The one book you need to read this year
Sebene is a Scorpio sun, Virgo moon and Sagittarius rising
Take a moment and do a quick audit, how much heartache has been caused by the simple feeling of not belonging in your life? Think back to school, to your family, to the worst job you ever had… how much of that hurt was connected to feeling alone, excluded or isolated? Chances are you answered more than a bit, probably quite a lot (SAME!). Now consider how much suffering on a global scale stems from exclusion, alienation and separation. Almost all of it, right?
In her new book, You Belong, author and meditation teacher Sebene Selassie invites us to consider the notion that while we are not all the same we are also, not separate. Not apart. Not alone.
You Belong has been dubbed one of the most important books of the year for good reason. It’s kind of amazing to think its author, Sebene Selassie began writing it long before 2020 began, and yet it could not be more timely. Part memoir, part meditation manual, part guide to life less anxious/tired-but-wired/disconnected/”just surviving” life, it chronicles Sebene’s battle with cancer – not once but three times – and her journey to understanding the paradox of belonging.
If this year has left you feeling overwhelmed, helpless, isolated, angry, disempowered, sidelined or apathetic, this book is for you. It is impossible not to be moved, inspired and touched by Sebene’s story. But most of all it is entertaining and stay-up-til-2am-reading-it good.
We Zoomed to chat about Sebene’s inspiration and find out what Belonging (with a capital B) truly feels like (hint: it’s not about the company you keep or your follower count). Warning: major fan-girling ahead (sorry Seb!)
“I try and have like limits with technology. I don't take my phone into my room at night, we don't bring technology into the bedroom,” says Sebene. “My husband and I have our tea and coffee together in the morning and we sit just talking to start the day. I used to have a goal of not sort of touching technology until 11:00 AM but it is very much an aspiration and not necessarily the reality.”
How did you come up with the idea for a book about belonging?
The structure was based on a course that I taught, but basically it's a book that integrates meditation as a tool for recovering a sense of belonging. Meditation doesn't even feel like an encompassing enough term, it’s more like embodied awareness. We have to start in the body and you have to know yourself and there has to be kind of a care for oneself or a love of oneself before you can start really. Our sense of freedom depends on all of these factors. We can't just try and meditate and thinks that that's going to bring us a sense of freedom or a sense of belonging, there are all these other factors to integrate.
What’s your earliest recollection of belonging?
Food. Food plays such an interesting part in belonging. My mother would make sure that we had Ethiopian food either by going to the one Ethiopian restaurant that was in DC.– now, DC is full of Ethiopian restaurants, they call it little, little Addis Ababa – but then there was only one back then. Or she would make Ethiopian food at home. Those smells and those tastes are really a sensory experience of belonging that I'm sure is connected to the first foods I had when I was a baby in Ethiopia.
What is your earliest recollection of feeling like you didn’t belong?
Isn't it like everybody's, their teenage years like preteen teen? I grew up black immigrant in mostly white upper middle class neighbourhoods. My family emigrated from Ethiopia to the US when I was a toddler so I didn’t have a real fluency with all the things that my American friends just seemed to understand really easily – pop culture and fashion and style. Not to mention, I could not completely emulate whatever I was seeing around me, which was mostly white because my hair was different and I looked different and my skin colour. I was also absorbing the messages of society that I wasn't desirable at a time when, like I was recognizing that my currency as a young woman was so much around desirability gave a very visceral sense of not belonging.
How do you connect with a feeling of belonging in day-to-day life?
I feel belonging through meditation practice. It’s become so important to share that where it starts is that sense of being really connected to, myself. That doesn't mean that everything feels good necessarily. But that capacity to really allow my experience. Even this morning, I was meditating and I was a bit fidgety and having a hard time kind of settling in and I was lying down and just resting. Just allowing myself to rest even in spite of the fidgetiness, but just allowing it all to be there and having that sense of ease with whatever was happening. To me that is that like taste of belonging that you can have in any moment.
