On a wedding in 1965, the two families that meet in me, and a prayer for abundance to make its home.
🌑 NEW MOON IN SCORPIO | NOVEMBER 8, 2026
It’s a New Moon in Scorpio, the darkest moon of the year’s descent. It keeps company with what runs underground: roots, old water, and what we carry in the blood before we have words for it.
My parents’ wedding day, Jane Goodwin & Choung Tai Chee
These are my parents on their wedding day in Maine, 1965, when marriages like theirs were still illegal in seventeen states. My mother’s father did not attend. And my father’s family did not approve of him marrying a white woman. They married anyway. Choosing love in the face of familial opposition, legal opposition, and vast cultural differences.
This photograph is now on my altar in these closing weeks of 40 Days of Ancestral Gold. Amie Heeter and I have been guiding the path towards restoration and reclamation of the mother line and the father line. Through daily study and practice we’ve been sitting with what came down each side, the gifts and the fractures both, and choosing what we’re ready to receive as spiritual inheritance.
I come from a grandfather who stayed home from the wedding and from a family across an ocean who said no. I also come from the two people who stood up together anyway.
Each morning I draw a circle of golden light and invite my ancestors in. All are invited. That includes the ones who stayed away. My Korean grandmother, whom I met only twice and never shared a word with, comes most mornings now. She sits beside me in the circle, close in a way we never managed in life.
In the eleventh mantra of the Sri Sukta we ask Sri, the radiant abundance of the Divine Mother, to dwell in our family: śriyaṃ vāsaya me kule, “make your home in my lineage.” The verse calls on the timeless sage Kardama, whose name means the rich mud a lotus rises from. In this hymn, abundance grows out of earth that is dark, dense and fertile, much like the ground Scorpio asks us to sit in tonight.
The whole Sri Sukta is a song of belonging, and of wholeness. It praises elephants trumpeting, the bilva tree and the fragrant earth, and everything in that field already has its place. When we chant it, we ask to be woven back into that wholeness, where every line we come from can be held.
For me, healing the lineage has looked like letting both families come and sit down together inside me. My parents built that bridge in 1965. I keep walking it in both directions: back toward the ones who couldn’t cross, and forward toward the descendants who will inherit whatever I make of it.
If you’d like to experience the living practice of the Sri Sukta in a held circle, Jillian Glikbarg and I would love for you to join us December 3–6 at Whispertree in Anderson Valley for the Sound Medicine Retreat: Sri Sukta: for Winter Renewal. Three days of deep rest, receptivity, and soul nourishment before the holidays arrive.
🌑 PRACTICE FOR THE NEW MOON:
Before your next conversation that matters, pause wherever you are and feel what is holding you up: your feet on the floor, your body in the chair.
Let yourself be supported for a moment.
Breathe in for four counts and out for six.
Chant Om Shanti three times, letting each repetition settle a little lower in your body.
Then enter the conversation from that rooted place.
🔥 THIS NEW MOON ASKS:
Where in my life am I longing for greater relational harmony?
What practice helps me return to peace when I feel pulled away from my center?
With you in the dark,
Stephanie Chee Barea
Sacred Sound Teacher | Mantra Practitioner | Spiritual Guide
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