🌑 Practices, Practices, Practices

it’s a solar eclipse/lunar new year/new moon in aquarius 🌑

Feb 17, 2026

🌍We Are Elemental: Embodying Earth, Water, Fire, Air & Ether🔥

I’m honored to be teaching my first retreat at Hollyhock Retreat Center in B.C., Canada, June 24—28. Over these four days, on the stunning land of Cortes Island, we’ll explore the five elements through guided meditation, embodied practices, solo and group time in nature, journal prompts, song, and conversation. My amazing friend, Shawna Wakefield, will be offering song circles throughout the program helping us connect to our elemental natures through sound and music. May we remember together: We Are Elemental.

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…

Happy New Moon! 🌑 This phase begins the monthly lunar cycle and supports intention setting & seed planting.

Listen to me read this essay:

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Hi friends

Happy Lunar New Year! 🔥🐎 Thank you for being here with me through these moonly cycles. I hope this threshold lunation offers you a fresh start and that you’re finding ways to renew on the regular.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m poly when it comes to beginning again, integrating various celebrations, celestial events, or an in-breath as ways to remind myself that nature and my own body continually offer evidence that life and death are cyclical processes, not linear programs. Still, sometimes I wonder if we humans are in fact coming to an end-end. Then I remember that this moment too is reflected by our solar system and we’re simply living out ancient (and future) cosmic patterns. I contemplate other people, my ancestors, who similarly felt their world was ending. Or the countless people throughout time, all our ancestors, who were invaded or enslaved, occupied or genocided, faced annihilation, searched for hope and meaning. The difference being, the ancestors could not consume a constant flood of disaster data from all over the planet, or retreat into an equally powerful torrent of information distracting them from it. [Say it together: No News Before Noon!] I’ve always loved the Buddhist metaphor of true spiritual practice as going against the stream. Today, we go against a tsunami. I just looked up what to do in case of a tsunami. I thought it would say “RUN, BITCH!” Of course, the real safety is higher ground.

In an early episode of our podcast Cosmic Clowns, Jocelyn and I joked about adding a “practices, practices, practices” line of gear to our imaginary merch shop. That episode is titled “Scared Into the Sacred.” Just like reactive and creative, the letter “c” transforms what frightens into something curious, what limits into something holy. Stepping out of content streams (especially those of my own mind) into sacred practices allows for renewal. Sacred practices are my higher ground.

My lovely friend Fran was my Valentine’s date. Fran and I did our community dharma leader training together over fifteen years ago. On Saturday, we reconnected on a luscious two hour catch-up call about life and practice (and tarot). She remembered that, on our inaugural retreat, we were paired for the very first dyad and even then I expressed a desire for more ritual—a desire she shares. [I recall that she seemed like a super wise, very embodied gal with great style—which she is.] I’ve written plenty here about rituals, and maybe cannot say enough. The tldr: Rituals are simply intentional practices. And we can make them sacred. Also, I would be (more of) a mess without them. Here’s what I’m realizing: The particular practices I’ve built over many years make it easier to stay on that higher ground. Duh, no brainer, right? But the key is the “c”—the sacred, creative nature of those practices.

As I mentioned last Full Moon, I want to lean even more into wonder, mystery, magic and all things sacred. Yes, here. Also, period. I’ve never stated this publicly, but, a few years ago, I stopped calling myself a dharma teacher. I love the buddhadharma. It saved my life. It’s in my bones forever. And I began feeling limited by that particular moniker. Yes, teacher can be uncomfortable, but even dharma practitioner feels limiting. I feel vulnerable saying all this because so many of my friends are dharma teachers and I love them and their teachings. But, although I practiced in a way that was much less stripped down than most insight meditation spaces, including chanting, ritual and other sacred forms, I still felt constricted. I wanted to talk about the erotic (I did) and power (I did not) and especially the feminine/yin (I tried but there wasn’t much space or appetite for it). I experienced a pressure or expectation that I center and privilege Buddhist teachings and dharma frameworks over, for example, feminism (a focus of my B.A. along with early Buddhism) or dancing (not allowed on retreat according the precepts).

