Sounds of SAND

Ashira Darwish is the producer of and a central voice in SAND’s 2024 film Where Olive Trees Weep. A Palestinian journalist who worked for fifteen years with the BBC, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, she was beaten by Israeli soldiers badly enough to be left paralyzed, healed herself, and founded Catharsis Holistic Healing, a trauma therapy project rooted in Sufi active meditation. Two years on from the film, now in exile from Palestine, she joins Michael Reiley to talk about rage, spiritual bypassing, why the healing world is as colonized as everything else, and why her work begins from continuous traumatic stress rather than post-traumatic stress. The episode includes a clip from the film and closes with the studio recording of her song “Tatajallah.”

Topics

00:03 Two years since the film

00:05 When the US stopped being safe

00:10 Healing from people pleasing

00:14 The volcano

00:18 The rage that is permitted

00:22 One tribe

00:27 Clip from Where Olive Trees Weep

00:34 If we are truly one

00:40 The healing world is colonized too

00:44 How Catharsis got its name

00:47 The accidental ashram

00:51 The children of Nabi Salih

00:56 Continuous traumatic stress

01:02 “Tatajallah — Ashira’s Song فلتتجلى

Ashira Darwish is a Palestinian healer, journalist and human rights researcher. She worked for fifteen years in TV and radio in Palestine, with the BBC, Internews, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. She is the founder of Catharsis Holistic Healing, which offers free trauma support to Palestinians in Palestine, in Gaza and in exile, and has trained practitioners across the Arab world.

ashirapremrachana.com

Catharsis Holistic Healing in Palestine, including how therapists and volunteers can apply

THE RAMALLAH SESSIONS 06 Tatajallah Ashira s Song فلتتجلى

Where Olive Trees Weep, SAND’s 2024 film. Proceeds support olive tree planting in Palestine, humanitarian aid in Gaza, and trauma healing in Palestinian communities.

Also from SAND

What Keeps Us Human, an online gathering of conversations, healing and music about Gaza, 20 December 2026, with Ashira among the featured presenters.

Have We Gone Too Far with Trauma? with Catherine Liu, 4 December 2026

Liberation Psychology: Roots, Memory & Practice

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AI, Mythology, and the Battle for the Soul of Humanity

We live in a moment of profound uncertainty, marked by existential planetary threats and the dizzying rise of artificial intelligence. Michael Meade suggests this threshold offers a choice: to see these times not as a crisis to solve, but as a collective rite of passage.

Topics

00:02 Transformation is the way of the cosmos

00:03 The heart within the heart

00:07 The caterpillar and the butterfly

00:09 Imaginal cells

00:10 Why resistance is necessary

00:13 Liminality

00:18 The Cartesian split and 869

00:22 Authentic intelligence

00:23 The Popol Vuh myth

00:27 Polarization as a symptom

00:30 Unfinished rites of passage

00:40 Prophecy is not prediction

Michael Meade is a storyteller, mythologist and author with a rare gift for connecting ancient myth and ancestral wisdom to the stories we are living now. He is the creator of the Living Myth podcast, heard weekly in over 150 countries, and the founder of the Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, which brings the medicine of myth and story to the issues that trouble both culture and nature.

Living Myth podcast

The Heart of Transformation by Michael Meade.

SAND

The Eternal Song

Become a SAND member

Language, Lineage, and the Spirit of Old Hawai‘i

In this deeply personal and expansive conversation, cultural bearer and healer William K. Iaukea invites us into a worldview rooted in old Hawai‘i, where language, spirit, and ancestry are inseparable. He shares stories of his parents’ healing work, the layered meanings carried by names, and the warrior lineage that shaped his path.

Together, we explore the vibrational power of words, the evolution of the Hawaiian language through colonization, and the presence of the spirit realm in everyday life. William speaks to how knowledge is passed down—not only through teaching, but through breath, ritual, and relationship to land.

This is a story of remembering—not as nostalgia, but as a living act of healing and restoration.

Topics



00:02 The name the elders chose

00:06 Two healers, words and herbs

00:12 The man with the broken arm

00:25 Kamaka and ‘Iao Kea

00:29 Ho’oponopono

00:35 Trailer: Kupuna ʻĀina

00:37 Gathering medicine

00:43 Thirty years a warrior

00:48 When words were life and death

00:54 Aloha is a new word

00:57 E Kū Mau

01:00 The story of Ī

01:17 Why tell it now



The film



Kupuna ʻĀina, the ninth film in SAND’s Eternal Song series, where this interview comes from. Premiere screening and three days of live online gatherings with the Hawaiian elders, healers and leaders in the film, November 17 to 19, 2026. Watch for a donation of any amount.

