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 this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit 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.