As my devotion to astrology, tarot, magic, ancestral practices, and other systems deepened, so too did my longing for a creative sacredness that could encompass all of me, including my love of dance and art and literature. I’ve been reading the novel Matrix, by Lauren Groff. Set in 12c. England, the main character, Marie de France, begrudgingly becomes the leader of a nunnery and over decades transforms the abbey into a feminine utopia. It’s gorgeous with beautiful lines. This one struck me:

And all souls as they sing shine radiant into the world.

And this:

Oh how the girl loves god, hungers for god, believes in the goodness of all things with a kind of rigorous simplicity. Such knowing simplicity in this complex world takes great intelligence, Marie finds. She envies the girl, admires her.

But the line that resounds for today’s post is this one:

All souls are limited in the circles of their own understanding.

Growing up, I was completely duped into reaching for whiteness, so I did not understand how much Black people embody the sacred creative until I started really paying attention to Black culture, mostly after high school. Sometimes I think about that scene in the “We Are the World” documentary, The Greatest Night in Pop, when Lionel Ritchie, Stevie Wonder, and Quincy Jones help Bob Dylan remember how to sing by being Bob Dylan to Bob Dylan. It’s a generous, holy circle offering in the midst of the musical mayhem happening all around them including drunk-off-his-ass Al Jarreau trying to “help” them. Thinking of that scene often then reminds me of the Dionne Warwick documentary when Snoop Dogg describes how, early in his career, before he made it big and became besties with Martha Stewart, Ms. Warwick summoned him and other L.A. rappers to her mansion. At 7 a.m. She sat them in her pristine living room, commanding them to call her all the denigrating names they used for women in their songs. They declined to do so. He says their lyrics shifted after that encounter. And then my friend La sent me the video for That’s What Friends Are For and it makes me think: Oh how Black people love god, hunger for god, believe in the goodness of all things with a kind of rigorous simplicity.

You know who’s not all that shocked by what’s happening in our country?

Back when I was on social media, I started following a white woman from a very different spiritual path. In one post, she stated she no longer studies under anyone who is also not a mother emphasizing that while she can learn things from everyone, she stopped centering non-mothers as teachers. I really dug that. While many of my main spiritual teachers had been women, none had been dark-skinned Black women until I studied with DaRa Williams and Isabel Adon for my Indigenous Focusing Oriented Therapy (IFOT) training in 2018. You know how some experiences seem to alter your DNA? IFOT shifted my perspectives about trauma and healing, about nature and elements, about sacredness. I began to better engage my various lineages, biological and social. Land and culture now act as allies to my practices. I experience earth, water, fire, and air in my apartment as well as in wilderness. I call on and connect to my ancestors in any moment, feeling their presence in synchronicities. I integrate silence and stillness on the path, not needing to privilege (or fetishize) them as the only markers of peacefulness. Peace exists in a city walk, in a bass drop.

So, I guess I’m saying to myself this: practices, practices, practices—but make them creatively sacred and sacredly creative… also, love Black people.

Happy Blackest (100th Anniversary) History Month! ✊🏾

With love,

Sebene

P.S. For the March 3rd lunar eclipse, I plan on sharing about my specific practices in hopes that some of my references and resources can support you too.

Updates:

The way Substack treats its internal “podcast”audio is annoying. It’s also challenging to create an essay and collage and meditation every New and Full Moon. I’ve decided to record a meditation once a month for the First Quarter Moon (this will be in addition to the first quarter chat which returns next week). Would you want this meditation emailed to you? This would mean hearing from me in your inbox approximately once a week. Or would you prefer I post it in Substack but not send it out? I’ll consider all comments! Thanks.
My plan was to begin a new round of my Sunday evening co-creation session, make sacred space, in March. Between body stuff and not being able to get my course platform to function properly, I decided to read the room and slow my roll (the room = the universe 💫). Stay tuned for April’s sessions.
Thanks again for being here. It means a lot.

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