Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 168: Jeff Warren, New Year, New You

Episode Date: January 2, 2019

With the new year upon us, it's the perfect time to help you make those resolutions stick. This week Dan Harris and his "Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics" co-author, meditation instructor Jeff Warren, listen to and answer your questions about how to begin a meditation practice, make it stick, and many other queries which may arise during the course of your practice. Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail at 646-883-8326. The Plug Zone Website: http://jeffwarren.org/ Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics https://www.amazon.com/Meditation-Fidgety-Skeptics-Happier-How/dp/0399588949 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 y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast.

I'm Dan Harris. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Happy New Year people. This is a time of year when we're making resolutions and one of the big resolutions is I want to meditate. And yet we tend to make these resolutions and abandon them by January 7th or 8th, maybe the 15th if we're lucky. Why?

Because we didn't evolve for healthy habits. I've said this before, but it bears repeating. Evolution didn't care about whether you've lost your teeth. Evolution cared about you getting your DNA into the next generation, which is why we're wired for threat detection and finding sources of pleasure like food and sexual partners. We're not wired for success when it comes to creating healthy habits, which is why we all struggle with our diet, exercise, and meditation. So we're dedicating this entire episode to answering your questions about how to boot up and abiding meditation habit.

We're going to be taking your voicemails and listening listening to your voice males and then answering the questions that you sent us through the voice male number we've set up. By we, I mean me and my beloved friend Jeff Warren who is an incredible meditation teacher based in Toronto, he and I wrote a book together that came out around this time last year and it just came out in paperback available to find bookstores everywhere in amazon.com etc etc. It's called meditation for fidgety skeptics. And in that book, Jeff and I took a cross country road trip in a very deeply silly orange

bus with a big 10% happier decal on the side of it. We took a road trip across the country and met all sorts of people, social workers, to politicians, to celebrities, to random people on the street, to police officers, cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, all sorts of people who want to meditate, but can't quite figure out how to get the habits started. We did this as an information gathering thing, and we really, in the process of doing this

road trip, identified six, seven, eight of the biggest hurdles, because we kept hearing the same things. There are these common hurdles that people have to get over in order to establish a meditation habit, like finding the time to do it, figuring out, am I doing it right? That's a huge issue. Wrestling with questions about whether this practice might make you lose your edge or whether it's self-indulgent or whether it's going to make you look weird.

Jeff and I used this trip as an information gathering thing and wrote a book about it, really giving people useful, practical hacks for getting over the hump and establishing this habit. So I'm bringing Jeff back in order to celebrate the release of the paperback, edition of meditation for fidgety skeptics, which as I said is available everywhere right now, sorry I'm being salesy, and also to celebrate New Year because this is a time of year when people are really thinking about how do I do this? What's the best time of day to do this? Where do I do it? Does it need to be pristine silence? Blah blah blah. We're going to answer all those questions in a second. But first let me, sorry, on a salesy tip. Let me just tell you about something that we're doing through the 10%

happier company, which is that we're creating a challenge, a three-week challenge that starts on January 7th that you can sign up for free. If you go to 10%happier.com slash challenge, you can sign up for this challenge for free. And basically it's a 21-day challenge. You win if you meditate for fifth win, I put that in quotes. If you meditate for just 15 of those days. And every day we send you a hand selected meditation and it's really fun and I think this is a good way to boot up a practice. We've, as I've said before on the show, we've run a version of this challenge

with our friends over at Apple and we found it to be really successful and so we're now releasing this publicly. And the idea of meditating for just 15 out of the 21 days, well, that's based on a big learning from the trip that Jeff and I took across the country, which is this concept of daily-ish. If you tell yourself you have to meditate every day,

well, then it's possible you miss a day and then you're the voice in your head, your ego swoops in and tells you a whole story about how you're a failed meditator and you just give up. Well, daily-ish has a kind of an accordion aspect to it. And so you don't have to do it every day. You're just trying to do it most days. And we find that really lowers the barrier to entry for people and so that's spirit is infused into this challenge. The challenge will start in January 7th, you can sign up now, it's free, but in the meantime let's answer all of your questions. Here we go. Jeff Warren and me and your questions.

