Sounds of SAND

Mirabai Starr is an award-winning author of creative non-fiction and contemporary translationsof sacred literature. She taught Philosophy and World Religions at the University of NewMexico-Taos for 20 years and now teaches and speaks internationally on contemplative practiceand inter-spiritual dialog. A certified bereavement counselor, Mirabai helps mourners harness the transformational power of loss. Her latest book, WILD MERCY: Living the Fierce & TenderWisdom of the Women Mystics, was named one of the “Best Books of 2019”. She lives with herextended family in the mountains of northern New Mexico. Mirabai’s Online Greif Community: Holy Lament Topics: 02:31 – Inter-spirituality Practice and Mirabai’s Path10:30 – What is Mysticism?16:23 – Nondual Spirituality: Devotion and Surrender21:33 – Tikkun Olam (“to repair of the world”) and Being with the pain in the world29:14 – St. John of the Cross and the Dark Night of the Soul38:20 – Mirabai’s Dark Night of the Soul in Losing Her Daughter Jenny41:59 – The Portal into Grief47:23 – The Importance of Grieving in Community49:44 – Mirabai’s Online Grief Community

Cornelius Boots is a woodwinding pioneer, composer and root philosopher. He is a nanotheist and elemental-nature lover. After a 30-year career of high-caliber jazz, classical, rock and experimental music activities (on multiple woodwinds with a focus on the bass clarinet), Boots has now positioned himself at the crossroads of personal expression and divine revelation, exclusively playing bamboo shakuhachi  (jinashi/hotchiku) and its baritone brother, Taimu. He is the founder of Black Earth Shakuhachi School, and composes music for The Heavy Roots Shakuhachi Ensemble, the world’s first bass shakuhachi group. (For bass clarinet and Edmund Welles-related information, go here.) In 2018, he was a World Shakuhachi Competition finalist and featured at Sony PlayStation’s E3 (LA). Also in 2018, he performed at the World Bamboo Congress (Xalapa, Mexico) and the World Shakuhachi Festival (London).  In 2019, Boots founded the Heavy Roots Shakuhachi Ensemble, debuting at SF Music Day.  In 2020, the Boots received a Musical Grant Program Award from InterMusic SF to compose four movements of Wood Prophecy, a woodwind chamber saga for the Heavy Roots.  The music video for his composition “Green Swampy Water” won Best Music Video in the Tokyo International Short Film Festival in January 2021. Cornelius is a sought-after composer, performer, and teacher. He is reshaping the landscape of modern shakuhachi performance and teaching through introducing a robust body of new compositions and a set of expressive signature techniques. Music from Today’s episode by Cornelius Boots “Black Earth” from Sacred Root: Kung Fu Flute & Buddhist Blues (Shakuhachi Unleashed Vol. III) “IV. Dark Hallow” and “V. Wood Prophecy” from Wood Prophecy    

From the SAND Archives we present a conversation between SAND co-founder Maurizio Benazzo and biologist and writer Merlin Sheldrake from SAND’s Wisdom in Times of Crisis Series (2020). In this talk they discuss Merlin’s book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist, writer, and speaker with a background in plant sciences, microbiology, ecology, and the history and philosophy of science. He received a Ph.D. in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He is a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), and sits on the advisory board of the Fungi Foundation. Merlin’s research ranges from fungal biology, to the history of Amazonian ethnobotany, to the relationship between sound and form in resonant systems. A keen brewer and fermenter, he is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms. He is a musician and performs on the piano and accordion.

