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Sink In: A Meditation

Duration : 6 minutes, 41 seconds

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Photograph by Angela Hennessy

Join artist and writer Angela Hennessy for a calming meditation.

(00:01):
Allow your eyes to soften or close, turning on your inner eye. Settle and sink into your body. Find and follow your breath. Waves returning to shore, rivers returning to the ocean.
Breathing in
and breathing out
Each breath is an opportunity to arrive again and again. Acknowledge everything you did today to be here in this moment right now. All the things did and done. Not done, undone, or redone. Let it float on by. Acknowledge your ancestors for everything they did for you to survive. Sink in. Allow gravity to do what gravity does. Sink in. Settle into that place in your body that knows things, that knows creation, that knows origin and heart-melting melodies. Sink in. Sorrow, songs, and salty tears, tender times caring for the dead before they died. Sink in. Settle into that place that knows the longing for something, someone who cannot, is not, anymore. Sink in. The place that remembers gathering at grief altars, weeping and wailing, humming and rocking, swaying and bobbing, forgiving and giving in. Not failing, but falling. Then laughing and singing. Surrendering. Sink in.
Breathing in
and breathing out
Gently on your exhale, expel and dispel unwanted, unwelcomed, uninvited forces occupying your body. Dispel judgment and criticism, dispel doubt.
Breathing in
and breathing out
Before this breath, this birth, who were you? Before this death, that death, who were you? Before this body, that battle, this spell, that spill, this grief, that grave, who were you?
(03:03):
As Black folks in, of, across the diaspora, a slave ship in shadow on the horizon, we are never far from the sea or the deep end of the ocean.
Breathing in
and breathing out
In your mind’s eye, in your body’s eye, find yourself at the edge of the sea. Physically, psychically, spiritually, turn your body toward the water. Looking out around the bay, along the shoreline, the bluffs, the tide pools, wherever you are, see who was there before you arrived. See the first peoples gathered at the ocean’s altar. See the people who were there before them, and before them, and before them, before them, and before them. Extend a greeting, form a gesture of gratitude with your hands.
(04:20):
See your brothers and sisters turning toward the water too, your cousins and the whole crew. See all your friends, the day ones who knew you when. See your people: biological, given, chosen. Old loves, lost loves, your last love. Form a gesture of gratitude with your hands.
See your family gathering at the edge, the living, the dying, and the dead. See the ancestors rising from the seabed. Notice any grief that is surfacing, and give it a name. Give it a shape, a color, a texture. Give it a sound. What needs to be heard in this moment? What silences are ready to be spoken? Say everything. When you are ready to say goodbye, say goodbye. Form a gesture of gratitude with your hands.
(05:58):
Breathing in
and breathing out
Allow this moment to pass like all others before. Waves returning to shore, rivers returning to the ocean. Each breath is an opportunity to love again.
Breathing in
and breathing out

As a material element in the origin story of Black Americans, the ocean, and water more broadly, holds psychic and spiritual dimensions of both suffering and survival. Inspired by Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence, this restorative meditation invites you to settle, sink in, and return to the edge of the sea.

Angela Hennessy is an Oakland-based artist and survivor of gun violence. Tending to themes of loss and liberation, her work draws upon mourning practices that activate hair as a material exchanged between the living and the dead. She has received awards from the Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco Artadia, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Hennessy is an associate professor at California College of the Arts, where she teaches courses on visual and cultural narratives of death in contemporary art.