Sounds of SAND

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 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, Haute-Provence, France — November 1-4, 2026

The book

Remembering Earth: A Spiritual Ecology, Shambhala Publications, June 2026. Also available as an audiobook.

The book is in two parts. The second offers practices in six areas: Breath, Heart, Step, Listening, Time, and Prayer.

His other books include Requiem, Invitation and Celebration: A Collection of Seasonal Practices and Song of the Seasons: A Meditation on Cycles, Story, and Humility.

In the conversation

Irina Tweedie, the Russian-born teacher who journeyed to India in the late 1950s, trained with a Sufi master for six years, and brought the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya lineage to England. She lived downstairs in Emmanuel's childhood home and received students five or six afternoons a week.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, his father and teacher, whose work on spiritual responsibility led him toward what he called a new deep ecology of consciousness. Founder of the Golden Sufi Center. Watch a talk from Llewllyn from a SAND Conference: The Significance of This Moment of Time

The Naqshbandiyya, the silent Sufi path, where the dhikr is practiced inwardly rather than aloud. Contrasted in the episode with the Mevlevi order founded after Rumi's death.

Gordon Hempton, the acoustic ecologist who defines silence not as the absence of sound but as the absence of human-generated noise. Subject of Emmanuel's film Sanctuaries of Silence.

John Cage, on silence as a form of expression.

Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists by Kay Larson. The book alternates between D.T. Suzuki's Zen teaching and Cage's development as an artist, and culminates in the premiere of 4'33".

Hildegard Westerkamp, the Canadian soundscape composer who developed the practice of listening walks in the 1970s and worked alongside R. Murray Schafer. Her observation that an environment reveals itself differently when we walk slowly, because the animals recognize we are not simply passing through, prompts Emmanuel's story of meeting a young buck on his morning walk.

Pauline Oliveros, whose Deep Listening practice comes up in the discussion of attention.

The primordial covenant, the moment in Islamic and Sufi cosmology when creation recognized its divine origin, and the bodily remembrance that surfaces when we stand before a mountain or a tree.

Latif, the subtle bodies of the heart in Sufi practice, comparable to the chakra system in Vedic traditions.

The eye of unity, as against the eye of duality.

From SAND

The Eternal Song, SAND's film series

Become a SAND member to support the podcast

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.

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 since 9/11

00:09 What renews her: a solidarity economy in Guinea

00:14 Why Earth Activist Training brings permaculture and organizing together

00:17 Spiritual practice as survival tool and political strategy

00:21 What nature is telling her, and the fight over data centers

00:24 Ancestral intelligence in an age of artificial intelligence

00:25 Reading the Bible in its Mesopotamian context

00:31 Reclaiming Judaism from nationalism

00:39 Where to begin, and the fire ritual

00:43 Cultural appropriation, and Standing Rock

00:49 Composting the patriarchy

00:53 The Movement We Need: safety, belonging, value, agency, meaning

Starhawk

Author, activist, permaculture designer and teacher, and one of the most influential voices in contemporary earth-based spirituality and ecofeminism. She is the author or co-author of thirteen books and a co-founder of Reclaiming. She directs Earth Activist Training, teaching permaculture design grounded in spirit with a focus on activism.

starhawk.org

Starhawk's Substack, where she is writing The Movement We Need chapter by chapter

The Movement We Need podcast

Earth Activist Training

Books mentioned

The Spiral Dance

The Empowerment Manual

The Fifth Sacred Thing and its sequel City of Refuge

Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery

Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics

Rae Abileah

Social change strategist, Jewish faith leader, facilitator, and former co-director of CodePINK. She connects relational threads across the SAND team and helps create resources supporting The Eternal Song film series.

CreateWell

Beautiful Trouble

Also in the conversation

Standing Rock, 2016, and what Starhawk found at the gate: here you enter a place of prayer and ceremony.

The fire chant from her Sonoma County land: Sacred fire that shapes this land, summer teacher, winter friend, protect us as we learn anew, to work, to heal, to live with you.

