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Awakening to the Heart of One Another
That we exist at all is a rare miracle. Coming to terms with the immensity, beauty, and difficulty of our existence in the face of promised impermanence is a sure pathway to awaken our hearts in witness, gratitude, and awe. After all, it could have been otherwise. We could have not existed at all. This is the heart of my work as a workshop and retreat facilitator, and as a speaker and educator: to co-create conditions that help us mature and grow. Once awareness dawns in the heart, it is no longer possible to act in violence and harm. So let's cultivate this seed of awareness already in each of us.
Email me at hello@moudisbeity.com to discuss a customized program.
Workshops & Retreats
I am available to facilitate and lead workshops and retreats centering writing and poetry as contemplative practices in cultivating empathy and awareness. I draw on my training as a therapist and writing facilitator, and my practice and training in both Sufi and Zen traditions to create an environment for self-inquiry, spiritual practice, and connection.
Speaking Engagements, Reading, & Educational Presentations
The topics I cover include stuttering, immigration, cultivating a poetic orientation to life, writing as a contemplative practice, interspiritual practices, mindfulness, grief and gratitude, existential themes, narrative encouragement, and mental well being.
Something Rather Than Nothing
after Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
The earth stands at an estimated thirteen septillion pounds.
That’s every living thing combined,
times the weight of our grief and every uttered joy,
added to whatever stunned grace keeps us in motion.
Contemplate this –
We are delicately held in the balance between
the bottomless fall into despair and the edging
determination to turn and face the sun.
Everything we know to be true, all thirteen
septillion pounds of it, is held by the intricacy
of a hair’s measure rising and falling in stasis.
Still, we are here, broken and alive,
under the providence of a round sky.
What can be more holy than this?
The ground beneath our feet,
the stories we carry from one day to the next,
the fluency of rivers as a reminder of something
rather than nothing.
- Moudi Sbeity
Hallelujah Anyway
And even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand
before the lord of song, with nothing on my
tongue but hallelujah – Leonard Cohen
I have seen the finality of my life from where I stand.
Too late now to be convinced otherwise; a lifted tongue
already brought to its note of joy, the somber landscape
behind it, fields grown in the wreckage. Here awaits
the kingdom behind the question.
And what now? After your heartbreaks?
After your litany of disappointments?
I cannot speak for you, whoever you imagine yourself
to be. Nor for your accomplishments, your grievances,
your lonely odes. The world is violent, yes. And gentle.
And full of mystery.
Ahead is a path built not of promise, or at all, but of
the millions sprouting where the thousands are slain.
The world is remade again. And again, fresh each day.
As for me, I’ll arrive in love and taken again by the
beauty of what saved me; Poetry. Awe. Sunrise.
Alone as I am, alone as this worn body has walked,
I’ll stand with lips parted, tongue yielded in praise,
whispering nothing but the recited prayer –
Hallelujah.
Hallelujah anyway.
- Moudi Sbeity