March 22, 2024 • 52 mins
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
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
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
(00:39):
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. We
(01:14):
hope you'll enjoy this episode from the archive. Thanks for
joining us. Our guest on this episode is sebin A 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 ten Percent Happier Meditation app
sebin A began studying Buddhism thirty years ago and is
(01:37):
a three time cancer survivor of stage three and four cancer.
Her book is You Belong A Call for Connection.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Hi Sebine, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Hi Eric, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
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
a battle. What is a good wolf, which represents things
(02:11):
like kindness and bravery and love, and the other's 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. 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
(02:34):
the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
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 excize or eliminate,
(02:56):
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
(03:19):
recognize what needs to be nurtured and what needs to
be maybe soothed or transformed or you know, worked with
in a different way, because 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,
(03:41):
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
(04:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
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
(04:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Yeah, And it just makes it so much more human. Relatable.
It gives this potential and possibility that I think is
really powerful.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
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 or feeding your bad wolf
(05:37):
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
(05:58):
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 Goodwolf 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
(06:19):
to you too. I do it totally for free, and
people seem to really love them. Just drop your information
at oneufeed dot 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 one youfeed dot net slash sms. And now back
to the episode. There are so many places I could
(06:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
This case, Yeah, you know. I start 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
(07:20):
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
have enough success, or maybe I was too much in
(07:40):
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
(08:05):
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
(08:25):
the relative sense of belonging and also this spiritual or
absolute sense of belonging, you.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Say that belonging is not dependent on things being as
we want them to be. You listen, 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.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
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 paradigm 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
(09:16):
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
(09:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Yes, I don't know who your teacher was. I know
who you said your teacher's teacher was, Joco bec So
I know you have a zen background I'm in the
Zen tradition primary, 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
(10:13):
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
and coaching. We start to wander into that absolute truth,
or we start to wander into the idea that like
(10:35):
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
(10:55):
say it than that? Because I feel like I always
fall short.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
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 are aversions and grasping, maybe
(11:22):
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 in ways. There's a war
(11:44):
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
(12:07):
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
(12:28):
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 which
(12:51):
one we're clinging to, which one are we're avoiding. That's
how it's been for me.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
Yeah, I'm a big fan of the middle Way. It's
one of those teachings that has meant so much much
to me. And we tend to think of the middle
way as why we just sort of split the difference.
But the other way that the middle Way, I think
manifests is you hold these two extremes.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Yeah. I like that. Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
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
(13:42):
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. Yeah, I really like that.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
While we're talking about this doctrine and 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 are religious traditions
of all sorts, and modern science both point us, you say,
to the truth of our belonging. You know, they both
(14:23):
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,
(14:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
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, you know, so subtle
sensations to strong sensations, to recognizing you know, tones in
(15:19):
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,
(15:40):
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 mystic goal
(16:01):
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
(16:23):
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.
(16:45):
It can be just really, 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
(17:07):
our antenna for that.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
You know. I connect it to this Buddhist teaching of
mana ma na, which is a polyword 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
(17:48):
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 to like fix it and solve
(18:09):
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 as 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
(18:29):
our mind that's constantly in that mode. And what's really
fascinating about it is that it's said that it manifests
as both an idea of better then and less then
and equal to, so it's not just about superiority or inferiority.
There's sort of an equality fixation that we have as well,
(18:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
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,
(19:29):
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
(19:51):
or I'm comparing down. I'm not connecting, and it was
that sense that the way out of this was to
be connected.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
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, our class integration,
that there can be that measuring just because society is
(20:22):
structured it that way. And I've really looked at the
lack of people kind of outside of and I have
a pretty multi racial 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
(20:43):
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
(21:05):
to deal with that comparison so much and reckon with it.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
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,
(21:30):
and woker. The error 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.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
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
Krishna Murti 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
(22:08):
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.
(22:30):
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 two
thousand and three, 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.
(22:54):
All the women were wearing the same kind of boots,
and all the guys had like a particular kind of
haircut or face 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
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
(23:16):
in the most mundane ways. The Doublewares product. I don't
know if you've seen that film, but you know this
certain color blue that everyone has suddenly two 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 depression.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
That is such a great quote. We're not thinking, Arthur,
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 and
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?
