🎧 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, Soulful Cycles. You can find all posts here.
Hi friends
Somehow we’re half way through a year most of which I spent debilitated. I’m still getting used to having energy again to do more than one thing a day. I’m thrilled to be feeling better and to welcome the sunny days of summer.
Thank you for being here. How are you? I hope the shift into a new season brings you opportunities for welcoming whatever warms (or cools) you.
My best friend Peter just came for a visit. We explored lots of inspiring culture around the city while continuing our almost four-decades-long conversation about art and justice and love. Also giggles. I probably walked more in the city in one week than I did over all previous months of 2025. On Monday, as the temperature soared, we went with friends to the People’s Beach for the first swim of the season. This part of Jacob Riis Park gathers the largest, most diverse group of adults I’ve ever witnessed. The ocean beckons us all. Not far from the shore, two dolphins swam back and forth, their fins surfacing together in rhythm. Seaweed filled the shallows, massaging our legs as we made our way past the break into deeper waters. I swam with gentle strokes (the only ones I can do lol), soothing my body from days of concrete pounding. A gaggle of young people played Marco Polo. Couples kissed. People removed swimsuits and swung them in the air.
Joyous queer folks collectively exclaiming “wheeee!” for every single swelling wave may be a perfect spell to counter
the relentless war machines operating across our planet. War originates from a Proto-Germanic word meaning “to bring into confusion.” While war requires denial about our inherent interdependence, the ocean reminds us to love.
War is distinctly human and has been a hallmark of our species throughout the ages. In this way, it’s “natural.” But only in the sense that it exists. War is a little word we use to describe many realities including basic attack and defense. In the animal world, conflict is not the same as war. Chimpanzees make deliberate raids on each other but they don’t form into opposing armies. Two animal communities do not ally to defeat a third. Only humans make “war.” And when we do, we spread destruction. In the past seventy plus years, eighty percent of major armed conflicts have taken place in biodiversity hotspots. We are able to destroy the natural world through war exactly because we’ve lost our deepest knowing of belonging to it all.
I’ve written before about how moderns (including me) have been taught to forget all that is mysterious and sacred and ensouled and enchanted. Throughout modernity, this process has not been a gentle one. The enforced forgetting of the soulful has been rooted in human hubris and ignorance. It’s been fueled by systematized greed and violence. One example: during the late nineteenth century “Scramble for Africa,” European leaders literally sat at a table in Berlin and carved up the map of the continent between them, intent on subjugating its peoples and extracting its abundant resources. They ignored ethnic and linguistic realities let alone sovereign communities. They refused to recognize the deep wisdom within sacred ways of knowing. All this required epistemicide, the intentional killing of indigenous rituals and the ongoing suppression of ancient spiritual systems. [I don’t have time here, but if you’d like to learn more about epsitemicide and how it relates to personal spiritual practice, I write about this in You Belong.]
Despite this forced forgetting of the sacred truth of life, wisdom teachings, indigenous people, and witches everywhere have never wavered from the deep understanding that if nothing is separate, then we must be constantly affecting the world around us. Possibilities for change always exist. Or as I heard a systems thinker say, “you control nothing, you influence everything.” Personally, I require continual reminders about our net of interbeing and often find them through rituals attuning me to cycles in nature. This newsletter is itself a Moon ritual. I mark every lunation for the year in my calendar (down to the minute) and create outlines in my files with relevant significations. Sharing this with you , I hopefully spread one reminder of our cosmic connections.
The next three essays will draw on Soulful Cycles, my three week course exploring change through the framework of intentions, rituals and ceremonies. I know many of you are very much here for all that is sacred and soulful. And some of you are likely thinking yeah, no, get me out of here because that is so not my jam, or I don’t know what those words really mean, or what’s the point of this when everything is falling apart... Welcome to all of you! I’m so thrilled we get to explore this topic in this particular moment when our planet needs all the power and magic we can muster in order to turn these destructive tides.
