Sounds of SAND

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

00:00 — Welcome & opening from SAND

00:03 — Rae opens: breathing, interdependence, and tending the whole amidst brokenness

00:07 — Nkem and Staci introduce themselves: lineage, the politic of suffering, and why this work

00:15 — The false wall: separating spiritual and political

00:16 — Case study: National Domestic Workers Alliance and embodied leadership

00:19 — Case study: LA County health system, anti-racism work, and the word "love"

00:25 — Burnout, overwhelm, and sustaining movement work from the inside out

00:35 — Consent, boundaries, and building a somatic culture in organizations

00:43 — Tearing down vs. building: holding contradictions without collapsing

00:48 — Visioning our yes: what a racially just feminist social democracy could feel like

00:50 — Legacy, small acts, and what we're building together

01:00 — Closing reflections: love as action and trusting our courage

Resources & Links

Nkem Ndefo

Lumos Transforms — website

The Resilience Toolkit

Lumos Transforms Community (global network)

Practicing Liberation — contributing author (North Atlantic Books, 2024)

Staci K. Haines

Website: StaciHaines.com

The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing and Social Justice — North Atlantic Books, 2019

Generative Somatics

The Outer Work Project

Strozzi Institute

Rae Abileah

CreateWell

Beautiful Trouble

ALAS — Ayudando Latinos a Soñar

Organizations & concepts referenced

National Domestic Workers Alliance — Staci's 7-year embodied leadership program with domestic worker organizers

Ai-jen Poo — founder of NDWA — referenced throughout the NDWA story

Movement Generation — Just Transitions zine — "From Banks and Tanks to Cooperation and Caring," referenced by Staci as an essential framework for a regenerative economy

Terry Tempest Williams — The Glorians (audiobook) — Rae references the passage "We cannot breathe" during the opening

generationFIVE — founded by Staci, committed to ending child sexual abuse within five generations using transformative justice approaches

SAND Events, Courses and Films

What Occupation Does to the Soul: A Global Reverberations of Palestinian Historical Trauma — June 26th, with Dr. Samah Jabr, Dr. Gabor Maté, and Dr. Jennifer Mullan

Decolonial Mental Health Practices — Four-part webinar series with Dr. Samah Jabr



The Eternal Song film series



Contact SAND

podcast@scienceandnonduality.com

Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

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



00:00 Welcome and Land Acknowledgment

02:31 Guest Bio and Introduction

03:51 Opening Blessing and Heart Question

05:10 Reclaiming Anger as Medicine

08:08 Libation Prayer for the World

15:57 Anger Rage and Lifted Veils

20:19 Rethinking War and Remembering Water

25:18 Gather Your People Reading

33:04 Grief Poetry and Inner Wars

36:13 War Wants Us Small

40:30 Soul Conditions That Grow War

42:14 Oxygen of War

44:12 Harvesting Clear Vision

47:05 Ferocious Grief Revival

49:38 How Grief Behaves

51:59 Poetry Against Silence

55:08 From Muteness to Voice

58:33 Artistry as Resurrection

01:03:42 Womanhood as Creativity

01:07:23 History as Sacred Hoop

01:12:45 Composting Harm into Healing

01:16:33 Intentional Living Practice

01:19:22 All These Rivers Choose Love

01:23:01 Blessings and Farewell



Dr. Jaiya John — Guest

Website: jaiyajohn.com

Soul Water Rising — global mission

Podcast: I Will Read for You: The Voice and Writings of Jaiya John

Freedom Medicine: Words for Your Brave Revolution — book

Wildflowers Praying at Midnight — book

We Birth Freedom at Dawn — book

All These Rivers and You Chose Love — book

Fragrance After Rain — book

Dr. Jaiya John's YouTube channel — where his poem for the Martyred Poets of Gaza and Palestine is available

Substack: jaiyajohn.substack.com

Dr. Jennifer Mullan — Referenced

Website: decolonizingtherapy.com — Dr. Mullan's "rage doctor" ministry and upcoming work

Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice — book

Therapy is Not Neutral: Dr. Jennifer Mullan & Iya Affo (SAND Podcast episode)

The Gaza Monologues — Referenced

The Gaza Monologues — ASHTAR Theatre — the global project of 33 young people from Gaza, which Dr. Jaiya John contributed a poem to

Support ASHTAR Theatre / Gaza Monologues writers — GlobalGiving

Nikki Giovanni — Referenced

Nikki Giovanni — Poetry Foundation — the poet whose performance broke Dr. Jaiya John open as a young man and birthed him as a poet

nikki-giovanni.com

Ancestors Referenced

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) — quoted: "Out of all our studies, history is most qualified to reward our research"

Geronimo — Dr. Jaiya John's ancestral grandfather spirit, whose question "What is in your heart?" opens the gathering

John Lewis — referenced for "good trouble" and getting in the way of harm

Hopi Nation / Turtle Island

The concept of Sipapu (the Hopi place of emergence/womb place) is discussed at length as a framework for understanding history as circular, not linear



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



Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

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

00:00 — Reconnecting

00:04 — Awakening as a Path

00:10 — Trauma & Trust

00:16 — IFS & Somatic Therapy

00:18 — Intimate Relationships as Spiritual Path

00:21 — Spiritual Bypassing

00:27 — The Limits of Mindfulness

00:33 — Guided Meditation: Rest and Allow by Stephan

Resources & Links

Stephan Bodian

Website: infinite-awakening.org

Infinite Awakening: A Guide to Nondual Wisdom and the Pathless Path — Shambhala/Penguin Random House, May 2026

Beyond Mindfulness — referenced in the conversation

Meditation for Dummies — Stephan Bodian

Psychology Today interview: "Stephan Bodian on Our Innate Drive to Awaken"

Referenced teachers and books

Adyashanti — website — gave Stephan Dharma transmission; wrote the foreword to Infinite Awakening

Ramana Maharshi — Wikipedia — referenced in discussion of awakening ideals

Nisargadatta Maharaj — Wikipedia — "I am That"; referenced in discussion of true nature

Thich Nhat Hanh — "inter-being" — referenced in discussion of inseparability and nonduality

Ram Dass — "go home to your parents" — referenced in discussion of relationships as spiritual mirror

Andrew Holecek — I'm Mindful, Now What? (Sounds True, 2024) — referenced as a companion conversation on the limits of mindfulness

Glissando of Consciousness SAND Podcast with Andrew Holecek

Gabor Maté — referenced in discussion of trauma as universal human condition

Psychological Modalities

IFS — Internal Family Systems — referenced as a somatic approach that complements awakening

EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — referenced alongside somatic therapy

SAND

The Wisdom of Trauma — SAND film

The Eternal Song — SAND film series

SAND membership

Contact SAND

podcast@scienceandnonduality.com

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

00:00 Podcast Welcome

00:22 Encore Tribute

02:28 Mysticism Book Intro

02:49 Spiritual Music Path

04:32 Conservatory And Tonality

06:37 Daily Raga Practice

12:55 Voice Breath And Wazifa

16:48 Creation As Vibration

20:14 Harmony East And West

24:07 Math Of Consonance

25:32 Temperament Versus Just

28:24 Tuning The Soul Quote

32:03 Piano Retuning Journey

35:54 432 Versus 440

39:56 Music As Universal Religion

46:02 Cage Oliveros Deep Listening

51:16 Commentary And Curriculum

53:08 Teaching Programs

55:26 Closing Thanks And Outro

Links

Michael Harrison — His Own Work

Evening Light: Raga Cycle I — Cantaloupe Music (2026)

Seven Sacred Names — Bandcamp (2021)

Revelation: Music in Pure Intonation — Cantaloupe Music (2007)

From Ancient Worlds — michaelharrison.com

Time Loops with Maya Beiser — Cantaloupe Music (2012)

