What if your deepest wounds carry your greatest gifts?

And what does it take to forgive the men who drove you from your home?

In this episode of Cash & Soul, Carl Hall sits down with Samina Vabo Ansari — lawyer, peacebuilder and author of the internationally acclaimed memoir When the Almond Trees Bloom.

Born in northern Afghanistan, in the same region as the poet Rumi, Samina became a refugee at four years old, grew up in a village of 300 people in northern Norway, and later returned to Kabul to work on the peace process — fighting to bring Afghan voices to a table they had been excluded from.

When Afghanistan collapsed back into Taliban rule, her outer mission collapsed with it — and an inner journey began. Samina shares how she traced her existential fear back to a childhood memory of two Taliban men knocking on the family's door, and the meditation where she suddenly saw that what she had always remembered as violence in their eyes was, in fact, grief.

She and Carl also speak openly about something they unknowingly share: both lost a child in the fifth month of pregnancy. A raw and tender conversation about grief, and about what becomes possible when it is truly met.

In this conversation:

• Why war trauma creates hopelessness — and how to dissolve it
• The "codes" of the land: why Samina needed both Afghanistan and the Norwegian mountains to become whole
• True alchemy: transforming wounds into gifts, and crisis into clarity
• Field alchemy and collective intelligence — why the next phase of healing is something we do together

Get Samina's book: www.whenthealmondtreesbloom.comFollow Samina on Instagram: @whenthealmondtreesbloom

Get your own copy of Carls latest book here:

https://mondial.se/products/ormen-i-mig

Produced by Navid Modiri.

Contact: navid@modiri.se