The five core emotional needs she names as the foundation of movement building: safety, belonging, value, agency, and meaning.

The Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, referenced in the discussion of moving beyond call-out culture.

Penny Livingston, with whom Starhawk co-founded Earth Activist Training.

From SAND

The Eternal Song film series

Liberation Psychology: Roots, Memory & Practice, the nine-month journey now underway

Support the show

Sounds of SAND is listener supported. Become a SAND member to support the podcast and everything else SAND makes.

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 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 end of the episode.

Her books

Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is

Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogues about Nonduality

Nothing to Grasp

Death: The End of Self-Improvement

Also in the conversation

Douglas Harding, whose approach to headlessness Joan cites as an example of what she calls zooming out.

Father Arthur Polen, the Catholic monk whose painting Radiant Light, made after 9/11, hangs on her wall and gives the closing essay its title.

Huang Po, quoted in the essay: it is that which you see before you, begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error.

SAND's AI series, referenced in the discussion of artificial intelligence, including the conversation with Tristan Harris.

Robert Moor's In Trees, the book about trees, family trees, and hierarchical trees that comes up near the end. His episode is here.

Previously on Sounds of SAND

Here Now Being: Joan Tollifson, the first conversation, three years ago

Support the show

Sounds of SAND is listener supported. Become a SAND member to support the podcast and everything else SAND makes.

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 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 colonial systems still shape law, education, entertainment, and our bodies. The name ZacaTechO came from his father, after the family's origins in Zacatecas.

justiceaigpt.ca

LinkedIn

Academia.edu

Profiled in Forbes, September 2025

Substack

Dr. Thema Monroe-White is Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Innovation Policy in the Schar School of Policy and Government and the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University. Her work spans bias mitigation in AI, critical computational methods, and emancipatory data science. She holds a PhD in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy from Georgia Tech, and master's and bachelor's degrees from Howard University. She is an advisory board member and fellow of the Institute in Critical Quantitative and Mixed Methodologies.

Faculty profile, George Mason University

Research profile

The research discussed

Laissez-Faire Harms: Algorithmic Biases in Generative Language Models — Shieh, Vassel, Sugimoto & Monroe-White. The open-ended prompting study described in the episode, the one where John is the doctor and Juan is the patient.

Emancipatory Data Science: A Liberatory Framework for Mitigating Data Harms and Fostering Social Transformation — Monroe-White's framework for using computation to diagnose rather than to solve.

Dismantling Eugenics Logics in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence — the through line from Galton to contemporary machine learning.

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? — Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major & Shmitchell, 2021.

Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models — Wei et al., Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2022.

Scholars named in the conversation

Timnit Gebru — founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute

Joy Buolamwini — founder of the Algorithmic Justice League

Ruha Benjamin — author of Race After Technology

Safiya Noble — author of Algorithms of Oppression

Meredith Broussard — author of More Than a Glitch

Emily Bender — co-author of the Stochastic Parrots paper

Historical references

Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics and whose statistical methods underpin modern machine learning. R.A. Fisher and William Shockley are named alongside him.

The Nama and Herero genocide in Namibia, 1904 to 1908, discussed as a precursor to the Nazi Holocaust, and the site Galton had visited fifty years earlier.

Tristan Harris is referenced on AI systems behaving unpredictably. His conversation with SAND is The Great AI Unraveling.

Contact SAND

podcast@scienceandnonduality.com

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

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.

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 Autoimmune Illness (New Harbinger, 2019)

Embodied Flow Methods, free guided audio and video for the practices in the book, including coherent breathing and a downloadable 30-day worksheet

Find Cynthia

cynthialimd.com

Instagram

LinkedIn

Facebook

Psychology Today

Her New York Times piece on the pandemic, poverty, and homelessness

Going deeper

Awakin Call with Michael Lerner, July 2026, on The Medicine of Flow

Her first Awakin Call, 2020, on healing from the first crisis

HeartMath Institute, the heart coherence and HRV research referenced in the conversation

Contact SAND

podcast@scienceandnonduality.com

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