Enjoy. How you doing Jeff? Excellent. How you doing buddy? Happy new year. Happy new year to you. We're a year out from the Mad Dash to publish meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, and it really was a Mad Dash. Have you recovered? I'm still feeling the trauma in my nervous system, Dan. Just as a backstory, we wrote that book faster than a book should be written. I think we we took the road trip that that forms the spine of the book in January of 2017. So we went on this big long cross country trip, which was amazing and fun. And we had this big silly orange bus that we did it in. And then we had to hand in the manuscript in I think the summer. So it was just not the sanest way to do a book,

especially given I have a full-time job, you have a full-time job. And yeah, anyway, it was crazy. But here we are, the paperbacks coming out, that which is pretty cool. Yeah, super cool. Actually, you know, as a thing about that book that made me realize, from now on, I only want to do collaborations.

Because even though it was crazy, it's like when you have that accountability, and there's a part of a team, it just makes it possible to do something a lot more quickly, and a lot more efficiently. So I think back to the old days when I'd spend 10 years working on a book, it was like, what was I thinking? So I was very appreciative of that experience, even if it was very intense.

Yeah, I agree. Collaboration is fantastic. And speaking as somebody who works in television, which is intensely collaborative, it is a much more fun way to work in my opinion. And actually, that leads us to one of the big themes that's going to come out, I suspect, during the course of this episode, which is being with other people, being in community and how that can, as you like to say, turbocharge or amplify your meditation practice. But again, let's get back to meditation. And we've got all these voicemails. I put something on Twitter and we, that generated a bunch of voicemails for us. So let's get to number one. Hey Dan, how to hear I love 10% happier in meditation for Fisidious skeptics. Thank

you for making meditation accessible to all of us who don't like the woo-woo. I have your app but have really been unable to stick with the study practice even though I know it's good for me to like like exercising, eating my vegetables. I seem to hold out meditation as like a carrot that I never grab, kind of like a hope and a promise just out of reach. My mind thinks, hey, when I have a study meditation practice like Dan, my life will be amazing. But in real life, I wait for the perfect moment to come for meditation, no one else home,

the dish is done, my software organized, et cetera, et cetera. And guess what? The perfect moment never comes. How do I stop procrastinating and make 2019 the year I start and stick to a practice? Thanks a lot. Happy new year. That's a great question. I have a million thoughts, but I wanted to defer to the Maestro here, Jeff.

What do you have to say to Heather? Well, you know, I was thinking I knew kind of what we were going to do in this episode ahead of time. We were going to be talking a little bit about the habit stuff. And I was thinking in a way, were the perfect two people to do it because we have such different styles. You are, you sit down at one point, you realize that you

wanted to start a meditation practice, and you just started doing like four hours a day. Like you are disciplined, you seem to have a way of creating a habit that worked for you. And so I wanna hear more about how you do that. My contrasting style is very different. You know, I have ADD, I'm all over the map. My biggest challenge in life is creating a habit and staying with the habit.

So I have figured out tricks for how to work with my system, but I feel like one of the kind of the big takeaways for people to have in mind at the very beginning here is that different tricks are going to work for different people. And you've got different kinds of, each have different kinds of challenges. So I was thinking I could do a response about what's worked for me, and then you could do a response about what works for you. And then people can, listeners can kind of listen to like, okay, well,

which of these is gonna work? What combination is gonna work best for me based on that? I love that, I think that's brilliant, because, I mean, this is one of the things we talk about in the book, and because you and I had to do a lot of learning about behavior change and how difficult that is for people, habit formation is incredibly difficult.

