There’s no shortage of advice in the wellness world. What’s rarer is finding teachers whose practice is lived—not performed. People who embody the work they share.
Today, we’re back with the Sovereign Teacher Series, a recurring collection of conversations and guided practices with meditation teachers, therapists, movement practitioners, coaches, and sound healers whose perspectives have shaped our own relationship to presence.
Each week we’ll share a new teacher, a guided meditation from their practice, and reflections on what it means to live with greater awareness in a world that constantly pulls us away from ourselves.
Today we’re honored to share a conversation that reads more as poetry, by Sarah Luna Van Arsdale. Luna is a meditation teacher whose practice moves through Hermeticism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Animism into something beyond any single name. For her, creation keeps us human—a way to move forward as souls in a story that seems to be consuming itself. She shared her gifts with us and guided a meditation on surrender, presence, and love as the underpinning force of the universe. Trace the edges of your own mind with her.
To me this is presence, the unflinching ability to exist with non-ambition so that the past and future collapse in on one another.
presence is a personal query of how to move forward, not as citizens of a failing state, but as souls inside a body, inside a time, inside a story that appears to be consuming itself?
Read our conversation with Luna:
Luna, tell us about yourself—who are you beyond your practice?
Luna: It is hard to say as my practice fundamentally is creative expression and I am nothing without it. So practice & I are inextricably linked; it is my soul in motion. Sarah Luna is my birth name, born with hands that can’t help but pluck at the strings that give rise to life. My journey has been one of wicked turns, ebbs and flows, and consequence battle earned.
Often I wish to unravel, to disperse from form, yet a thing of beauty will catching my skin, eye, or ear, luring me with moments of bliss to remain just a bit longer. I simultaneously feel like smoke and water as I know there is treasure to be found in the field if I were to look a bit longer, more meals to break bread with lovers & strangers, and moments to see animals curl and spiral through the corridors of nature. Though, the grief of living in a world that broadcasts cruelty openly, that glorifies hungry ghosts masked by measures of merit, that doesn’t flinch away from erasing whole lineages with a single press of a button remains a steady presence. It is what haunts me & yet is why I must remain.
Each morning I ask “Holy mother, what would you have me know?” It is a question of ontology. Asking, how do we move forward as souls inside a body, inside a time, inside a story that appears to be consuming itself? To me: we create. Creation keeps us human.
Describe your personal daily practice. What does it actually look like?
Luna: No two days are the same. No matter how I try, pluto first house seethes at sticking to routine. I once felt such frustration & despondence with myself for this. Through praxises like meditation, I came to acceptance. I learned that what may look different each day on the outside carries a thread of continuity that practice wove through, no matter the task. Some hours I hyper fixate on the computer, others I am consumed by painting & prose, some hours I lay despondently staring at my ceiling or sky asking the creator to make me undone, some have me doomscroll, and others still lead me to wander aimlessly, looking for the next grove of mica.
I still tussle with judgment of my own unpredictable nature, yet the more I resist whims, the faster I find myself on the frontlines of a battle. So my daily practice? Waving a white flag. aka : Surrender.
What does “presence over performance” mean to you in your own life?
Luna: It means to be in right relation with nature. To know what is essential, what is our essence and to live by it rather than trying (and often failing) to shapeshift into another.
Performance requires a barrier, an obstruction of self that at times can be deeply healing if used cathartically, but performance for the ambitions of greed, lust, clout, posterity, etc. leaves only a husk of a human behind. Yes, the soul remains as it is incorruptible, but the mind & spirit begins to fracture under the pressure of lies, and more dangerously, half-truths that it has been spoonfed to desire.
When we are stripped of every title, every victory, every martyrdom, every connection, achievement, failure, creation, etc. what is left? Can we sit & look in the mirror?
To me this is presence, the unflinching ability to exist with non-ambition so that the past and future collapse in on one another.
What is the practice or moment that consistently brings you back to presence?
Luna: Love. If it is hard to find in myself, I look for it in the world around me. The affection of a parent, the rascal, poet, scientist, so be it. I find it in witnessing passion, devastation, devotion, awe. When able, I look within myself, tracing the contours of my heart. A dark cavernous void that radiates the most benevolent form of Love: one that holds no opposite.
I will die on the hill that Love is the underpinning and overlighting force of this universe, polarity exists within its embrace but will never supersede it. Love is purity, it is essence.
What has your practice given you that you didn’t expect?
Luna: Refuge. A place to externalize all in the privacy of my own heart.
What do you hope people feel after they sit with your meditation in this collection?
Luna: I hope people feel curious. That they feel an urge to trace the edges of their own mind & find expression that was once cauterized by judgement, doubt, or some equally limiting part of self. Externalization is an ancient medicine.
What is your hope for presence culture in the world right now?
Luna: To sensitize our heart. To recognize that Love moves body to body, hand to hand. Whereas our current systems that feed atrocities, such as war, moves downward. Those systems require a mind that has learned to abstract a human being into a coordinate, a threat, a number on a ledger that someone, somewhere, will call their annihilation a necessity.
As I wrote in the first question, presence is a personal query of how to move forward, not as citizens of a failing state, but as souls inside a body, inside a time, inside a story that appears to be consuming itself?
To me the answer: we create. Creation keeps us human. Creation keeps us engaged.
SS: Luna, thank you for your beautiful words, we could read them again and again.
trace the edges of your own mind—practice with Sarah Luna through Sovereign Studios.