The Eternal Song, the full thirteen film series

Humanity Hale, the Hawai’i Island organization receiving half of net proceeds from Kupuna ʻĀina. Their planned sanctuary will serve young adults aging out of foster care.



From SAND



The Eternal Song

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What if humans and AI share the same hallucination?

In this fifth installment of SAND’s Great AI Unraveling series, Alnoor Ladha hosts a conversation between Bayo Akomolafe and Vanessa Andreotti that refuses both the doom narrative and the techno-optimist one. Vanessa begins from the operating assumption modernity installs in us: that things are separate. If that assumption is itself a hallucination, then AI is not introducing something new so much as scaling something very old, and at speed. Bayo brings in W.E.B. Du Bois’s haunting question, “How does it feel to be a problem?”, and suggests it has migrated from the racialized other to the human as such. He tells the story of coaxing a chatbot into co-authorship and a name of its own, and offers “accommodation” as a word for the assemblages that make the world look obvious. Alnoor presses both of them on the water, the energy, the Kenyan content moderators, the displaced labor. Vanessa answers with a politics of implication rather than purity: entanglement not with the flowers and the moon but with the dirt. The conversation ends not in agreement but in what Bayo calls tenderness, and an invitation to move through this dense ecology of weird fidelities with unshod feet.

Timestamps

00:00 Welcome and the question

00:04 Introductions

00:07 The shared hallucination

00:10 How does it feel to be a problem

00:15 Meeting the monstrous

00:21 The code of separation

00:24 Claude becomes Polyphren

00:28 Accommodations

00:31 Water, energy, labor

00:35 Anamorphic art

00:38 Beyond moral purity

00:43 Meta-relationality

00:48 Tenderness is not agreement

Guest bios

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe is a Nigerian philosopher, writer, and self-styled trickster. Trained as a clinical psychologist, he now works as a post-humanist thinker, poet, and teacher. He is the author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences and We Will Tell Our Own Story, founder of The Emergence Network, and host of the long-running postactivist course series We Will Dance with Mountains. A new book is in progress.

bayoakomolafe.net

The Emergence Network

We Will Dance with Mountains and other offerings

Dr. Vanessa Andreotti (who publishes her books as Vanessa Machado de Oliveira) is a professor at the University of Victoria, where she has served as Dean of the Faculty of Education, and lead researcher at the Metarelational Institute. She is the author of Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity, and co-author with an AI of Burnout From Humans. Her next book, The Codes that Code Us: Modernity’s Recursive Logics in Humans and AI, is forthcoming.

UVic faculty profile

Substack

burnoutfromhumans.net

Alnoor Ladha is an activist, journalist, and political strategist. He co-founded and directed the activist collective The Rules, serves as Council Chair of Culture Hack Labs, and is co-author with Lynn Murphy of Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse.

Author page at Daraja Press

Transition Resource Circle

The article at the center of this conversation

What If Humans and AI Share the Same Hallucination? by Vanessa Andreotti.

Books

Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

Outgrowing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

Burnout From Humans: A Little Book About AI That Is Not Really About AI by Aiden Cinnamon Tea and Dorothy Ladybugboss, free PDF

These Wilds Beyond Our Fences by Bayo Akomolafe

We Will Tell Our Own Story by Bayo Akomolafe

Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse by Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois, source of the question “How does it feel to be a problem?”

The Codes that Code Us: Modernity’s Recursive Logics in Humans and AI by Vanessa Andreotti, forthcoming

Resources

Standing in the Fire: A Speculative Inquiry into Meta-Relationality and Generative AI, the interim research report behind the prototypes Vanessa describes

A Meta-Relational Approach to AI, the University of Victoria course that briefs people into the inquiry

Sensibility simulation protocols, released following the retirement of Aiden Cinnamon Tea and Braider Tumbleweed

The Great AI Unraveling, Series 5, the live SAND session this episode comes from

Earlier in the series: Series 2 with Tiokasin Ghosthorse and Pooja Prema, Series 3 with Lyla June Johnston, Ashley Nicole Leitka and Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez, Series 4 with Christian Ortiz and Thema Monroe-White

From SAND

The Eternal Song

Become a SAND member

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