🎧 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:
💫 🤡 ANNOUNCING COSMIC CLOWNS 🤡 💫
After many months of scheming, my friend Jocelyn and I are launching Cosmic Clowns, a podcast about exploring consciousness, surviving chaos, and finding the comedy in it all. You can find our trailer on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other platforms. Be sure to follow the show so you’ll be in the loop when our first episode drops this Friday, October 24th (and every other Friday after). See below for more info.
Hi friends
Thank you for being here with me as structures crumble and global chaos grows. I appreciate your attention amidst this great mayhem. Yes, beautiful babies keep being birthed, sunsets continue their glorious color combos, and people all over offer brave support to strangers. Still, shit gets shittier every day. As you may know, I don’t generally offer hot takes on the news (you’re welcome) because that’s not my j.o.b. or my skill set. I trust you understand the severity of what’s happening in the U.S. and that it impacts everyone everywhere.
I do believe all of this fuckery warrants even more care to our own well-being. I encourage us to make extra space and time for grounding & centering so that we can be radically creative & courageous in this moment. Something I’ve learned from over thirty years of spiritual study and fifteen years of teaching is that each of us needs different practices and resources to do our inner work. Similarly, our chosen responses to this nonsense will vary depending on our contexts and capacities.
I continue practicing No News Before Noon—I am going on ten months of strict no–reading–rubbish until at least half way through my day, and it has been one of the kindest things I’ve done for myself this year. I also recently deleted the Substack app from my phone (it’s still on my iPad) because I don’t want other people’s activated systems constantly fed to me. Suddenly, everyone’s a pundit—even if it’s called Notes here, it’s still a feed. I take responsibility for nourishing myself. Meditation, contemplative reading, stretching, cooking, pulling tarot cards and astrology study all contribute to my self care. Also, watching Josh Johnson on YouTube.
Let’s internalize all the cheesy but profound sayings that help us prioritize our personal power: put on your own O2 mask first, you can’t pour from an empty cup, it’s a marathon not a sprint, don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm, physician–heal thyself… As I navigate ongoing health trama (iykyk), that last saying has been on my mind. Lately, I’ve been feeling frustration verging on wrath toward unhealed physicians. Also, all the other rabid rationalists running these rotten systems. In one of my doctor’s offices the other day, I felt such aggravation with the way she completely ignored my explanation of the various healing modalities that help me manage my pain. I assume they don’t fit into her materialist worldview.
I realize I myself may be sounding like a blowhard calling the pundit didactic, but I’m tired of all these folks telling me how it is and what to believe and what to do and that all the answers to my bodily (or our planetary) breakdown exist only in data and intellect. I’ve mentioned how my tendency towards the fawn and freeze trauma responses have led me to internalize a lot of emotions. Though I do not aspire to remain there, anger feels incredibly clarifying right now. Though all trauma responses probably have their strengths and weakness, I am curious if flight and fight are healthier in how they both actively release energy. A benefit of this recent aggravation with doctors (and pundits) has been recognizing my deep devotion to a cosmic perspective that makes space for all of reality, including that which I, as a dumdum human, cannot perceive let alone articulate through rational analysis alone. I believe it’s imperative that we cultivate cultures that center remembering the sacredness inherent to the universe. Collapse is coming. For all of us. It may simply be hitting people at different speeds (even as it’s been happening to many for a long time). As rational solutions become less useful as our only options, our responses may require less information and more inspiration, less analysis and more art, less pundits and more play. I believe this:
The revolution will not be desacralized.
I first wrote a variation on this idea many years ago. What strikes me now: desacralized connotes both sacred and sacral. As I go on four and a half years of hip pain (from bone metastasis + radiation + multiple fractures + surgery + blahblahblah), it’s never been lost on me that this particular cancer confluence resides in my sacral chakra. In the before times, I wrote a few posts on the erotic (a few linked below) with a promise to continue. I didn’t forget. It’s just that, while dealing with my body’s breakdown, I’ve simply been physically unable to explore my own sexual sacral let alone write about it, though I know I will for my next book (including the ancestral roots of sacral constrictions within my family and in Habesha culture generally). But like Audre Lorde taught us, the erotic is not merely the sexual. The erotic is a sensual engagement with life that ultimately connects us to the sacred rhythms of all creation. I promise to write more about this…
For now, let us remember what we’ve been taught to forget: that there is an inherently numinous and mysterious nature to reality. We can practice remembering the sacredness inherent to the universe through the sacred rhythms moving through our bodies. May we feel it all.
With love,
Sebene
P.S. Scorpio season starts tomorrow!! Get ready for good chaos!
Cosmic Clowns is a podcast about exploring consciousness, surviving chaos, and finding the comedy in it all. At the intersection of spirituality & humor, this is a show about the power of the cosmic perspective and how comedy can challenge oppression.
If you too are upset by what’s happening in our world right now and are sick of the war–mongering, chaos–wreaking bozos-in-charge giving clowns a bad name, you will definitely dig it. Join us as we celebrate the connection between laughter & liberation.
You can find our trailer on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other platforms. Be sure to follow the show so you’ll be in the loop when our first episode drops this Friday, October 24th (and every other Friday after).