Joan Tollifson is a writer and lifelong explorer of what is. Her background includes Buddhism, Advaita, nontraditional meditative inquiry, radical nonduality, martial arts, somatic work, addiction recovery, political activism, visual arts, and a devotion to both boundless presence and the beauty of the ordinary. Joan has held public and private meetings as well as occasional workshops and retreats since 1996. Her bare-bones approach is open, direct, down-to-earth, and rooted in the ever-fresh aliveness here and now. She encourages people to question the stories, beliefs and misunderstandings that create so much of our human suffering and confusion, especially our tendency to mistake conceptual maps for the living actuality. Rather than relying on outside authorities, traditional ideas, acquired knowledge or beliefs, this is about the immediacy of present experiencing, just as it is. Joan has been with many different teachers and non-teachers and was especially close with Toni Packer, a former Zen teacher who left that tradition behind to work in a simpler and more open way, but Joan does not identify with or represent any particular tradition or way of working. Joan describes her writings and meetings with people as explorations, "like a child exploring its toes or a lover exploring the beloved," and she adds, "There is no end to such explorations, all of which are forms of play." Joan is the author of Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life (1996), Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is (2003), Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogs about Nonduality (2010), Nothing to Grasp (2012), and Death: The End of Self-Improvement (2019). Joan has lived in northern California, rural New York state, and Chicago, and currently resides in southern Oregon. Links: Joan’s website Joan’s substack SAND Talks with Joan: Death the End of Self Improvement The Freedom of Nothing to Grasp Being Just This Moment Emerging from the Dream of Separation

Kabir Helminski is co-director, with his wife, Camille Helminski, of the Threshold Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to sharing the knowledge and practice of Sufism. He is the author of Living Presence and the translator of four volumes of Rumi’s poetry, including Love Is a Stranger and Rumi: Daylight. His new book which we discuss on the podcast is The Mysterion: Rumi and the Secret of Becoming Fully Human. Kabir's website: sufism.org Mentioned in the episode: Can a Computer Become Conscious by Federico Faggin from the SAND18 Conference.

From the SAND Archives we present two talks from Christian Mystic, Richard Rohr from two SAND Conferences recorded before live audiences. The two talks are entitled “Christianity and Unknowing” from SAND16 and “The Christian Meaning Of Enlightenment” from SAND11.    Richard Rohr, as a Catholic priest and Franciscan Friar, offers a concise history of how Western Christianity once had, soon lost, tried to retrieve, and now is roundly rediscovering its own traditional understanding of unitive consciousness (which was our word for non-dual thinking). The Christian contemplative mind was usually a subtext, and yet it was always clearly there too, and much closer to the surface, but only for those exposed to the mystical base that was revealed in the Gospel of John, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the Celtic and monastic traditions, and what was generally referred to as the apophatic or wisdom stream of Christianity. These were our many saints and mystics. This possibility was brought to the fore by Thomas Merton in the middle of the last century, and is now flowing in many positive directions. It is now our task to rediscover the pre-Enlightenment Christianity that reveled in "the cloud of unknowing", what some called "learned ignorance", and the very notion of Mystery itself. Only when we got into competition with rationalism and secularism, did we adopt this rather recent mania for certitude and a very limited kind of scientific knowing. Almost the entire history of Protestantism emerged in this period, and thus the contemplative mind is an utterly new revelation for them, and frankly for all of us, as we again learn to be comfortable living on the edge of both the knowable and the unknown.   Fr. Richard Rohr is a globally recognized ecumenical teacher bearing witness to the universal awakening within Christian mysticism and the Perennial Tradition. He is a Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Fr. Richard’s teaching is grounded in the Franciscan alternative orthodoxy—practices of contemplation and self-emptying, expressing itself in radical compassion, particularly for the socially marginalized. Fr. Richard is the author of numerous books, including Everything Belongs, Adam’s Return, The Naked Now, Breathing Under Water, Falling Upward, Immortal Diamond, and Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi.   https://cac.org/

