Image ID: Color horizontal collage diptych – on the left a color photo of 42nd Street under a B&W image of a scene from Midnight Cowboy of Jon Voight holding a distraught Dustin Hoffman and on the right Japanese kanji under a color photo of a young Māori woman looking directly into the camera; in the a middle a strip of green/red/black Masai geometric pattern topped by a Black Panther Party button depicting a dove and the words “PEACE AND FREEDOM” breaking a chain.
💓 the first rule of LOVE CLUB is definitely do talk about love... with everyone. all the time. forever.(especially self-love) 💓
My first offering of 2024 is open for registration. LOVE CLUB is a four week course starting Valentine’s Day. Come explore your barriers and openings to love through teaching, contemplation, and connection. Wednesdays, February 14 — March 6 // 6–8pm ET // On Zoom & Recorded
Happy New Year! I hope 2024 has started with some grace and ease for you.
Thank you for being here, and welcome to all the new readers. Sometime during my monthlong absence, this newsletter surpassed 10,000 subscribers! Wowowow. It’s a huge honor that so many of you want to connect in this way. And I want to do right by you/me/us. 2024 is a crucial year for our fragile Earth. In the U.S. in particular, urgent and major shifts are required to prevent our slide into totalitarianism. I spent the final days of 2023 contemplating what uniquely is (and is not) mine to do — how to harness my particular capacities for nudging the collective needle towards love & justice, closer to freedom & joy for all.
Even though my health data continues to disappoint, I am committed more than ever to showing up with sincerity, integrity, depth… and jokes.
To that end (well, the first three), you may have noticed I’ve changed the name of this newsletter to Ancestors to Elements. Inspired by my workshops/course of the same name, I feel it speaks more fully to my ongoing mission to spread the truth of sacred belonging and its central paradox that we are not separate AND we are not the same.
Welcome to the Paradox Party!
I am not an astrologer (as if, lol), and Cosmic Connection felt too astral. We are cosmic/elemental, yes. We are also human/ancestral. The latter got us into this mayhem. The former is vital for transforming it. The two are interdependent. I stand firm that we need to understand and utilize them both — the mystical and the material. I do that by writing & teaching from my experience.
Every month, in addition to the three newsletters sent to your inbox (two essays and one links-list), I’m adding a First Quarter Moon Chat combining readings, reflections, journal prompts, and discussion (you can find the first intro one here). I will post the monthly chat in the app/website (no extra emails – you’re welcome). Like all my offerings on Substack, it’s free and open to everyone. Also, now that we’ve reached peak millennial-advice-column, I’m relaunching In My Experience… (my ultra Gen-X, so-called advice column) as a quarterly newsletter. The next one is March 25th. If you have questions for me, you can submit them here.
I will maintain my no-paywall-on-anything policy in this Substack space. No shade to those who have paywalled content. We all live within the extraction + exploitation wasteland that is late stage capitalism. I trust us to find our various ways through this mess of a maze. This is my way. It stinks that we’re made to pass back & forth the same few leftover scraps from the tables of deluded billionaires (seriously, I recommend the entire scroll, it’s so well done and astounds me every time — by the time it gets to the chemo costs, I want to scream). I’m heartened by the fact that we seem to be learning and teaching each other how to forage, how to transmute scraps into seeds, as well as how to forge new ways, to cultivate new landscapes, to build new worlds.
I will continue to offer newsletter subscribers a pay-what-you-can option for my online workshops and courses, as well as keep tithing 10% of my online earnings (writing & teaching) to various causes, including supporting local indigenous organizations on the Lenape Territory where I live.
Thank you to those who support me financially here. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, it’s very much appreciated.
And offering support by sharing my writing, re-stacking posts, and leaving comments is also greatly appreciated.
Finally, although I will no longer be running my Cosmic Collage! workshops, I’ll be releasing last year’s recordings for free close to their astral events. Here’s the one for the Lunar New Year.
Thank you again for being here. It means a lot to me.
On to today’s exploration… Remember, you can always listen to me read all of this at the link above. Let me know what you think.