And one of the major headlines is, what works for you may not work for me, and what works for you right now may not work for you in six months, and that's why the essential move in trying to establish a habit is to approach it with a spirit of experimentation. And knowing that you will fail and or quote unquote fail. And that's that's that's just part of of of how it goes and we quoted Thomas Edison in the book as

well he was reputed to have said I I've never failed I just tried 10,000 things that didn't work and that is the attitude. Exactly. So let me say for me for me, I, this idea I had, so it was all about the right environment for me. It's all about creating a structure, you know, and this has been the big takeaway as I read, as I read books about willpower and I would see myself how, how much of a failure I was at actually getting something done if I was just relying on my will, I started to realize that what I need is a structure, a kind of container, and that's what works best with my ADD. So that's why I would go to, at the beginning, when I started meditating, it was all about going to retreats for me, because retreats would have a container, or it would be enrolling in courses, or it would be doing weekend things, or doing every kind of community thing I could, because when I showed up somewhere, there was already a structure that I just had to kind of go into it. So when I tell people who are having trouble getting started, I say, well, what is the container that you already have in your life? Where is

there a structure that has clear delionations, you know, like, you wake up this time, you brush your teeth here, you arrive at work here, like, and then how can you take that structure and then just like add to the structure a little piece where the meditation fits in. So it can just become something you don't think about. You're just like, you know, you're just the structure happens. It's all but environmental design. You design the right structure and then the sit just kind of takes care of itself because

you know where it fits in the structure. When I have that kind of thing going on, then by far, I'm most likely to do my meditation and stay with my meditation. When I lose the structure, I lose the practice. Although there's a huge caveat I can say, and maybe we'll unpack it in another question about how you begin to do the applying in life thing, which is another big piece for me.

So that's maybe a place to start. Yeah, I think that's a great place to start. I'll just say a few other things to Heather that come to mind from, you know, just the research we did around the book. I get the idea of waiting for the perfect time, but as I think Heather has now realized, that rarely arises the perfect time. So I think the last piece of advice you had about looking at your schedule and thinking about what are your existing habits?

Where is there already behavioral momentum? You know, I know I'm gonna exercise at this time or I know I'm gonna brush my teeth at this time. I know I go to bed at this time. I know I pull my car into the driveway at this time, where I know I'm going to brush my teeth at this time, I know I go to bed at this time, I know I pulled my car into the driveway at this time and then drafting off of that momentum to say, oh, I think I could add a minute of meditation right there, or two minutes of meditation, which leads into my next piece of advice, which is lower the expectations about the commitment because one of the things we've learned at the app

is that if you tell people, hey, one minute counts, and we have a whole bunch of one minute meditations in the app and in the book, you wrote some great one minute meditations, that becomes eminently doable. And so I think there's a lot of power to that. The other thing I would say is thinking about people often ask what's the right time of

day. But just remember, if you're not a morning person, don't try to shove it in there. Try to do it at a time of day when it's gonna be, when it's gonna be most likely to actually stick. And so I think thinking about that, there isn't a time of day where it's magic. The best time to meditate is when you will actually meditate. So really just thinking about what are the ways to set your life up so that the odds are the highest.

And Jeff mentioned willpower, and you may want to say more about this, Jeff, but willpower is not something to be counted on. It is an emaddingly ephemeral inner resource, which tends to evaporate in the face of things like hunger or boredom or loneliness or fatigue. So, a better way to go about this sort of demonically difficult process of setting up a habit is to instead of relying on willpower to rely on dopamine, rely on pleasure, rely on the pleasure centers of the brain. So, really, it's about figuring out once you've established the habit, what are the benefits? You may find if you try to do a couple of weeks of practice that, oh, all of a sudden you're

more focused or you're less yanked around by your emotions or you're calmer or you're sleeping better, let those benefits drag you forward rather than grit, which again tends to evaporate. And just one last thing, we, a couple of last things here. Another concept that we came up with in the book, I think Jeff, this was when we visited Newton South High School, my alma mater, where I was a waste role in Nair du Well in high school. And we had a couple couple hundred people that showed up for an evening talk about meditation. And one of the women in the upper deck of the auditorium said

that a concept that her yoga teacher had given to her is daily-ish. And you and I really latched on to that, because it's just another way to make things more doable. Yeah, it's great to be, you know, if you can be super militant the way I am about doing it every day, but the problem with that is if you fall off the wagon for a day, then the voice in your head or your ego is going to swoop in and tell you a whole story about how you're a failed meditator and then you're done. But the

daily-ish has that sort of elasticity to it that I think can be super helpful. And at the 10% happier app company, we actually used a lot of the things we learned in the process of writing meditation for Figuity Skeptics in our work with Apple. So we work with Apple and we teach there, we run an annual challenge for all the employees all over the world at Apple.

