🎧 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 💥
Only a few more days left to register for Sara Shapouri’s Power, Shadow, and Spiritual Teaching, a 3 week series for teachers and students looking at the less than savory side of spiritual teaching. It begins this coming Wednesday 12/4 with a conversation with philosopher (and mutual friend) Noah Lopez talking about power. Jungian analyst, Morgan Stebbins, will explore shadow on 12/11. And on 12/18, Sara and I will dive into how we can only understand and balance power & shadow through relationship—to ourselves, to others and to mystery. Hope you can join us.
Listen to me read this essay:
Hi friends
Do you know the Dungeons & Dragons Alignment Chart? My friend Aaron introduced me to it driving back from our Omega event in October. We spent a chunk of that ride making ourselves giggle as we categorized contemporary spiritual teachers according to its classifications. Now I can’t stop slotting all the things within this system. The world leans extra chaotic and especially evil these days…
How are you feeling? I sense the usual running-on-fumes energy that almost always hits me this month. Of course, in the north, signals from nature accompany these end of year slower rhythms. Yet, whatever hemisphere you’re in, the annual calendar now winds down for us moderns. And as
has emphasized, wintering, can beckon at any time of year. Or any time of life. I hope you’re heeding the insistent invitations from whatever season currently summons you. I hear wintering’s thundering call. The call for deeper rest. And for deeper healing.Part of this rest is admitting I have no real message today. No inspirations arrived in the past few weeks as they usually do. I did not feel pulled to my collage corner (even though I ordered some old National Geographic magazines from Etsy to inspire my basket). Today’s image is a photos of a painting in my living room (the first “real” piece of art I bought twenty years ago). Today’s meditation is a quickie oldie from my archives. My next email on the 15th will be my final “spontaneous” essay for the year before I head into retreat, after which I will be away and taking January off from teaching (but not from writing).
It’s December? It’s almost 2025. I give up making sense of time.
Though, as 2024 winds down, I am in sense-making mode about the first full year of writing to you as Ancestors to Elements. This newsletter recently passed 18,000 subscribers. I remain amazed and honored that part of my professional work involves thousands of people reading or hearing the words I tap out out in time to lunar phases (and that some of you pay me to do so without any added bonus 🙏🏾). What kind of magic brought me this good fortune? Well, magic and media. Say what you will about the imperfections of this (or any) platform, I give gratitude to Substack for providing a structure for me to earn income from writing. However, a platform is nothing without kind attention. Thank you.
Tomorrow, there will definitely be fewer of you. Though I long ago turned off notifications for who subscribes or unsubscribes and when, I do know that because of the way Substack automatically adds readers from recommending-publications plus the fact that many find me through the secular meditation door, some people don’t understand what they’re getting themselves into when they sign up for “moonly missives.” I tried to provide a humongous hint by renaming this from the neutral good Call for Connection to the chaotic good Ancestors to Elements. Still, it may take someone a moment to recognize just how much of a weirdo I am. If you thought you’d be getting true neutral mainstream mindfulness here… um, no. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with mainstream mindfulness. I fully stan mindfulness and believe we desperately need all the gateway drugs/doors/wormholes to personal & collective (same thing) awakening. My preferred portal involves simultaneous translations between social and spiritual liberation… plus jokes. Liberation as our feminist godmothers taught us, that the personal is political. And liberation as in we’re all literally vibrating patterns of cosmic stardust not separate from anyone or anything throughout the history of the universe which means it’s all elements or energy or frequencies or vibes or sound or whatever metaphor you want to use for the great mystery, also what is time?
Perhaps the message today is simply to listen when wintering calls.
Again, thanks for being here.
With love,
Sebene
P.S. I will be joining my buddies Dan & Jeff for a NYC meditation party to benefit New York Insight Meditation Center. Join us in-person or online Monday, December 9 at 7pm for The Heart of Connection: Spiritual Friendship in Challenging Times.
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