As most of you know, I spent the last month in Aotearoa (aka New Zealand). Only understatements are possible. It’s a truly phenomenal place. I will have a ton-o-stuff to say about it, which you’ll hear over time. Today, I want to talk about a fascinating (i.e. nerdy) connection I noticed while there: between the Māori idea of mana and the Buddhist/Pali concept of māna.
I’ve written before about the Pali word māna. In You Belong, I talk about it in the chapter on domination. [I also expand on the concept to outline what I call systemic māna — of which the war machine of the modern nation state is perhaps the most extreme example.] Often translated as “conceit,” in Theravada Buddhism, māna is considered a fetter of the mind. That is, māna inhibits our liberation. It’s actually believed to be one of the very last fetters to release before full awakening. That is, get. used. to. it. From a root meaning “to measure,” māna is often referred to as “comparing mind” and is thought to have three expressions: greater than, less than, and (here’s the kicker) equal to. In my book, I label māna as “domination” and describe how, since birth, we are conditioned to look at the world in a never-ending process of ranking ourselves to what we see – whether material manifestations or imagined ideals.
“Greater than” probably makes sense to you as domination. Why is “less than” classified as conceit? I think because it’s simply the reverse side of the same supremacy coin (“equal to” is its bogus filling). As far as I can tell, no one is born wanting to feel “less than,” even though that may become our conditioning and comfort over time. In modernity, we are taught to believe that “greater than” (whatever that means to us) is the safest and best option. Nonetheless, we each have personal and societal influences, and even if I flip that coin to “less than,” I still remain within the ranking competition. I may not be actively dominating others, but I am caught in the overall game of domination. In the case of us rebels, our rejection of the ranking is itself just another ranking (DOH!). Whichever of the three becomes our tendency (and usually it’s context dependent), we’ve all been trained to walk through the world constantly spinning this counterfeit currency in a desperate attempt to win security (with the most deluded amongst us obsessively hoarding these fake coins to the point of insanity — no, seriously, why is that kind of hoarding not considered a mental disorder?).
We are instructed in measurement and comparison at home and in school, we do it at work and in our communities, often ceaselessly until we die. I know I do it every live long day. Even when I am mindful, I continue to measure myself against other beings, places, experiences. I wonder how many times, waiting for the B65 bus, I’ve noticed my māna loops and brought my attention back to the present moment, to my feet on concrete (multitudes, it’s many many many times I’ve done that). Even though with awareness, the loops lessens in frequency and intensity, I still look and compare. From appearances, to acquisitions, to actions — monitoring whether I’m measuring up to long ago constructed ideas of how I should be. Looking, comparing. Looking, comparing. Over and over. Grades to grave. That’s why I’m calling it “everyday arrogance.”
Here’s another way I think about it: any denial of the truth that we are inextricably interconnected leads to comparing mind, to this deluded looking, to forgetting or ignoring that we are not separate. AND deluded is the key word, because it IS possible for me to look in a way that’s not deluded. As deluded as I am, I DO experience moments of non-delusion, of comprehending that domination is not the same as difference.
This is where the Māori idea of mana interested me. So, from what I’ve read (and that’s all I have done), mana refers to a person’s power, essence or presence. One’s mana is sacred. And though it comes directly from the atua or gods & deities, personal mana is dependent on various factors — sacred power can increase or decrease according to various circumstances.
That’s as much as I’ll offer as an explanation.* But I’ll add this: We are not the same. As Audre Lorde said, “Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.”
Here’s what this application of my rusty Comparative Religious Studies degree leads me to ponder: What is that increases my delusion/māna and what increases my essence/mana? What perpetuates everyday arrogance and what promotes sacred power?
Because, especially in this moment on this planet, I want more mana and less māna.
In October, I left Instagram (to which I have not returned… yet). And, for the second time in less than two years, accidentally deleted my Twitter/X/whatever account (oops). Within a few days of leaving social media, I felt my system settle and my attentional capacities revive — for feeling and sensing, for reading and listening, for stillness. I was no longer mindlessly reaching for my phone. As I’ve said here before, I like a lot of things about social media. AND, I am acutely suspicious of how my attention has morphed into currency constantly co-opted by algorithms that numb my decision making. Even if some of those algorithms direct me to people I admire and support, they’re still addicting me to an unconscious scroll. For the moment, I do not miss this.