Michael Harrison website

Episode Music

Michael Harrison — "Mureed" from Seven Sacred Names (2021, Cantaloupe Music)

Michael Harrison — "Alim: Polyphonic Raga Malkauns" from Seven Sacred Names (2021, Cantaloupe Music)

Michael Harrison — "Qadr: Etude in Raga Bhimpalasi" from Seven Sacred Names (2021, Cantaloupe Music)

Hazrat Inayat Khan — "Purvi Khal: Kamli Wale Tope Sabkuchhvare" (2022, Primitiv)

Michael Harrison – “Sami: The Acoustic Constellation” from Seven Sacred Names (2021, Cantaloupe Music)

Hazrat Inayat Khan

The Mysticism of Sound and Music — Goodreads

Inayat Khan 1909 78rpm Recordings — YouTube

Hazrat Inayat Khan — Wikipedia

The Inayat Order — Pir Zia Inayat Khan

Turning Toward the Heart — SAND Podcast with Pir Zia Inayat Khan

Teachers & Lineage

Pandit Pran Nath — Wikipedia

La Monte Young — Wikipedia

Terry Riley — Wikipedia

Pir Vilayat Khan — Wikipedia

Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan — Wikipedia

Other Composers & Artists Referenced

Pauline Oliveros — Center for Deep Listening® — Michael Reiley's teacher; creator of Deep Listening practice

Pauline Oliveros — paulineoliveros.us

John Cage — Wikipedia — composer, Zen Buddhist, creator of 4'33"

Arvo Pärt — Wikipedia

Hildegard of Bingen — Wikipedia

Ravi Shankar — Wikipedia

George Harrison Concert for Bangladesh — YouTube

Roomful of Teeth — website

John Eliot Gardiner — Wikipedia

Josquin des Prez — Wikipedia

Claudio Monteverdi — Wikipedia

J.S. Bach — Wikipedia

Programs & Institutions

Arts, Letters and Numbers — Creative Music Intensive

Michael Harrison Foundation for Just Music — donations in his memory

Manhattan School of Music — where the harmonic piano is now archived

Contact SAND

podcast@scienceandnonduality.com

Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

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 — Welcome & framing the deeper questions

00:04 — Opening body practice: tuning into felt sense before speaking

00:07 — Tiokasin: AI as the latest ship on the shore — colonization in a new form

00:17 — "There is no artificial intuition" — what technology cannot replace

00:18 — Pooja: the cosmology behind AI — colonial linearity vs. the curving motherboard of Earth

00:25 — AI as the latest savior narrative — and why that story keeps repeating

00:45 — Who owns the data? Who controls the intelligence? The politics of AI

01:05 — AI as therapist, AI replacing elders — the cost to young people and mental health

01:10 — Ghost in the Machine: how to resist empire over the long game

01:15 — Closing: "Our body is the mystic" — an invitation to make this a living inquiry

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

Akantu Intelligence — website

First Voices Radio — archive

Featured in The Eternal Song — SAND film

Pooja Prema

Website: poojaprema.com

The Rites of Passage Project

The Ritual Theatre

Instagram: @thecabinwitch

Film referenced

Ghost in the Machine — documentary directed by Valerie Veatch, Sundance 2026 — traces the buried history of AI and its roots in eugenics, racism, and colonial power. Featuring Tasheka Lavann on how indigenous nations are resisting data centers and how we resist empire over generations.

Concepts discussed

Conspecific aggression — Tiokasin's term for what happens when a species competes so aggressively over shared resources that it turns on itself

Present-phobic language — technology as a tool for escaping the present into an imagined future

The real motherboard — Pooja's framing of Earth and cosmos as the original curving, relational, non-linear intelligence that AI's linear grid cannot replicate

SAND series context

Part 1 of The Great AI Unraveling — with Tristan Harris

The Eternal Song — SAND film series

Contact SAND

podcast@scienceandnonduality.com

Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member