“‘Woo-woo’ is a jokey term masking a colonized mindset: if Western science can’t prove it,
it must be wrong”
How does our cultural tendency to strive, or as you put it the “pathology of productivity” hijack our sense of belonging and even infiltrate the way we approach meditation?
Our meditation practice can be just another thing that plays into that pathology, it’s performative. It's very profound how deep that programming is. It shows up in our work life and all of the things that we're trying to get “right”, how to parent, right, or how to be better at our jobs; but it can also really infiltrate our spiritual life. We're trying to be the perfect meditator, the perfect spiritual person, the perfect Yogi. So approaching what we do with a lot more gentleness and tenderness really towards ourselves is important, and really changing our attitude rather than doing things differently. It’s one of the reasons I started doing lying down practice – it feels like a surrender in giving up on trying to “get” somewhere.
We had too many lightbulb moments to list, but one amazing insight came when you introduced the idea of epistimiside and the patriarchal inference of the term “woo- woo”…
Woo-woo is often used as a pejorative to dismiss ways of knowing that fall outside modernity’s scientific materialism. It’s a jokey term masking a colonized mindset: if Western science can’t prove it, it must be wrong.
Epistimiside is the killing of knowledge. It refers to the wiping out of ancient ways of knowing… I believe epistimiside is a primary reason we as moderns have lost our sense of belonging. In the process of modernization, we have come to believe that anything that is not provable through the scientific method must be impossible.
I learned the word from my friend Bonnie Duran who's a native American Dharma teacher and an academic. It gives me a place to land by giving me a term for the things that I know are missing, that I may never even be able to recover. And it also gives me a way of having a legitimate term to look at what does get legitimized in terms of ways of knowing and knowledge. It makes clear the hierarchy of the ways of knowing and how epistimiside works with white supremacy and colonization and, and patriarchy to erase ways of knowing and systems of knowledge. When I think of all the knowledge that's been lost – women's knowledge – that was a race through the inquisition and witch hunts.
Of course, not everything ancient is unequivocally right or good, and many aspects of modernity have been useful. But as the French philosopher Bruno Latour said: “A modern is someone who believes what others believe… Epistimiside is at the heart of colonization but we cannot decolonize our minds by unknowing modernity. Our belonging to each other requires exploring what (and who) has disappeared (and why). We must talk about cultural appropriation and understand respectful cultural sharing.
Your book really dives deep into this paradox that while we while we do belong to each other – and everything – we are not all the same. How do we reconcile the concept of belonging to each other, as humans, without falling into the trap of spiritual bypassing and minimizing personal experience and trauma, particular among marginalised groups?
Balancing the harmony of the absolute and the complexity of the relative is really an exploration for each of us to uncover where we land. We tend to be either someone who moves towards harmony because we’re conflict averse or someone who's quick to fight because they're the the kind of rageful rebel rouser.
Wherever you are on the collective belonging scale, there might be a need to move towards a practice that helps you nurture and balance the other side.
There is a tendency in white people to not deal with whiteness and fall to the spiritual bypass of harmony of oneness. And then there's also a tendency in people of colour to cling to the complexity of the group identity, because that's what's been projected on us for so long through social structures themselves. So I'll encourage people of colour who are doing the work of justice and equality – which is a lot of us because so many people of colour from any professional background are also engaged in community work – to rest more.
Encouraging folks of colour to do more nature practices that encourage rest and less untangling and sorting through the complexities of society and encouraging white folks, maybe to do more practices that have them look at unconscious bias, and actually use the meditative practices to start to untangle things that have been less known they're less aware of.
how can we use meditation to look at our unconscious bias?
I have a guided meditation, you can listen for free through the 10% Happier Podcast (link here). It's a 20 minute meditation that takes you through kind of looking at the ways you think about yourself and the ways you think about people of other groups.
You Belong is available now in paperback, iBook/Kindle and Audible
