Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 42: Sebene Selassie, A Life of Service While Fighting Breast Cancer

Episode Date: October 19, 2016

Sebene Selassie's career has taken her all over the world. An Ethiopian immigrant, Selassie grew up in the Washington, D.C., area. Her father left her family in the '70s to go back to Ethiopia and became a guerrilla fighter in the Eritrean independence movement. Her brother became a "Hare Krishna" devotee. Selassie, however, found meditation, and started practicing in high school. She studied Comparative Religious studies at McGill University and went on to work with not-for-profits in international development, including in refugee camps in Guinea. She was a self-professed "really bad dharma student," until she was diagnosed with stage-three breast cancer at age 34. Then she says she became "a really good dharma student." Selassie has now survived breast cancer three times and works as a meditation teacher and transformational coach in New York City. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey, hey, before we get started, we've had a really busy week on this podcast. Normally we do one podcast a week. This week we're doing three or we've done three.

This is the third. So in case you missed the last two, which we're calling them bonus episodes, you should go check them out. One that we posted on Sunday is we're calling it an emergency edition of the podcast where we got together some meditation teachers to talk about election stress. Everybody's freaking out about this election and meditation, maybe something that could be useful. So that's one. And then the other on Monday, we posted as a bonus was with Robin Roberts who's the co-anchor of Good Morning America and a daily

meditator and just an awesome human being so those are two bonus episodes go check them out but not before you listen to this one here we go. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, welcome back. My guest this week is one of my favorite human beings. So if you're expecting objectivity, you should download another podcast. 70th Celacii is just getting ready for somebody who's really smart about meditation practice, about issues of illness, and about issues surrounding race,

and whatever the hell else she wants to talk about. 70, thank you very much for coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Jan, very kind words, thank you. There's a lot more to say about you, which we'll get to, but I wanna ask you the question I always ask everybody, which is how did you come to meditation?

Well, I first came to meditation in high school, not Buddhist meditation. My brother, I think I was about 15, he became what's colloquial and known as the Hari Krishna. Wow. Yes. Okay, but you guys were Ethiopian immigrants, so that must have been a like a that's a real combination of cultures there Yeah, I was a mess a mess your parents freaked out. So yeah, we'd already been here So we got here when I was about three and so I was 15 at the time

So you know my parents had been here for a while, but nothing had prepared them for that So yeah, so he became a harry christina. How did that happen? You know, I don't know actually how he came into contact with them, probably like, you know, jumping around in their robes and bells, downtown somewhere. Yeah. This is DC. That's where you grew up right? So we grew up in Washington, DC.

And there was kind of a big scene around the Krishna's then. So this was the 80s, the mid 80s, and the hardcore punk rock scene in DC. There was this kind of variation of it that was called straight edge. Yeah, I remember that. Right. So they were vegan and didn't drink, didn't do drugs, and a bunch of them were into heart and... Heart and stress.

I didn't know that. Wow. So was your brother into the whole straight edge thing? You know, kind of sort of on the edge. He was a little bit older. He's eight years older than me So he wasn't so much in that scene, but kind of got connected to it So he had a bunch of friends who were skinheads and you know, musicians and they had a temple out in Potomac, Maryland Where a lot of people lived and also the Indian community would come to those who were in the Krishna

lineage, but they had this thing called the O street temple which is an O street in Dupont Circle and that was sort of the hangout for all the cool kids. So I was not a cool kid at all, like I was not a part of that scene, but I would go with him. I started meditating by chanting hard-crush now with Molo Beads. I quickly realized that wasn't for me, although I still would hang out with my brother. He moved to New York at some point. I went to actually stay in the temple with him there in Brooklyn. I knew a lot about it, but I started doing my own research at that point and started looking into other Eastern philosophy and spirituality and I went to kind of a hippie high school alternative private school and we had peace studies and East Asian studies and I did a research paper on meditation and taught

my class to meditate. I'm sure it was like the worst meditation instruction ever, because I had no idea what I was doing, but I was kind of interested, but not really practicing. But you were, if I recall from just our personal conversations over the years, you were kind of a, a little bit of a rabble rouser as a little kid. I think you tell me some story about like leading protests in your neighborhood. Yeah, so my dad was a leader in the Air Train Liberation Movement. So when I was young, probably about four, so 1974 when the Revolution happened in Ethiopia, he went back actually and disappeared for years. And fought? Yes, so he was actually picked up a gun and fought. Yeah, he wasn't good at it, but yes, he was a guer fighter as were many of my cousins which is not uncommon for air train families, so I'm half-eat-thieu been half-air train

so yeah a lot of my cousins on that side were fighters and My dad disappeared on us for a few years. Wow. No warning or no He went back when the revolution happened because nobody knew at that point You know at that point when there was word over here that the, that highly salicy had been deposed, there was a lot of excitement because people thought something good was going to happen and they didn't realize, you know, a nightmare of decades was about to happen. So, so he went there and then quickly had to flee Adi Sababa. You know, he had been part of the government for many years. He was the Attorney General of Ethiopian Secretary of the Interior under Haileys Lossi.

So he was wanted once he got there. So he fled and went back to Esmara, back to Eritrea where he was from, and then went into the field as it's called and became a guerrilla fighter. How long? How long was he there? Yeah. You know, I really should ask that. I think it was about two and a half, three years.

