The One You Feed - Sebene Selassie on Belonging and Connection

Episode Date: May 7, 2021

Sebene Selassie is 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 Percent Happier meditation app. Sebene began studying Buddhism 30 years ago and is a three-time cancer survivor of stage 3 and 4 cancer. Her book, You Belong: A Call for Connection is discussed in today's episode.But wait - there's more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It's that simple and we'll give you good stuff as a thank you!Registration for the Spiritual Habits Group Program is open now! Visit spiritualhabits.net to sign up and learn more about how to bring forth real transformation in your life!In This Interview, Sebene Selassie and I Discuss Belonging and Connection and...Her book, You Belong: A Call for ConnectionBelonging is the feeling of not being separate from anythingThe absolute and relative truth of belongingNavigating our imbalances and aversionsHow separation begets domination, which leads to clinging to being rightThe comparing mind measures everything as better than, less than, or equal toHow our society is structured for comparison and competitionOur thoughts are often not our own, but come from our cultureThe challenge of recognizing our unconscious biasEmbodiment practice is bringing mindfulness to your bodily sensationsDifferences between thinking about the body and actually feeling the bodyThe different phrasings of the 5 Buddhist PreceptsSebene Selassie Links:Sebene's WebsiteInstagramSebene's video and audio linksOrganifi: Your all-day, total body, certified organic, delicious superfood system. Go to www.organifi.com and enter promo code WOLF to get 15% off any product in their store.Aura Digital Security provides digital security protection to keep your online finances, personal information, and tech safe from online threats. To sign up and get 3 months of service for free, visit aura.com/wolf.  Ancient Nutrition offers whole food nutritional products that are designed to provide Ancient Nutrients in a modern, convenient form to power the body and mind and restore health, strength, and vitality. Enter promo code WOLF at ancientnutrition.com to get 20% off your first order If you enjoyed this conversation with Sebene Selassie on Belonging and Connection, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Deep Transformation with Spring WashamRobert WrightSteve HaganSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We know that things like meditation and mindfulness practice are life-changing, but we usually can't stick with them consistently enough to really see their benefits. We read inspirational authors, listen to podcasts like this one, get fired up to apply what we've learned, and inevitably we fall back into old patterns. It's so frustrating. When we can stick to our spiritual practices, their benefits are guaranteed to develop over time. But without enough traction, we barely scratch the surface. This is why any spiritual practice needs to become a habit for it to transform our lives.

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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. 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. 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. Sabine began studying Buddhism 30 years ago and is a three-time cancer survivor of stage three and four 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 greed and hatred and fear.

And the grandmother stops and she thinks about it for a second. And she looks up at her grandmother. 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 have 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 have 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. It 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 the 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. 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. 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, 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 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 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 relative level, it's none of those things. And I have to hold both those. Yeah. And I know for me, a really good sign that I'm not holding that is when I kind of slip into domination. And I really believe, 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? Yeah, you know, there definitely been experiences, particularly on deep retreat, where there's been that understanding of the energetic body and the experience in many different ways. energetic body and the 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, you know, a love for others. And people experience this on dance floors, you know, 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, 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, you know, 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 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, you know, 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.

Yes. 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'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?

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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. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really? No, 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. 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 for 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 I 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, you know, white anesthesiologists, you know, white assisting surgeon and the other nurses. And then the doctor came in, Dr. Laborde, 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, 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 this can happen in all of us and also even the most practiced of us. 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. Yeah, 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 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 and then not to mention our unconscious 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, common in our contemporary culture that we are a head centered, you know, rational oriented, modernist people. That's such a feature of modernity, you know, 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. 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 a 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. 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, But I have also made progress in that area where in the beginning when it was like, feel this, I was like, why? 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 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 and variability that I actually had something I could work with, you know, and then over time, you know, 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 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. 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.

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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. can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. You know, 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. You know, 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, 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. In 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 earlier 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. 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. 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 over giving in a sense and not overtaking. Right.

Well, what I liked about these rephrasings is I think they are in a lot of senses broader. You know, 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. 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, you know, 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 are dilute our minds besides booze and drugs, you know? Yeah, 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, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level and become a member of the One You Feed community,

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