All fall, I continued to decrease my media intake. I only checked news apps once a day. I stayed informed of world events, particularly the war on Gaza, largely through longer interviews and essays. During my month on the other side of the planet, I was even more limited, sometimes being mostly off of my phone for days at a time.
Regardless of minuscule personal experiments in minimizing addiction to my gadgets, calls from Palestinians to “bear witness” to the atrocities and horrors inflicted on them continue. I do not want to turn away from their (or any) suffering. Many times these past months I asked myself, what does it mean for me to be a good witness? I wondered whether limiting my consumption of media is in service only to a solipsistic need for comfort. I also wonder if it matters at all whether I do or do not look. I found some helpful threads (not answers) to my questions in this profound piece by Palestinian American writer, Sarah Aziza, that asks “what does all this looking do?”
Perhaps the fundamental work of witness is the act of faith—an ethical and imaginative leap beyond what we can see. It is a sober reverence of, and a commitment to fight for, the always-unknowable other. This commitment does not require constant stoking by grisly, tragic reports.
My recent break from all the looking reminded me of another (unintentional) media fast, two decades ago. I was working for an NGO in refugee camps in the remote forest region of N’Zerekore, in the southeast of Guinea. On the border of Cote d’Ivoire and Liberia (both beset by war at the time), N’Zerekore experienced continual internet outages. Sometimes there would be no ready access to news for weeks. It was still early-ish days of the web, but I’d grown used to getting my information online, especially so far from home. It was only about one hour by plane to the capital Conakry, but (arbitrary) colonial borders meant it took two full days by road. I couldn’t always afford that much travel time. And, after one too many harrowing experiences on overloaded regional planes (piloted by chain-smoking white dudes straight out of central casting for mercenaries and gun runners), I decided only to fly on the U.N. flights on which I could rarely book a seat. All that to say, I had long gaps in all the looking.
One trip, I returned to Conakry and made my way to the internet cafe halfway between my boyfriend’s U.N. apartment and the upscale Hotel Palm Camayenne. I remember exactly where I was sitting — in the second row of long tables and computers, facing the windows. I was eager to see what had changed in the larger world. While I waited on the crawling connection, I watched people walking up and down Corniche Nord. Just beyond them was the calm of Sangareya Bay. In the distance, Îles de Los, the lush islands that served as weekend getaways for aid workers. Those beaches opened to the wilds of the Atlantic Ocean and marked at least one of the almost 200 ports to the Middle Passage along the West African coast.
When the BBC homepage finally loaded, it took me a moment to realize I was seeing almost the exact same page as the month before. Details had changed, but the general headlines were identical. This was 2003. The major stories were a U.S. led war in the Middle East (Iraq), the (second) intifada in Palestine, a pandemic (SARS), and various celebrity nonsense. I stared at the page in disbelief. I assumed there would be a reflection of new in news. I was slightly stunned and remember thinking to myself “Nothing changes.” I could have asked: “What does all this looking do?”
Between 2020-2022, amidst the complete and total media blackout during the “official” war in the Tigray region (there’s still combat happening now, despite an “official” ceasefire), I refreshed my google searches of “Ethiopia war” dozens of times a day. I incessantly scoured Twitter for information. I keep thinking about a tweet lost to my long ago first account — a video of grainy footage shot clandestinely from a window. It was a summary execution by government soldiers of Tigrayan men kneeling on a desolate street. Someone commented to the effect “If only the world could see.” Sometime later, CNN and a few other media outlets did reveal evidence of other executions of unarmed people. Over 500,000 civilians died during those two years, tens of thousands raped, millions displaced. Relatively few of us were looking. It was nearly impossible to bear witness. Conflicts rage on in multiple regions throughout Ethiopia (and famine looms).
My mana is no match for this. Neither is my māna. As much as I long to be of service in the world, I am still plagued by my own conceit: fears about my health compared to an idea of “healthy,” hopes for my creative projects compared to the success of those I admire, worries about my resources compared to what “I should have achieved” by now, and even more trivial: concerns about my wardrobe, my sagging skin, what so-and-so thinks about me, where I should order dinner from... Yet, as I said at the very beginning, I long for integrity, to understand what is mine to do, to engage my talents. I want to be more than just a good witness but at least be a good witness. I want to feel my feet. I want to feel.
