The One You Feed - How to Find Connection and Where You Belong with Sebene Selassie

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

In this episode, Sebene Selassie shares insights on how to find connection and where you belong through spirituality. She discusses the concept of belonging as a sense of ease and connection on both social and spiritual levels. Sebene’s personal journey of feeling like an outsider and her search for wholeness and connection make her perspectives relatable and insightful. Her personal experiences and teachings offer a profound perspective on integrating interconnectedness into daily life and navigating the challenges of modern society. In this episode, you will be able to: Embrace ethical teachings for a fulfilling modern life Overcome unconscious bias through mindfulness for greater understanding Cultivate belonging and connection through spirituality for a richer life Integrate body awareness to deepen meditation practices Harness the power of gratitude for personal growth and happiness To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Honoring of life really becomes about being clear about what our values are and making those decisions with the commitment to the least harm possible. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. Instead of what we do, we think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure?

And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We hope you'll enjoy this episode from the Archive.

Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Sebené Selassie, a teacher, author, and speaker who explores the themes of belonging and identity through meditation, creativity, and spirituality. She is also a teacher on the 10% Happier Meditation app. Sebené began studying Buddhism 30 years ago and is a three-time cancer survivor of stage 3 and 4 cancer. Her book is You Belong, A Call for Connection. Hi, Sabine. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me. It's a real honor to have you on. We're going to be discussing your book, You Belong, A Call for Connection. But before we do, we'll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.

And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second and she looks up at her grandmother and she says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, I really appreciated this question. I gave it some thought and in reflecting,

I realized that I might've had a different answer in the past that really thought of those so-called bad qualities and that bad wolf as something that I needed to kind of excise or eliminate, something that was not a part of me, you know? And I really take it to heart that the parable says that these are both inside us. And as I've come to maybe hopefully more maturation in my process and in my practice, you know, recognizing that I don't need to reject any part of myself and I can still recognize what needs to be nurtured and what needs to be maybe soothed or transformed or, you know, worked with in a different way. Cause I've really come to appreciate everything that's brought me to this moment, including my so-called negative traits or bad qualities or the bad wolf, and really come to

appreciate how I might not have even gotten to understanding how much I want to support and encourage the good parts if I hadn't had to deal with the bad parts, right? So even just that good and bad starts to be thrown into question. And it really becomes about really understanding my values and living in an integrity and alignment with this process of waking up. So it's a profound parable because it seems simple and just kind of identifying these good and bad qualities, but it really leads us into a full exploration of what it means to be human. Yeah, I love that. That's a great and nuanced take on it. I've joked before that almost I would

rather say the skillful and unskillful wolf, but that doesn't make for a very good parable. Kind of loses some of its edge. But like you said, one of the things I love about the parable is it does not say we have to starve the bad wolf. It doesn't say we have to lock him up. We don't have to do anything to the bad wolf. It's just, let's give a little bit more attention. But I also think you're right, that I like that idea of, I think, if I look at my own life, and so much of this show has been me talking about all the things that I've messed up in my life and how those things have led me to where I am, you know, how our pain and our mistakes and our problems is that idea of, yeah, understanding and soothing the bad wolf.

Yeah. And it just makes it so much more human, relatable. It gives this potential and possibility that I think is really powerful. Yeah. So something I'm going to be doing a little more often is ask you, the listener, to reflect on what you're hearing. We strongly believe that knowledge is power, but only if combined with action and integration. So before we move on, I'd like to ask you, what's coming up for you as you listen to this? Are there any things you're currently doing that are feeding your bad wolf that might make sense to remove? Or any things you could do to feed your good wolf that you're not currently doing? So if you have the headspace for it, I'd

love if you could just pause for a second and ask yourself, what's one thing I could do today or tonight to feed my good wolf? Whatever your thing is, a really useful strategy can be having something external, a prompt or a friend or a tool that regularly nudges you back towards awareness and intentionality. For the past year, I've been sending little good wolf reminders to some of my friends and community members. Just quick little SMS messages two times per week that give them a little bit of wisdom and remind them to pause for a second and come off autopilot. If you want, I can send them to you too. I do it totally for free and people seem to really love them.

