Sounds of SAND

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 a...

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....

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 fundamenta...

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 practitione...

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...

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 c...

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,...

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 int...

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 liv...

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 ar...

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...

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, intro...

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 civ...

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, abu...

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 Tr...

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...

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, a...

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, gri...

Recorded live at a SAND Community Gathering (Feb 2026) Dr. Samah Jabr , a Palestinian psychiatrist and author of Radiance in Pain and Resilience, joins Dr. Mays Imad (with questions from the audience chat) for a conversation about  what it means to stay human when the structures meant to protect people are the ones doing the harm. Drawing on decades of clinical work inside the occupation, Dr....

What if language was not a tool for naming things, but a vibration of relationship? What if intelligence wasn’t a human asset, but an ecological rhythm? What if consciousness is not what happens in our heads—but what happens between us, through us, with the land, with water, with wind?   Come gather for a conversation with Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Cheyenne River Lakota elder, host of First Voices...

In this conversation, Ellen Emmet reflects on her path into Jungian analysis and how the teachings of Carl Jung continue to shape her inner life, clinical work, and spiritual inquiry. Together, we explore what it means to hold depth psychology and nondual realization in the same field—without collapsing one into the other. The dialogue moves through questions of decolonizing therapy, the subtle dy...

From a SAND Community Gathering (December 2025), Francis Weller joins SAND co-founders Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo for a wide-ranging conversation on grief, initiation, and the sacred thresholds of a changing world.   They speak of rough passages and necessary descents—of what must burn away, and what endures. With Francis’s steady guidance, sorrow, longing, beauty, and vulnerability are reclai...

Blackfoot scholar Dr. Leroy Little Bear shares foundational Indigenous ways of knowing—revealing a worldview built on energy, motion, and relationship rather than matter, time, and separation. In this conversation, Little Bear illuminates how Blackfoot philosophy understands reality through "interpretive templates"—cultural lenses shaped by language, land, and cosmology. Where Western thought cent...

This episode was recorded live at The Eternal Song Film Gathering in 2025.  Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo welcome Dr. (Uncle) Paul Gordon and Joe Williams, featured in the upcoming SAND Film In the Circle of Life premiering January 20, 2026. In this conversation they discuss the profound importance of connection to the land, cultural heritage, and traditional practices in achieving wellness. The...

From a recent SAND Community Gathering (December 2025). This urgent conversation, facilitated by Ashira Darwish and rooted in Haidar Eid’s new book Banging on the Walls of the Tank , moves through the fractured present of Gaza, bringing forth a chorus of resistance, mourning, refusal, and clarity.   This is a dispatch from within the rubble, the classroom, the lull between airstrikes. Togethe...