To Flow Like a River: Moudi Sbeity on Stuttering, Spirituality, and Self-Discovery
Fluency isn't perfect, uninterrupted speech. It's speech that moves like a river, gurgling and bubbling and singing along the way... A river, if we listen closely, sings precisely because of what's in the way. – Moudi Sbeity
Some conversations stay with you long after they've ended. And every so often, you meet someone who offers profound, soul-imprinting wisdom nearly every time you speak with them. This has been my experience with Moudi Sbeity: a Lebanese-American author, poet, counselor, stutterer, and spiritual seeker.
I first met Moudi when he came to Colorado Speaks (a CU Boulder summer camp for teens who stutter) as an adult mentor. He struck me instantly as a supercommunicator—someone who listens intensely, synthesizes even the most divergent of ideas, and then offers up a pearl of fundamental truth that leaves the rest of us sitting in quiet, self-reflective silence.
At camp, Moudi had been listening to a group of teens express to their parents what they wished they knew about stuttering. A concerned father had responded with some frustration. If backing off on prompts and listening patiently was the best way to support his child, what could he actually do to help? It felt too passive. Moudi offered a story in reply. He told the group that his own parents had once expressed the same frustration, and that their attempts at "helping," especially in public, had only ever heightened his anxiety around stuttering. So later in life, he gave them something else instead. He told them, "When I'm in a block, that's your cue to breathe." It gave them something tangible and active to do, and it quietly turned the tables on the advice so often given to people who stutter, to "just breathe." Maybe it wasn't the person stuttering who needed to breathe. Maybe it was the listener. The advice landed as a real solution for the concerned father, one I later found myself passing along to parents in my own practice.
Later, I would be gifted with many other Moudi-isms that helped shape my own thinking about stuttering and stuttering therapy. Sitting on my back deck together, Moudi told me about a poem called "Fluent," by John O'Donohue, that fundamentally changed the way he felt about stuttering. He also told me the three things he shares with all his counseling clients: the fact of impermanence, that no future is free from trouble, and that our authentic self doesn't truly exist because it's always in flux. These echo core Buddhist teachings on impermanence and non-self. Once we can accept them, Moudi says, we're set free to flow more effortlessly, and to wake up to life's natural unfolding.
There is something I find deeply aspirational about Moudi's steady, peaceful way of moving through the world. I came to learn that he left war-torn Lebanon at 18, and that he faced discrimination not only as a stutterer but also as a gay man in Utah advocating for same-sex marriage rights. Despite this difficult path, he meets even life's toughest challenges with a softness that's hard to describe. For some time, I've wanted to share the gift of a Moudi conversation with the wider stuttering community, and a blog post felt like the best way to do that.
What follows is an interview based on the past conversations Moudi and I have shared. If you're left wanting more, you're in luck! He has two books coming out this month. One is a poetry collection, Alhamdulillah Anyway, and the other a memoir, Habibi Means Beloved. He'll also be traveling the country to give readings over the next year. You can learn more about his books and event schedule at: moudisbeity.com.
Allegra Ludwig (AL): You were born in the United States but raised in Lebanon, spending your childhood years there before war with Israel would eventually change everything. Before we talk about that departure, take me back to being a kid who stuttered in Lebanon. What memories stand out to you? Was there a point where you first understood yourself as a child who stutters?
Moudi Sbeity (MS): There is no definitive point at which I realized or understood myself as someone who stutters. It was always there, much like a hand or foot is always there, and you don't one day realize that you are a person with hands and feet (or a person without hands and feet, if that is the case). As far as I can remember, I've always stuttered. But there's an interesting caveat here: I don't remember my childhood before the age of ten. My mother tells me I started stuttering by age ten. There is video evidence at a younger age where I don't stutter. So I'm left to wonder if some traumatic event caused it, or if the expression of that gene (as we know it is about 80% hereditary) lay dormant till then, and then the fact of it was so severe that I forgot everything that preceded it. I've since let go of trying to reason or explain why. Understanding why something happened doesn't change the fact of it, though it may provide us comfort in having a clear narrative. The fact is that I stuttered, still do, and this shaped me. I remember being an introspective kid who paid attention to words and language, to how sound shaped space, and how what we say creates the conditions we live in. My memories are mostly of an inner awareness looking out, an observer rather than a participant, someone who was met with this silencing condition and had to then figure out and make sense of who I am in relation to others, others who built their identities on what they said and how they spoke.