(24:20):
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 then 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
(24:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
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
(25:14):
that it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Story, oh, with my sister.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
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's 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 the surgeon was great,
(26:01):
that she explained everything to Funat who doesn't have a
big vocabulary or you know, an intellectual understanding of what's happening.
But she's very motion like mature, and she was 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 preoper room was white except for
(26:24):
one Filipino nurse. There were you know, white anesthesiologists, you know,
white assisting surgeon and the other nurses. And then the
doctor came in, doctor 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
(26:47):
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
(27:09):
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,
(27:31):
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. Yeah,
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
(27:52):
to work on changing those unconscious beliefs.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
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 Kendy
on the show and was talking to him and this
idea that I can absolutely have racist thoughts. You know,
(28:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
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,
(28:52):
you know, this stuff is just going to roll by.
And that's where the defensive NIF 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. That's the challenge that many practitioners
of color have come up against in spiritual communities, where
(29:13):
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 it has never been
examined and has never been really seen, because you know,
we need some kind of larger awareness of what it is.
(29:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
So listener, consider this. You're halfway through the episode Integration reminder.
Remember knowledge is power, but only if combined with action
and integration. It can be transformative to take 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
(30:11):
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. Cant 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
(30:32):
prompts and wisdom from podcast guests. They're a nice little
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they're a helpful way to not get lost in the
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oneufeed dot net slash sms and if you don't like them,
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there are over one and seventy two others from the
(30:54):
one you feed community on the list, and we'd love
to welcome you as well, so head on over to
oneufeed dot com, 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
(31:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
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. Yeah, you know, because you've
seen a lot. And I like to say, just because
(31:44):
you've seen the nature of reality, it doesn't mean you
understand anything.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
It's interesting because it's the same thing with cognitive bias. Right,
we learn about cognitive bias, and yet most of us
hope 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
(32:08):
I know I have them. What am I missing here?
It's a curiosity, It can be a curiosity.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
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 admit on retreat
or you know, just different folks pointed things out to
me that I never knew, you know. And much like
(32:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
You talk a lot about how belonging really starts with
our body and with embodied practice. It's a term it's
being used a lot these days. Embodied say a little
bit about what it means to you.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
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, and which I think is pretty
common in our contemporary culture, that we are head centered,
you know, rational oriented, modernist people. That's such a feature
(33:37):
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 so
(34:00):
many of these ancient teachings are fully embodied. They're often
paired with embodied practices, you know, be it chigong or
yoga or tai chi, 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,
(34:21):
those are embodied experiences of it. I didn't experience it
in my head. I experience 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,
(34:42):
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
(35:07):
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 wellbeing that's only
in our heads. There is an ease and a wellness
that comes only through the body, or especially through the body.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
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?
Speaker 1 (35:35):
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 taichi. I'm
really talking about practicing meditation and stillness, but with an
(35:57):
awareness or an attention to the body.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
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 that there's a difference between
the outside of their feet and the inner feet, can
they send just one toe at a time, and you know,
(37:03):
sort of taking them through all these different cues that
helps them to start to bring in a liveness 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,
(37:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:32):
And have you found that, like mindfulness or meditation in general,
is a skill that we get better at.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
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
(38:01):
we're speaking, is testament to that.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
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, like, do I have feet? I mean I
assume I do. I remember for a while I practiced
with these Reggie Ray tapes.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Yeah, he's great with that.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
And he would say, like, notice the personality of your
big toe, and I'd be like, what is what I mean?
Speaker 2 (38:27):
First?
Speaker 3 (38:27):
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, you know.
And then over time, you know, I got more subtle,
(38:49):
but I have a long way to go with it.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Yeah. I used to work at a meditation center and
Reggie Rays Group rented it once and he came in
and it was packed with chain 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
(39:13):
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
(39:36):
that you know, that sense of embodiment comes much more alive.
Speaker 3 (39:39):
In the book, you talk a little bit about inter reception,
the process by which we sort of sense our internal body.
You also then talk about one of the central practices
and mindfulness is around vedonna, which is this often translated
you say, is feeling tone, which is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.
(40:00):
Is inter reception, the scientific name for what we're driving
at with verdonna.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Vedana is definitely part of interception. I'm trying to reflect
if there's any part of interception that's not only vedana.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
And I guess I'm pronouncing it wrong when I say veidana,
because when I've read about each of them separately, I've
been like that this 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.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Yeah, you know, I've always understood veidana not so much
about liking or not liking. That comes in the classical teaching.