It's a lot of people. And we are the two main principles that we've adopted are one minute counts and daily ish. So during the month of October, we tell the people that Apple, hey, meditate at least a minute for 25 out of 31 days. And I can't give away the numbers, but basically suffice it to say, it's produced really good outcomes in terms of engagement.

People, when you set the bar low like that, it becomes much easier to do. And along those lines, we're about to, with Apple's blessing, make that challenge publicly available. So January 7th, you can sign up for this challenge. It's a three week challenge. And if you meditate, I think it's like 15 out of 21 days for at least a minute, then you win.

I don't know what you win. So these are some of the concepts that we've found in writing 10% meditation for fidgety skeptics, and hopefully Heather, they will help for you. Jeff, anything you want to say in terms of the last words to Heather? Yeah, just that, you know, it's, while the consistency can be a thing that you're always coming back to, there is something that happens once you've meditated a little bit. And it doesn't necessarily take that long, which is that you start to get a taste for the kind of simplicity of it, you know, the piece of it. And it's like, you just get yourself in the posture

and it's like somehow just from doing that, it starts to happen. So what I would say is that's why the one minute stuff is so important or the two minute counts stuff is so important. Just take the two minutes, get in the posture and after you've been at practice for a few weeks, it will, it's sometimes the meditation just starts to happen. And it's like the nervous system notices where it is and it just starts kicking in to gear. It's not unlike with me, if I have trouble falling asleep, sometimes I'll just pretend I'm sleeping. I'll just start breathing in a really slow way like I'm sleeping and then it'll suddenly trick my body and I'll start sleeping. In the same way you get into a meditation posture, the meditation itself just starts to happen.

So that's why give yourself that two minutes, and then if that's happening, then you can go a little bit longer, a little bit longer if you like. But it's amazing, the meditation will start to do you. I think that's so important. In fact, I think we wrote a little bit about in the book, the idea of just put your body there,

which I think we stole from share in solsberg the You know if you're struggling Even in or you just don't feel like you want to do it just put your body on the cushion There's a real power to just getting your body there even if you get up after 30 seconds But the other thing I want to say is just in terms of overcoming inertia That's what I one of the things I like about a challenge in which I think might work for Heather, is that if you sign up for this thing, and Jeff you talked earlier about the sort of momentum that can be created by signing up for a course,

or signing up for a treat, if you sign up for a challenge, especially if it's uniquely unantimidating the way one minute for 15 out of 21 days is that then you can start to taste some of those benefits. You start to taste the the the bombier inner weather, the lack of emotional, the reduction in emotional reactivity. And that is what the once that gets its hooks in you, then the practice is here to stay. Even if you fall off the wagon, you're much more likely to get back on because you see when you fall off, how you suffer more.

And in fact, I think in some ways, falling off the wagon in my own personal experience in times when I've been on a big breaking news story and I haven't been able to meditate, I see. Oh yeah, my life is worse right now because I'm not meditating. And that just gives a kind of propulsion to the practice that I think is super healthy. All right, Jeff should I go on to voice mail number two or do you do you have something else you want to say? Well, just because you said it the challenge is a structure.

You know, that's that's the piece around environmental design. Like, you know, everyone should just close their eyes and picture yourself and then picture yourself surrounded by a grid. What is your structure? Because you carry that around with you. The more deliberate you are about what that grid is and how the meditation can fit into it, the more it'll happen. That's literally a visual that I have in my head if I want to.

I think about, okay, what is my structure right now? It's like, I depend on that structure. So I just, I mean, if anyone was like me, if they're ADD, what's your grid? What's your structure? What's the design a grid? It may or be clear about what it is in your life. And then that's where you fit the meditation in.