AL: You've shared something with me that's stayed with me since the first time you said it: that you eventually told your parents, "when I'm stuck in a block, you breathe." Can you take me back to that moment? What was the dynamic with your parents around your stuttering that led you there, and what shifted once you gave them that invitation? That line has been something I've passed along to other parents who express fear around their child's stuttering, and I'm curious what it did for your own relationship with them.
MS: At some point in my training as a counselor and study of mindfulness and meditation, I saw the wisdom of slowing down to breathe. As people who stutter, we are often told to calm down, relax, breathe. The frustration with this is that it bypasses our struggle with a desire by the other, usually a parent or a teacher, to fix or solve our stutter. So it is natural that we get angry with this, and write off the good advice. I certainly did. Whenever an adult would ask me to slow and breathe, I got upset, thinking they don't know what it's like, and anyways, a stutter can't be fixed. This is also true. But we can change our relationship to stuttering. For me, rushing through a block or a repetition is an internal fight against time and the expectation of a society that values efficiency and lacks patience. I inherited the stress of feeling that if I did take time with stuttering, then it would annoy other people, or that they would not listen to me. In some cases, this is true, though other people's reactions are outside of my control. What if then, just like I do when meditating, I watched my breath and slowed down to pay attention to not just what I was saying, but how I was saying it? What if I practiced interoception, or inner awareness, of how a stutter manifested inside of me? And further still, what would change if I invited the other person, through disclosure, to breathe with me? This changed the whole experience. I say something along these lines: “I am a person who stutters. This means I speak slower, I may block, repeat words or phrases, click my tongue, or exhibit other characteristics as I try to get my words out. My invitation for you is to breathe with me through it, and while you're at it, send me your support through the ground. I'll feel it.” Now the person I am talking to is in on it. They are informed about what is happening, they have something to do when I block or repeat, and it gives them the feeling that they are helping, as well as an invitation to relax themselves. More so, since I am at ease and comfortable with myself, they are too. The adults were right in instructing me to breathe, just not for the right reasons, and forgot to breathe with me themselves.
Later in life, after I was practiced and more at ease with my own stutter, I brought this invitation to breathe to my parents. I don’t remember the exact moment, or what happened then, but they’ve been much more patient with me since. I feel listened to and heard by them, without the rush of having to say things perfectly or quickly.
AL: What do you remember about the actual decision to leave Lebanon, and what did that departure feel like, leaving your family and everything familiar at 18, in the middle of a war? Looking back, do you see any connection between that difficult journey and the evolution of your stutter at that time?
MS: The decision to leave was a difficult one. Outwardly I was defiant against leaving, inwardly I was praying for it. I both wanted to stay alongside my family and country during this formative and trying time, and I felt the promise and call of liberties in America as a young queer person. My mother insisted that I take the opportunity, especially since this was the plan all along, and I would have moved to the United States in the following years given that I am an American citizen. I write about this in my memoir, in the opening chapter and paragraph, how I grappled with my privilege while my family ran for cover. Stuttering added a layer of hardship. I had to give my name many times to Navy personnel and other folks helping me navigate the many checkpoints of evacuation. I feared they thought I stuttered as a traumatic response to war, and so elicited unwanted sympathy and pity. Coming to the US provided me with more resources to address stuttering, and for that I am grateful. Though awareness of stuttering has grown even in Lebanon now, I find more comfort in speaking English today than in Arabic.
