🌕 (Re)Attuning — Presence & Process / Microscope & Telescope

it's a full moon in aries 🌕

Image ID: Collage centering a color illustration of a dark skinned person with long straight hair wearing a beige blazer with a pink flower in the lapel, layered photos of nature including l to r, top to bottom: photos of a red sky, 2 vined trees in a forest, a b/w image of Joshua trees set against a wide clouded sky, small red flowers, a distant pier with small white birds as well as a Georgia O’Keefe painging of a white flower

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Registration CLOSES TONIGHT for ANCESTORS TO ELEMENTS: Reconnect to Nature, Mystery, & Joy. I'm incredibly excited about this offering. It feels like an emergent expression of my decades of study and practice in various traditions and disciplines (esp the discipline of life! LOL). I can promise that it will be an engaging and eclectic mix of nerdy, contemplative, magical goodness. I hope you can join me. ✨MORE INFO & REGISTRATION HERE✨

If you’re curious about this course but want to learn more before registering, last week I hosted a one-hour Sample Session. You can find the recording & resources here.

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Listen to me read this essay:

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Hi friends

Happy Equinox and almost October!! ☀️ 🌍 🎃

How has the change of seasons been so far? Are you feeling synched to nature’s cues? Finding resonance with the rhythms of the land & environment where you are? How can you better resonate with the elements & ecosystem within and around you?

I hope that these emails support your relationship to the cycles of the natural world. Many of you know this, but each moonly newsletter I send is timed to the exact moment of a particular phase… so the Moon is full RIGHT NOW (at 5:57 am ET, when I scheduled this to go out). That means it’s reached the half way point of its monthly orbit. It appears “full” because it is directly opposite the Sun, with Earth/us in between. The Moon’s brief presence in a constellation amplifies the qualities of that sign (Aries: fiery, catalyzing, martial). There’s so much more involved (like the entire ass solar system! LOL), but tuning to the Moon’s cycles in this small manner is one way I invite your connection to the cosmos (get it? 😜).

Maybe you can take a moment in the next 24 hours to look for and experience this Full Moon, paying attention to what you feel in the process. [n.b. It’s generally not recommended to look at a Full Moon during an eclipse which we’ll have on 10/28. But go for it tonight!]

With this Moon, I am preparing for autumn’s descension. It’s been an intense three years for me (understate much?). I’m looking forward to that final eclipse in Taurus on the 28th which will end a two-year run of eclipses there and in Scorpio that mirrored my ass being kicked up and down the Nodes — as above, so (I) bellow!! I am finally settled and feeling grounded. I currently have no fractures or ongoing pain in my body! YAY! My cancer is stable. 🍀🤞🏾🍀 I am immensely grateful for all the blessings in my life, especially my health. But I realize summer’s activity has kept me very active and I am ready to further understand and integrate all that’s transpired. I gladly embrace the coming colder seasons and less outward activity. I’m itching for the quiet and inwardness that these months invite. Even if I also have a renewed commitment to movement & strength training, I do intend to socialize less, rest more, and surrender deeply to wintering. That is, if I can remember and trust to do so.

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Image ID: A black and white illustration of a room with roughly drawn line drawings of two dancing couples in the foreground and the more fully illustrated Celestial Seasons Sleepy Time Tea bear sitting in a cozy corner in the background. The bear says, “they don’t know im sleepy” while the couples say “yes we do” and “your eyes are literally closed”

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Why is attuning to my own body and its inherent connection to nature so challenging? [Oh, right, — patriarchal persecution of women/herbalists/animists, disconnection from and extraction of land, imperialism, industrialization, colonization, epistemicide, intergenerational traumas, electricity/light pollution, the medias, my multiple gadgets, my own habits… you know, to name a few “things.”]

Given the enormity of these factors, attuning actually means RE-attuning — over and over and over again. This requires cultivating awareness, as the classical mindfulness teachings say:

internally

externally

and both internally and externally

In other words, knowing what’s going on inside and outside and both inside and outside. This takes practice presencing and processing.

Sometimes I take for granted the enormous amount of work I’ve done both to cultivate presence and to process my internal experience. This effort is the reason I can open to what’s happening, moment to moment. I had to learn both how to pay attention (in an EMBODIED WAY) and how to understand what I was witnessing (which for years was a huge messy confusion of pain, defensiveness, and activation). I am probably a very slow learner, but it took me a very long time. Meditation was a big part of this. Also many types of therapy. Lots of presence. Lots of processing.

Yet, I’m certainly not saying that I am now always self-aware or that I’ve completely resolved that internal mayhem. I’m sure my friends and family could point to multiple ways I am unmindful and unkind. Yes, sometimes attunement happens in retrospect – maybe recognizing only after the fact that I said something a bit harshly or didn’t offer my full attention to someone. AND, I know that I am much more attuned than I was even a couple of years ago.