Love it. All right, let's do voice mail number two. Hi, I had the pleasure of meeting you and Jeff Warren last January at a book signing in Pasadena, California was rolling along really well with my meditation practice if you will and I've fallen off the bandwagon for the past two or three months and struggling to get back into it and he suggested that helpful. This is Chris and Pasadena, California. Thank you. Thank you Chris. I

remember that event with Jeff. That was fun. I think we went to like California pizza kitchen or something like that afterwards. Yeah, we wrote a whole chapter in the book about falling off the wagon and how to keep the practice going because this is a huge problem for people. I mean, people get very streaky about this. They start a habit. I mean, this is not just meditation, it's also for exercise too. You, January one rolls around, you're in the gym every day for three weeks

and then boom, you're off. So Jeff, let me start with you. Any thoughts on how to get back on the wagon? Yeah, my basic thought is, you just do it. You begin again, you make it simple. I think a lot of the challenge that happens when we fall off the wagon is only built this big story in our head about how we're screwed or how we start to make getting back to meditation is way bigger thing than it is. And I know that's what happens with me, then it just starts the rationalization, just start kind of ballooning out. So the key to the practice is just that you can start at any moment.

At any moment, you just start again, it's not like you're starting over, like the your history of a practitioner, your history of all the times you've meditated, it's there in your nervous system, you know? So you just go back to it and make it really simple. Don't make it complicated. Like this is the, you know, this, you kind of mentioned this earlier on an earlier, the earlier voicemail.

Like the more you can connect to the simple pleasure of it, like I found that practitioners that really make it work over the long term. One of the things they all seem to share is that they have the capacity to appreciate the simplicity of the activity. That it doesn't need to be complicated, it doesn't need to be a big thing. That there's just this idea that you can just drop in and do this one thing for a little bit of time, even if it's for two minutes, for one minute, or for five minutes, and that's all it needs to be is meditation. So, you know, if you got in your head this big thing, oh, I got to do it right or I have to have this whole, you know, you see,

it's just the mind will create all of these obstacles. But if you can just make it really simple and just slow the whole thing down and just decide right then as soon as you notice in that you're avoiding meditation, close your eyes and just do a minute of sitting with yourself, a two minute with sitting yourself, well guess what? You're back on the van wagon. Yeah, I love that. I want to say a couple things. One, just on a technical note, you may notice that there's a difference in the quality

of my audio and the quality of Jeff's audio. That's because I should have said that's the beginning, Jeff's up in Canada and dialing in through a special app we have, which actually makes it better audio quality than being just on the phone. But I'm sitting in a fancy studio in New York, which is, you know, why my velvet baritone is so, you know, anyway. That's the one thing.

And then the other thing I wanted to say, Jeff, to I want to amplify a point you made and then amplify another point. One is, just as the instruction of basic meditation is just begin again every time you get distracted, just begin again. That is meditation. And we spent a lot of time talking about that in the book because people worry about doing it right, and I suspect we'll have more to say that about that later. But just as just beginning again is the instruction par excellence for beginning meditation, it's also applicable to the habit of meditation. It is inevitable that you're going to fall off the

wagon starting a habit is incredibly hard. And if you just use the same good natured experimental approach that we discussed at the beginning to rebooting the habit, then you're much more likely to be able to reboot. And to know, look, life is unpredictable. It's, you know, lots of things are going to come up that may knock you off of your pristine habit. And it's okay, nothing's been lost just as when you get distracted in meditation itself. And the other thing I wanted to get at, Jeff, is you talked about the simple pleasure of practice, but this is one of the things you really taught me in the course of our friendship and in writing the book, which is that I, you talked at the beginning

about how I'm pretty disciplined and I'm able to form a habit. But often there is a, there is a militaristic, gritcher teeth, each of your vegetables, a flavor to my practice because I'm just beating myself, you know, into submission. And you really got me to focus on the fact that meditation actually the act itself can be pleasurable. Not I've tended well on the benefits of the practice, which I hope can get their tendrils into you and make you an abiding meditator

because it's working for your anxiety or depression or whatever. But your message is much simpler, which is no, no, no, no, actually meditating can be a source of enjoyment. So can you say more about that? Yeah, it has a lot to do with the nature of the concentration that gets developed in a meditation practice.