AL: You are now part of an adult stuttering support group and have also mentored teens who stutter at Colorado Speaks Camp, the same camp where we first met. What was it like the first time you were in a room with other people who stutter? What does it mean to hold both roles, peer and mentor, at once, and what do you recognize in the teens that you recognize from your younger self? What insights have you gained from the adult group?
MS: The first time I had a friend who stuttered was about two years ago. I'm 38 now. The first person I met who stuttered was when I was a kid, and the adults spoke of him as if he were unintelligent. He was older, and we never spoke to each other. And the first time I met someone else who stuttered as a young adult was in a men's group, but I shied away from him too. It took me a while to accept myself as someone who stutters, to even entertain talking to others who stuttered. The big shift happened for me when I decided to attend the 2022 NSA conference in Austin. I remember walking into the reception area and hearing all these dysfluent voices bubble into the air. It felt like a homecoming, and yet I was still shy to speak to people. This is how deeply experiences of otherization and shame can root into us. Now I love going to adult groups and camps for young stutterers because I love listening to people who stutter. It is comforting, and in the process, I don't feel the need to deploy all my skills to not stutter. I can just speak as the words come without effort to shape fluency.
I especially delight in being around teens who stutter. Offering the kind of attention, compassion, and love to a younger version of myself is healing for me too. I remember being told to calm down or slow down when I was younger, and I learned to repress my expression overall, so that any kind of excitement came with a dose of shame. I now recognize the excitement teens have in expressing their ideas and thoughts, and love joining them in the experience. From my time spent with adults who stutter, I keep witnessing how deeply shaped we become by early childhood experiences, and how the path forward with stuttering (in addition to learning techniques) is in cultivating confidence and acceptance, even celebration, in the ways we talk. At the same time, we must find a middle ground in not letting pride take us too far into excusing our behavior, nor becoming ashamed, but learning how to be at ease with who we are in the world.
AL: You have built a life and career around language as an author, a poet, and now a counselor. Was that a deliberate choice, or did stuttering pull you toward these paths in a way you didn't expect? How has your relationship to that career shifted as your relationship to your own stutter has changed?
MS: Coming to this place in my life was both a choice and a pull toward a path I did not expect. I chose to follow and trust where my heart was leading. This is a choice we can exercise in most anything: to open toward our experience or close against it. I opened toward the path of writing, poetry, and counseling. Before that I was operating and running a restaurant I started, alongside a food packaging company. But something in me, a clear voice, kept on telling me to walk away and follow a desire and interest in writing. I naively believed that I could write a book in a year and get published, so I found myself at a juncture of not knowing what to do with my life after I left the restaurant. I don't regret the decision though. Pursuing writing changed my life, and I now write as a daily practice, it's the first thing I do when I wake up. It is a way to meet myself and discover what is true. When I trained as a writing facilitator, I saw writing in community with others around poetry established a ground of intimacy and belonging. So I followed the next natural step, pursuing a master's degree in clinical mental health counseling, with a research emphasis on how writing and poetry are effective therapeutic and mindfulness interventions. I've since graduated, and now work as a contemplative counselor with folks from all walks of life (including people who stutter) on how to come to terms with the conditions of our life, inquire into our experience, and reorient our relational framework to ourselves and one another. Engaging in this work myself helped me see the gifts of stuttering, and how we can help others from the wisdom of our own wounds.
AL: You have told me that your stutter, once very strong, shifted into something profoundly easier after you read John O'Donohue's poem "Fluent." Can you walk me through that moment? Where you were, what the poem said to you, and what changed afterward? What does "fluency" mean to you now, and do you think the shift was really about your speech, or was it something deeper?
MS: I love this question, for the weaving of poetry of course, and for the invitation to address something deeper. In my worldview, there is always something deeper. Not to veer too much into the mythopoetic or mystical and spiritual experiences, but I find that once we can sink beneath surface illusions and appearances, we find a depth congruent with our experience which empowers and humbles us. This is the power of poetry, after all.