Oh, so not a vacation? No, yeah, not a vacation for my mom and us because she was now a single mom with three kids, one with a major disability, my sister, so it was really, really rough on us. So but when he came back, he was still involved with the movement and... Your mom took him back? She did. You know, that's a whole other story, but yeah, it wasn't a great piece making their divorce now many years later.

So yeah, so I was sort of politicized young through him and he would take us to rallies and meetings and I would learn all the EPLF chance, the Air Train People's Liberation Front, I would come back, we lived in a white neighborhood, middle class neighborhood and I would sort of rally all the little white kids around and make them chant, you know, long live EPLF and raise their fists in the air and yeah, it was a little ridiculous. That's kind of adorable. So I took you on a pretty big detour there, but so here's your brother. He's into the hard Christian movement, and you're, you think there might be something to the meditation thing, but not the way they're doing it.

So where did your research take you? Well, it took me into academics. So I went away to college to McGill University and I majored in comparative religious studies and I focused on Hinduism and Buddhism. But I really didn't practice, which is not uncommon for academic religious studies people. I'm getting that sense that I've met a bunch of people or read about a significant number of people who I was just actually reading about Jack Kerawak last night. Not an academic but he was really interested actually reading about Jack Kerawak last night, not an academic, but he was really interested in reading about Buddhism, but didn't practice.

Yeah. Yeah, and there was even sort of a poo-pooing among scholars of, you know, you don't mix practice and scholarly work, so. Don't get high on your own supply. Maybe, yeah. That you can't have objectivity, right? If you, if you're actually practicing, which was not the case at the end. Right, would exercise physiologists say that though?

It's ridiculous, yeah. And what's crazy is there's still some scholars and still some departments that lean heavily that way. McGill was not like that, actually my advisor was a practitioner, but for whatever reason, I think, because I was stuck in my head because I was busy partying and doing drugs and because I was actually also very politically involved

in college, I wasn't practicing. I was just studying this stuff, and I really didn't come to practice until after I graduated. So I started meditating really when I moved to San Francisco after college. And you were doing social justice work? I was doing social service, social justice work, so I got involved in that

in college on a volunteer level, and then when I moved to San Francisco I started working for an after-school program for kids in a pretty messed up neighborhood, the tenderloin. Yeah, the tenderloin, although that's getting a little bit gentrified now, right? Yeah, everything. Yeah, San Francisco. So when you started to meditate, what were you doing? I started going to Zen Center of San Francisco, which did not work for me. Sort of the strictness and really the anonymity I felt there wasn't a lot of warmth and it might be because I wasn't finding the right kind of entry points. So I was really just kind of dabbling on my own, reading a lot, trying to practice at

home, and then I moved to New York when I was 25 and started going to all the different centers that were around then. So I think doing what a lot of people do, just sort of kind of hopping and chopping meditation practices. So I did the first two levels of training at Trambala, and I went to a couple of different Zen centers. Then in probably around 2006, 2007, I did my first 10-day retreat, a Gwankar retreat, which was really powerful. You know, I was kind of mind blowing for me in terms of what I saw and what I experienced, but I didn't really gel with the Gwenka's groups and communities back in New York. So I kept doing kind of looking around and I was really interested in Charlotte Joko back at that

point. She had a couple of books out. She was a student of my Zumi Roshi and a Dharma heir, so he sanctioned her to teach. So she was a Zen teacher? She's a Zen teacher based in San Diego and founded a school of Zen called Ordinary Mind. Oh, I've heard of that. Yeah, so Barry Magid who lives in New York City is a psychoanalyst. He had a little community here, so I wandered into that and I liked it, so it stuck so he was my first teacher really, and I was a really bad student. What do you mean by that? Everybody thinks they're a bad student. Well, you know,

I was in my mid-twenties. I was partying a lot still and really just kind of chasing boys. I would go to the sittings back then, the sittings were in his office, his therapy office. So, you know, it's very informal in a lot of ways, it was Saturday mornings. And he would walk. Not the best time Saturday morning for a mid-20s person. Yeah, exactly.

So 10 o'clock in the morning, and he would lock the door exactly at 10 and You know more than a few times I was kind of hungover Wandering down the hallway and I would hear the door click and I'd have to like turn around and Kind of do a Buddhist walk of shame back home You sent me some a very sort of Funny and but a butignant in some ways. List of bullet points about your life, some of which I already knew.

So you said you were a really bad Dharma student and then there was something that happened that made you a really good Dharma student. Can you talk about what that was? Yeah, so I practiced with Barry for a few years and then I ended up moving to West Africa. My boyfriend at the time worked for the UN and so I got a job working in the refugee camps in Guinea. And while I was there, I discovered a lump in my left breast and.

And you're how old? At that point, I was 20... No, I was 30. How old are you? 33 or 34, yeah. You terrified? I was, and I got a check out in Guinei, and they said it was fine.

And it was just a sister, you know, abnormal growth, but it was benign. I wanted to get a second opinion, so my boyfriend at the time was Danish, so we were in Denmark and got it checked again. They told me the same thing. Move back to the States, by this point we had broken up and you know things just didn't seem right. The mass was starting to grow and the breast was starting to change, so I went and got to checked out again and it was Stage 3,

breast cancer. Stage 3. Yeah. So 34 years old and you know single and living in D.C. which I had returned to because we had split up but really wasn't my home. It was anymore. I hadn't lived there since I was in high school and really disoriented. There was no ordinary mind school in DC.