Sarah Aziza again:
Our work as witnesses is to be marked; we should not leave it unscathed. We must make an effort to stay with what we see, allowing ourselves to be cut. This wound is essential. Into this wound, imagination may pour—not to invade the other’s subjectivity, but to awaken awe at the depth, privacy, and singularity of each life. There, we might glimpse, if sidelong, how much of Gaza’s suffering we will never know. This is where real witness must begin: in mystery.
I’m still catching up on articles and podcasts from my time away. The other day, I spent time with this list. Not scrolling. I printed it out. It’s seven sheets of paper double sided. How is that enough? I stay with what I see. The singularity of each life. Each photo. Each bio. These unknowable others. Each essence. Each mana.
My name is Nour al-Din Hajjaj, I am a Palestinian writer, I am twenty-seven years old and I have many dreams.
Image ID: Color photo of Nour al-Din Hajjaj, killed by an Israeli airstrike on his home in Al-Shujaiyya on December 2
I am not a number and I do not consent to my death being passing news. Say, too, that I love life, happiness, freedom, children’s laughter, the sea, coffee, writing, Fairouz, everything that is joyful—though these things will all disappear in the space of a moment.
May we each know our power and say what we love. Not the same. Not separate. May we share everything that is joyful.
*A huge caveat that this is my interpretation based on a superficial encounter with a profound and complex spiritual philosophy. I studied Buddhism for decades. I have read and heard various teachers and scholars discuss māna. Even then, I can only offer my own (limited) understanding of it. But I definitely can NOT explain Māori spiritual concepts (as if, lol). I am simply naming what I noticed and found interesting about the coincidence of two spiritual concepts with the same exact spelling and opposite meanings.
A 4-week Course Exploring Love, Starting Valentine’s Day
Wednesdays, February 14 — March 6
6–8pm ET // On Zoom & Recorded // $240 (or 3 payments of $80)
Learn more here. Register by Friday, February 2nd and receive a 10% discount. Use Code LOVE10 or click HERE.
💓 Register by this Sunday, January 28th and receive the 10% discount + my Uncoupling from Couple-DOM workshop as a free bonus.💓
LOVE... Four letters. Boundless territory.
LOVE is used to describe our relationship to everything from romance to family to pizza. Most songs are written about it, every genre tackles it, lots of us are seeking it, and many of us feel inadequate about it. But can anyone who is willing to talk about it really fail at LOVE? Let's definitely do talk about this in LOVE CLUB!
Centering self-love, LOVE CLUB will explore our personal boundaries and openings to LOVE.
Through teaching, contemplation, and connection, we will explore our own longings and aspirations for LOVE. We will examine our ideas about LOVE, understanding the societal roots of our limitations and misconceptions. And, together, we will nurture an embodied, interconnected, sacred LOVE within ourselves that includes self/other/nature/everything.
If the price of this course or the payment plan are a hardship, please email me at connect@sebeneselassie.com for a pay-what-you-can option.
If you’d like to practice with me in person:
I’ll be back at Omega Institute three times in 2024! In May, with my friends Jeff & Dan for Meditation Party. In June for The Greatest Love of All with Dawn, Kate and La. And in October for an encore with Dan & Jeff. Scholarships are available for all three programs.
I recently realized how much energy and time my thoughts spend in comparisons thinking, and how it is so not helpful or conducive to mental health for me. I wondered.....is it just me who struggles with this? Thanks for your honesty in talking about your experience with this also. Because, after all, you're so enlightened (another comparison), and even you struggle with this! LOVE YOU.
I recently realized how much energy and time my thoughts spend in comparisons thinking, and how it is so not helpful or conducive to mental health for me. I wondered.....is it just me who struggles with this? Thanks for your honesty in talking about your experience with this also. Because, after all, you're so enlightened (another comparison), and even you struggle with this! LOVE YOU.
Nour’s words cracked my heart open 💔