One way to think about what the skill you're building, is this idea of gathering all parts of your attention into doing one thing. So, in the easiest to kind of describe the opposite of that, which is say, anything else we're doing, like say you're washing the dishes by hand. You know, you could have a really deep meditative experience of that by just feeling

the water on your hands and being completely in the moment with the sort of sensory experience of it. But instead, what happens is we're going over our to-do lists, we're obsessing about this problem, the water on your hands and being completely in the moment with the sort of sensory experience of it. But instead, what happens is we're going over our to-do lists, we're assessing about this problem, or this slide, or this thing happening over here, we're catastrophizing, we're basically our attention is spread into like five, six, seven, eight, nine different tracks. So when we notice that, you know, with mindfulness, and we, we, to come into a practice, the idea is to just like decide that you're going to commit

all your faculties to one thing. So you bring everything in to say just feeling a breath or feeling a sound or whatever it is. As we start to do that, the body will naturally start to get relaxed and then the mind starts to feel a particular flavor of pleasure that is really becomes the feedback loop for any long term practitioner. It's this inherent feeling of just sort of satisfaction of doing this one thing and kind of doing it well.

Like you're just paying attention to the breath. You're just listening. And you start to notice, oh, all the parts of you that decide that are thinking, oh, this is boring, this is this, this is that, all that stuff you bring with you. But you just notice that, you come back and you go, you drop back into this one thing. And the more you have the attitude of like, oh, this is like a break, you know, I'm so appreciative. I get this moment where I don't have to be exhausted and stretch out a million different

directions. I can just do this one thing. So you create this feedback loop with the appreciation for the simplicity, creates more simplicity, creates more convergence, and eventually you're kind of, you're pulled together in a sort of flow state with the practice. And that's what what I'm talking about. As you start to get that going, it doesn't have to take very long. Then you start to look forward to the practice as like a place where you're practicing the basic value of doing something simple, doing something well,

appreciating the simplicity. And it rolls out into your life in all of these very healing ways. You know, I mean, there's no question about it. That's like one of the central ways the practice can help us. So Jeff, this strikes me though. I love everything you just said. And it's had a big impact on my own personal practice, but the one fear I have when I hear you say everything you just said is that people might get into this space of expecting

to feel a certain way during meditation. And expectations are of course quite a noxious ingredient to add to the recipe here because if you go in desiring some specific outcome almost guarantees that you're not going to get it in fact it kind of shuts the whole system down it also can get people thinking oh i'm a failure because meditation sucks for me. yeah i mean that's it's all about the balance right so i mean what i that why I say to people, the most simple thing you can bring to a practice by far is just this appreciation for being, for just sitting and nothing needing to happen. So you just sit and you're in a way that you're trying to be with yourself and then you do the best, the best you can, you sort of stay with the breath, but that is the fundamental practice.

And for that, anything that's going on is fine. You know, whether you're distractable at the time and you're having thoughts go off, whether you're, you know, feeling discomfort, whether there are sounds going on around you, like, just the act of being able to just sit with yourself and letting all those things be there is the basic, the absolute baseline. So in that sense, that's managing expectations because you're not saying it needs to be in any way other than just being there there is the basic, the absolute baseline. So in that sense, that's managing expectations because you're not saying it needs to be in any way other than just being there with it. If it's uncomfortable, then the maturity is to be okay with this comfort. If it's

pleasurable, then you enjoy that. But the fundamental training is, I agree, it's just being open to whatever is happening in experience. I mean, you used a phrase. We at one point in the road trip, you were talking to one of the hosts of Elvis Durand in the morning show, one of the big morning FM pop and talk shows in America. And you use this phrase with her, yeah, it's about enjoying your beingness and she gave you a look that was roughly akin to the look that my cats give my three-year-old son when he offers them his toys, a total lack of comprehension. So you, but I, so I made fun of you for using this kind of woo-woo phrase of enjoying your beingness. However, I Actually have really that has become kind of a little bit of phrase that