By training, Gail Brenner is a licensed Ph.D. psychologist and trauma specialist with almost 30 years of experience offering individual sessions and group workshops. Her work as a therapist and teacher invites people to shed attachment to false identities, return to their essential wholeness, and realize the truth of who they are. In primarily group courses, she holds safe space for people to investigate patterns of early trauma that live in the mind, body, and heart—and are carried through family generations. And she welcomes celebration of the freedom that’s discovered when the attachment to these patterns falls away and there’s space for awakened living in everyday life. Her teaching is practical and accessible to all. She loves meeting with people who have tried everything and are still searching for an end to suffering. Gail received her B.A. from Carnegie-Mellon University and Ph.D. from Temple University. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Florida and a clinical internship at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, CA. She has special expertise working with older adults and their families, bringing clear seeing and compassion to the transitions of aging, death, and dying. As a member of the clinical faculty at University of California, San Francisco, she helped physicians develop communication skills and learn to address psychosocial issues with their patients. She has authored numerous published articles on coping with stress and chronic medical illness. And, for 15 years, she consulted with staff of assisted living and skilled nursing facilities about aging, dementia, and caregiving and gave presentations to the community at large on these topics. Gail is the author of three books: The End of Self-Help: Discovering Peace and Happiness Right at the Heart of Your Messy, Scary, Brilliant Life, At the Core of Every Heart: Reflections, Insights, and Practices for Waking Up and Living Free, and Suffering Is Optional: A Spiritual Guide to Freedom from Self-Judgment and Feelings of Inadequacy. As a blogger, she has been featured on CNN, Huffington Post, Zen Habits, MindBodyGreen, Tiny Buddha, Inspire Me Today, and the Undivided Journal. She is on the board of Science and Nonduality (SAND).

After a PhD thesis on non separability and non locality in Quantum theory, Dr Vandana Shiva studied non separation between forests, soil and water, the Green revolution in Punjab and the relationship between violence against nature by chemical agriculture and emergence of violence in society. Since then, she has kept working on the link between seeds, plants, soil, climate, and biodiversity. This talk is hosted by Alnoor Ladha and Maurizio & Zaya Benazzo. This talk was recorded from the SAND series Wisdom of Time of Crisis from 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown. Please excuse the audio quality of this recording. We hope you can listen past the audio glitches and low fidelity to the power of Dr. Shiva’s message.

Ash Canty (they/he) is a Death Walker & Psychic Medium. Their ancestors are Indigenous peoples of West Africa, Cherokee, Iroquois, Blackfeet and Northern European. They support and walk others in the threshold and ritual of their own unique death and dying process. They are led by spirit, ancestors, and nature in all that they do. They teach many programs that support others in the liberation of their soul and coming back to their spirit. Ash creates deep spaciousness for others to be able to step into a non-linear time space to hold conversations around being with the grief & praise of being alive. They provide virtual death care services to families and loved ones who are in the active stages of dying. They are regenerated by the earth and the land of the Kalapuya Peoples on which they live on through gardening, listening, canning, hand crafting, and indigenous practices of their ancestors. Instagram / Website

This conversation is from the Wisdom of Trauma Talks on Trauma Series (2021). Somatic Abolitionism is living, embodied anti-racist practice and cultural building —a way of being in the world. It is a return to the age-old wisdom of human bodies respecting, honoring, and resonating with other human bodies. It is not a exclusively a goal, an attitude, a belief, an idea, a strategy, a movement, a plan, a system, a political position, or a step forward. Resmaa Menakem is an American author and psychotherapist specialising in the effects of trauma on the human body and the relationship between trauma, white body supremacy, and racism in America. He is the author of “My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies,” published in September 2017, which appeared on the New York Times bestseller list in May 2021 and "The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning," published in 2022.He is also the founder of the Cultural Somatics Institute. Rather than offering quick-fix solutions to these complex issues, Dr. Gabor Maté weaves together scientific research, case histories, and his own insights and experience to present a broad perspective that enlightens and empowers people to promote their own healing and that of those around them. After 20 years of family practice and palliative care experience, Dr. Maté worked for over a decade in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side with patients challenged by drug addiction and mental illness. The bestselling author of four books published in over thirty languages, Gabor is an internationally renowned speaker highly sought after for his expertise on addiction, trauma, childhood development, and the relationship of stress and illness. His book on addiction received the Hubert Evans Prize for literary non-fiction. For his groundbreaking medical work and writing he has been awarded the Order of Canada, his country’s highest civilian distinction, and the Civic Merit Award from his hometown, Vancouver. His books include In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction; When the Body Says No; The Cost of Hidden Stress; Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder; and (with Dr. Gordon Neufeld) Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. His next book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture is due out on September 13, 2022. His second next book, Hello Again: A Fresh Start for Parents and Their Adult Children is expected in 2023. Gabor is also co-developer of a therapeutic approach, Compassionate Inquiry, now studied by hundreds of therapists, physicians, counselors, and others internationally. More on his books and programs can be found here.