I had already started looking for Asanga when I first got there. Let's just define Asanga for those who don't know it. It's just like a Buddhist community. So I started in sitting with the Insight meditation community of Washington. Is that Tara Brock? That's Tara Brock. So, uh, when I got the diagnosis, I was already part of that community. And uh, yeah, and my life turned upside down, but my practice really deepened.

Yeah. I mean, this is where the rubber hits the road. Really, yeah. So, I have a million questions, but what, what was the course of treatment, like A, and you can take this and whatever whatever you want, and B, how did it, how exactly did it deepen your practice? Well, you know, initially I didn't do any Western alathic medicine. So for the first while I was doing sort of alternative therapies. No chemo radiation, I'm back to me. I didn't do chemo radiation.

I was getting a lot of conflicting opinions. Some surgeons were saying because of the way the tumor had kind of pulled the breast, they couldn't really do a clean mastectomy. So they wanted to, some said they wanted to treat me with radiation first, some said they wanted to treat me with chemo first, see if they could shrink it. So I started doing natural therapies, which were very intensive, actually went part time at work, and they were really supportive about that. I was working in international development at the time and focused all my energies on that and practicing a lot. So deep in my practice in the sense that I was meditating a lot,

trying to do retreats, taking care of myself, and then pretty soon after that I moved to New York and then started pursuing treatment. And I found this very zany, wacky oncologist who's amazing and probably saved my life who did a former treatment that's really uncommon for breast cancer. It's really uncommon for most cancers called chemo perfusion, where they actually flood the area with chemo and he was able to shrink the tumor doing that.

And then I did a regular course of chemo and he was able to shrink the tumor doing that and then I did a regular course of chemo very, very long and then radiation. And I can only imagine trying to meditate while you're siffused with nausea and feeling weak and did you do a lot of it lying down? I did do a fair amount of practice lying down. Yes and the chemo perfusion is a very caustic treatment. So I actually had pain in the tissue itself, which extended to the back because I had cancer

in the lymph node under my left arm as well. So the profusion really affected that whole left upper area. So yeah, there was a lot of pain. There was a lot of fear and kind of just trauma. And yeah, I had to practice with all of it. Yeah, I was projecting there what I would be feeling in that situation. And so fear and anger would be the two biggies.

Yeah, the anger, I'll tell you, a really good prequel for cancer is working in refugee camps. It was kind of hard to take my pain too personally and too seriously. That helped me put things in perspective. I had never really, although I come from Africa, traveled in Africa and seen a lot of different experiences having traveled around the world a fair bit, nothing prepared me for just the insanity of a refugee camp.

This was in 2002-2003, so we were on the border of Liberia and Cote d'Ibar. So both were blowing up at that time. And within days, tens of thousands of people would be on the border, traumatized, homeless, weary. I was working specifically in a program for unaccompanied minors or separated children, which is just, you know, a heart-making reality. So the anger part wasn't as strong for me because I, of course, I would have these sentiments, especially when I would see somebody like smoking cigarettes and eating cheeseburgers and, you know, perfectly healthy as far as I knew.

You know, I didn't know anything about them, but even some of the people in my life and didn't have cancer and me who meditates and does yoga and eats well, you know, just faced with this harsh reality. But that kind of whine me. I think I service that was done for you by by you in some ways in the fact that by By dint of the fact that you had chosen to live a life of service in this way, but I'm curious about the meditation So you you kind of tripled down on that was it useful because you know I would imagine a lot of people listening to this practice meditation for, you know,

to be more focused, to have a little bit more calm in their life, to not be so yanked around by their emotions, et cetera, et cetera. This is an entirely different kettle of fish. So did it work in that crucible? Yes, I mean, it was useful in that it gave me tools to recognize what was coming up when I had fear or panic or, you know, when I was spinning out in what if, what if, what if, and really, I got really sick later on.

And there was a lot of fear about whether I was going to make it or not. And so that that... What do you mean by really sick? Because it sounds to me like stage 3 breast cancer is really sick. Well, I had a really strange turn of events where like I... Things happen that weren't related necessarily to the cancer. So for example, I had this bowed of nausea at one point, not because of chemo.

I hadn't actually started chemo yet because of some other treatments they had given me. And I was throwing up and it led to a twist in my intestines. So I had a twisted intestine and was hospitalized with kidney failure because I hadn't figured out what was going on because I thought it was just the cancer, but it was all these other things. So, you know, a long story. And in summary, I was really, really ill and they were really scared to operate on me because they didn't know if I could survive the operation. And luckily, I'd intestine untwisted naturally, but, you know, I was lying in bed in pain, really scared. And at those times, I could be with the experience. And also, not just meditation, but really the Dharma practice,

or the Dharma being the teachings of the Buddha, the Dharma practice, kind of allowing me to put things in perspective. What do you mean by that? How do you specifically, what do you mean? What is the difference between the meditation and the Dharma practice that you're referring to? Well, I think the meditation helped me sort of not project the pain into the future. So if I was having pain to actually be

with a sensation of it and not do what we normally do, which is actually feel something that's not happening. We're sort of panic, and then do what we normally do, which is actually feel something that's not happening. We're sort of panic and then we think we can't handle the pain. Stress is really a stressor that we think we can't handle. So to really be with the sensations and sometimes need medication, but when I could press the button and a nurse would come and give me more medication, I could also appreciate the fact that I had medication. I distinctly remember being in the hospital bed and this was the time when Darfur was blowing

up. And I had seen an image in the New York Times of this mother who was already emaciated herself holding her dying child and just imagining the pain that they'd been in. And realizing I had this little pain button that would bring this very kind being with drugs to help me alleviate it. So it was partly actually being with the true sensations, not projecting to something that wasn't happening, but also just the appreciation and gratitude for what I had in that moment. And the latter was the result you think from learning about the teachings of the Buddha

generally as opposed to doing the specific meditation practices. Yeah, because I think that the teachings, the sort of larger teachings, do teach us a lot about gratitude and perspective and, you know, the five daily recollections which is chanted in most Buddhist countries and almost daily by a lot of people. What are they because I won't remember? There that I will age, I have not gone beyond aging, I will grow ill, I have not gone beyond illness, I will die, I have not gone beyond death, everything that I have that is dear to me, I will grow ill. I've not gone beyond illness. I will die. I have not gone beyond death.

