Sounds of SAND

Afleveringen

1. A Time Between Worlds: Michael Meade

   29 oktober 2026 · 44 min

   Afspelen
   AI, Mythology, and the Battle for the Soul of Humanity Lees meer

   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

2. The Name Remembers: William K. Iaukea

   22 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 24 min

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

   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

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

   15 oktober 2026 · 55 min

   Afspelen
   What if humans and AI share the same hallucination? Lees meer

   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 …

4. Our Sacred Earth: Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

   8 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 1 min

   Afspelen
   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. Lees meer

   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…

5. Rooted Action: Starhawk & Rae Abileah

   24 september 2026 · 1 uur

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   Earth, Spirit, and Collective Empowerment Lees meer

   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 si…

6. Nuance of Wonder: Joan Tollifson

   17 september 2026 · 1 uur 1 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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.

   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…

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

   10 september 2026 · 51 min

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   Part of SAND’s The Great AI Unraveling Series Lees meer

   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 colon…

8. The Flow of Coherence: Cynthia Li

   3 september 2026 · 1 uur 3 min

   Afspelen
   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. Lees meer

   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

   The Medicine of Flow: Harmonizing Your Inner State for Effortless Healing (Reveal Press, May 2026)

   Brave New Medicine: A Doctor's Unconventional Path to Healing Her …

9. The Dance of Exile & Settlement: Bayo Akomolafe

   27 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 27 min

   Afspelen
   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. Lees meer

   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.

   bayoakomolafe.net

   The Emergence Network

   These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home (North Atlantic Books, 2017)

   We Will Tell Our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, with Molefi Kete Asante and Augustine Nwoye

   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 A…

10. The Unbroken Thread: Pir Zia Inayat Khan

    20 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 3 min

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    Pir Zia on the secret history of the world Lees meer

    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.

    pirzia.org

    Inayatiyya

    Sulūk Academy

    The book

    Tears from the Mother of the Sun: A Secret History of the World, Inner Traditions, 2026, with full-color paintings by Amruta Patil

    Amruta Patil, writer, painter, and India's first female graphic novelist, author of Kari, Adi Parva, Sauptik, and A…

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