You Belong: A Call for Connection
By Sebene Selassie
HarperOne 2020; 256 pp., $24.48 (cloth)
Meditation teacher Sebene Selassie opens her new book with an invitation: “Connect to any ways you feel you don’t fit in, aren’t accepted, or are separate. Can you sense that longing for connection within you? Is there a part of you that knows the universality of that longing?” As an immigrant, woman of color, and cancer survivor, Selassie shares her own struggles with feeling that she did not belong. Through clear, cogent guidance grounded in Buddhist practice and psychology, she offers not a map to freedom, but a “map key.” The map, of course, has always been in our hands. She reminds us that by fully realizing our connectedness, we reduce suffering, both in ourselves and within society. “When we love ourselves,” she writes, “our sense of separation softens, the need to dominate dissolves. Comparison and competition clear away in the presence of self-love. Hierarchy and oppression crumble. We belong.”