Everything that I have that is dear to me, I will lose and I am subject to karma. It's a little dark. It's it's dark only if you only want the positive side of the equation. Right puppies and and skittles. Yeah. If you only want a sunshine, you're going to be in for some serious disappointment. Yeah, every night. When the sun sets, you know. Yeah. And just being able to hold all that. And you know, that's not to say we don't want to alleviate the suffering that's out there

and help people who can be helped, but to just put our own lives in perspective and realize that it's not always going to be up. Sometimes it's going to be down. Indeed. So what, just to back up for a second, what, because people like to hear this, I think, what kind of meditate, what, when you sat on the cushion, what was your meditation? And I guess you were still practicing in the original mind. Well, actually, by now, you've moved into the insight, meditation world. What kind of meditation were you doing when your blood hit the cushion. Yeah, at that point, I was doing a lot of meta

or loving kindness practice. A teacher had recommended that I make that a big part of my practice. So for months and months, I was only sending loving kindness and wishes of well-being to myself. Just yourself. Just to myself.

And I would start my practice and really you know spend maybe half the time doing that. Which is also a concentration practice. Yeah, the mind gets pretty sharp. Right. And then I would be with starting with the breath, be with the sensation to the body. Starting with the breath, okay, so you're feeling whatever comes up in your body and then when you get lost, start again. Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. And you know, within that, of course, noticing what's happening in the mind.

It wasn't doing a lot of sort of mindfulness of mind or emotions right then, because my thoughts and emotions were all over the place. Yeah. Yeah. You know, really sticking with the body as being in the present moment. At that point, you know, when I was really going through rough treatment, I was future tripping a lot. Just, there's a great word in Buddhism which is proponsha, which is the imperialistic tendency of mind, where you take a data point in a current moment and just project out into the future. So I'm having this pain from this treatment. This is going to get worse and worse and worse. I can't handle this. I'm going to

die. Right. Yeah, that was like every 10 minutes for me, maybe. Yeah, I'm surprised it wasn't every 30 seconds. Yeah. A huge part of the Dharma or the Buddhist teachings is about getting you to not have such an attachment to your body, because this is a temporary vessel and definitely fragile and rotting. So was that useful? Yes and no. I think that I have the propensity to be stuck in my head. I'm kind of intellectually oriented and were surrounded by especially my dad, but people around me were that way and so I actually needed to

kind of connect with the body more. So in a way, yes, it's helpful to kind of know the impermanence of the body and know that this is like you said, a temporary vessel. But in the actual experience of the body, actually needed to connect with the body more. But would it be useful not to take it so personally because the point is that body is in yours. And so if you're experiencing things in your body that you don't like, if you're not, if you don't identify it as you, it doesn't feel so insulting in some way.

Yeah, that's very true. And I think when you connect to the body in a deeper way, it doesn't feel so personal. And that's the benefit of longer retreat and deeper practice, but you really start to feel all the energetic realities of this body that you can't really put into words anymore. Yeah, I mean, I think you can even understand it on some intellectual levels. How connected do you think most of us feel to our pancreas? Or the microbiome, which is something my wife studies, which you know trillions, I'm going to get this wrong, but trillions of little life forms in our gut that are not you, but without those life forms you would have trouble surviving. Like they perform a lot of useful things,

you know, services for your body. But so it's like a war if you were to, when you clip your fingernails, is that part of you that's gone, or if you were to lose a leg, how far would you have to cut in order to until you're not you anymore? So you can kind of understand this intellectual,

but that is like kind of intellectual Chinese food in a way because you forget it very quickly. Your situation entirely different. So you ended up pulling out of this. I did. So the treatments worked and I was deemed cancer-free. How many years later? I think that the course of treatment took me about two years. So with my kind of alternative treatment, it was about two and a half years, that leg of it. And then about five years later, it was redigmed with cancer again, stage four. So I had come back in the right breast this time and in the bone, my chest bone.

So at this point, you're in your late thirties? I mean, my late thirties and metastatic cancer, yeah. And in between the, if I got, if I got the timeline right in the interregnum there, you met Freddie. I did, I met my husband. And I really, because I've been deepening my practice so much, I had started to study to become a teacher. So this was before I met you because you were the executive director at the New York Insight Meditation Center. So this is when the second round of cancer hit, this was before that job. Yeah, I was working at New York Insight, but I wasn't yet the executive director.

So the second round comes and metastatic. So I think we all know what that means, that it's spread, but how far had it spread? It's spread into the bone and lymph nodes and the breast. So it had an left kind of my upper body, but once you're metastatic, they consider you to have cancer for life. So how did you take that news? Not well. No, I...