Just drop your information at oneufeed.net slash SMS and I can send them to you. It's totally free and if you end up not liking the little reminders, you can easily opt out. That's oneufeed.net slash SMS. And now back to the episode. There are so many places I could jump in here because your book has so many wonderful things. But I think I'm just going to start at the beginning, which is to talk about belonging. And I guess I was hoping maybe we could start by having you define what you mean by belonging in this case. Yeah, you know, I start the book kind of in that classic thing where you define something by looking at its opposite. And so I talk about the fact that I am a belonging expert because I didn't feel like I belonged for so long. And so for me, belonging really begins to fill out a sense of wholeness that I didn't feel as a young person and even more recently in my life

that I always felt like an outsider, either culturally or racially or socially, or there are ways that I felt like I was not enough, didn't look a certain way or have enough things or had enough success, or maybe I was too much in certain spaces. Like I was too political or, you know, too disruptive to certain spaces or places or communities. So, you know, belonging was something I was searching for and feeling a lot of times that I didn't have. So on a social level, like a human level, belonging is that sense of ease and wellness and sense of connection that we feel with people. And I'm also talking about belonging on sort of a more

absolute or spiritual level, which is that feeling of not being separate from anything. So from parts of ourselves, from other people, from nature, and really from all of reality. So talking about both the relative sense of belonging and also this spiritual or absolute sense of belonging. You say that belonging is not dependent on things being as we want them to be. You list some things off. It's not necessary to achieve some definition of success or to behave like everyone else or to have the perfect partner or be the perfect size or shape. You even say the forces of oppression don't have to magically disappear in order for us to belong. Yeah. And so, you know, a lot of the book I spend kind of

exploring what are often called in Buddhism, the two truths or the paradox of the two truths, this absolute sense of belonging that I was speaking of, which is the truth of reality that, you know, modern physics and ancient wisdom tell us that there's no separation. So even on a just energetic level, we're all vibrating energy patterns. And that's been shown to be true, even if our senses tell us otherwise. And so we belong no matter what, you know, that fundamental sense of belonging is a fact that it's undeniable. And then there's also the relative truth of all those lists of things you just read, and including the forces of separation. So I kind of repeat this two sentences over and over again,

that we are not separate, and we are not the same. And navigating those two truths is really the work of belonging. Yes, I don't know who your teacher was. I know who you said your teacher's teacher was Joko Beck. So I know you have a Zen background. I'm in the Zen tradition primarily. And that absolute and relative is such a Zen idea. It shows up there so often, whether we refer to it that way as absolute and relative, or we refer to it as form and emptiness. I think it's such an interesting thing to talk about because you actually say, how do we acknowledge difference and inequities and also hold a firm conviction that fundamentally we are all irrevocably interconnected?

And I think this is such a question I get a lot when I'm working with people in coaching. We start to wander into that absolute truth or we start to wander into the idea that like everything we're seeing is our perspective. And people will go, yeah, but what about Donald Trump? What about this act of violence? And it feels like there's never a very good answer, except to say, we kind of have to hold both these truths. But do you have a better way to say it than that? Because I feel like I always fall short. Well, you know, it's a process, because we're all falling short all the time, because there's no perfect balance of meeting both, not in most humans I've met anyways.

And, you know, for me, it's really navigating where our imbalances may be and particularly where our aversions and grasping may be, especially when they are quite subtle, right? So we can have a tendency to want to bypass discomfort. And there's a lot of discomfort with the relative reality because it is uncomfortable. You know, it's painful to witness what we're still doing to each other in this day and age, you know, in the most obscene ways. There's a war raging right now in Ethiopia where I was born that is based on the most inane delusions of separation that you could imagine. You know, any delusion of separation is delusion, but the lengths that people will go to kind of cling to that idea that there are these fundamental differences that require violence and aggression. But, you know, those are sort of the very

egregious acts of separation. But, you know, we don't even want to look at kind of the anger that comes up in response to our neighbors or to our family members. And so we can kind of lean towards that absolute of we're all one, or it's all emptiness as a way to actually avoid that there's a subtle aversion in our practice. And then on the other side, you know, we can cling to those relative realities as if they're true, true, and, and more true. And the thing about this paradox is they're both true. It doesn't say that one is truthier, you know, so it becomes a really moment to moment, subtle awareness of, you know, which one we're clinging to, which one we're avoiding. That's how it's been for me. Yeah.

I'm a big fan of the middle way. It's one of those teachings that has meant so much to me. And we tend to think of the middle way as, well, we just sort of split the difference. But the other way that the middle way, I think, manifests is you hold these two extremes. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, that's great. On an absolute level, it's all interconnected. It's all one. It's all essentially fine. And on a absolute level, it's all interconnected. It's all one. It's all essentially fine.