It's talked about as sankara. You know, that's that's sort
of the action of liking or not liking. Veadana is
just a perception, So it's actually just the perceiving quality,
(40:48):
or it's related to the perceiving quality of just knowing. Actually,
Vadana and sonya perception both are rooted to panya, which
is wisdom, so they all have this quality of just knowing.
They all have the same roots, so they know what's happening.
That's why they're so connected to interception. So it's just
(41:09):
knowing whether something is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Sankara. I
know I'm getting really nerdy here, but I'm a nerd,
so please. And Kara is the same root as karma
or comma. And you know, comma 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,
(41:32):
it helps me just understand that distinction so that I
can be with something unpleasant without any need to like
or dislike. Right, that's the freedom.
Speaker 3 (41:41):
It's so interesting how those two happen so fast.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
They're all happening at the same time. So it's not
even that they are like separate experiences, like all of
the five aggregates arise at the same moment. Right.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
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
(42:43):
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 them idea. But you talk about them.
But you described the five precepts in what to me
(43:06):
was a really interesting way. I had not heard them before.
You phrase 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.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
Yeah, and just didn't note they're not my phrasing.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
The first is to honor life, which is traditionally said,
as I've read it, do not kill.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
Yes, but I like.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
That phrasing of honoring life. How do those mean different
things to you?
Speaker 1 (43:31):
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
(43:55):
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
(44:17):
the commitment to the least harm possible. And you know,
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
(44:39):
and whether they're tested on animals or so. It really
becomes about a bigger picture of honoring life, not just
what it means to kill something or not.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:48):
There's always that smart, elic response that I get as
a vegetarian, which is, well, you're killing plants. I'm like, why, Yeah,
true I am. And we drive back and forth to
Atlanta to take care of mom, and one look at
the windshield and the bumper of the car tells me
I took an enormous number of insect life forms.
Speaker 2 (45:08):
It's there.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
The second is to be generous.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
Yeah, to take not what's not freely offered. You know,
for me, this is such an interesting one because they
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
(45:35):
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
(45:56):
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,
(46:17):
but when you said that, it reminded me of you know,
there's also a being a generous to ourselves, you know,
and not overgiving in a sense and not overtaking.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
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, don't know each other, and we're really
not sort of giving that attention where it may not
(47:06):
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
(47:28):
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.
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Which leads us into the next one, which is traditionally
do not lie. But I like this interpretation much better.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
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
(48:20):
a quality of clarity and kindness to our interactions so
that what comes out is for you know, the betterment
of a relationship.
Speaker 3 (48:29):
And then the final one is traditionally said avoided intoxicst
here says cultivate clarity, which again I really like that
spin on it.
Speaker 1 (48:40):
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 intoxicate that should be avoided. It doesn't
acknowledge sort of what it means to heal our trauma,
(49:02):
to grow in wisdom and learn from indigenous ways, and
so it gives a much broader sense of what it
means to be 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.
Speaker 3 (49:24):
You know, so listener and thinking about all that and
the other great wisdom from today's episode. If you're going
to isolate just one top insight that you're taking away,
what would it be? Not your top ten, not the
top five? Just one?
Speaker 2 (49:37):
What is it?
Speaker 3 (49:38):
Think about it? Got it?
Speaker 2 (49:40):
Now?
Speaker 3 (49:40):
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
for SMS list, I'd highly recommend it as a tool
(50:03):
you can leverage to remind you to take those vital
baby steps forward. You can get on there at oneufeed
dot 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 what I recently
shared to give you an idea of the type of
stuff I send. Keep practicing even if it seems hopeless.
(50:24):
Don't strive for perfection, aim for consistency, and no matter what,
keep showing up for yourself. That was a great gem
from recent guests 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 dot net slash SMS
all right back to it.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (50:46):
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 for la months 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
(51:07):
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 one feed dot net slash join Seviani. Thank you
so much for taking the time to come on. I've
really really enjoyed this conversation, and as often as the case,
(51:27):
it has kind of flown by, I'm like, well, how
do 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.
Speaker 1 (51:40):
Thank you, Eric, It's been great.