Does anybody take it well? You know, yeah, I don't know. It was... In some ways, it was more devastating because I... It felt like, you know, this second knock to the head. Again, it's like, I need this, like, I need a hole in the head after what I'd been through. But luckily, they didn't want to do chemo. They only did very high dose, but only radiation, which is exhausting and not easy in itself,

but it's much easier than doing both, obviously. And in a lot of ways, because I was, I had been practicing so much and really deeply, I really felt like I could handle it. I, whatever was going to happen, that I was going to be able to meet it. So in the space between the first round of cancer and the, was a five years later, you had been doing a significant amount of practice. So your mind state was, do you think significantly different as you met the second wave? Yeah, definitely. And also because of the first experience, there's some truth to that quote from Nietzsche that everybody misuses something like, you know, whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger.

It's true, just that, that the wisdom and kind of spiritual maturity that came out of getting through that experience in a spiritually mature way was really empowering. But on this one was it, it seems to me, again, I'm projecting, I can't help it. was it seems to me again I'm projecting I can't help it. A little scarier in that they're they seems like they're saying there's no back door you know on the first one it was bad but they declared you can't so free this time they're coming to you and saying it's terminal yes or chronic I don't know what the right word is either and I'm, I don't know what the right word is either. I like to sort of throw skepticism in around statistics.

I think at some point I made a decision that I was going to be on, you know, sort of the positive side of that statistic. What was the statistic? Just whatever statistics exist about the rate of survival for metastatic breast cancer. And they weren't good. They weren't good, but I just sort of asked myself, well, why can't I be, and I meditate, I take care of myself, I eat well, why wouldn't I be in the 10% or whatever it is of the positive side of that statistic.

And as it turns out, you were. I was until I got diagnosed again. Right, which was about a year ago. A year ago, yeah. Yeah, I remember getting the email. What was the diagnosis the third time? So the third time, it had returned to the left breast. It was in the left lymph nodes.

It was in the lungs. It was in the lung lymph nodes. And it was in bones. So it was in the lung lymph nodes, and it was in bones. So it really, really spread. Hey. And yeah, and that, I mean, you know, in some ways, of course, I was devastated and in tears receiving the diagnosis, but I also kind of had to laugh. I mean, it was just ridiculous.

It's like, oh, maybe every five years I get cancer now. I had a great team. And again, they didn't want to do chemo this time. They didn't want to do radiation either. So they put me on hormone therapy and I doubled down on the natural treatments as well. Really took care of myself. Basically took the fall and winter off and through... Last fall and last winter. So as we record this, it's September.

Right, a year later. And had some wonderful friends raise funds for me so that we could kind of do that. Freddie took time off to take care of me as well. And amazingly, last December, I got a PET scan back that they still had cancer in my body, but unbelievable the changes in terms of not only the size of the spots and tumors, but also the intensity. What do your doctors think is going on there? And what do you think is going on there? You know, it depends who you talk to.

If you talk to my oncologist, it's just the hormone treatment working. If you talk to my naturopath, it's everything. It's my diet. It's, you know, not having too much stress for the past year, really taking it a lot easier on myself, but also in what I'm doing. And I think if you talk to my Dharma teachers and from my perspective,

there's also something inexplicable that happens to all of us, you know. Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground

up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and K cotopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discuss their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way

like confronting big challenges and how to lead through uncertainty. So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery app. So what is the prognosis now? Well, I have a PET scan on Thursday, so I'll know more next week. But everything looks okay right now, as far as my tumor markers. So tumor markers are blood tests. They're not the most reliable in terms of exactly what's going on, but they've been going

down and down steadily even since December. You said you used to phrase everything looks okay. You look more than okay. You look phenomenal. So nobody would guess that you were dealing with illness. Never mind something this serious. So you were clearly doing something right. I take good care of myself.

I try and eat really well. I try and obviously meditate and take my life a little probably a lot more easy than the average New Yorker and the way that I used to function in the city. What is your practice like now? So my meditation practice, I do first thing in the morning and I sit from anywhere, depending on my day, anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes, I do some chanting, I do a sitting practice that usually depends on the day, what's needed, if I'm really feeling scattered, I might do some kind of concentration or gathering practices, usually the breath is a good one for me.

And then what I mostly like to do is open awareness. Just to find that. So just really being mindful, aware, and with whatever is arising. So noticing, changing, phenomena, noticing what comes in and out of my perception, so that could be thoughts, it could be sensations, it could be sounds. And I like to do that practice because that's what I carry with me into the day. So the rest of my practice is daily practice of just really checking in with the body, checking in with my awareness moment to moment as much as possible, which is not all that

much, but more than it used to be. And you have done a lot of retreats too. And I know last time, one of the last conversations we had on the phone, you would just come back from South Africa where you had done pretty lengthy retreat with your husband. Yes. I think you were telling me you kind of wanted to kill him because he was snoring or something like that. Yeah, he doesn't know this, and now he listens to

this, I know, but I was calling him a fidgety Mcfidget in my head. In interviews. Yeah, we actually shared a room. That idea. How was that a good idea? Silence. It was amazing. It was a really incredible experience. Yeah, except for the fidgeting. Yeah, that was in the hall. Oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, I did a month long in South Africa. My teachers have a hermitage there.