And on a relative level, it's none of those things. And I have to, and I talk about this in the book, that separation begets domination, these dominating patterns where we cling to being right. And there's some way in which I like that holding the extremes where you really can't be right if you're sort of in the extremes of both camps because you're recognizing the multitudes of realities along that whole spectrum in between, right? Instead of trying to hold to some particular balance in the middle. So I really like that. While we're talking about this doctrine of the two truths between the absolute and the relative, let's just talk for a moment about the absolute. I love how you mentioned that both sort of our indigenous wisdom, our religious traditions of all sorts, and modern science both point us, you say, to the truth of our belonging. You know, they both point to the fact that separation is a myth. For you, how has that gone from an intellectual understanding? Because again, if we study science closely enough, we

sort of, yeah, you do arrive at this point where you're like, well, yeah, I guess, you know, it is all energy that's just swirling around in all kinds of different ways, whether, you know, more condensed or slower, but that's all that's happening. How has that happened for you experientially? Has it largely been through meditation practice that you've had some of those maybe more experiences of oneness? experience in many different ways, you know, so subtle sensations to strong sensations to recognizing, you know, tones in the body that map to the chakras and all types of experiences that many people probably had. I think my earliest experiences were through psychedelics when I was in college. And like a lot of people opening kind of a door to the mystical

and the awareness that, wait a second, there's more going on here than the ordinary senses reveal. And so that is a really, I think, powerful window into the nature of reality. We're in the right circumstances and conditions that allow for that. And then, you know, I think also, unless sort of, let's say, mystical and meditative experiences, or not less meditative, but less kind of typically what people would think were spiritual awakenings, there can be really powerful mental and emotional understanding of this, you know, something as simple as being on retreat and reaching such a point of stillness, that there's an awareness that when we're truly present and mindful and with our sensory experience that we

can be flooded with love and connection, you know, feelings of witnessing the same room and the same people in a completely different way. And so it doesn't have to be like an energetic body experience or out of body experience or the walls melting or that it can be just really, um, you know, a love for others and people experience this on dance floors, you know, at festivals or in nature, at the beach with their children, with their pets. So it's also tuning ourselves to what that is actually speaking to and kind of waking up our antenna for that. There's a phrase that you use in the book that I want to talk about because I think this is so insidious in modern life. Although

I actually don't think it's a modern phenomenon. It's just maybe been turned up a little bit. And you call it compare and compete. Say a little bit more about that. You know, I connected to this Buddhist teaching of mana, M-A-N-A, which is a Pali word that means to measure. And one of the things I love about that teaching, as I heard it from Joseph Goldstein, is that mana is one of the very last fetters or, you know, these bad wolf qualities in us. It's one of the very last ones in the classical teachings. It said to release before awakening. So basically that measuring mind, it's often called the comparing mind. It's there till the end. And I always want to start with that because

it's something that we have to work with and get used to. So we can get into like fix it and solve it mode that this is something to get rid of, you know, kind of like the bad wolf, but it's actually something that we have to acknowledge is part of being human. And we don't want to feed it. But you know, we have to learn to kind of live with it inside us. And it really is that measuring, you know, we literally measure everything, there's a part of our mind that's constantly in that mode. And what's really fascinating about it is that it said that it manifests as both an idea of better than and less than and equal to. So it's not just about superiority or inferiority. There's sort of an equality fixation that we have as well, which, for those of us who are interested in issues of justice and equity,

you know, we really have to look at that because it's still fueling a sense of separation. And so it's still navigating that paradox when we work with it. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting teaching too, that better than, worse than, and equal. I think I've shared this experience on the show before, but I had this experience of, I went to Los Angeles and I was interviewing somebody and I went to their apartment and they had a really nice apartment in the Hollywood Hills. It was beautiful. And I stepped on the balcony and I had this moment of looking down at everybody down there. And I was thinking, you know, this guy has it all. Like, look at all those people down there. You know, it's,

it's, you know, sort of looking down on. And then I had this moment, I glanced over my shoulder, and I saw these houses up the hill. And I was like, oh, wait a minute. Like, this guy's just got an apartment. And in that moment, I just got this sense. And the sense was, whether I'm comparing up or I'm comparing down, I'm not connecting. And it was that sense that the way out of this was to be connected. Yeah, I really see it in my life too, in terms of just the way our society is structured, so that we often aren't in contact with people that are that different from us, right? So we see that in terms of the lack of racial integration, or class integration, that there can be that measuring just because society has structured