Speaker 2 (51:58):
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(52:19):
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the show.
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.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
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
(00:39):
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. We
(01:14):
hope you'll enjoy this episode from the archive. Thanks for
joining us. Our guest on this episode is sebin A 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 ten Percent Happier Meditation app
sebin A began studying Buddhism thirty years ago and is
(01:37):
a three time cancer survivor of stage three and four cancer.
Her book is You Belong A Call for Connection.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Hi Sebine, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Hi Eric, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
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
a battle. What is a good wolf, which represents things
(02:11):
like kindness and bravery and love, and the other's 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. 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
(02:34):
the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
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 excize or eliminate,
(02:56):
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
(03:19):
recognize what needs to be nurtured and what needs to
be maybe soothed or transformed or you know, worked with
in a different way, because 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,
(03:41):
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
(04:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
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
(04:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Yeah, And it just makes it so much more human. Relatable.
It gives this potential and possibility that I think is
really powerful.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
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 or feeding your bad wolf
(05:37):
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
(05:58):
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 Goodwolf 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
(06:19):
to you too. I do it totally for free, and
people seem to really love them. Just drop your information
at oneufeed dot 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 one youfeed dot net slash sms. And now back
to the episode. There are so many places I could
(06:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
This case, Yeah, you know. I start 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
(07:20):
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
have enough success, or maybe I was too much in
(07:40):
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
(08:05):
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
(08:25):
the relative sense of belonging and also this spiritual or
absolute sense of belonging, you.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Say that belonging is not dependent on things being as
we want them to be. You listen, 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.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
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 paradigm 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
(09:16):
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
(09:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Yes, I don't know who your teacher was. I know
who you said your teacher's teacher was, Joco bec So
I know you have a zen background I'm in the
Zen tradition primary, 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
(10:13):
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
and coaching. We start to wander into that absolute truth,
or we start to wander into the idea that like
(10:35):
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
(10:55):
say it than that? Because I feel like I always
fall short.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
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 are aversions and grasping, maybe
(11:22):
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 in ways. There's a war
(11:44):
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
(12:07):
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
(12:28):
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 which
(12:51):
one we're clinging to, which one are we're avoiding. That's
how it's been for me.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
Yeah, I'm a big fan of the middle Way. It's
one of those teachings that has meant so much much
to me. And we tend to think of the middle
way as why we just sort of split the difference.
But the other way that the middle Way, I think
manifests is you hold these two extremes.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Yeah. I like that. Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
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
(13:42):
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. Yeah, I really like that.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
While we're talking about this doctrine and 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 are religious traditions
of all sorts, and modern science both point us, you say,
to the truth of our belonging. You know, they both
(14:23):
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,
(14:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
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, you know, so subtle
sensations to strong sensations, to recognizing you know, tones in
(15:19):
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,
(15:40):
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 mystic goal
(16:01):
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
(16:23):
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.
(16:45):
It can be just really, 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
(17:07):
our antenna for that.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
You know. I connect it to this Buddhist teaching of
mana ma na, which is a polyword 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
(17:48):
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 to like fix it and solve
(18:09):
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 as 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
(18:29):
our mind that's constantly in that mode. And what's really
fascinating about it is that it's said that it manifests
as both an idea of better then and less then
and equal to, so it's not just about superiority or inferiority.
There's sort of an equality fixation that we have as well,
(18:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
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,
(19:29):
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
(19:51):
or I'm comparing down. I'm not connecting, and it was
that sense that the way out of this was to
be connected.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
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, our class integration,
that there can be that measuring just because society is
(20:22):
structured it that way. And I've really looked at the
lack of people kind of outside of and I have
a pretty multi racial 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
(20:43):
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
(21:05):
to deal with that comparison so much and reckon with it.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
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,
(21:30):
and woker. The error 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.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
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
Krishna Murti 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
(22:08):
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.
(22:30):
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 two
thousand and three, 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.
(22:54):
All the women were wearing the same kind of boots,
and all the guys had like a particular kind of
haircut or face 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
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
(23:16):
in the most mundane ways. The Doublewares product. I don't
know if you've seen that film, but you know this
certain color blue that everyone has suddenly two 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 depression.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
That is such a great quote. We're not thinking, Arthur,
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 and
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?
