🎧 Listen to the Essay and/or Meditation 🎧
Why, yes, those are 2 separate audio links – 1 below, 1 above. || My reading of this essay is right before the opening Hi friends. 👇🏾 || A guided meditation is at the top of this email. 👆🏾 || An archive of meditations lives here.
Listen to me read this essay:
This is the first in a 3-part series based on my online course about grief, Let It All Out. You can find all posts here.
Hi Friends
How are you feeling? I’m questioning my judgement in choosing to write a series on grief at the apparent end of everything on Earth. Before we get to grief, I want to talk about pain.
If I had a church, it would be the ministry of not being in contention with reality while creating with reality. In other words, I’ve learned that all my suffering (not pain) comes from wanting reality (including pain) to be different rather than engaging creatively with reality as it is. Practice means learning to observe and work with this dynamic in me. Please be aware, I’m talking to myself today as I resist this recent resurgence of acute pain. Actually, right in this moment I don’t sense any great discomfort in my body. But, this past week–especially at night when flare ups increase, I frequented my bathtub a whole lot (which is saying a whole lot because I love me a bath). My new pup must think this is what humans do—pretend to go to bed, then (seemingly randomly, sometimes again and again) arise in the middle of the night to make a visit to the rushing hot water.
I’m deeply grateful for the rushing hot water at the end of everything.
In the before times, when I was 30, I solo-traveled in South East Asia for a few months. Using my bff Naomi’s place in Bangkok as a base, I visited Cambodia, Indonesia and was probably the only tourist in East Timor where my boyfriend worked for the U.N. peace keeping mission. In Thailand, I stayed almost one month at Wat Suan Mokkh, a forest temple in the south founded by Ajahn Buddhadhasa, a pioneer of engaged Buddhism. Even though it was sweltering, I soaked in the temple hot springs every day which goes to show how consistent I am. During my visit, I met an older straight Swiss couple who had been practicing meditation for decades. I had the wherewithal to ask them if they had any lessons to offer. The only thing I remember from that conversation is the woman saying something like, When I was young, my mind was the challenge. Now that I’m old, my body is the challenge.
I’ve spent eight months waiting for a pain-free body to emerge like an inevitable medal after a marathon. I finally realized I may be running an ultra-marathon of unspecified length. While I recognize “pain-free body” as an oxymoron, I also grieve the body that glided through the world thinking nothing of walking more than a mile, getting up from a low chair (let alone the floor), standing a long time, sitting a long time, going to one of those fancy food courts (food courts have the hardest, worst seating of anywhere on the planet and somehow make metal feel harder than metal), moving without fear of spasms or surges or spikes, and simply existing in a body with a sense of assumed ease. And I know some people have never or will never experience some or all of that. Most of the time, I crave for the pain to subside because it’s extremely unpleasant (sometimes excruciatingly so). My other frustration is about my inability to do the things that I used to do. Because pain and its meds affect my focus, these loss of capacities extend beyond the physical. This combination of things make me cry regularly. And I constantly catch myself judging my tears. For being in actual pain? With very few solutions? For eight months? As I’ve said many times in this newsletter, crying was deeply discouraged in my family. And, as we know, visibly expressing grief is not super popular with modernity in general (where it seems the more “educated” we get, the less we cry at actual funerals).
My aching body, fuzzy mind, and activated emotions all signal that I must slow down, must do less. Then contention with reality shows up as thoughts that what I truly am is deficient. Even though I’ve made considered decisions about how much I can handle this year. Even though I consciously acknowledge that I really cannot do more than what I’m doing. Even though when I try to push, my body responds with a clear nope. Still, that annoyingly sneaky inner-nag tries to get me to think I’m not doing enough which clearly reveals how conditioned I am to believe that my very worth is tied to productivity. Like I’ve got to put in hard work and long hours to earn the right even to breathe.
I’ve started to think of that inner critic as the adult, extractive-capitalist version of my childhood, fawning-response. In a country with ever-decreasing social safety nets, my good-girl-productivity served as a survival strategy. As I grapple with illness while systems and structures rapidly devolve into the current chaos, the “you better get back to work or you’ll never make it out alive” panic rises. Thing is, no one ever gets out of here alive.