it that way. And I've really looked at, you know, the lack of people kind of outside of, and I have a pretty multiracial group of friends, but I don't have a kind of group of friends that spans the education spectrum or somewhat a wealth spectrum. But I often notice that I feel a sense of separation from my friends that are way, way wealthier than me and feelings of guilt or that kind of privilege paranoia can crop up with friends who have a lot less than me. And so just starting to see how it plays out in our own lives. And then we start creating these bubbles where we feel safer, maybe because we don't have to deal with that comparison so much and reckon with it. Yep. I find it so interesting that that phrase keeping up with the Joneses, right, comes from,

you know, really comparing yourself also, but just to the person right next door. It's so endemic. But you say in the book, and I love this, you say, we hustle relentlessly to be better, smarter, healthier, cooler, thinner, richer, funnier, prettier, calmer, and woker. The er at the end of these words is comparison and competition. And I love that, that idea, like anytime you've got that prefix at the end, is it a prefix, a suffix? I don't know. Those two letters at the end, you're in comparison mode. Yes. Yeah. And you know, to not beat ourselves up about any of this. Of course.

One of my favorite statements ever, and it's in the book, is one from Krishnamurti where he says, you think you're thinking your thoughts, you're not. You're thinking the culture's thoughts. And just to realize that this patterning and conditioning is really just bred into us, literally, you know, epigenetically, some of these anxieties and ways that we bring in these fears about the outside or others or certain experiences, that's passed down. It's either passed down genetically, or it's passed down culturally or socially or in our families. And, you know, it's really obvious. I spent a year working in refugee camps in West Africa, and that was the longest I'd spent

outside of New York City in over a decade. I lived in New York at that time. This was back in like 2003. And when I came back, it was so wild. I got on the subway and I could see all the fashion trends that were popular that year. All the women were wearing the same kind of boots and all the guys had like a particular kind of haircut or facial hair. And there was this way in which I could just see this, how does that happen? You know, how does suddenly everyone pick up, but it's, it's in this comparison. Oh, she looks cool. And she has that. Maybe I should get that, or this is in this magazine or that celebrity. And so it shows up in the most mundane ways. The devil wears Prada. I don't know if you've seen that film, but you know, the certain color blue that everyone has suddenly to really harmful ways where the comparison and competition leads to everything from eating disorders to self-harm to suicide to much more harmful, also systemic oppression. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you two? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really. No really.

Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. That is such a great quote. We're not thinking our thoughts. We're thinking the culture's thoughts. And I think one of the best things about meditation for me was when I finally got over worrying that there were thoughts happening, feeling like that was bad, to suddenly really sit back in a position of curiosity and be like, what is happening in here?

Where do these thoughts keep coming from? I call them mine, but they're not mine in any sense that I can say I chose them exactly. I mean, meditation shows us that right away. Like, well, I'm not choosing to think or not think. And if you go a level deeper, as you're saying, you start to realize like, I didn't choose these thoughts. They are the culture's thoughts, or they are my parents' thoughts. They're this combination of all these things. But that's a really freeing, at least it was for me, a really freeing realization. Like, oh, wait a minute. I don't have to take these so seriously. Yeah, it's freeing.

And it's also so powerful for what ails us as a society, because it really allows us to tackle some of the divisions and some of the inequities without those feelings of guilt or accusation. And I like this saying that I've heard now from many people that it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility. That is a very well articulated phrase. Exactly. It's not my fault, but it is my responsibility. You talk a lot about implicit bias. You told a story, I think it was with Dan Harris, about being at a hospital and meeting a surgeon. Could you share that story? Oh, with my sister? Yeah. Yeah. So my sister's intellectually disabled, so I'm her guardian. She's older than me. And so I tend to a lot of

her medical decisions and she lives in a wonderful community. She needed surgery. So it was part of the process in terms of getting that set up, but I didn't go to the initial meetings with the surgeon, but her house leader was telling me that, you know, the surgeon was really great, that she explained everything to Funnet who doesn't have a big vocabulary or, you know, an intellectual understanding of what's happening, but she's very emotionally mature and she was, you know, feeling comfortable with the surgeon. So she lives in upstate New York, and so I went up for the day of the surgery,

and the hospital is pretty white. It's a fairly rural area, and everyone in the pre-op room was white except for one Filipino nurse. There were white anesthesiologists, white assisting surgeon, and the other nurses, and then the doctor came in, Dr. Laborde, and she was a young, dark-skinned black woman. And I was completely surprised because even though I knew she was a woman, because they had been referring to her. So I just naturally assumed that she was white.