(24:20):
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 then 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
(24:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
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
(25:14):
that it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Story, oh, with my sister.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
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's 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 the surgeon was great,
(26:01):
that she explained everything to Funat who doesn't have a
big vocabulary or you know, an intellectual understanding of what's happening.
But she's very motion like mature, and she was 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 preoper room was white except for
(26:24):
one Filipino nurse. There were you know, white anesthesiologists, you know,
white assisting surgeon and the other nurses. And then the
doctor came in, doctor 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
(26:47):
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
(27:09):
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,
(27:31):
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. Yeah,
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
(27:52):
to work on changing those unconscious beliefs.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
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 Kendy
on the show and was talking to him and this
idea that I can absolutely have racist thoughts. You know,
(28:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
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,
(28:52):
you know, this stuff is just going to roll by.
And that's where the defensive NIF 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. That's the challenge that many practitioners
of color have come up against in spiritual communities, where
(29:13):
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 it has never been
examined and has never been really seen, because you know,
we need some kind of larger awareness of what it is.
(29:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
So listener, consider this. You're halfway through the episode Integration reminder.
Remember knowledge is power, but only if combined with action
and integration. It can be transformative to take 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
(30:11):
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. Cant 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
(30:32):
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they're a helpful way to not get lost in the
busyness and forget what is important. You can join at
oneufeed dot net slash sms and if you don't like them,
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there are over one and seventy two others from the
(30:54):
one you feed community on the list, and we'd love
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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
(31:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
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. Yeah, you know, because you've
seen a lot. And I like to say, just because
(31:44):
you've seen the nature of reality, it doesn't mean you
understand anything.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
It's interesting because it's the same thing with cognitive bias. Right,
we learn about cognitive bias, and yet most of us
hope 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
(32:08):
I know I have them. What am I missing here?
It's a curiosity, It can be a curiosity.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
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 admit on retreat
or you know, just different folks pointed things out to
me that I never knew, you know. And much like
(32:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
You talk a lot about how belonging really starts with
our body and with embodied practice. It's a term it's
being used a lot these days. Embodied say a little
bit about what it means to you.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
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, and which I think is pretty
common in our contemporary culture, that we are head centered,
you know, rational oriented, modernist people. That's such a feature
(33:37):
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 so
(34:00):
many of these ancient teachings are fully embodied. They're often
paired with embodied practices, you know, be it chigong or
yoga or tai chi, 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,
(34:21):
those are embodied experiences of it. I didn't experience it
in my head. I experience 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,
(34:42):
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
(35:07):
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 wellbeing that's only
in our heads. There is an ease and a wellness
that comes only through the body, or especially through the body.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
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?
Speaker 1 (35:35):
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 taichi. I'm
really talking about practicing meditation and stillness, but with an
(35:57):
awareness or an attention to the body.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
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 that there's a difference between
the outside of their feet and the inner feet, can
they send just one toe at a time, and you know,
(37:03):
sort of taking them through all these different cues that
helps them to start to bring in a liveness 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,
(37:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:32):
And have you found that, like mindfulness or meditation in general,
is a skill that we get better at.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
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
(38:01):
we're speaking, is testament to that.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
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, like, do I have feet? I mean I
assume I do. I remember for a while I practiced
with these Reggie Ray tapes.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Yeah, he's great with that.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
And he would say, like, notice the personality of your
big toe, and I'd be like, what is what I mean?
Speaker 2 (38:27):
First?
Speaker 3 (38:27):
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, you know.
And then over time, you know, I got more subtle,
(38:49):
but I have a long way to go with it.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Yeah. I used to work at a meditation center and
Reggie Rays Group rented it once and he came in
and it was packed with chain 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
(39:13):
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
(39:36):
that you know, that sense of embodiment comes much more alive.
Speaker 3 (39:39):
In the book, you talk a little bit about inter reception,
the process by which we sort of sense our internal body.
You also then talk about one of the central practices
and mindfulness is around vedonna, which is this often translated
you say, is feeling tone, which is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.
(40:00):
Is inter reception, the scientific name for what we're driving
at with verdonna.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Vedana is definitely part of interception. I'm trying to reflect
if there's any part of interception that's not only vedana.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
And I guess I'm pronouncing it wrong when I say veidana,
because when I've read about each of them separately, I've
been like that this 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.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Yeah, you know, I've always understood veidana not so much
about liking or not liking. That comes in the classical teaching.