Who are your teachers? My teachers are Tnisar and Kitesaro. They are, they have poly names, but they're Westerners. So Kitesaro is from Tennessee and Tnisar is from London. And they were both monastics. Westerners, so Kitasaro's from Tennessee and Tnisaro's from London. They were both monastics. So Kitasaro was a monk and Tnisaro was a nun with Ajahn Chah, who was a Thai forest monk. Widely regarded as a master.

Yeah. They both studied with him and after about, I think, 15 years, they fell in love and left the monastery and got married and disrobed. The widest sense of that word. Now that you've walked us through this really harrowing health, Odyssey, that you've been on, what do you think are the lessons for the rest of us? That's a good question.

I love this teaching of the Buddha about the eight-worldly winds. Do you know that one? No. I don't know anything. You know a lot, Dan. Eight-worldly wins, oh, let me forget them now, okay. Let's see if I can remember them. I have a phone in my pocket. We could Google it, yeah. Pleasure and pain, gain and loss,

fame and...fame and...dis, yeah, yeah. Crazy Victorian translation and and praise and blame. Praise and blame, yeah. Okay, I know. I had heard of these. Yes. So, you know, just our tendency to want one side of that equation. Oh, yeah.

And how when the other side shows up, we think it's a mistake. We think there's something going wrong. And it's that sort of question that we can ask ourselves, like, why not me in any moment? And this can happen to any of us. It can happen to us. It can happen to our children.

It could happen to our loved ones. Not only that, it will happen. It will happen. It might, I hope that most people I know don't have to experience cancer, grave illness like that before they're very old age, but something will happen. You know, that side of the equation hits us every single day and it's incredible. I mean, I'm telling myself this as I'm speaking to you, but it's incredible how much we every time it shows up, you know,

whether it's a blister on our foot or a head cold or somebody yelling at us and blaming us for something that, you know, we didn't feel we did wrong, we think it's a mistake. We think this should not be happening. But does that still happen with you, like, given, I mean, you've gotten this repeated series of jolts of perspective. So do you no longer sweat the small stuff? It a lot less. So blisters, you can handle blisters. If you bring Freddie in here, he might have a different story to tell you.

He will have a different story to tell you. But you know, I think I'm able to kind of, definitely with the big stuff, talk myself off the ledge and just realize this is just part of life. And more and more with the small stuff as well. Yeah. We people really don't like talking about this stuff. No.

Yeah, it's not comfortable. It's not pleasant in a lot of ways. And that's, you know, a fundamental teaching of meditation, right? Is that second foundation of mindfulness to just be aware of pleasant and unpleasant? And in some ways, a lot of practice, I think, is learning to tolerate mostly the unpleasant because we like the pleasant and just kind of growing realistic about life. Realistic about life. There's a way which that phrase could be ignored because it's sound it improvised but that is it. I mean the truth is nobody gets out of here alive. No.

And nobody gets out of here without sorrow and loss. And that's not a bad thing. I love this saying from Charlotte, I'll go back. I read once. She said, joy is whatever is happening minus our opinion of it. That used to be your email text. Yeah. And she's making the distinction between joy and happiness. So happiness and unhappiness happen throughout the day. We could have moments of unhappiness or

happiness, but joy is something different. What is, how's it different? Joy is not about pleasant unpleasant. Joy is about an experience of freedom with regardless what's happening. So I could be in that sick bed and have gratitude for pain reliever and gratitude for my life and all the loved ones. So I can still have that pain and have that feeling of joy or freedom. You said before that nobody gets out with us, sorrow, et cetera, but wasn't the Buddha advertising and escape from sorrow, lamentation, blah, blah, blah?

Wasn't he saying Nirvana, Enlightenment, liberation, awakening, the island, freedom, the beyond, the heart to see, whatever all those names was away out of this. Yes, and he's also purportedly wept or was sorrowful when his two greatest students died. So it's, I don't, again, you know, this is semantics here, but it's not that we don't have happiness and unhappiness. It's that we can be with both with a measure of ease. Our mutual friend Mark Epstein has said that it may be

a little bit like being punched in the face when you're on heroin. I don't know if Mark knows that experience. I think he was theorizing, I think, just based on my acquaintance with him. Let me ask, there are so many things I would like to talk to you about, but I'm sensitive to your time. But the other area of focus for you, and something we've talked about quite a bit, is race. I don't know. I don't have any, I have a million, I'm sure I will have specific questions, but let me just throw that out there.

What's on your mind these days when I use that word? What's on your mind these days when I use that word? Well, I'm a black woman, which you can't tell if this is only audio, necessarily by my accent. My cousin's boyfriend yesterday, the other day told me I sounded like a California white girl. Well, one could theorize based on what we're saying, but your Ethiopian slash aerotrain extraction, but yes. Right. Oh, right. Exactly. Yeah. Good point, Dan. So, you know, for me, there was a black woman supposed to sound sound like. Well, that's a good question, too. And could bring up issues around unconscious bias, which is one of the things I'm'm really interested around race right now. So this is a big discussion in Buddhist communities in Western, Buddhist communities

right now because they tend to be the convert communities, obviously not the Asian immigrant ones, but they tend to be very white and upper and middle class generally. Absolutely. Yeah, I've been out enough for treats to see that myself. And there is a desire to kind of be more inclusive. I can tell you the number of years I was practicing not only being often the youngest person in the room, but as my friend Law says, I was the only person of color besides the Buddha in the room.