And by naturally, I mean, you know, I was thinking the culture's thoughts that we hear doctor and we might think male, but maybe we've evolved beyond that to think, okay, it could be a woman. But, you know, even though I've had black doctors, I grew up in DC and, you know, I was fortunate to have doctors that look like me growing up that I just sort of absorbed this idea that this doctor was going to be a white doctor. And I was just so, you know, embarrassed at my own mind, but also could, thankfully, as a mindfulness teacher and someone who, you know, a week later, I think was giving a talk on unconscious bias at a big conference for doctors and nurses, medical people working in

hospice care. And, you know, I could also laugh at myself and use this as an example that we don't have to take our thoughts personally. You know, this is not because I'm a bad person. It becomes a problem when I don't take responsibility for it and start to question that and, you know, start to work on changing those unconscious beliefs. I love that story because I think it shows that unconscious bias, even among your own race. You know, it's not my fault that I thought that, but I'm responsible for working on it. And that was a really powerful idea I got last year. We had Ibram X. Kendi on the show and was talking to him. And this idea that I can absolutely have racist thoughts. You know,

we tend to say, I'm not racist, as if it's an identity. And it was really powerful for me to realize and to start to be more comfortable with saying, that's a racist thought. I had it. Doesn't mean I'm a bad person, but I have to own up and say, that's what that was. Yeah. And you know, that's the maybe later step. You have to first even see it. And that's the hard work. Yeah. Because there has to be a willingness to see it. There has to be the openness and then there has to be the capacity. And that's really the practice, because if you're not used to even examining what's going on inside you know this stuff is just going to roll by and that's where the defensiveness comes in because you're not even seeing what people are pointing to and and this can happen in all of us and and

also even the most practiced of us that's the challenge that many practitioners of color have come up against in spiritual communities where there is the assumption that there's this attention to our thoughts and our behaviors and unconscious patterning in particular ways, but there's a whole layer that has never been examined and has never been really seen. Because, you know, we need some kind of larger awareness of what it is. You know, we don't know what it is we don't know. And so there can be thoughts, speech, actions that are actually revealing a lot of unconscious bias. And it's just not even really acknowledged by people. So listener, consider this your halfway through the episode integration reminder.

Remember, knowledge is power, but only if combined with action and integration. It can be transformative to take a minute to synthesize information rather than just ingesting it in a detached way. So let's collectively take a moment to pause and reflect. What's your one big insight so far, and how can you put it into practice in your life? Seriously, just take a second, pause the audio, and reflect. It can be so powerful to have these reminders to stop and be present, can't it? If you want to keep this momentum going that you built with this little exercise, I'd encourage you to get on our Good Wolf Reminders SMS list.

I'll shoot you two texts a week with insightful little prompts and wisdom from podcast guests. They're a nice little nudge to stop and be present in your life and they're a helpful way to not get lost in the busyness and forget what is important. You can join at OneYouFeed.net slash SMS and if you don't like them you can get off the list really easily. So far, there are over 1,172 others from the One You Feed community on the list, and we'd love to welcome

you as well. So head on over to OneYouFeed.net slash SMS, and let's feed our good wolves together. I think you do a nice job in the book of talking about that and saying, hey, you know, I don't remember exactly the way you phrase it, but it gave me a little bit of laugh. But it was basically like, hey, unconscious bias is unconscious, as in you don't know you have it. You know, the very definition of it, which is such a great way to think of it. It's like, well, yeah, I don't see what I don't see. Right. Yeah. But if you have been practicing for a really long time or, you know, you feel pretty aware of a lot of things, there can be that bypassing to bring that up again, to think that you do see what you don't see, you know, because you've seen a lot. And I like to say,

just because you've seen the nature of reality, it doesn't mean you understand anything. It's interesting because it's the same thing with cognitive bias, right? We learn about cognitive bias and yet most of us go, that's interesting. I see how my friend Bob has that and I can sure see how my wife has that, but it actually doesn't for most people penetrate like, oh, I have those, you know? So it's an interesting question to sort of be asking on a regular basis. Like I know I have them. What am I missing here? It's a curiosity. It can be a curiosity. Yeah, I often bring up the issue of fat bias or fat phobia, which is something that I have been

