Sebene Selassie — Podcast Appearances & Summaries

Featured On 1 Podcast

10% Happier with Dan Harris

4 episodes

All Appearances

4 episodes

Feel Your Feelings, Drop the Story | Sebene Selassie

10% Happier with Dan Harris

Apr 24, 202627 minMeditation teacher and author

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→ WHAT IT COVERS Meditation teacher Sebene Selassie joins Dan Harris for a live Q&A with app subscribers, covering breath meditation alternatives, working with shame using the RAIN framework, the Pema Chödrön "feel your feelings, drop the story" approach to rumination, and the four-element Buddhist body awareness practice. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Breath Meditation Alternatives:** Breath meditation is not mandatory. If focusing on breath creates restriction or feels unnatural, shifting attention to hands, feet, or heartbeat is equally valid. Lying-down meditation often makes breath awareness easier because the body is more relaxed, reducing the self-monitoring tension that makes seated breath observation feel forced or manipulated. - **RAIN Framework for Shame:** The RAIN technique — Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture — developed by Michelle McDonald and popularized by Tara Brach, works for shame as it does any strong emotion. The "nurture" step replaces the original "non-identification" because non-identification can pull practitioners into conceptual thinking rather than direct felt experience of the emotion. - **Rumination Remedy — Feel the Feeling, Drop the Story:** Pema Chödrön's directive to feel feelings without engaging the narrative is the core remedy for looping regret. Rather than analyzing or categorizing the emotion, returning attention to the body interrupts the storytelling loop. The body serves as a present-moment anchor that naturally dissolves the mental replay cycle. - **Grammatical Reframe for Shame:** Shifting from "I am feeling shame" to "there is shame" creates psychological distance without requiring deep philosophical understanding of not-self. A further step moves to "shame is being known," which then invites the question of what is doing the knowing — a gradual, accessible entry into non-identification practice. - **Four-Element Body Practice:** The Buddhist mindfulness-of-elements practice uses earth (solidity), water (fluidity), fire (temperature), and air (breath/movement) as body-sensation anchors. It can be applied during walking meditation or daily life — feeling feet on ground as earth, breath as air, warmth as fire, saliva as water — making embodied awareness accessible without formal sitting. → NOTABLE MOMENT Selassie, who has undergone numerous surgeries and hospitalizations, revealed she has never had a colonoscopy because her frequent medical scans make it unnecessary — a disclosure prompted by a live subscriber who was anxiously drinking colonoscopy prep during the session and struggling to meditate. 💼 SPONSORS [{"name": "Quince", "url": "https://quince.com/happier"}, {"name": "Hunter Douglas / Elite Shutters and Flooring", "url": "https://eliteshuttersandflooring.com"}] 🏷️ Mindfulness Meditation, RAIN Technique, Embodiment Practice, Shame and Rumination, Buddhist Body Awareness

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What To Do When Life Won't Let Up | Sebene Selassie and Jeff Warren

10% Happier with Dan Harris

Apr 10, 202662 minWriter, teacher, and meditation teacher

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→ WHAT IT COVERS Dan Harris, Sebene Selassie, and Jeff Warren explore how to navigate relentless life challenges through three core frameworks: Selassie's "trust life" tattoo philosophy, Warren's "this is the curriculum" reframe, and the three time-scales of meditation practice. Listener voicemails on work-life balance, obsessive thinking, and meditation versus napping ground the conversation in practical application. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Trust Life Framework:** Selassie's guiding philosophy, credited to teacher La Sarmiento, is not about denying difficulty but maintaining flexibility within it. Facing worsening cancer scans, she applies it by redirecting energy away from fear-driven control behaviors — obsessive research, constant planning — toward sleep, exercise, community, and joy. The practice is recognizing that balancing forces coexist alongside hardship rather than replacing it. - **"This Is the Curriculum" Reframe:** Warren's personal mantra for meeting overwhelming life challenges reframes hardship as training material rather than evidence of wrongness. Instead of running a background narrative of "this shouldn't be happening," treating each difficulty as the specific lesson life is currently offering builds capacity for future challenges. Warren reports a measurable shift in his ability to handle parenting stress and global anxiety using this approach. - **Three Time-Scales of Meditation Practice:** Warren outlines three distinct layers of meditation benefit: immediate mood shifts within a single session, nervous system retraining over months and years, and a third long-arc scale where practice generates a felt sense of coherence across one's entire life. Most practitioners focus only on the first two scales, missing the third, which Warren describes as the genuinely spiritual dimension of sustained practice. - **Stopping Rumination with Ritual Finality:** For obsessive thinking loops, Warren recommends using a structured ritual — he uses the I Ching, a 64-entry Chinese divination system — to create a felt sense of closure and redirect mental energy. The mechanism is not the specific tool but the act of declaring a decision made and moving forward. Alternatives include singing repetitive thoughts aloud, using the mantra "up and out," or asking "is this useful?" at the 15th mental repetition. - **Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Overwhelm:** Drawing from Russ Harris's book *The Happiness Trap*, Warren identifies the core trap as believing happiness must be the baseline condition. The ACT alternative is asking, at any moment of difficulty, whether the current response moves toward or away from personal values — even when formal meditation practice is impossible. This moment-to-moment micro-application replaces the need for dedicated practice time during high-demand life periods. - **Intention Setting as Default Mode Override:** Harris describes setting the intention "for the benefit of all beings" before any activity — eating, exercising, working — as a neurological intervention against the brain's default mode of self-referential rumination. Neuroscientist Richie Davidson applies this systematically throughout his entire day. Harris marks the practice with a tattoo (FTBOAB) and notes it counteracts selfishness not in a moral sense but as a cognitive reorientation away from chronic self-focus. → NOTABLE MOMENT Selassie reveals mid-conversation that her cancer, previously improving, has recently reversed course with scans showing significant deterioration. She describes recognizing fear manifesting specifically as a compulsive need to control — researching mutations, micromanaging treatment data — and consciously choosing to surrender that pattern and trust her oncologist instead. 💼 SPONSORS [{"name": "Quince", "url": "https://quince.com/happier"}, {"name": "Wayfair", "url": "https://wayfair.com"}, {"name": "Bombas", "url": "https://bombas.com/happier"}, {"name": "Progressive Insurance", "url": "https://progressive.com"}, {"name": "Noom", "url": "https://noom.com"}] 🏷️ Mindfulness Practice, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Rumination Management, Chronic Illness Coping, Intention Setting, Work-Life Balance

