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

10% Happier with Dan Harris

10% Media, LLC

Mental Health, Health & Fitness

4.6 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2026

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What does it actually mean to "trust life" — especially when life is handing you something genuinely hard? In this Meditation Party episode (originally aired in 2024), Dan, Sebene Selassie, and Jeff Warren dig into that question from multiple angles: as a personal mantra, a philosophical stance, and a daily practice. Plus: listener questions on rumination, work-life balance, and the eternal napping-vs.-meditating debate.

"Trust Life" vs. "This Is the Curriculum" — Sebene shares the origin of her tattoo and what the mantra has meant through years of health challenges.
The three timescales of practice — Jeff breaks down how meditation works in the moment, over months and years, and across the arc of a whole life. The third one is where things get interesting.
Obsessive thinking / rumination — Practical tools from all three, including one from Sebene involving a trampoline, and one from a clinical psychologist that will make you feel ridiculous in the best way.

Sebene Selassie describes herself as a "writer, teacher, and immigrant-weirdo." She teaches meditation on the ten percent happier app and is the author of a great book called You Belong. She's based in Brooklyn.

Jeff Warren is also a writer and a meditation teacher. He and Dan co-wrote the book, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. He also hosts the Consciousness Explorers podcast. He's based in Toronto.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:18.2	Hello, everybody. How we doing? We've got a fascinating and often very funny discussion today, and we cover a lot of ground. How can you be cool with literally anything that happens? Does everything happen for a reason? Is there any truth to that old cliche? We also take your voicemails with questions on worklife balance, obsessive thinking, and meditation versus napping.
0:41.3	This episode is part of an occasional series we do here on the show called Meditation Party.
0:45.9	It features two of my old friends, Jeff Warren and Sebinay Salasi.
0:50.2	If you are not familiar with those guys, here's a little bit more information about them.
0:55.2	Sabine describes herself as a writer, teacher, and immigrant weirdo.
0:59.2	She is the author of a great book called You Belong.
1:02.1	She's based in Brooklyn in NYC.
1:05.3	Jeff Warren is also a writer and meditation teacher.
1:07.7	He and I co-wrote a book called Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, and he hosts
1:12.5	his own podcast called The Mind Bod Adventure Pod. Jeff is based in Toronto. He's my favorite
1:17.5	Canadian, as I often say. Three quick housekeeping notes before we dive in. First, this conversation
1:23.0	first aired back in 2024, but we're bringing it back because it's really good, as you will hear.
1:28.3	Second, if this episode leaves you wanting more, I've got good news for you. We're doing a three-day
1:34.2	meditation party retreat, IRL, at the Omega Institute in Reinbeck, New York. It'll be going down
1:41.1	October 16th through the 18th, so it's a weekend event. It's really fun. We teach a bunch of different flavors of meditation. We take a lot of questions from the crowd. And there's also plenty of time to just chill and socialize, play pickleball, whatever you want to do. We even do a dance party. You will find a link to register right there in the show notes, or you can just go to eomega.org.
2:02.1	Third thing to say, and then I'll shut up, Jeff and Seb are two of the featured teachers
2:06.7	over on my newish meditation app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. I know looking at the news
2:13.7	these days, you can feel quite powerless in the face of world events, like what can
2:18.3	you do about it? My view is that taking care of your own mind is actually essential. It's not
2:24.1	self-indulgent. It's a community service because it allows you to respond sanely. So over on the
2:29.3	app, we've got a growing library of meditations to help you train your brain with teachers like
	...

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