having my eyes open to more and more over the years because certain students and people who I met on retreat or, you know, just different folks pointed things out to me that I never knew, you know. And much like racial stereotypes or racial biases that are unfounded, you know, there are a lot of ideas we have about fat people. biases or aversions to fatness that, you know, it's really shocking where we start to really look at it in ourselves and then towards others. And it's been quite humbling, actually. You talk a lot about how belonging really starts with our body and with embodied practice. It's a term that's being used a lot these days. Embodied, say a little bit about what it means to you. For years, I really practiced mostly with my head. You know, there was a way in which I was constantly trying to figure out the practice. And there was a real disconnection from the body,

which I think is pretty common in our contemporary culture that we are a head-centered, rational-oriented, modernist people. That's such a feature of modernity, the rational and the cognitive rules. And so for me, even just starting to feel that I had a body to actually listen to the classical teachings in a deeper way, not as they were filtered through some of my teachers who kind of pushed the mind of mindfulness more than anything. And recognizing that, you know, so many of these ancient teachings are fully embodied. They're often paired with embodied practices, you know, be it Qigong or yoga or Tai Chi, or that there are ways for us to come into an experiential embodied presence that is about that energy. When you asked me about

connecting to the absolute, those are embodied experiences of it. I didn't experience it in my head. I experienced it as really starting to connect to that vibratory energy. So for me, just on a fundamental level, like being able to feel the body was a hurdle. And I really had to learn that. And I find that I'm often having to teach that to people, that they don't quite know how to actually sense the body. And that is such a powerful and really revolutionary experience that leads on to so much more awareness. So that when we start working with thoughts and emotions, and especially difficult emotions or traumatic memories, that that capacity to be in our bodies lends so much support to unraveling that and to

actually cultivating a sense of well-being. We can't really have a sense of well-being that's only in our heads. There is an ease and a wellness that comes only through the body or especially through the body. Embodiment or embodied practices, do you mean the same thing as somatic? That's another term that is used a lot. Are those interchangeable in your mind or is there a distinction there? I don't see a distinction. There might be a semantic difference that I don't know about, but for me, sometimes when people talk about embodied practices or somatic practices, they're talking about those movement practices like yoga and Tai Chi. I'm really talking about practicing meditation in stillness, but with an awareness or an attention

to the body. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts his stuntman reveals the answer and you never know who's going to drop by mr brian cranson is with us hello my friend wayne knight about jurassic park wayne knight welcome to really no really sir bless you all hello newman and you never know when howie mandel might just stop by to talk about judging really that's the opening really Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really.

Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You say for many people it can be difficult to know the difference between feeling bodily sensations and simply thinking about the body.

Is there a ground rule or a way that you have of sort of knowing whether somebody's actually feeling what's going on versus thinking about the body? How do you tell where somebody is? If it's a room full of people, I can't tell. how do you tell where somebody is? If it's a room full of people, I can't tell. So I give a lot of cues and so invite people to feel the pressure, to understand how the heat is being distributed, or, you know, if I'm having them sense their feet to notice if there's a difference between the outside of their feet and the inner feet, and can they sense just one toe at a time and, you know, sort of taking them through all these different cues that helps them to start to bring an aliveness to the sense of their understanding of the body

so that they, you know, start to notice sensation, vibration, pressure, pulsing, temperature on the surface versus temperature inside. And so giving a lot of cues, if I'm working with someone individually, you know, then I can start to ask them questions and have them reflect back to me what they're feeling so that I can understand better. And have you found that like mindfulness or meditation in general is a skill that we get better at? Yes. Yeah. You know, I'm living proof of that, that I did not have an embodied sense of myself and definitely not in my practice for years. And so the fact that, you know, as I'm talking to you, I can actually feel my feet on the floor. And that's, you know, part of my kind of fluctuating awareness as we're speaking is testament to that. Yeah. I think I have a long way to go, but I have also made progress in that area where in the beginning when it was

like, feel this, I was like, wow, like, do I have feet? I mean, I assume I do. I remember for a while I practiced with these Reggie Ray tapes. Yeah. He's great with that. And he would say like, notice the personality of your big toe. And I'd be like, what is what? I mean, first, that still makes me laugh. It just it's a funny thing to say, I think. But I got much better at body practice by practicing in the shower because there was enough going on sensation wise, enough change in variability that I actually had something I could work with.

