All of it at once
On dropping my daughter at college, the heart's capacity, and Sri Sukta as medicine
🌑 NEW MOON | AUGUST 2026
New Moon in Leo. The sign of the heart — generous, creative, unflinching in its willingness to feel. This moon arrives at the height of summer asking us not to dim what we are carrying, but to let the heart be large enough to hold all of it. Leo is big, dignified energy.
Napping with my newborn daughter, Lucia, December 2007
This morning I became an empty nester. My youngest left for her first year of college, and I surprised myself — not with grief, though that is here too, but with the sheer size of what I felt all at once. Joy. Pride. Love at full extension. The brightness of watching someone you have known since before they had words now walk toward their own life.
Twenty-three years of motherhood have taught me that the heart does not choose between emotions. It holds them all, simultaneously, at full volume. This morning was no different. The joy and the grief arrived together, as they always do when something real is happening. I have learned to stop trying to sort them into separate piles.
The truth is, this summer has been reorganizing itself around me in ways I did not plan. A manager I depended on at the Hideaway left mid-season — a record-breaking one, as it happens. My mother, who moved to California earlier this year, is settling into her new life there. Today, after leaving my daughter, I fly back to Maine to close on my mother's house. The life I thought I was living looks different than it did in June, and different again than it did this morning.
Leo would say: good. Let it be big.
What I am learning again this summer — the way you learn things you already know when they arrive at full volume — is that the fullness of an emotional landscape is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is a sign that you have loved without reservation. The grief and the pride arrive together because they were never separate. You cannot let someone go without having held them fully first. The empty nest is not a loss. It is evidence of twenty-three years of showing up.
Sri Sukta has been (and continues to be) my medicine this summer. These sixteen ancient verses invoke Sri — a living force of wholeness already moving through you, waiting to be remembered through sound. I reach for them when ordinary language fails, when the heart is too full for a coherent thought, when I need something that can hold more than words can. The tradition teaches that Sri does not arrive from outside. She is already here, already woven through every experience — the record-breaking seasons and the empty nests, the closed chapters and the open ones. The practice is simply remembering.
This is what abundance actually looks like, up close. Not the tidy version. The real one — large and grief-threaded and joy-lit and held.
What I know, having chanted Sri Sukta through a summer like this one, is that the practice deepens precisely in the seasons when the heart is most full — when there is too much to hold and the sound becomes the only container large enough. That is what I want to offer this December, before the year draws to its close.
In the space between Thanksgiving and the Winter Holidays, I am co-hosting a Sound Medicine Retreat with Jillian Glikbarg built entirely around the living practice of Sri Sukta — December 3–6, 2026 at Whispertree in Anderson Valley, California. Three beautiful nights on 600 acres of oak savanna and rolling hills, just before the holiday intensity arrives. Deep study, sacred fire, sound baths, yoga nidra, and the amplifying power of community practice, chanting, eating, playing and stargazing together.
If community practice has been calling you — whether you have been chanting Sri Sukta for years or have never heard it before — this is the container. The retreat meets you exactly where you are. Details and registration at the link HERE.
🌑 PRACTICE FOR THE NEW MOON:
Sit for a few minutes this week with everything the heart is currently holding. All of it — the joy, the grief, the love, the overwhelm, the things that haven't resolved yet. If you practice with Sri Sukta, let even one verse be your offering into that fullness. If you don't yet, simply let the fullness be witnessed. Let it be enough to name what is actually here.
🔥 THIS NEW MOON ASKS:
What is your heart holding right now that hasn't been given permission to feel fully?
What would it mean to let the bigness of this season be a form of abundance rather than a problem to solve?
With you in the dark,
Stephanie Chee Barea
Sacred Sound Teacher | Mantra Practitioner | Spiritual Guide
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