Wops into my consciousness once in a while while meditating. It's like yeah, it doesn't matter what's happening right now It's it's like kind of knocking you up to against this fundamental and kind of interesting fact They're like oh, yeah You're alive and all this stuff is happening. And we take this for granted. But actually, it's kind of a powerful thing to touch once in a while in your meditation practice. It's the ultimate low barrier to entry because everyone exists. So it's just that's lily what I'm saying. It's just, it's, it's, it's just noticing, okay, I can just sit here and be.

I mean, it sounds, this is meditation. This is what we're talking about here, the contemplative insight. There's no getting around the fact that we're putting, we try to put it into skill development and we're building different muscle groups and we're doing all this stuff and absolutely that stuff's all happening. But these are fundamentally contemplative practices. And the contemplative endeavor across all traditions is about kind of tasting and appreciating the fact that you exist and actually beginning to be curious about that and feeling into that.

And that is the absolute ground of all of this is where all this stuff emerged from. And the beauty of it is that we're all already there. And that's why all these practices and techniques and perspectives that tell you, there's nowhere to go. You're already there. That's the thing they're trying to show you. They're trying to say, hey, look, notice, it's right here right now. This is this moment and you're in this body and here's this time to just be with yourself.

And what does it feel like to just sit like that for a minute and appreciate it. And of course, it's hard to do. Of course, we bring all our crazy into it. But that fundamental orientation or that fundamental stance is the deep training that is happening in a practice. So don't make it complicated. You know, just recognize that. That's what I keep. You know, I take, I spend some of that as an entire retreat going over that. And but and people get it right away or it takes a little time to sink in, but it can be that simple. And then you can build all kinds of fun stuff on over top of it, but recognize that that simplicity is sort of the ground of what we're talking about here.

Hey, I'm Aresha and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wunderys Podcast, even the rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one.

Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Roo off course. In our series RuPaul Born Naked, we'll show you how RuPaul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app So let's let's do our third voicemail. I can't believe we've gone this far the Jeff and I We're such windbags, but we're probably only gonna get to a couple calls because we get so excited nerding out about meditation

So here's here's the third voicemail. Hello, Dan calling from cano high-level love your podcast love your book and i kind of lead to my question uh... i'd like sort of an obsessive personality so very interested in the meditation whole interesting aspect of it so i read all your books

and i started listening to some of your podcasts and then went back and listened to all of them and then started listening to more podcasts about meditation and then using some of the interesting, I don't know, topics I would get off the 10% happier app. The problem is, leading to my question, I have not yet begun to meditate, just sort of gathering all the information. And I find it super interesting, and I really want to get all the benefits from it.

I don't know why I just haven't taken the step into it. So, if you could sort of lend me a piece of advice as to taking the first step, I know it'll probably be just go slow at first. But yeah, I don't know if it's a fear or anxiety sort of thing that I've got, but I appreciate any feedback you got. And thanks for all your help and bye-bye. It's a great question. I feel like we've covered some of this already, but there's one thing we haven't covered that I think might be helpful for that collar and many others, which is a real hobby horse for Jeff

and the issue that he talks about a lot, which is the power of community, that for some people are just having trouble getting over the hump and starting a habit. And again, you shouldn't feel bad if you're having trouble getting over the hump and starting a habit and again you shouldn't feel bad if you're having trouble getting over the hump and starting a habit. We did not evolve, and I talk about this in the book, we did not evolve to form healthy habits. I mean evolution didn't care about you flossing your teeth, evolution cared about you getting your DNA into the next generation. So we're really good at threat detection and finding sources of pleasure like food or sexual partners, not so good at establishing long-term habits.