That’s the internal part. The microscope. Observing and understanding myself – my history, patterns, longings, intentions, action.

Attunement to the external is also part of the holistic, engaged awareness that I long to cultivate. The telescope. Widening out from self, I aspire to be present to the world around me and process it as well – people, plants, animals, land, water, sky, spaces, forces, planets, stars...

Currently telescoping includes sensing the increasing anxiety in this country as we get closer to another presidential election, noticing the change in temperature and light as the Earth tilts away from the sun, sensing promise of a revived labor movement (#supportunions), connecting with a friend in hard times, watching astrology videos on YouTube, donating to causes I care about*, watching the sky as I sit at my kitchen table, scheduling a visit with my sister.

As I do any of this, I also want to be aware of what’s going on within. Like, I get really excited watching astrology videos. Then I fire off texts to my nerdiest astrology friends. Sometimes I am able to attune to the fact that this is not what everyone else does with a Tuesday night (too bad for everyone else) and simply feel my excitement.

Microscope… Telescope…. BOTH/AND.

As I mentioned in my message on Tuesday, BOTH/AND was the name of Lorraine O’Grady’s show at the Brooklyn Museum. She used the title to describe thinking “that is continuously birthing supremacies from the intimate to the political of which white supremacy may be only the most all inclusive.”

Or as les féministes say: the personal is political (et vice versa).

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Image ID: Color photograph of artist Lorraine O’Grady wearing a large black leather jacket.

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Currently, attuning also means continuing to choreograph my ongoing dance with technology. Especially now, living alone. As it gets darker earlier, I will likely do less gallivanting out and about. Being home in the evenings, I am aware that I sometimes (ok, often 😐) revert to screens as companionship. I’ve recommitted to the practice of leaving my phone (and iPad) out of my bedroom. I challenge myself to less Netflix and more phone conversations. I’m actually pretty good with reading (I’m a very curious hermit-nerd). However, lately I am scrolling too much, which means I’m definitely up for tackling the growing stack of texts by my bed (as well as the menacing pile of New Yorkers in my living room). But not just reading, also dancing and making out and making food and daydreaming. It’s encouraging to know that others are dancing with me. I see that Marlee Grace has just left Instagram. And that my friend Chela has returned (hurrah!).** My microscopic practice is bringing presence to the impulse to be online and processing my intentions before reacting. My telescopic practice is to presence my environment and process the wonder of the world beyond social media.

I was just on the phone with my friend Dalila and she was describing a very different seasonal shift in Arizona, where the deadly heat of this summer has finally abated and she feels a renewed energy for being outside and engaged with the world. Maybe something similar is happening where you are. Maybe something very different from either of these seasonal shifts. Perhaps you too are grappling with current social media or technological entanglements. Perhaps you are on a temporary or permanent break from screens and not feeling that tug. Wherever you are, I hope you enjoy practicing with your microscope and your telescope.

May we all find the most attuned ways to our own presence and process.

With love,

Sebene

* A reminder that 10% of September paid subscriptions will go towards my auntie Salem’s fundraiser for her documentary about Awra Amba, a uniquely indigenous ‘utopian’ village. Salem has been visiting this incredible intentional community for almost a decade. She took my mother there not long before she died, and I was fascinated by my mom’s stories of this truly egalitarian society (in the midst of a highly non-egalitarian country). As Salem says, “It shows us that the choice is within our reach to transform ourselves and our communities. It is a story you too will want to proudly share with the world.” Watch some clips and support Salem’s film here.

** My amazing coach and awesome friend, Chela, is enrolling her signature, 9-month group-coaching program. I know a number of people who’ve participated in LEAD and been transformed in the process. I’ve done group-coaching with Chela too and can attest to her mastery and power. Registration closes soon.

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If you can’t make the in person retreat at Omega, join me and my friends Dan Harris and Jeff Warren for the Meditation Party Livestream Workshop, Friday 10/13 — Sunday 10/15. Register Here.

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Last Call for ANCESTORS TO ELEMENTS!! Registration closes tonight at midnight.

Main sessions will run on Zoom every Wednesday October 4 — November 13 from 6–8pm ET, with optional 1-hour practice/Q&A sessions on the following Mondays from 5–6pm ET. All sessions will be recorded.

✨MORE INFO & REGISTRATION HERE✨

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The final collage workshop for the year will be on Sunday, November 5th in celebration of All Souls’ Day. 💀🦇👻

At this time of year, the veil between realms is thin. We will explore what is unseen, mysterious and magical through meditation, contemplation and creativity. Registration opens October 6th.

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