Change is both happening and needed in our world now more than ever. I believe rituals can help us in creating a sacred relationship to change. Rituals are a fundamental part of the human experience. All people engage rituals: small children and top athletes, spiritually inclined and not. And rituals work! Studies consistently show that rituals improve outcomes, they increase confidence and decrease anxiety. They help us savor experience and promote interconnection. And like placebos, rituals involve mystery (a lot more on rituals and placebos next time).
As a course, Soulful Cycles explored working with life changes: beginnings & endings, personal & collective, intentional & unexpected, wanted & unwanted, and everything in between. Like with the Love Club series, there’s no way I can cover here what was experienced in live sessions with multimedia resources plus plenty of jibber-jabber from me. However, I share in this form too because the ability to flow with change is a super advanced spiritual skill and worth our time here. At least it feels that way to me. My life and this world present continual cycles of change. When I resist that change, suffering happens. When I soulfully flow with it, I better shape the reality I desire. Or as Octavia said:
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
is Change.
God
is Change.
― Octavia E. Butler
Over three essays, we will explore working soulfully with change through intentions, rituals and ceremonies. Here are brief descriptions of how I think about these three categories in relation to the sacred.
Everything can be remembered as soulful/sacred through INTENTIONS. From the instant I open my eyes upon waking and with a gentle reminder before I sleep, I can invite the truth of the inherent ensoulment & enchantment of this world into every aspect of life. I close my eyes and return to my breath anytime I feel disconnected. I remind myself why I teach and write (to serve in our collective awakening to love).
RITUALS are intentional habits & routines and/or singular soulful practices. My morning meditation, making matcha, pulling cards, making collages, altar care, weekly work planning/review, exercise/dance, making meals... Any of these can be reminders of the sacred.
CEREMONIES are special moments created or participated in to acknowledge, celebrate, or consecrate. These require preparation and often involve other beings (seen or unseen) and are inevitably filled with scared intention and ritual. They often happen for me around specific cycles of nature like certain lunations, the solstice and equinox, or special moments of personal meaning like birthdays and death anniversaries.
I’ll end today by emphasizing that all of this starts with intention. I was not raised to weave sacred wonder into my everyday. If you also missed that section in social studies, this skill takes practice and patience—especially without regular access to nature. Yet, even if you do not live in the madness of a major city, all of us are embedded in shitty systems with challenging connections to inner and outer sacredness. Even with decades of spiritual study and practice, it’s not like I’m walking around all the time feeling interdependent with everyone and everything across Brooklyn, able to magically effect inner and outer tranformations. Most of the time I feel subject to the vagaries of public transportation and my own mind. I am definitely imapcted by the chaos manifested by this many people living on metaphorical and real islands. However, I do attempt to recognize myself in those that annoy me, to create boundaries when I know I have no capacity for more. Trips to the ocean remind me that water surrounds all of us and any self importance we may carry, water for thousands and millions of miles.
For me, sacred intentions is not a perfect practice but a daily dance of remembering, which implies forgetting. I close with these words from Donella "Dana" Meadows, the late environmental scientist, educator, and writer. She said this in her iconic piece Dancing with Systems.
“[T]he mindset of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control… The future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being.
We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!
I already knew that, in a way before I began to study systems. I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. All those endeavors require one to stay wide-awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback.”
— Dana Meadows
May we all deepen our intentions as we dance with all that is soulful within and around us.
With love and wheee,
Sebene
JOURNAL PROMPTS:
Which land, ancestors and lineages keep you connected to what is soulful/sacred?
What is your relationship to change: big change, small change, sudden change…? Where are you in the process of developing a wise relationship to change?
What change(s) do you most long for right now and how can you shape them into intentions?
ONGOING PRACTICES:
Try to imbue every day with with soulful connections in whatever ways feel sacred and meaningful to you.
Notice change within and around you – whether that’s the breath, thoughts, emotions, light changing in a room, nature…
Return to your intentions and explore how they’re being formed, shaped, changed over time.
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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