The Same Fire
On ten years of returning to one fire, the belonging I kept making too small, and what it means to grieve together
🌕 FULL BUCK MOON IN AQUARIUS | JULY 2026
Full Moon in Aquarius, with Jupiter and the Sun in close proximity — is about what becomes possible once you stop mistaking your limits for your ceiling. It’s asking what you’ve been keeping small in your own expression and potential.
Ten years ago I sat at a fire for the first time, and some part of me sat at the edge of it.
Healing Turtle Island is a Native-led ceremonial prayer and global movement, now in its tenth year of a twenty-one-year commitment, spearheaded by Indigenous leaders including my teacher, Sherri Mitchell. It calls people across cultures to acknowledge the historical violence of colonialism and genocide, to help heal the earth, and to begin rebuilding what reciprocity between peoples could actually look like. This was my tenth summer returning to it — with Sherri, at the sacred fire in Monroe. No phone. No agenda. No workshops to attend or notes to take. Just listening — to ceremony holders and wisdom keepers, to stories older than any of us, to songs I didn’t know the words to but felt land somewhere true anyway.
That first year, I remember holding myself carefully at that fire. This isn’t my ancestry. This isn’t my tradition. I am a guest here, and a guest keeps a respectful distance. What I didn’t say out loud, not even to myself, was the other thing that fire held for me — some of my own ancestors were among the first white settlers on that very land. My presence there was never neutral. I’ve since learned that the careful distance I kept wasn’t respect so much as a small, safe idea of where I was allowed to belong, drawn long before anyone at that fire ever asked me to draw it.
Ten years of returning taught me something my own fire, the one I tend in the Sri Vidya tradition, had been waiting to give me. In that practice the fire carries what we offer it — ghee, mantra, intention — up and out, beyond the reach of the one making the offering. I know that fire. I have built it, fed it, sat close enough to feel my face go hot and my hands go still. But it took this other fire, tended on land my own ancestors once took, to show me the edge I’d been keeping around my own belonging.
All fire is the same fire.
That’s the teaching that really settled in this time, sometime in the middle of that day. The same element that carries my prayers carries theirs. It doesn’t check lineage at the door, and it doesn’t check the history a person carries into the circle, either.
And here is the larger belonging that this fire keeps asking me to grow into: not to sort the circle by what happened to each of us.
Whether you were the one injured, the one who caused the injury, the descendant of one or the other, or simply someone who stood nearby and watched — the fire holds all of it the same way. Colonization, violence, the long inheritance of harm passed down through blood and land and silence — I am not outside that history. Belonging, at that fire, was never about ancestry clearing me of anything. It was about showing up willing to sit with what none of us made alone, on land that remembers exactly who I am.
I came home with the smell of smoke still in my hair. I didn’t wash it out. I lay there wanting to keep it a little longer — that particular, rare gift of a day with nowhere else to be, nothing to produce, no one to perform for. Just fire, and story, and a belonging I finally let myself stop rationing.
If this calls to you, the Global Matriarch’s Gathering is coming up on August 14–16, also in Monroe — Sherri’s next invitation into that same circle. A portion of every practice container I offer continues to go toward the Land Peace Foundation, her life’s work of protecting Indigenous land, water, and sovereignty. It is a small offering held next to a very large fire.
🌕 PRACTICE FOR THE FULL MOON:
Light a candle, or if you can, a fire.
Sit close enough to feel it. No phone within reach. N
otice any distance you keep out of habit — from the fire, from a room, from a circle you’ve told yourself you don’t fully belong in, or don’t have the right to.
Let it soften, just for these few minutes.
Then, if it feels right, chant Om Agnaye Namaha once or twice, softly.
Naming and honoring the warmth, illumination and living flame as yours, theirs, ours. Across all difference.
🌱 THIS FULL MOON ASKS:
Where have you been keeping a respectful distance from something that was actually inviting you closer?
What would it mean to let your sense of belonging grow past the edges you drew for it long ago — even the ones history handed you?
UPCOMING EVENTS IN MAINE
This August 2, I am offering a sound bath experience at The Rangeley Hideaway — an evening to come sit in a room that has been loved into being for five years, in the mountains, by the lakes. Details at the link.
And if the mountains are calling you for longer, I am hosting a small group of women this October 1–5 for sound healing and ceremony at the shores of Rangeley Lake. Four nights to go deep, to listen and to let the land hold what the practice points toward. A handful of spots remain.
Let this moon illuminate what has quietly become real — and let yourself receive it.
With you in the fullness,
Stephanie Chee Barea
Sacred Sound Teacher | Mantra Practitioner | Spiritual Guide
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