🎧 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 4-part series based on my online course, Love Club. You can find this and future posts here.
Hi friends
The tiny park near me with weekday sun bathers packing its patchy lawn tells me spring has finally, fully sprung in Brooklyn. I’m grateful to those who planted all the daffodil and tulip bulbs so a sweet toddler boy could tenderly pick a crimson bloom and proudly carry it home to someone. I hope you’re finding a small or humongous spot of grass/water/sky to remind your body that we are tethered to an incredible planet, always palpable, even in the midst of urban intensity or societal turmoil.
Thank you for being here! As mentioned, over the next many months I will be sharing from some of my online programs, starting with a four-week course I taught last winter called Love Club. The first rule of Love Club: definitely do talk about love... with everyone, all the time, forever (especially self-love). So, here we go… To frame our process, I will offer statements from bell hooks’ powerful book, All About Love—starting with this one (the foundation for all four weeks): “All awakening to love is spiritual awakening.”
Honestly, that’s the entire vibe of remind me to love—remembering that love IS the path. Of course, remembering implies forgetting, which is why I keep showing up to the page/cushion/crying-on-the-bathroom-floor. Love is a complex and multifaceted concept. Duh. Its meaning can vary depending on the context and individual perspectives. Different spiritual and philosophical traditions espouse varying frameworks around love. Rather than offer you a singular definition of love, I want us to consider ideas about it that we have absorbed from our families, our communities, our personal experiences or the larger society. This includes our culture’s outsize emphasis on romantic love. We can compare these messages to our own deepest inquiries and aspirations around love. [There are some prompts below you can use for journaling.]
We all come from different backgrounds, identities, and conditioning. And even though we have commonalities of living as adults in 2025, our experiences of love will vary based on where we are socially located including our age, gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc. Having said that, contemporary hyper-consumerist culture based on endless scrolling & consumption requires that every single one of us NOT feel good about ourselves. We are made to believe we need things outside our very own bodies to make us complete. Or we become convinced that we must diminish ourselves (often attempting literally to shrink in size) in order to be lovable. This can make it hella challenging to love ourselves or anyone else. It can lead to fatigue, avoidance, or cynicism around love.
I want to emphasize just how hard it is to understand and embrace love in our lives with the wildly imperfect versions we’ve been fed. I was never formally taught anything about love. Growing up, I witnessed not one single healthy loving romantic relationship in my extended family. Writing that sentence breaks my heart. Verbal and physical manifestations of love were extremely limited. Other expressions of love were conditional to obedience and performance—I felt loved when I behaved or excelled. I’m not blaming my parents or caregivers for their anemic manifestations of love. I know that was learned. Or unlearned as so much context for love was lost with immigration (like many immigrants, one of the main ways we stayed connected to love was through food). On retreat many years ago, during a long sitting period, a powerful memory emerged. In it, I sat at the top of the living room stairs. I was maybe four years old. I looked down on my mom, aunties, uncles and older cousins smoking, drinking and playing cards. What I recognized during that meditation was how very young they all were. This realization washed over me as a wave of forgiveness for these barely-adult-people, ripped from Africa, horrified by the politics raging back home, and plopped in an often hostile environment. Much of what and how they loved was lost to them. To us.
Now, I am gifted with the opportunity to reclaim love.
Love Club invites us to admit that we care about love, that love is vital to spiritual life, and that centering love matters even if we are confused or nervous or weary about it all. Thus we begin week one with this declaration from bell hooks:
“To practice the art of loving, we have first to choose love – admit to ourselves that we want to know love and be loving even if we don’t know what that means.” — bell hooks, All About Love
I find that last part such a relief: even if we don’t know what that means. Because, show of hands, how many of us truly understand love? Yeah, me neither. I think often of a story told by my friend Sharon Salzberg. At a 1990 conference in Dharmsala, Sharon asked His Holiness the Dalai Lama what he thought of “self-hatred.” Besides taking a while to even have the concept translated (a clear sign that western culture may not be the best at self-love), ultimately he could not comprehend the sentiment of self-hatred, eventually stating: “I thought I had a very good acquaintance with the mind, but now I feel quite ignorant. I find this very, very strange.” Another show of hands, how many of us fundamentally do not understand self-hatred? I thought so… Ugh.