It's talked about as sankara. You know, that's that's sort
of the action of liking or not liking. Veadana is
just a perception, So it's actually just the perceiving quality,
(40:48):
or it's related to the perceiving quality of just knowing. Actually,
Vadana and sonya perception both are rooted to panya, which
is wisdom, so they all have this quality of just knowing.
They all have the same roots, so they know what's happening.
That's why they're so connected to interception. So it's just
(41:09):
knowing whether something is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Sankara. I
know I'm getting really nerdy here, but I'm a nerd,
so please. And Kara is the same root as karma
or comma. And you know, comma 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,
(41:32):
it helps me just understand that distinction so that I
can be with something unpleasant without any need to like
or dislike. Right, that's the freedom.
Speaker 3 (41:41):
It's so interesting how those two happen so fast.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
They're all happening at the same time. So it's not
even that they are like separate experiences, like all of
the five aggregates arise at the same moment. Right.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
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
(42:43):
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 them idea. But you talk about them.
But you described the five precepts in what to me
(43:06):
was a really interesting way. I had not heard them before.
You phrase 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.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
Yeah, and just didn't note they're not my phrasing.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
The first is to honor life, which is traditionally said,
as I've read it, do not kill.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
Yes, but I like.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
That phrasing of honoring life. How do those mean different
things to you?
Speaker 1 (43:31):
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
(43:55):
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
(44:17):
the commitment to the least harm possible. And you know,
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
(44:39):
and whether they're tested on animals or so. It really
becomes about a bigger picture of honoring life, not just
what it means to kill something or not.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:48):
There's always that smart, elic response that I get as
a vegetarian, which is, well, you're killing plants. I'm like, why, Yeah,
true I am. And we drive back and forth to
Atlanta to take care of mom, and one look at
the windshield and the bumper of the car tells me
I took an enormous number of insect life forms.
Speaker 2 (45:08):
It's there.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
The second is to be generous.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
Yeah, to take not what's not freely offered. You know,
for me, this is such an interesting one because they
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
(45:35):
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
(45:56):
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,
(46:17):
but when you said that, it reminded me of you know,
there's also a being a generous to ourselves, you know,
and not overgiving in a sense and not overtaking.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
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, don't know each other, and we're really
not sort of giving that attention where it may not
(47:06):
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
(47:28):
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.
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Which leads us into the next one, which is traditionally
do not lie. But I like this interpretation much better.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
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
(48:20):
a quality of clarity and kindness to our interactions so
that what comes out is for you know, the betterment
of a relationship.
Speaker 3 (48:29):
And then the final one is traditionally said avoided intoxicst
here says cultivate clarity, which again I really like that
spin on it.
Speaker 1 (48:40):
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 intoxicate that should be avoided. It doesn't
acknowledge sort of what it means to heal our trauma,
(49:02):
to grow in wisdom and learn from indigenous ways, and
so it gives a much broader sense of what it
means to be 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.
Speaker 3 (49:24):
You know, so listener and thinking about all that and
the other great wisdom from today's episode. If you're going
to isolate just one top insight that you're taking away,
what would it be? Not your top ten, not the
top five? Just one?
Speaker 2 (49:37):
What is it?
Speaker 3 (49:38):
Think about it? Got it?
Speaker 2 (49:40):
Now?
Speaker 3 (49:40):
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
for SMS list, I'd highly recommend it as a tool
(50:03):
you can leverage to remind you to take those vital
baby steps forward. You can get on there at oneufeed
dot 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 what I recently
shared to give you an idea of the type of
stuff I send. Keep practicing even if it seems hopeless.
(50:24):
Don't strive for perfection, aim for consistency, and no matter what,
keep showing up for yourself. That was a great gem
from recent guests 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 dot net slash SMS
all right back to it.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (50:46):
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 for la months 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
(51:07):
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 one feed dot net slash join Seviani. Thank you
so much for taking the time to come on. I've
really really enjoyed this conversation, and as often as the case,
(51:27):
it has kind of flown by, I'm like, well, how
do 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.
Speaker 1 (51:40):
Thank you, Eric, It's been great.
Speaker 2 (51:58):
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(52:19):
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