Podcast · Devotional & Spiritual

Sounds of SAND

by Science and Nonduality · English · Devotional & Spiritual

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 cu

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 1 hr 2 min
Latest: 8 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

8 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 1 min

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…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

24 Sep 2026 · 1 hr
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.…
17 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 1 min
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, 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…
10 Sep 2026 · 51 min
AI & Colonial Logic: Christian “ZacaTechO” Ortiz & Thema Monroe-White
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…
3 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 3 min
The Flow of Coherence: Cynthia Li
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…
27 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 27 min
The Dance of Exile & Settlement: Bayo Akomolafe
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…
20 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 3 min
The Unbroken Thread: Pir Zia Inayat Khan
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,…
13 Aug 2026 · 58 min
Arborescence: Robert Moor
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…
6 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 16 min
Superfluity of AI: Lyla June, Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez & Ashley Nicole Leitka
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…
30 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
Healing the Soul Wound: Eduardo Duran
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.…
23 Jul 2026 · 50 min
Grow, Become, Love, Alone: Nicole Wordlaw
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…
16 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 6 min
Songs of Sila: Avianja Rakel Sanimuinaq, Ikimaliq Pikilak & Nuka Alice
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…
9 Jul 2026 · 50 min
Reigniting Indigenous Science: Maceo Carrillo Martinet
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…
2 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 1 min
What Occupation Does to the Soul: Samah Jabr, Gabor Maté, Jennifer Mullan, Facilitated by Jess Ghannam
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…
25 Jun 2026 · 53 min
Animism, Activism & Ancestry: Daniel Foor
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,…
18 Jun 2026 · 55 min
Tending the Whole: Nkem Ndefo & Staci K. Haines, Facilitated by Rae Abileah
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…
11 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 26 min
Sacred Remembering in Times of War: Dr. Jaiya John (Mshkiki Odeh Inini, Medicine Heart Man)
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…
4 Jun 2026 · 40 min
Awakening in Times of Collapse: Stephan Bodian
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…
21 May 2026 · 59 min
Mysticism of Sound & Music: Michael Harrison (Encore)
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…
14 May 2026 · 1 hr 23 min
The Great AI Unraveling, Part 2: Tiokasin Ghosthorse & Pooja Prema
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…
7 May 2026 · 1 hr 2 min
The Indigenous Paradigm: Pat McCabe & Lynn Murphy
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…
30 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 17 min
What Empire Cannot Erase: Fatemeh Keshavarz-Karamustafa, Omid Safi & Mays Imad
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…
23 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 30 min
The Great AI Unraveling: Tristan Harris
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…
16 Apr 2026 · 56 min
Mongolian Dharma Poetry: Simon Wickhamsmith
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…
2 Apr 2026 · 53 min
Ancient Minoan Wisdom: Chiara Baldini
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…
26 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 43 min
The Architecture of Silence in Spiritual Culture: Gabor Maté, Bayo Akomolafe, Pat McCabe, Tara Brach, V & Matthew Remski
Recorded live at a SAND Community Gathering (March 2026). Something is cracking open in the spiritual and wellness world; and it has been for a while. Have wisdom traditions containing genuine gifts been composted into a product that only serves the very forces those traditions were born to resist? It is no news that some powerful spiritual leaders with devoted followers have, for a long time, abused that power for dominance and, in many cases, for sexual exploitation. The Epstein files are not an interruption to the pattern; they are the pattern, made suddenly impossible to scroll past. We…
21 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
Transforming Colonization, Extractivism & Socio-Ecological Injustice: Casey Camp-Horinek, Osprey Orielle Lake, Abby Reyes & Rae Abileah
Recorded live at SAND's Wisdom of the Ancestors event for the launch of the film series The Eternal Song , four powerful voices converge to address colonization, extractivism, and ecological injustice — and what it takes to move toward healing. Moderated by Rae Abileah , social change strategist, Jewish faith leader, and co-creator of the global Climate Ribbon art ritual. Abby Reyes , author of Truth Demands and Director of Community Resilience at UC Irvine, shares her harrowing personal story of the 1999 murders of her partner and colleagues near U'wa territory in Colombia, and a landmark…
12 Mar 2026 · 54 min
Reading As Resistance: Patty Krawec
Patty Krawec is Ojibwe Anishinaabe, a retired social worker, and author of Becoming Kin and her new book Bad Indians Book Club . In this conversation she explores kinship beyond blood, land as ancestor, and why reading together — slowly, in community — might be one of the most quietly radical things we can do right now. Topics 00:00 Introduction 00:56 Meeting Patty Krawec 02:00 Land Lineage Roots 04:17 Becoming Kin Origins 06:43 Bad Indians Book Club 10:12 Reindigenizing The Future 14:55 Reclaiming The Word 20:28 Reading Together Power 25:06 Attention In The Feed 25:27 Relearning Deep…
5 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 17 min
Block by Block, Heart by Heart: Dr. Lyla June, Kaira Jewel Lingo, Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg & Rae Abileah
Recorded from a live SAND Gathering (February 2026). From Los Angeles to Minneapolis, communities are turning toward one another in a time of uncertainty, remembering that care begins close to home. Beyond public action, quieter networks of support are taking root: block-by-block relationships grounded in land, lineage, and love. This gathering explores how spiritual practice, trauma-aware care, and neighborhood organizing are being woven together as living traditions. We ask what it looks like to shift our energy from reactive mobilization toward steady, proactive organizing that can…
26 Feb 2026 · 1 hr 7 min
Medicine in Our Wounds: Liza Rankow
Dr. Liza J. Rankow , author of Soul Medicine for a Fractured World , explores healing justice in a time of social and ecological upheaval. She names oppositional dualism and domination as the root fracture of our world and invites a shift toward lived non-duality as the ground of lasting transformation. The conversation touches the “crucible of the in-between,” apocalypse as death and renewal, grief as medicine, and the movement from commodified self-care to soul care rooted in spirit, community, and nature. The conversation emphasized deep listening, silence, and relationship with the…

About Sounds of SAND

Sounds of SAND is a English devotional & spiritual podcast from Science and Nonduality. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Science and Nonduality
Language: English
Category: Devotional & Spiritual
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 1 hr 2 min
Latest episode: 8 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1643318607

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