And I really didn't even realize I was so used to being in white spaces all the time. I didn't even realize the level of discomfort that I had, sort of underlying. There is, you know, has been documented that people of color in white spaces operate operate with sort of this threat response, that there's this often validated feeling that they will be experienced in a certain way, so they often underperform or behave in particular ways that limit them. So if we're talking about freedom and ease, that that's not happening in these white spaces. And you know, from the side of the white communities, so we're talking about, again, Buddhist communities here, but we could sort of expand that to the larger society.

There's unconscious bias happening. And to me, these sort of subtle aspects of the unconscious mind are so, they're just excellent topics for Buddhist to explore because that's what we do, we study the mind. But there's a resistance to really talking about it. A resistance from a lot of white meditators who are uncomfortable talking about issues of identity, talking about issues of race and whiteness, and particularly of racism and unconscious bias,

white privilege. Because it's not cool to be a racist anymore, I mean, in most places. But there's sort of a new order of racism that is this implicit bias and unconscious bias that doesn't really get talked about because nobody wants to be called a racist. Nobody wants to really look at the ways in which they might stereotype people or make

assumptions, have fears, have judgments about people based on the color of their skin. It's hard because there because the taboo against racism is just so justifiably severe. You know, there's a line from Stephen Bachelor, I'm gonna mangle it, but the great Buddhist writer, Stephen Bachelor, who says something effective, you know, if you look into your own mind, you're gonna see a rapist and a killer sometimes.

You're gonna see a racist too. Nobody wants to see it, but you're going to, if you're willing to look, you'll see it. It doesn't mean it'll arise and pass just like everything else, but you have to be willing to acknowledge it's there. I'm surprised therefore that there's so much resistance among these Buddhists, given that that's what we're in the business of looking. resistance among these Buddhists, given that that's what we're in the business of looking. Yeah, well, I think that there's a real, especially among Buddhists, you know, these ideals of kindness and compassion, there can be a bypassing of anything that's sort of negative. As a great term, spiritual bypass, you were the first person I ever heard this term from. That you, so it's like we believe that practice is enough.

So we don't have to work on our crap, we don't have to really examine our behavior or attitudes or subconscious conclusions about people of other races and ethnicities because we're sending love and kindness. Yeah, so spiritual bypassing was coined by John Wellwood in the 80s to describe kind of this tendency, especially among Western practitioners,

to not deal with negative emotions, to bypass sort of anger and depression and rage and emotions that they didn't want to feel and just kind of prematurely transcend them. But that just seems to me to be like a complete in complete contradiction with the thrust of the of the Dharma just to look at everything. It is and I think it is particularly this Western phenomena because we can you know the Dharma is fast there's so many teachings and we can pick and choose. So that transcendent stuff looks pretty good. Like I wanna get there. And so you can ignore looking at everything

if you just wanna get to that peace and stillness and that was happening a lot. And that was remedied somewhat or addressed through all the psychological work and this marriage of Western psychology and but a psychology and Mark has done a lot of work around that as well. One of the leaders in sort of seeing where we might need a different approach to actually look at our stuff and not bypass it.

Jack Cornfield as well. Yeah, but this tendency for what actually a friend of Brian Lissage, who's a teacher. I'm taking this course right now. Brian is running a course through, which I highly recommend of anybody's interested, the Barry B-A-R-R-E, that's the name of a town in Massachusetts. Barry Center for Buddhist Studies.

Brian is running a course, which is an online course. I think they're offering it right now. It's too late to sign up for it, but they'll probably offer it again, Brian is running a course, which is an online course. They're offering it right now, it's too late to sign up for it, but they'll probably offer it again called Identity, Not Self, and Awakening, it's a mouthful. But it's all about looking at this stuff through the lens of Buddhism. Right. Yeah. And Brian and I sort of kind of hybrid this term, cultural spiritual bypassing.

We're going to teach a course at BCBS on that to look at, okay, so we psychologically bypass maybe anger and we don't want to deal with it. So we just let go, but we actually have just repressed it. And I met plenty of passive aggressive Buddhists over the years to recognize that that's something that people can do. You know, they can sort of say, you know, I just want to be peaceful. I'm not years to recognize that that's something that people can do. You know, they can sort of say, you know, I just want to be peaceful. I'm not going to look at that.

But we can do the same thing around cultural issues. We can sort of have all of these tendencies that we just don't want to look at. We want to go straight to loving kindness and oneness and interdependence and the Buddha nature and not realize that, you know, we sort of get tense when we're walking down the street and a young black man at the hoody is walking past us. Not to be able to acknowledge that is not looking at that stuff. So what can we do about it? I don't want to hold myself up in any way as some sort of example, or example are here. I'm willing to talk. I'm not afraid to look at it or talk

about it, but I'm sure there are lots of ways that unconscious bias is working in my life because it is unconscious. So what can we do to A, root it out? What can we do to root it out? And be better. Well, I think that one is to talk about it. And it's not only around race, it's around all sorts of issues. There are these wonderful sexism, gender, sexuality, size. I've been educating myself recently about fat phobia, which I really didn't recognize in myself for a long time. I'm ashamed to say that it's only through actually a number of students who have been pointing things out to me and posting articles on Facebook that I'm realizing kind of the size judgments,

the size bias that I'd create. And so part of it is just educating ourselves, being aware, having conversations. And then I think a lot of it, in real time, is learning to catch it. And that's where meditation practice and this conversation about the mind that Buddhists are very adept at is really helpful, because it is in a moment that we can see it. But if we are not looking for it, and we don't want to see it,

then it's not going to happen. So, you know, in that moment where you see this kid and you realize this stereotype is coming up, can you do a replacement of that? You know, sometimes I'll ask myself, even in my neighborhood or in my building, you know, if I have that tendency to come up, I'll just say, you know, well, maybe he's a road scholar. I don't know.