Which brings us back to grief. I am currently grieving all that’s been lost through illness (incl. some body parts) while also trying to create healing (incl. no more cancer). I’m in that let it be practice where I aspire to allow (let it be…) AND imagine (let it be!!). I hope for less pain and more mobility AND if or, rather, when this marathon winds down because either it ends or I decide I don’t want to run a fucking marathon, I do not want to be in contention with the reality of a body that gets older by the second, grapples with being both big and little “s” sick on the regular, and will be dead some day.
Loss is an inherent part of life. So is grief. And there is no end to what can be grieved in any moment. My own list grows. My friends and family accumulate losses too—of capacities, of identities, of security, of loved ones, of dreams. When I look to the larger world, the loss seems unbearable. In fact, the collage above came about because I save images sometimes for years and held onto pages from a 2018 issue of The New York Times Style Magazine titled “Those We Lost to the AIDS Epidemic” which featured simple square photos of those who worked in arts and culture. It especially moved me because, as a young person, ACT UP (Montreal) was my real introduction into activism and taught me, as Morgan Bassichis expresses in his brilliant show Can I Be Frank?, that mourning and militancy are not mutually exclusive.
I never learned how to mourn as a kid. I was barely allowed to cry. Not about what I grieved. Now, I am a grown ass lady so I’m learning to tend to my own personal grief. But as I’m still learning, it often feels overwhelming to process grief on a global scale. Now you see why I started with questioning my judgement? Good idea or not, the next two newsletters in this series will explore some ideas from my online course about grief. And, of course, I cannot cover here everything I created for Let It All Out, but this is how I would summarize today what I was trying to get across in that program:
Because we live in a society that fears therefore loathes aging, illness and death, we have become inherently grief averse which leads us to become uncomfortable with our natural feelings of grief. In this confusion, we conflate grief and mourning extending both into sometimes never-ending cycles. However, grief is what we feel when confronted with loss, and mourning is how we process those feelings. Throughout time, humans have tended to grief through mourning. However, most of us today have lost those traditional mourning rituals and ceremonies which exist to help the feelings of grief be released, to let it all out. With practice, we can create our own.
I will save the rest for next time. I just want to share one thing from the foreword to Saeed Jone’s Alive at the End of the World (which I linked to in last week’s newsletter). In it, the poet D.A. Powell offers a reflection on this quote from Shakespeare’s King John: “I will instruct my sorrows to be proud, for grief is proud and makes his owner stout.” Powell goes on to point out that in some editions stout reads stoop. He says:
“Two very different ways of thinking about the weight of suffering: does it thicken us, make us stronger? Stout. Or does it bend us like a tree branch grown heavy with icicles? Stoop.”
To me, both stout and stoop signal the faith that comes with experience, comes with age. Wisdom understands the truth of inner strength with outer frailty. Losses more than diminish, they can strengthen. And even when heavy, a loss can lead me to bend rather than break.
May we allow our losses to inspire a pride in grief.
With love,
Sebene
JOURNAL PROMPTS:
What loss(es) are here with you? What grief are you holding?
Have you mourned this loss or these losses so far and how?
ONGOING PRACTICES:
Notice if you are experiencing loss in daily life.
Practice allowing loss and any associated feleings.
One more chance to practice with me in person this year…
Meditation Party: Reckless Conviviality With Mindfulness Superfriends (with Dan Harris and Jeff Warren)
October 24–26 at Omega Institute
Many of us meditate solo, especially these days. This is a chance to get all of the high-occupancy-vehicle-lane benefits of meditating in a group.
Join self-proclaimed meditation nerds Dan Harris, Sebene Selassie, and Jeff Warren for a weekend “do-nothing” party with lots of meditating. This is definitely not a silent retreat. It is an opportunity to connect with others, move your body, nap, and discover the power of applying your practice to everything in life.
Note: Meditation Party is one of Omega's most popular workshops and will host as many as 425 participants. Register early to secure your seat and housing.