The first time I heard John O'Donohue's poem "Fluent" I was at the River Writing table in Salt Lake City. Four short lines changed my life. O'Donohue, as far as I've read, did not stutter nor did he talk or write about stuttering or people he knew that stuttered. So what did he have to say about fluency? The poem reads:
I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.
It all made sense then. Now there is a lot I can dive into in exploring this potent poem, but here is what mostly stands out. A river just keeps flowing, its fluency is in the surrender of its flow. And a river, if we listen closely, sings precisely because of what's in the way. This redefined fluency for me, not as perfect, uninterrupted speech, but as speech that moves like a river, gurgling and bubbling and singing along the way. The something deeper here is both spiritual instruction on how to live, and how to be with my speech. What was I resisting beneath the stutter? Where could I loosen my grip or attachment to ideals and outcomes? How can I be with the natural procession of things, rather than dictate my will over the path of my life? As I wrote earlier, our two choices are to open or close. Here I can open toward the experience of stuttering, and then I can be curious about how the words form, what is said, where it might be leading me.
AL: You were once married to a Utah state senator, and your shared advocacy helped legalize same-sex marriage in several states, a period that made you far more public facing than you may have chosen for yourself. What was that experience like, and did your relationship to your own voice change under that kind of visibility?
MS: Who would have thought that coming to the United States included this fated whirlwind? The way in which all this unfolded was beyond my imagination. I detail it all in the memoir. Stuttering certainly added extra stress, especially when surrounded by cameras on days we appeared in court or hosted fundraising events. One moment stands out especially. My now ex and I were invited onto the Rachel Maddow show and Democracy Now. We woke at 5am to get ready and drove to a green room at a local news station. I have difficulty speaking, so I let Derek do most of the talking, if I remember correctly. Being on TV terrified me. I've since had more experience and don't feel as intimidated, but there is something there about the rush to fill in air time. I didn't address my stutter much then, nor disclose as often, still ashamed of it and believing it somehow made me less than. I wish I had the confidence I have today. It would certainly have added a richer layer to our case.
AL: You hold a contemplative psychology degree from Naropa University and work from an acceptance-based approach with your own counseling clients who stutter. You have shared with me that there are three things you tell everyone you work with: that all humans die, that no future is free from trouble, and that the authentic self doesn't exist. Can you unpack those three ideas for us, why you lead with them, and how they apply to stuttering specifically?
MS: At first this all sounds grim. People seek therapy or counseling to get relief from their ailments. But what if our freedom is found in coming to terms with the givens of life? Accepting these things doesn't mean we abandon joy or love or any other desirable feeling. Only that we hold all this together. These three terms are rooted in Buddhist practice. The Buddha famously taught that the two foundational truths are impermanence and the "emptiness" of self. Emptiness may sound vague here, or a bit nihilistic. What is meant is that the self is not separate from anything else, so that an identity of "I" is inherently empty since it is interdependent with others.
When someone reaches out to me, they are often dealing with accepting a difficult loss, an arising problem, or this larger than life desire to become someone true and certain. But if impermanence is a truth and the self is empty, then resisting such experience will lead to suffering. So, can we see and acknowledge each day of our lives that we just don't know when death will come for us or our loved ones? This is one doorway to gratitude and presence. Can we also see that because of impermanence and change, problems or challenges will most always arise? Then we can admit our insanity in seeking perfection rather than practicing and acquiring the skills to effectively address what we already know we must face. And lastly, if things always change, and if who I am is inter-reliant on the environment and the people around me, then why chase an ideal version of who I believe I must be? Then I can practice authenticity as the ability to meet each moment with full honesty and awareness, not as someone fixed, but as someone who is discerning and present.
These may not all apply to stuttering in a specific way, though by growing our tolerance to be with life's certainties and uncertainties, we also grow our tolerance for being with uncomfortable experiences. There are some unique perspectives that stuttering can provide. For example, I stutter to varying degrees of severity in different situations and with different people. I am changing along with my environment, and that tells me something about myself and how I am impacted by my perception of a person or a situation. So it makes sense then that when anxious or hurried, I might stutter more. It's not that anxiety causes stuttering, but it heightens or exacerbates the experience of stuttering itself.
