The essay that prompted this conversation. Radiant Light in Dark Times, August 12, 2026. Read in full at the end of the episode. 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<spa
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About Sounds of SAND
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
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