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. 

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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.

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Dr. Maceo Carrillo Martinet

Referenced in the conversation

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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

Resources & Links

Dr. Samah Jabr

Dr. Gabor Maté

Dr. Jennifer Mullan

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Thinkers referenced in the conversation

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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

Resources & Links

SAND Films

Referenced

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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

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Nkem Ndefo

Staci K. Haines

Rae Abileah

Organizations & concepts referenced

SAND Events, Courses and Films

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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

Dr. Jaiya John — Guest

Dr. Jennifer Mullan — Referenced

The Gaza Monologues — Referenced

Nikki Giovanni — Referenced

Ancestors Referenced

Hopi Nation / Turtle Island

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

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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

Resources & Links

Stephan Bodian

Referenced teachers and books

Psychological Modalities

SAND 

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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

Links

Michael Harrison — His Own Work

Episode Music

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Teachers & Lineage

Other Composers & Artists Referenced

Programs & Institutions

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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

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

SAND series context

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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

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