AL: You have two books arriving in the next month, a poetry collection, Alhamdulillah Anyway, and a memoir, Habibi Means Beloved. What did it mean to write about your life in both forms at once? Did you discover anything about your own story in the process of putting it into words, and is there a passage or poem you'd want to share here?
MS: Writing is a healing practice, an inquiry practice, and a mindfulness practice. I could go on about this (I am working on a book on how poetry and writing are contemplative practices to awaken the heart), but I'll keep to this metaphor, that of an archaeologist. Our experiences layer into us, and if not processed, they compress and depress and become heavy. So the pen is my digging tool, and the page is where I discover the geology of experience, as well as map my inner landscape. From then, I can rewrite the narrative, not by changing what happened, but telling it in a different way. Writing these books was the way I knew how to deal with coming to terms with the events of my life in the case of the memoir, and it was how I could process the genocide in Gaza, the war in Lebanon, and the daily barrage of terrible news. How does anyone make sense of violence? Poetry here becomes a kind of alchemy in which we transmute grief into a shared practice that lightens the load. Writing also helped me become intimate with my own fluency of expression. It influenced my stuttering and the way I think by giving me the confidence in not just saying what I want to say, but knowing what I want to say. Writing helps us grapple with big ideas so that we could then talk about them.
I'll share a poem here that was sung by the Ars Nova choir, The Poet Wonders:
AL: Do you still hold any fear around stuttering, even now? Given the three truths you teach, impermanence, difficulty, and the absence of a fixed self, what do you hope readers take away from your writings?
MS: I do still hold fears around stuttering. It is only human to feel fear and trepidation. The point isn't to become free of fear, rather a companion to it. I'm thinking of the etymology of the word courage, which means to stand by your own heart. What good does it do to say I am fearless or fully healed, and who would believe it anyway? Acknowledging the three truths mentioned before does not magically resolve our life. But they do help orient us into a truer perspective. So yes, I feel fear when introducing myself in new situations, when wanting to make a good impression, when an opportunity comes up where I can share myself and I want it to go as well as possible. I fear being rejected, because some people will reject me, or judge me, and that stings. What can I do then? I acknowledge the fear or the hurt, I place a hand to my heart, I remind myself of the gift of impermanence, and the necessity of being true and honest. If I close off to my experience and pretend that I am not hurt or afraid, then I deny myself the opportunity to learn from it. I hope readers recognize that there is no need to prove our worthiness or pretend to be fearless. I hope they also recognize that it is possible to find belonging with every step. The truth of the matter is that we simply are. Beyond that, I hope these books and my writing serve as guides for someone who decisively takes a step inward.
AL: Is there anything you wanted to be asked that I haven't asked you? Final words of wisdom for fellow stutterers who may be struggling with the idea of acceptance around their stutter?
MS: Your questions were thorough! Thank you for being so attentive.
I'll leave fellow stutterers with this poem I wrote addressing stuttering as a form of sacred divinity. If we were met with God or the Great Mother or All That Is, as Moses was, surely our lips would tremble at the door of truth. How could we utter what is larger than us and unknown?
Divine Repetition
Imagine now that the tremor on my lips
pulse from God's breath.
That the sound of interrupted speech more tenderly
reflects the mothering of some pregnant
possibility. That in truth a stutter is none
other than the heart stumbling in praise
of what stands before it. There is so much
to love, and so many ways to tell of it.
Let wonder flutter in your throat.
Let joy utter its resounding affirmation.
Let your voice bend towards its own
holy expression.
To you, to the one who's spent a lifetime
clutching a mouthful of grief—
remember, the sacred makes hesitant
the tongue, its presence worthy of
divine repetition.
Moudi Sbeity
Author of Habibi Means Beloved
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