And then over time, I got more subtle, but I have a long way to go with it. Yeah. I used to work at a meditation center and Reggie Ray's group rented it once. And he came in and it was packed with chairs and people everywhere. And the first thing he had people do was lie down on the floor. And there was really no room. And so people were like lying under their chairs and sideways and people's feet were in people's head. And I was really impressed by that because I know for myself, like I really, I do have to lie down when I feel disembodied because sitting up, there's a way in which so much of my energy is keeping my body up. And when I'm lying down, I can really feel the whole length of the floor. I can feel

supported. I can feel so many points of contact with the earth that, you know, that sense of embodiment comes much more alive. In the book, you talk a little bit about interoception, the process by which we sort of sense our internal body. You also then talk about one of the central practices in mindfulness is around vedana, which is this often translated, you say, as feeling tone, which is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Is interoception the scientific name for what we're driving at with Vedana? Vedana is definitely part of interoception. I'm trying to reflect if there's any part of interoception that's not only Vedana. And I guess I'm pronouncing it wrong when I say Vedana, Vedana. Because when I've read about each

of them separately, I've been like, that sounds like a very similar thing. Because when I tune into my body, there's often that very basic, I like it, I don't like it, or I don't really notice it. Yeah. I've always understood Vedana not so much about liking or not liking. That comes in the classical teaching. It's talked about as sankhara. That's sort of the action of liking or not liking. Vedana is just a perception. So it's actually just the perceiving quality or it's related to the perceiving quality of just knowing. Actually, Vedana and Sanya perception both are rooted to Panya, which is wisdom.

So they all have this quality of just knowing. They all have the same root. So they know what's happening. That's why they're so connected to interoception. So it's just knowing whether something is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Sankara, I know I'm getting really nerdy here, but I'm a nerd. No, no, please. Sankara is the same root as karma or kama. And kama just means action. Karma just means action. So Sankara is the action of moving towards or away or not. So that's the liking, you know, kama just means action. Karma just means action. So sankara is the action of moving towards or away or not.

So that's the liking, not liking when we move towards something or not. So, yeah, it helps me just understand that distinction so that I can be with something unpleasant without any need to like, like or dislike. Right. That's the freedom. It's so interesting how those two happen so fast. They're all happening at the same time. So it's not even that they're like separate experiences, like all of the five aggregates arise at the same moment, right?

Interesting. I've never heard anybody say that before. I've heard people talk about how they're not really separate, how we're sort of making distinctions that don't exist. I've always thought of it somewhat sequentially. Yeah, there might be the like, stopping time, Jedi master version of seeing them in their sequence. Yeah, so that we can separate it out. But for most of us, it's just a rising moment to moment to moment to moment. Yeah. And a little while we're going to go into the post show conversation, you're going to lead us in a short meditation that's one of your favorite

practices around embodiment, which is an elements practice. So I'm not going to talk about what that is, except to say it's a great practice. We'll do that in the post-show conversation. But I think where I want to kind of wrap us up here is you talk about being at the heart of the Buddhist path are ethical teachings. Really, all of our religious traditions, there are these ethical teachings, and we tend to like to sort of skip by them, particularly in our modern interpretation of a lot of these. We don't really like them. We don't like the term moral. We don't like that idea. But you talk about them, but you describe the five precepts in what to me was a really interesting way. I had not heard them before. You phrased them slightly differently and I really

liked it. And I thought I would just maybe walk through each of those and you could just briefly talk about them for a second. Yeah. And just to note, they're not my phrasing. Okay. The first is to honor life, which is traditionally said, as I've read it, do not kill. Yes. But I like that phrasing of honoring life. How do those mean different things to you? Or do they? They do mean different things to me. You know, there's a way in which gratitude, and I talk about gratitude early in the book, is so central. You know, we started talking about the wolf and being grateful for the bad wolf as well as part of the process. And so there is harm that's part of being human. And so whatever steps we take to do the least amount of harm possible, you know, whether that's being a vegan or speaking

out against war, there's a way in which we have to acknowledge that we all are going to bring harm in some way or another. So that honoring of life really becomes about being clear about what our values are and making those decisions with the commitment to the least harm possible. And for some of us who choose to eat eggs or drink milk, or maybe that means only buying those things from humane sources and knowing what our food chain is involved in or, you know, where our products come from and whether they're tested on animals. So it really becomes about a bigger picture of honoring life, not just what it means to kill something or not. Yeah. There's always that smart aleck response that I get as a

vegetarian, which is, well, you're killing plants. I'm like, well, yeah, true. I am. And we drive back and forth to Atlanta to take care of Ginny's mom. And one look at the windshield and the bumper of the car tells me I took an enormous number of insect life forms. It's there. The second is to be generous. Yeah. To take what's not freely offered. You know, for me, this is such an interesting one because there are such different expressions of generosity in different cultures. I've seen that being a part of different cultures growing up and the expression of generosity in Ethiopian culture looks so different than the expression of generosity in American culture. And so that sense of not stealing and being generous becomes really about understanding what it means to be in relationship and what it means to be in

