Sebene Selassie On How To Be "Non-Attached" When the Stakes Are High

Overview

This episode features meditation teacher and author Sebene Selassie in a live Q&A session with Dan Harris. They explore profound topics such as practicing non-attachment in high-stakes situations, meeting chronic pain with compassion, building a sustainable meditation habit, and understanding Buddhist teachings on impermanence, rebirth, and the self. The episode also includes a grounding guided meditation and practical advice for integrating mindfulness into daily life.

Notable Quotes

- Joy and pain, like sunshine and rain. There’s no getting out of the pain. This practice doesn’t make pain disappear; it allows us to experience it with spaciousness. – Sebene Selassie, on the paradox of joy and suffering.

- Learning to care and not to care simultaneously. – Dan Harris, quoting T.S. Eliot on practicing non-attachment.

- Feel your feelings, drop the story. – Sebene Selassie, on working with emotions like grief and envy.

🌱 Practicing Non-Attachment in High-Stakes Situations

- Sebene Selassie emphasizes honoring emotions like love and care while recognizing the impermanence of all things. She highlights the Buddhist teaching of impermanence as a key to understanding non-attachment.

- The Five Remembrances practice is a powerful tool for accepting life’s transient nature, including aging, illness, and death.

- Dan Harris reflects on balancing care and detachment, quoting T.S. Eliot’s idea of learning to care and not to care simultaneously.

🧘‍♀️ Grounding Meditation for Intense Times

- Sebene Selassie leads a 10-minute guided meditation focused on grounding in the body and cultivating awareness.

- The practice includes gladdening the mind by recalling something that brings joy, followed by anchoring attention to bodily sensations and allowing experiences without judgment.

- Questions like What’s happening right now? and Can I allow this? help participants stay present and accept their current state, whether it’s pleasant or challenging.

💊 Meeting Chronic Pain and Illness with Compassion

- Sebene Selassie shares her personal experience with chronic illness, emphasizing the importance of feeling emotions like grief and sadness without getting lost in stories of comparison or victimhood.

- She recommends self-compassion practices, such as those by Kristin Neff, which involve mindfulness, recognizing shared humanity, and self-kindness.

- Acknowledging systemic challenges, such as navigating healthcare systems, is also part of extending compassion to oneself.

🕰️ The Science and Practice of Habit Formation

- Both Dan Harris and Sebene Selassie address the difficulty of forming a consistent meditation habit, emphasizing that it’s not a personal failing but a result of human evolution favoring short-term rewards.

- Practical tips include starting small (e.g., meditating for just one minute daily), being flexible, and leveraging community support to stay motivated.

- Sebene Selassie highlights Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies framework, which explains how different people are motivated by internal or external factors, and suggests finding strategies that align with your tendency.

🌌 Rebirth, Ancestry, and the Concept of Non-Self

- Sebene Selassie discusses the intersection of Buddhist teachings on rebirth and the scientific exploration of intergenerational trauma and resilience.

- She references research by Jim B. Tucker on past lives and the idea of a karmic stream that transcends individual lifetimes.

- On the Buddhist concept of non-self, Dan Harris explains that it’s not a fixed self that gets reborn, but rather a continuation of karmic energy or mindstream.

- Sebene Selassie acknowledges the complexity of these topics and encourages openness to the mysteries of existence, beyond rigid rationalism.