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A Practice for Fidgeters, Restless Minds, and Anyone Who Hates Sitting Still | Meditation with Sebene Selassie

10% Happier with Dan Harris

Mar 20, 202613 min

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→ WHAT IT COVERS Meditation teacher Sebene Selassie guides a walking meditation from Dan Harris's audiobook "Even You Can Meditate," offering a movement-based mindfulness alternative specifically designed for fidgeters and people who struggle with seated practice. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Walking as a bridge practice:** Walking meditation connects formal seated practice to daily life by using an activity most people already do constantly. The technique requires no special setting — just a quiet path and a slower, more deliberate pace than normal walking. - **Three-phase foot awareness:** Each step is broken into three distinct sensations — lifting, moving, and placing the foot. Tracking this sequence anchors attention to the body and prevents the mind from drifting, functioning as a concrete anchor equivalent to breath in seated meditation. - **Expanding attention progressively:** The practice builds in layers — start with foot sensations, then expand to full-body awareness, then include environmental input like sounds, colors, and air temperature. This graduated expansion prevents overwhelm while training broad, stable attention. - **Thought management during movement:** When thoughts arise during walking meditation, the instruction is to acknowledge them without judgment and return to step sensations — identical to the restart technique in seated practice. This reinforces that meditation is the act of returning, not maintaining perfect focus. → NOTABLE MOMENT Selassie closes the practice by inviting gratitude for the body's capacity to move and for the path underfoot — reframing a routine physical act as something worth appreciating rather than taking for granted. 💼 SPONSORS [{"name": "Samsara", "url": "https://samsara.com/happier"}, {"name": "Fatty15", "url": "https://fatty15.com/happier"}, {"name": "Progressive Insurance", "url": "https://progressive.com"}] 🏷️ Walking Meditation, Mindfulness for Beginners, Movement-Based Practice, Stress Reduction

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How To Stop Getting Dragged Around By Your Anxieties, Thought Loops, and Insecurities | Sebene Selassie

10% Happier with Dan Harris

Mar 6, 202621 minMeditation teacher and author

AI Summary

→ WHAT IT COVERS Dan Harris and meditation teacher Sebene Selassie preview their Audible original *Even You Can Meditate*, covering mindfulness fundamentals, the Buddhist concept of sati, the five hindrances, posture options, and how intention shapes practice — designed for distracted or overwhelmed beginners and experienced meditators alike. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Mindfulness as embodied awareness:** The Pali word *sati* — the origin of "mindfulness" — means more than paying attention. It encompasses body, mind, and emotions holistically. Because the body exists only in the present moment, it serves as a reliable anchor when the mind drifts into past regrets or future anxieties during meditation. - **Getting distracted is correct practice:** Losing focus during meditation is not a failure — it is the mechanism of the practice itself. The moment of noticing distraction and returning to the breath or body *is* the practice. Reframing forgetting as necessary to remembering removes self-criticism and makes restarting feel productive rather than discouraging. - **Freedom is available in single moments:** Full enlightenment aside, practical freedom from anxiety, thought loops, and insecurity can be experienced breath by breath. Finding even one moment of peace within a spiral of worry constitutes genuine freedom. This makes meditation immediately useful rather than a long-term project with delayed returns. - **Posture flexibility lowers the barrier to entry:** Sitting cross-legged on a cushion is not required. Standing, lying down, or sitting in a chair all work. The one structural guideline is keeping the body open rather than collapsed, which supports breathing and alertness. Lying down fully releases muscular tension, making body-scan awareness easier for many practitioners. - **Clarifying personal intention accelerates habit formation:** Before starting a practice, identifying a specific *why* — stress reduction, better sleep, more focus, or presence for others — creates a motivational engine that sustains consistency. Intention can start self-focused and expand outward over time, but even a narrow initial reason produces compounding benefits within weeks of regular practice. → NOTABLE MOMENT Selassie, who has lived with metastatic stage four breast cancer for fifteen years after a stage three diagnosis at 34, describes meditation not as a distraction from suffering but as a tool to meet pain directly — building genuine capacity rather than avoidance. 💼 SPONSORS [{"name": "Chime", "url": "https://chime.com/happier"}, {"name": "Spark Energy", "url": "https://drinkspark.com"}] 🏷️ Mindfulness Meditation, Buddhist Psychology, Anxiety Management, Habit Formation, Stress Reduction

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