🎧 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.
💥 POWER, SHADOW, AND SPIRITUAL TEACHING 💥
My last offering for 2024 will be on December 18 when I’ll be joining my dear friend Sara Shapouri for the final session of her 3 week series Power, Shadow, and Spiritual Teaching. Right now, it’s easier than ever to project our own shadow material outwards—seeing “the bad” only in others. This conversation will be a rich exploration of our personal shadows, how not contending with them contributes to the bullshit we currently see all around us, and how shadow work is, like life itself, all about relationship: to ourselves, to the other, and to mystery. Hope you can join us.
Listen to me read this essay:
Hi friends
OOF & SHEESH. What a week! I know you must be inundated with “JUAT just happened?!” emails. I too almost wrote you right after the election. That would have been out of lunar order. I decided to trust the cosmos and wait. So, it’s the Moon who saved you from yet another hasty hot take on this huge mess. Thank them.
How are you holding up? I hope you’re finding ways to stay grounded and centered in the tumult while allowing your genuine flow of emotions. I truly appreciate your interest in my words and ideas at this time. Thank you for being here.
I’ve been feeling various feelings and attempting to care for them all. With the help of my amazing acupuncturist, I thwarted another head cold that wanted to settle in my already compromised lungs. Plus, regular sessions and classes with my magical trainer. And my cranio-sacral lady. Fer reals, it takes a village midsize-metropolis to keep this body strong and ready for the revolution, lol. I’ve also been feeling a fair amount of grief. Yesterday, I woke up weepy about personal and collective woes. I know to turn to connection, creativity, and comedy. Catch up calls and group chats with my far-away ones—lamenting together and uplifting one another. Meditating. Journaling. Meeting friends for art dates. I started watching the second season of Bad Sisters. I’m sleeping a lot. I went to my first clown show. Love. [Get ready. In the new year, I’m going all-in on laughter, starting with Clown Level 1… again —because, seriously, I’m no good at clown AT ALL and that is why I’m on the remedial track.]
I’ve noticed my mind is slightly scattered during meditations and in general. [I lost my Fitbit somewhere and for the life of me I cannot figure out where it could be. Though I am blessed with a large rent stabilized (which means I must die here) place, it’s still a 2 bedroom apartment! Where is this damn watch!? 🫥] I’m microdosing the news, and as usual, I’ve noticed the tendency to want to figure everything out in my tiny brain. So, to yank myself out of the current whirlpool of whiplash opinions, I’ve been trying to read fiction and non-election related essays from the many The New Yorker piles laying around (one of which may be harboring my runaway Fitbit? 🤔). Also, books!!
This week I taught the final session of my six-week Ancestors to Elements course (A2E) which has been a serendipitous space to speak with many brilliant beings. A2E takes a deep dive into my fave paradox: we are not separate AND we are not the same. Not to simply state this truth and know it conceptually, but to explore what it actually encompasses, to feel it, to embody it in daily life, and to share about it. People joined from all over—California, Hawaii, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Saskatchewan, Wisconsin—with stories about their ancestors, of how the elements appear within and around them, about their practices and perspectives. It’s my second time teaching this course. Not only did I once again learn a lot from/with the group, this round became part of my own process for digesting all that’s happening in this very moment. [Honestly, thank you friends. 🙏🏾] We are inextricably interconnected—everything in our entire universe (including us) is just vibrating energy patterns linked throughout time and space. AND more than fifty percent of voters elected a convicted felon and rapist who promises to reward corporate greed & environmental destruction, demonize & deport immigrants, taunt & terrorize Trans people, continue supporting international despots, and dismantle any systems not serving “his” agenda to destroy democratic safeguards.
This paradox that we are not separate AND we are not the same is an irrefutable fact—but how do we navigate what is sadly, surely to come our way without losing sight of the former and not bypassing the latter? As many in A2E expressed, it’s been incredibly challenging to accept the “we’re not separate” part of the paradox this week. And, as we acknowledged together in class, that does not mean our fundamental belonging to each other is not true. I often refer to this paradox as sacred because paradoxes, by revealing that two seemingly contradictory things can both be true, point to something ineffable about existence. Mystery and its myriad possibilities begin to surface when we allow for the paradoxes at the center of life itself. This is why I insist the revolution will not be desacralized (and because every Indigenous teaching says so, duh). We cannot rely solely on secular systems to get us through this. That materialistic modernity jig is up. I cannot summarize the six weeks of meditations, slide show presentations, conversations, and singing + chair-dancing that led (I’ll speak only for myself here) to my deeper understanding of these truths and to my renewed faith in the sacred mystery. But I want to offer two things that are supporting me this week.
