July Quarter Connections - by Sebene Selassie
My latest offering, Soulful Cycles: Creating Intention, Ritual, & Ceremony for Life-Changes, is a 3-week exploration for connecting to ALL change as sacred. Wednesdays, July 26 and August 2 & 9, 6–8pm ET, on Zoom.
🌊 Learn more and register here. 🌊
Hi friends
I hope this Sunday 🌗 last quarter moon has been good to you.
Brooklyn is hazy today and I am finalizing today’s links before I rewatch this (which is also the first one below).
I’ve been in receptive/research mode — prepping for my next offering, Soulful Cycles. As my personal teaching style evolves, I continue to embrace my unique, emergent, and uber-nerdy ways for effecting change in a world rife with challenges and crises. Mine to do includes writing & teaching — showing up authentically, even if it seems pointless considering what we face. These days, my creation process goes like this…
I choose an idea from what currently intrigues and excites me. I create a title and description. Then, I fully commit to what my friend Jocelyn calls channeling — I follow ALL the breadcrumbs: Reading, watching, meditating, making notes, mapping ideas. [So far, for this one, I’ve explored dreaming beyond capitalist realism (it feels like half the people I know are currently reading this book), the undeniable and immense power of placebos, and various frameworks of ritual from from indigenous to modern, scientific to mystical.] I talk to friends, journal, doodle, pull cards, SOS for comsic help, sing, dance. Finally, I synthesize it all and chart a contemplative, engaging experience for you (including a shareable list of all the resources from along the way).
These are my steps — aka rituals.
Soulful Cycles is at its essence about ritual. As I mentioned in this IG post, ritual was essential to my writing process for You Belong. “Ritual” may sound complicated or inaccessible. It does not have to be. Many animals engage in rituals. All humans do. Because it is deeply connected to symbolic thought, ritual likely led to the development of cognition and language. Many experts now believe that ritual and intelligence developed side by side.
Soulful Cycles will explore intention, ritual and ceremony as sacred pathways for relating to change. That is, as sacred pathways for relating to life, periodt. Whether change is something we long for or something we are forced to confront – it’s always present (and always a present?). My premise: We can explore change in ways that are conscious, creative & cosmic. In fact, when we bring care, reverence & faith to any process, we invite extraordinary possibilities, even magic.
I know many of you are change-makers, and this world is definitely in need of our magic.
Hope to see you there.
With love,
Sebene
P.S. In honor of Disability Pride month, 10% of July’s paid subscriptions will go to Alice Wong’s GoFundMe and my sister’s community, Camphill Village.
If there’s only one link you follow from this email: Watch this incredible conversation about how we live in a conscious cosmos. I’ve sent it all around and I’m definitely going to watch it again (and probably again…). There’s no denying that “belonging” is actually consciousness, all the way down…
Yes, YES to Spider Punk and Spider-Man India. I haven’t laughed that much in a theater in years. And the animation is so beautiful – see it on the big screen! 🤩
Yeah, Idris Elba is probably the only person I’d watch basically sitting in a plane seat for an entire season.
Does everyone know there’s an ad-free music station running non-stop on Apple TV? [I know you know that a Gen-Xer must have made this.]
Three hours and forty minutes of venus retrograde (because it’s come for us).
These two episodes of the current withchy season of How to Survive the End of the World are my favorite so far: astrologer Jessica Layandoo and herbalist Empress Karen Rose are both master healers and teachers and each drops all kinds of wisdom.
This conversation on Katherine May’s podcast with Kerri ní Dochartaigh on the mystical everyday is full of magic.
This movie was absolute garbage, but the music!
I’ve been into this song again and forgot how much I also love the video.
A blast from way farther past that I am rediscovering. I used to listen to this CD (remember?) over and over.
I believe part of the job of writers, scholars, artists, scientists, and culture-makers in general is to help us understand language and ideology — to reveal the deep conditioning of our minds. This essay explores how perceptions of invasive species mirror colonial attitudes as a whole and it reminded me of this article I read when I was in Portugal last fall which among other things around language and ideology, mentions the mischaracterization of the Moors as violent invaders. Archeology is revealing the time of the Moors in the Iberian Peninsula to be a singular one of flourishing, harmonious coexistence.
This interview with Kelefa Sanneh on what popular music can teach us about each other is full of insights around the complexity of belonging. “When people talk about the division in America, they’re usually decrying it. Through music you can look at those divisions and see an upside, because they also create a sense of community of people who love it, which is where a lot of its energy comes from.”
This article about the joy of Trump supporters further proves that it’s belonging all the way down.
On the cosmic mind and blending quantum physics with psychology.
I’ve been recommending Vmagic Vulvar Balm to all my peri/menopausal friends. If you’re not using latex condoms, it’s fantastic as lube. The ingredients are entirely edible. 😉 It’s also a general healing balm — I’ve been using it on my new tattoos (see below).
I told you all I was serious about La’s mantra “trust life.” Femme and queer New Yorkers, Haven Studios lives up to its name. Deja is super sweet and great with fine lines.
Image ID: Photos of the outside and inside of my right forearm showing freshly inked tattoos — the two sides read: “trust ⭐” and “life ♥️”
with special thanks to the meme (and everything) goddess adrienne maree brown
Image ID: tweet from @nickbouker reading: “Hey quick question are you fucking kidding me”
Image ID: Instagram post from @adriennemareebrown showing two images of Tupac with the text: WE’RE NOT FORM THE LEFT AND WE’RE NOT FORM THE RIGHT / WE’RE FROM THE BOTTOM AND WE’RE COMING FOR THOSE ON THE TOP
Image ID: tweet from @adremily rading: 4 year old: is money real or pretend? / Me: *clears throat* “takes sip of water* *arranges note son podium*
Image ID: circular logo of words UNIONS ARE PEOPLE (graphic by Roger Peet)
Image ID: Tweet from @aaolomi with text reading: “workers of the world, unite” over an image of a cat sitting on a fence post in front of four attentive baby llamas
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