Probably all of us have some feeling of inadequacy around love whether it’s because we are recently divorced 🙋🏾♀️, we experienced neglect or abuse growing up, we’ve never been “in love,” or we simply have judgements about our capacities for loving. For many years, I idealized parental and especially maternal love, critiquing my capacity for “real” love because I’m not a birth mom like so many of my girlfriends. I decided I will never completely understand that experience because, well, I can’t. I did not grow another human inside my body and then care for them for a couple of decades. But I also bought into an idealization of maternal love that’s based on the ridiculous expectations for love placed on moms. I appreciate this from Leslie Jamison on the complexity of her feelings for her daughter.
“My love for my daughter is not a pure feeling insofar as it holds only love and only worship. It also holds exhaustion, frustration, boredom, resentment. We do such a disservice to what love is and to the texture of our own inner lives when we treat those darker, more difficult feelings as pollutants. Instead of our job being to get those pollutants out, maybe it’s to name them, recognize them, accept their presence and shift the terms of a dynamic so they’re a little less present. Replacing the work of seeking purity or innocence or the uncontaminated with the work of muddling through, I think that’s most of the work of my adult life.” — Leslie Jamison1
Um, hello, yes. I too am mostly muddling my way through love. And that’s okay. So, if you too are a love-muddler, you’re in the right place. Welcome!
One more thing. Y’all know, I love me a framework. And frameworks are small-t tools not big-T Truths. I made this one up using words based on things other people made up using words. [News Flash: All language is metaphor, so literally everything we think and believe is made up.] The next three essays in this series will explore ways we can consider love based on the concept of the three intelligence centers of the body which I first learned about through Enneagram work.2 In this model, the head, chest and belly delineate different ways we relate to the world (as thoughts, emotions and sensations). Depending on our Enneagram type/number, we have a proclivity for one or another (I’m a 4, so I gravitate towards the heart/emotions). Though I do believe, regardless our type, as moderns we are all conditioned and rewarded to emphasize the head and decenter the body.
In the coming weeks we will explore love as idea, as emotion, and as behavior and work with prompts and practices to help us know, feel and sense love.
Until then, there are some journal prompts and some ongoing practices for you to explore if you want to nerd out on love. If nothing else, do please sing any/every love song to yourself (now and forever).
Thank you for first choosing love.
With love,
Sebene
P.S. In last year’s Love Club class, we created a playlist of love songs to sing to ourselves… sing away friends!
JOURNAL PROMPTS:
Free-write about love. Look at this word love and consider whatever comes up. I recommend not trying to compose perfect thoughts… this is just for you. Let whatever words, associations, questions arise come through. Don’t stop writing for a few minutes.
Consider bell hooks’ statement: To practice the art of loving, we have first to choose love – admit to ourselves that we want to know love and be loving even if we don’t know what that means. Reflect and free-write on what ways that you do admit that you want to know love and be loving and in what ways you do not admit this.
What is a loving space, person and experience to you? Is it a where you feel safe or warm, rested or cool, where you are energized or relaxed. Describe this with as much sensory detail as you can.
ONGOING EXPLORATIONS
Practice singing one love song to yourself.
Explore Letters from Love with Elizabeth Gilbert and try writing a letter from love.
Explore your enneagram type and intelligence center.
The Enneagram is a personality typing system that describes nine distinct personality types, each with unique motivations, fears, and behavioral patterns. You can learn more here.
If you’d like to practice with me in person this year…
Learn to Let It Be: Acceptance & Equanimity for Individual & Collective Liberation (with Kate Johnson, Dawn Mauricio & La Sarmiento)
August 22–24 at Omega Institute
There is so much that is unacceptable in our world. And yet, the first task of change is accepting things just as they are. It's a paradox, and it's a ripe place for practice.
Join us for a weekend of meditation and dharma talks mixed with reflective journaling, nature walks, and music and dance activities. Together we explore "letting be" as the antidote to both unnecessary struggle and resigned indifference.
Register Here for Let It Be
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.
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