One is short. Just a word. I learned it last week from the astrologer Diana Rose Harper: thrutopia. [The term comes from writer
]. Thrutopia is neither utopic nor dystopic—it demands that we look at what’s right in front of us and recognize there’s no easy escape hatch, that the only way out is through. Thrutopia asks us to release both fantasies and despair. Thrutopia implies engagement—the realm of meaningful practice not mere pontification. Thrutopia requires connection & creativity (and possibly clowning). We probably need many, many thrutopias in the coming years. I plan to learn more and share with you.The other idea continues from the last New Moon exploration about frequencies and how, sound master John Bealieu teaches that the challenge of our “practice” is to allow all vibrations/experiences—basically, to NOT be in constant contention with internal or external reality (just like on the cushion). Otherwise, he says, we are attempting to separate ourselves from the universe. Something Dr. John shared has been resonating 😜 with me. He explained that Johannes Kepler, the 15th c. German astronomer/astrologer (same thing back then), mathematician, and philosopher realized that although the planets move in elliptical order (producing awe inspiring patterns, like the ones below), they do not move in perfect pythagorean harmonies. Kepler showed how it’s only at the extreme ends of their movement, at the outer part of the ellipses that the planets come into what we would consider perfect harmonies with each other. Everything else is what we call dissonance, so, ultimately, there is beauty created by the discordant aspects of these planetary relationships.
However, there’s still order!
It’s made me wonder about our current planetary chaos. About how we’ve lost the balance, unable to harmonize within the natural discord of life’s paradoxes. Yes, we are not the same—dissonances will always arise with and between humans. And, we are absolutely interconnected—we are capable of great harmonies. Yet, we’ve lost our vibrational order. Our greater relationships are a wreck. As I quoted last time, the music critic Alex Ross said, “Music is our name for the noise that we like.” But even by the most expansive of musical standards, our current collective music really stinks. These patterns are not pretty. How do we get into some measure of congruence? What will it take? The Earth is definitely trying, and their example makes it seem like it ain’t gonna be so easy… but might be what’s needed to save our dumb asses.
I know part of the answer is Worry about yourself, Sebene—I gotta get myself in vibrational congruence with my own harmonic and discordant frequencies, plotting my own patterns (including the shadows!). Believe me, I am trying! And, I’m curious about how to better attune to all the different frequencies in our cacophonous world—beginning with harmonizing/healing tones of care for myself and my communities. Then, building my capacity to allow all the frequencies (even those that may feel really, really fucking dissonant).
As I wrote in our First Quarter Moon Chat, I’ve been reflecting on love as the frequency that allows all frequencies because it brings them into coherence. Like the Earth balancing themselves through climate changes that disturb us but are ultimately loving attunements for the whole, what do my many attunements feel like and how can they bring more coherence internally and externally? Again, that may not look like nice, easy energies all the time… And I’ll continue tuning and toning, creating beauty and music and sacred revolution with all of you.
Thanks again for being here. It means a lot.
With love,
Sebene
P.S.
The above meditation is an exploration of the four elements (earth, water, fire, air). This is my take on the classical Buddhist practice found in the Satipatthana Sutta. Hope you enjoy the meditation! [BTW, in A2E, we also explored the 5th element of ehter/space/sound as the element of beauty, music, mystery, and love that is the ultimate origin of all.]
December’s Full Moon is my final In My Experience… of the year. If you have a question for my so-called advice column, you can submit it here (and not by replying to this email).
Dan, Jeff and I are bringing the meditation party to New York City, this time to benefit New York Insight Meditation Center.Join us in-person or online Monday, December 9 at 7pm for The Heart of Connection: Spiritual Friendhsip in Challenging Times.
💥 POWER AND SHADOW IN SPIRITUAL TEACHING 💥
I’m honored to be in conversation with my dear friend Sara Shapouri for the final session of 💥 Power, Shadow, and Spiritual Teaching💥 for teachers and students looking at the less than savory side of spiritual teaching and how we can work with the hidden, uncomfortable dynamics that can hinder our path and harm others.
I recently shared the above meme with Sara and she responded “Goddamn if that ain’t the truth.” That’s why I adore her and know our discussion about power and shadow will be authentic and deep and hilarious. Please join us!
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