🌕 Embodied Enough
it’s a full moon in sagittarius 🌕
Happy Full Moon! 🌕 Halfway through the monthly lunar cycle, this phase supports generating & harvesting. The Moon is Earth’s celestial anchor in a vast and mysterious cosmos. Honoring lunar phases reminds us to feel our connection to nature’s rhythms & cycles. Welcome to this moonly missive…
Listen to me read this essay:
Hi friends
I sit at my desk a few days before today’s Full Moon and begin writing. I hear birds chirping beneath the rumble of the B65 bus on Dean Street. Knowing their morning songs will soon fade, I refuse to close my office windows, even with the slight chill. Having just returned from retreat, I’m longing for nature however I can get it—gazing at the blue sky over Manhattan in the distance, watching the draped leaves of my walking iris blow in the breeze, petting ChaCha as he snoozes in my lap, and sensing my own deep inhale of cool air.
Tomorrow is June? Soon we will be halfway through 2026 and I’m still processing 2025. How can the last five months feel like both one week and one era? Thank you for being here with me this century year. How are you feeling? I hope you’re giving yourself time to enjoy any goodness in your world right now.
I experienced incredible goodness at a Black spirituals and protest songs retreat in Barre, MA, where I savored time meditating in nature while also receiving the gifts of making sacred music in community. The deliberate pairing of singing and sitting reminds me of the tradition of Cambodian Dharma songs described by scholar Trent Walker as stirring and stilling. This was my second time at this program and, once again, I felt the transformative power of combining African American songs of liberation with liberating Buddhist practice: stirring the heart and stilling the mind, stirring the soul and stilling the ego. Singing with new and old friends felt fortifying. I intend to do more of it in various forms. My bff Naomi just informed me that the Sound of Music Sing-a-Long we attended last year at the Hollywood Bowl happens in cities around the U.S., and now I’m scheming a group trip next summer. Maybe it’s like the distinction I’ve made before between ritual and ceremony where a sing-a-long can be sacred ritual depending on how I relate to it. This retreat did feel like sacred ceremony.
There were many incredible singers there—people who can harmonize and riff and belt it out like no one’s business. In such a welcoming space, I didn’t need to compare myself. I simply enjoyed song. I sing well enough. More importantly, I love singing. But I tense up in spaces where there’s an expectation to hit the “correct” notes. I’m sure there’s a lot I could learn and practice to work on this. And in this space, sitting in a circle, we were invited to sing in a relaxed way that included humming and clapping and moving and being silent. There was no perfect piece to polish for performance. And while we tried to stay in tune, we were also encouraged to experiment—with harmony and improvisation, with volume and tempo. That license to play helped me release my usual vigilance about getting things right. I simply enjoyed singing, feeling the meaning of these freedom anthems as they repeated and blended into one another, looping and resonating through my body. This permission through music and especially play made meditating feel both more grounded and more relaxed. I sing as I gaze at the trees outside, as the rain fogs the windows, as tears roll down my cheeks. I hum on a path, in the line for lunch, as I sit on a rock overlooking a meadow. I wonder why I don’t sing more often, even in unexpected places, and how delightful it is when some brave person breaks into song while walking down a busy street or sitting on a bench. Those people offer us something sacred.
Stirring and stilling in this playful way supports my embodiment practice. On the New Moon, I wrote about embodiment as my primary, ever-evolving practice. Yet, while sitting on retreat, I realized that somewhere in my mind lives an idea of perfected somatic awareness—something I’m always striving toward. I hold a vague finish line of ideal embodiment. Even though I reject the idea of perfection, or even of being “finished,” there’s a way my embodiment never feels complete, never feels enough. Like many aspirations, embodiment has become another thing I can fail at. Over the days of the retreat, as I allowed my singing to be enough, I wondered, How do I allow my embodied awareness to be enough too?
During the retreat, we were encouraged to remember our benefactors. This is a standard Buddhist practice, but something in the wording made me judge the love in my life as insufficient. I’ve done benefactor appreciations often enough to recognize this judgement as my mind playing sneaky tricks. I quickly acknowledged all the friends who’ve supported me through this past year of health trauma. In fact, a year ago at this same retreat, I spent much of my time on the floor, crying from severe physical pain. As I pictured each person who has cared for me since then, tears of joy replaced my initial bereftness.
A few months ago, I listened to a Telepathy Tapes interview with Liz Gilbert. She and the host talked about the idea of a much-loved child—how some adults can still remember what it felt like to grow up with unconditional love. In a text exchange about the episode, my wise friend Dalila called unconditional love “a cosmic amenity not everyone gets.” Some of us (me included) can’t recall unconditional love from childhood, but Gilbert argued that we can learn to conjure it for ourselves now. That conversation made me consider Donald Winnicott’s idea of the good enough mother, and how it might extend beyond parenting and what we do. “Good enough” can also apply to what we receive and feel. Writing this now, a day after I began it, I can feel into all that I’ve received in life. No, I didn’t have unconditional love as a child, but I was nurtured enough, supported enough, and taught enough. I am currently resourced enough, able enough, happy enough. I was and am loved enough.
Now, sitting on my sofa, typing on my laptop, I feel the sun on my left arm and hand. I taste the metallic flavor of a zinc lozenge in my mouth. I hear a helicopter in the distance and feel ChaCha’s movements as he diligently attacks the one pillow he’s allowed to destroy. I sense my body supported and settled. I feel my breath. I am embodied enough.
Singing those songs of freedom, I imagined my mother and other women ancestors above me, in the center of our circle: my mom, Koki; my mother’s sisters, Tsige and Hirut; my paternal aunts, Bisrat and Mebrat; both my grandmothers; and my paternal great-grandmother, Sebene. I sang to all of them—in gratitude and glory, in prayer and praise, in love and freedom.
Oh, freedom, Oh, freedom. Oh freedom over me.
With love,
Sebene
P.S. I know I said I’d also talk about the erotic, but I will be traveling for the June New and Full Moons and will be re-running two posts (on the erotic!) with new intros then. See you for the Last Quarter List on June 8th before them.
Thanks for this post. Singing IS healing and I loved what you said about being enough. I tell myself that every day. It helps.
Thank you for your writing and for your reading to us. You elicit such warm feelings in all of your sharing . . . way more than just "enough." 🎶🙏❤️🌹