Finding Belonging in the Body

As someone who has been living with cancer for nearly two decades, Sebene Selassie is no stranger to being with suffering. In her work as a writer and dharma teacher, Selassie focuses on how we can tap into a deeper sense of love and belonging in the face of pain, violence, and division. Her most recent book, You Belong: A Call for Connection, draws from Buddhist philosophy, multidisciplinary research, and her personal experience to lay out what she calls a “map back to belonging.”

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sat down with Selassie to discuss how loving-kindness can be an antidote to fear, what it looks like to center love right now, why we’re often divided from ourselves, and what we can learn from staying with paradoxes and contradictions.

James Shaheen: Sebene, you’ve written a lot about belonging or the lack of a sense of belonging. So what do you mean when you talk about belonging?

Sebene Selassie: I think when most people hear the word “belonging,” they might think only of a social level of belonging like fitting in. But the belonging that I’m turning us toward is something much deeper. It’s a sense of the nonseparateness or the interconnection and interdependence at the heart of existence. I like to say that we are not separate, and we are not the same. Sometimes when we look at this sense of true belonging that points to this nonseparation, we can bypass the fact that we also are individual beings with our stories and our histories. That’s often where we feel the pain of separation because of those differences. And so I’m pointing to the paradox of the two truths that is at the heart of a lot of Buddhist teachings: that there’s an absolute reality of interconnection, and then there’s the relative reality of our individual lives. Belonging is really an acceptance of this paradox. For many of us, it’s healing that sense of separation that comes from not understanding the truth of those two things.

James Shaheen: Right now we’re living in a time of great political division, and that can exacerbate a sense of isolation or a lack of belonging. So how do you think about belonging against the backdrop of this divisiveness?

Sebene Selassie: Yeah, I think that’s some of the hardest work because it requires not only a deep spiritual understanding but also an opening of the heart to allow in what feels potentially harmful and dangerous. When we can open our hearts, it doesn’t mean we lose our boundaries of protection. So it’s a dance of understanding what it means to keep ourselves and our communities healthy and safe while also not shutting our hearts to the fact that we are connected to all of these people who we consider to be on an “other” side. I loved what one dharma teacher said once: It’s not about taking sides; it’s about taking a stand. There’s only one side, and that side is belonging and connection. But how do we take a stand against harmful acts and people who are causing that harm?

When we can open our hearts, it doesn’t mean we lose our boundaries of protection.

Sharon Salzberg: You also say that on top of being divided from one another, we’re also often divided from ourselves and our bodies, which can lead us to numb out and become alienated. So can you say more about this and how we can have loving-kindness for our body?

Sebene Selassie: Yeah, this has been an obsession of mine since I realized how disconnected I was from my own body. I often say mindfulness is a misnomer as a translation of sati—it’s a very good word in a lot of ways, but it leads us to think that it’s all about the mind. Our culture already encourages that focus on the mind and the intellect, and because we’re educated to be in our heads, it can be really hard to include the body in our awareness as we’re developing the capacity for more presence. For me, this has been a real practice of continuing to bring my awareness down into the body, starting from the feet to feel grounded so that [I’m not just caught] in [the] mental loops that I’m in. It can be so powerful to [connect to that] real presence so that when I do shut down in certain situations, I can actually sense it in my body. It’s not just a thought loop that I’m in. And it takes a lot of practice to really connect to that.

[For example,] right now, it’s hard for me to reach my left foot. I have this special cream that a friend made for me, and in the mornings after I bathe, I put the cream on my feet. It’s really hard to put it on my left foot, so that becomes a caring, loving practice of tending to this part of me that feels really far away right now. Just this morning, as I was doing that, I was like, “Oh, wow, I’ve had this foot since I was a baby. When I was a baby, I could probably put my foot in my mouth.” It’s like I had a completely different sense of my body. Just having that kind of tender care toward my body has provided so much capacity for being in my life in a different way where I can actually sense what’s happening, like the tightening of the stomach or the closing of the chest when something fearful or upsetting comes up. And so for me, this practice is a holistic one of embodied presence and embodied awareness.

James Shaheen: OK, Seb, I have one more question. I just read your newsletter this morning, and you write something I find very helpful. You write, “There is so much that is unacceptable in our world. And yet, the first task of change is accepting things just as they are. It’s a paradox, and it’s a ripe place for practice.” Can you say something about that?

Sebene Selassie: I mean, that’s all of it, right? Of course, we can come to practice out of pain and wanting to end our suffering, but we soon realize that the equation that suffering is pain times resistance ultimately lets us know that pain is going to be there. The pain of our own bodies, hearts, and minds and the pain in the world is not going away. It’s just a fact of life. We’re not going to outrun the pain, but we can learn to actually practice with mitigating that pain if that’s possible, like with my experience of physical pain. Then we learn to care for ourselves and tend to our needs, and then we can also hopefully help others with their pain so that it doesn’t turn into suffering and it doesn’t become part of this loop of grasping or pushing away that will go on forever. And so right now, I’m trying to understand what my role is in helping mitigate the pain of the world so that we can ease the suffering that’s happening.

This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.