But we make all sorts of assumptions about people based on what they're wearing, how they look that day that we wouldn't necessarily make about someone else. And the Brian points it out in this course. It's not that you have to beat yourself up every time it happens. It's just to see that it's happened. Right. Then that actually makes it much more doable.

Because if we're, if we're going to be so ashamed that it's happening, you're going to be, you're either not going to look or you're going to be in for a lot of suffering. But if you are given permission for it to happen, and just the mission is just to see it, and maybe not be so captivated by it, that's doable. And to realize we're all affected by it, if we're talking about race, then why people, a lot of it, is around guilt, and to realize that everyone is affected by it,

that some of the officers that were involved in Freddie Gray's death were black, that we're all internalizing these external systems, but are we willing to be honest and look at that? What do you think canners should be done to bring this practice that we're talking about, Buddhism, secular meditation, whatever you want to call it. It's got lots of flavors. To make it more attractive to all sorts of people rather than, you know, I haven't seen the data, but my unscientific polling seems to suggest that it's an overwhelmingly upper

middle class white phenomenon at this point. What can be done about this? You know, I think that there are a lot of different things. I'm not an expert on how to bring this to the masses, but from what I see, there's sort of that secularization that's happening that's bringing it into schools, like with Mindful Schools and Holistic Life Foundation and other programs. We had a lot of Smith on the trip. Yeah, and all those programs are doing great work when we're talking about meditation itself.

We're talking about the Buddhist teachings in the Dharma. What I see works really well is this phenomena of affinity groups. And to me, the Buddha's supposed to have said to some of his monks, teach in the vernacular. There's this question, do we teach in the classical language and keep it pure, you know, some monks are teaching in the vernacular, that seems wrong. And he said, no, teach in the vernacular because people aren't going to understand the teachings if you're not speaking to them in a way that's understandable. And so this idea that people, everyone is going to understand the way

Jack Cornfield teaches the Dharma or Joseph Goldstein or me, that they might need it, spoken to them in a different way. There's a lot of groups that meet around 12 steps. So Buddhist meditation groups that are oriented around AA and the other 12 step programs. And they speak differently in that group. They teach the teachings in a different way.

That's relevant for that community. So people of color groups, the Dharma is going to be communicated in a different way that's relevant to those communities. And to not see that as isolationist or, you know, a threat, you know, it's also, I've heard it be challenged as not in line with the teachings, because we're all one. It's like, yeah, we're all one, and you talk funny.

I want to hear it taught in a different way. No, I think it's important. We all gravitate to teachers who we can relate to. Right. And so just make sense and do you have a lot more options if you're white, you know, because pretty, you know, they're huge, there's a huge, overwhelmed majority of white people in the teacher class. Yeah. There's no two ways about it.

And that's an emphasis right now also to make sure that we have more teachers, teachers of color and people from other groups. So I'm very close with Joseph Goldstein, for example, who runs and founded the Insight Meditation Society along with other people. But, you know, I know we just, I don't want to come off as an apologist because you can tell me from wrong about this, but it seems to be a very high priority for him, and I get the sense from those in positions of power and responsibility within the Buddhist world that it is on their mind, and they seem to be trying to do something about it. Am I giving them too much credit, or do you think I'm right about that, or I'm wrong about that?

I think there's more awareness about that now, especially in particular communities. I think yes, in the inside community, that conversation is very strong. And it's challenging. You know, the stuff is deeply rooted. And it's rooted in the systems. It's rooted in the institutions and in the structures. And it's going to bring up all sorts of questions

around how we do everything. So this, for example, and I'm sure Brian will talk about this in the course. We talked about it in our segment. Just that over emphasis on silence, there's so much emphasis on silent practice here. And it is. It's very profound. It's very powerful. There is not the same kind of emphasis in Asia. If you've ever traveled in particularly in Southeast Asia where this tradition, the insight tradition,

comes from there's a lot of yacking going on in temples, and monasteries. And of course, there is a lot of meditation practice, but kind of the preciousness of silence here is it might not appeal to people of color to younger people. And so to start to understand that it might challenge these things that we've decided is the Dharma, is the teachings, but actually are culturally constructed as well. That's really interesting. Where can people find out more

about you or even contact you if they want. My website is my name, subanaiselossi.com. Can you spell it? S-E-B-E-N-E-S-E-L-A-S-S-I-E. And you've slowed down, I talked over you, there was a dot com there, it's not a dot net. You've slowed down a little bit, but are you still teaching? I know you were doing coaching. Are you still doing all that? Yeah, I am. I'm starting to teach more again. I'm not going to be doing a whole lot of retreat teaching just because they find the travel challenging, but some

Brian and I are teaching a retreat in May at BCBS and I'll do some teaching here and there, but yeah, I teach locally and I coach. Is there anything you wanted to talk about that? I didn't give you a chance to. Anything I should have asked you that I didn't. We covered so much. I feel like I've had a therapy session. I don't even charge. Okay, before we let you go and update in that interview, which we recorded a few weeks

ago, you heard Seb mention that she was on her way to go get some new tests. So since then, she's gotten the results back and they were really positive and she's doing great. So a huge relief for Seb and for everyone to love her. So a happy ending to this podcast and we'll be back next week with more. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.

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