You are not practicing alone
What happens when you stop practicing alone and invite your ancestors in
🌑 NEW MOON | MARCH 2026
The sky tonight holds an unusual concentration of water energy, and if you’ve felt it 🌊 — maybe you're more porous than usual, more moved by small things, less able to hold your interior life at arm’s length — know you’re not alone! And with Jupiter moving through Cancer this week, something older is stirring beneath it. The ancestral waters. What has been held in the body across generations, waiting not to be excavated, but simply received.
For over a decade, I have begun my morning seated practice the same way. I find my seat, settle the breath, soften into ease and stillness — and then, before vishoka and chanting begin, I draw a circle of golden light around myself. A luminous, protective field. This is where I have always started.
This past January I spent a month in India in deep immersion with the Sri Sukta — an ancient Vedic song to nature's forces of prosperity, nourishment, and continuity.
On the very first morning, I sat for my dawn practice, began the same way I always do — and as soon as I drew the circle of light around myself, something came through that hadn’t before.
Without hesitation, I found myself inviting my ancestors to come and sit with me.
Three feet out, sometimes six, sometimes twelve — a constellation of named and nameless, known and unknown, expanding outward in circles of support from what has come before. An open invitation simply to be together, without animosity, without wanting to excavate or analyze or heal anything in particular. Whether I know their faces or their names doesn’t matter. All are invited. None are excluded.
What I didn’t anticipate was how much would arrive, quietly, over time. My Korean grandmother — my father’s mother, who I met only twice, in Korea, and with whom I never shared a common language — comes anyway. There is a quality of presence in these mornings that I can only describe as company.
Most of us were taught to earn our way forward — to pull from our own reserves, to need as little as possible from what came before. The Sri Sukta offers something quietly different: the understanding that prosperity is not something you achieve alone. It is something you receive — from what came before you, from those who survived so you could be here, from a chain of care and struggle and endurance that runs further back than any name you know.
The practice has been asking me to try receiving that. To draw the circle, extend the invitation, and let the subtle sounds of the mantric resonance reach the gifts of the past that have long been forgotten, lost or disregarded.
🌑 A PRACTICE FOR THE NEW MOON
Find your seat. Take a few slow breaths until the body feels settled and easy — not forced, just softened. Then imagine a circle of golden light around you. As wide as feels right. Three feet. Six. Twelve.
Invite your ancestors in. Not to work through anything — just to be present with you. Whatever comes next — silence, a hum, a prayer, simply breathing — let them be there for it.
Notice what shifts — even slightly, even just in the quality of feeling less alone.
🌱 THIS NEW MOON ASKS:
What have you inherited that you’ve been treating as a burden — that might, if you softened toward it, reveal itself as a resource?
What would it feel like to receive support from your lineage rather than carry it?
Who do you want to be sitting with you as you move through what’s next?
With you in the dark,
Stephanie Chee Barea
Sacred Sound Teacher | Mantra Practitioner | Spiritual Guide
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