reciprocal relationship. Because there were times in kind of an American context where I was behaving in an Ethiopian way, where you always offer to pay for everything and you give a lot. And that's based in a culture there. There's a reciprocal relationship of generosity so that there's always a balancing happening. And so you also have to learn what is generous and what's appropriate and what's in balance. So I know this is different than what the classical teaching is saying, but when you said that, it reminded me of, you know, there's also being a generous to ourselves, you know, and not overgiving in a sense and not overtaking. Well, what I liked about these rephrasings is I think they are in a lot of senses broader.

If I say do not steal, that's a law. Be generous is a different way of looking at that. The next is to respect erotic power. Yeah. You know, I so appreciate this teaching on retreat to refrain from sexual activity, which really feels restrictive, but creates a container of safety for people who are practicing together, living together, who don't know each other. And we're really not sort of giving that attention where it may not be desired and we're helping to see our patterns in that way. And at the same time, there can be this subtle and sometimes not so subtle message that sex is bad and erotic energy is bad.

And so really learning to respect that energy in a way that also allows it to flourish when it is appropriate, rather than actually really sometimes stifling it in the name of something that is more spiritual or more profound. It's such a delicate balance. And so where we are and who we're with and what's appropriate is really a communicative process, I think. Which leads us into the next one, which is traditionally do not lie, but I like this interpretation much better, communicate honestly. Yes. And honestly doesn't mean saying everything all the time. What I love about these and, you know, the phrasing in the book has the inclusion of the earth and the ancestors and all of these qualities that to me denote relationship. And so

this one especially is about really learning to listen and to bring a quality of clarity and kindness to our interactions so that what comes out is for, you know, the betterment of a relationship. And then the final one is traditionally said, avoid intoxicants. Here it says cultivate clarity, which again, I really like that spin on it. Yeah. And, you know, with this growth of interest in plant medicine, even in Buddhist communities and with Buddhist teachers, you know, this traditional idea that anything outside of ourselves is considered an intoxicant that should be avoided, it doesn't acknowledge sort of what

it means to heal our trauma, to grow in wisdom and learn from indigenous ways. And so it gives a much broader sense of what it means to be clear, clear-headed, clear-minded. And yeah, I love it too. And it also invites in questions about technology and media and, you know, the other things that dilute our minds besides booze and drugs, you know. So listener, in thinking about all that and the other great wisdom from today's episode, if you were going to isolate just one top insight that you're taking away, what would it be? Not your top 10, not the top five, just one. What is it? Think about it. Got it? Now I ask you,

what's one tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little thing you can do today to put it in practice? Or maybe just take a baby step towards it. Remember, little by little, a little becomes a lot. Profound change happens as a result of aggregated tiny actions, not massive heroic effort. If you're not already on our Good Wolf Reminder SMS list, I'd highly recommend it as a tool you can leverage to remind you to take those vital baby steps forward. You can get on there at oneyoufeed.net slash SMS. It's totally free, and once you're on there, I'll send you a couple text messages a week with little reminders and nudges. Here's one I recently shared to give you an idea of the type of stuff I send. Keep

practicing, even if it seems hopeless. Don't strive for perfection. Aim for consistency, and no matter what, keep showing up for yourself. That was a great gem from recent guest Light Watkins. And if you're on the fence about joining, remember it's totally free and easy to unsubscribe. If you want to get in, I'd love to have you there. Just go to oneufeed.net slash SMS. All right, back to it. Yeah, like I said, I had never seen the precepts sort of put in these words, and I really resonated strongly with them. Well, thank you so much for coming on. You and I are going to talk in the post-show conversation where you're going to lead us through a short four elements practice, which, as I said,

is a wonderful practice that I've recently been exposed to, and I'm looking forward to that. Listeners, you can get access to this post-show conversation, ad-free episodes, a special episode each week I do called A Teaching Song and a Poem, and other benefits of our community by going to oneufeed.net slash join. Sabine, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. I've really, really enjoyed this conversation. And as often as the case, it has kind of flown by. I'm like, well, how did we get an hour already? But here we are. So I really enjoyed the book. And we'll have links to it in the show notes and to your website and all that. And I really appreciate your time. Thank you, Eric. It's been great. If what you just heard was helpful to you,

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I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like, why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum a failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to

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