So just knowing that we're wired for failure is important. But anyway, one of Jeff's signature recommendations is the power of community. So Jeff, the floor is yours. Yeah, I mean, it could be community of two. It's, a lot of us are fine practicing on our own. You know, it's like we can create the necessary momentum. We have the discipline and we like the simplicity of that. But for a lot of us, they're, and I'm basically part of this group, there's something about being with other people

that creates more accountability for me. So that might even mean, if like I practiced with my wife with Sarah and I, that helps me be more regular when I sit. And it definitely means when it comes to the community piece, that's why I go and I sit, that's why I started the Conscious Explorers Club. So, I could have a group of people to sit with. And that, it's like, I'll screw myself over all the time, but I will, if I'm accountable to another group or they're expecting me to show up,

whether I'm in a leadership role for holding space or I'm just like another sitter, I'll do that. And there's something about the motivation of feeling the energy of that and seeing other people do it. It just, it gives me a lot of momentum. And so some people, the right move is just to go, okay, if I'm having trouble getting this on my own,

is there another person I could sit with, or what would even taking it to another level? What if I decided that I want to start my own group? I don't mean like a big, giant thing. I mean like two or three of your friends, you get together, you know, you listen to a guide meditation or you practice actually guiding each other in a simple way. The soon as you start to hold space in that bigger way, there's something else that

happens, which is the, the practice starts to deepen in a new way. Like, because when you're getting together, trying to sit together and be real together, you kind of got to be real. You can't just be full of, you got to kind of actually kind of actually be centered, you kind of come into yourself in a way. So a lot of my best practice happens when I'm in a space where I'm kind of like, I know other people are coming in to meditate, I got to kind of be there for them and I find it drops me into a very present kind of meditative space. So I can't, I mean, there's so much to say about this.

I've written some of this in a, I wrote a free guide for people called the Community Practice Activation Kit. It's on the Consciousness Explorers Club website, CECMeditate.com. And it's totally free, and it basically just talks about the value of sitting in community and how you can kind of start up a small group on your own.

That's just a very simple affair. That's true to your values and whatever's going on and locally and it talks a little bit about the inner game of holding space for people and how all that can be a real catalyst for deepening your practice so that is an option for people. that length in the book, meditation, proficiency skeptics, and just a bolster your point. I am always a little reluctant to quote the Buddha, because people might come away with the wrong impression that I'm super sectarian or something like that, but I'm going to do it anyway. There's a great exchange between the Buddha and his right-hand man named Ananda.

Ananda apparently is coming back from having a very invigorating discussion with some fellow meditators. He says to the Buddha, like, that was awesome. Hang it out with, quote, unquote, spiritual friends, friends who meditate. It's like half the path. And the said no, no, no, no, it's a hundred percent of the path. So there's a reason why Sanga or community is emphasized so strongly by these ancient master meditators and it's because it really helps It has an HOV lane effect It's like you're carpooling with other people towards sanity and it's extremely powerful. And I think Jeff contributions in this area are awesome. It's also, yeah, go ahead. Well, I just say it's like, it's a way of pooling wisdom, too.

You especially if you get into a situation where you're like, you practice a bit, and then you share a little bit about what's going on. Because these, you know, Chinzen and my teacher always says, subtle is significant. A lot of what's happening in a practice is very subtle and a lot of little ways in which we can get caught up or we can get, like, we can be practicing in a way that kind of like feels like it's kind of going in the wrong direction. It's, there's little subtle things that we're doing that we don't know that we're doing.

But when we hear other people talk about their practice and what's working for them and what's not working and all of a sudden these new things start to come into our experience. You start to notice new stuff. So you don't need to do it alone as a solitary brain. You can basically pull the wisdom as part of this collective endeavor and hear how other people are approaching and what they're doing. And it just, I've had so many breakthroughs because I've heard how someone else, someone's asked a question or given a report or shared an insight about how they've done something and it's like, oh my God, all of a sudden I can see something in my experience now that

I couldn't see before. So that is, I can't say enough about how important it is. That's also why we read good books about meditation and about practice because they give you exactly those kinds of perspectives too. Well said, let's do our fourth voicemail. Here we go. Hello, Dan and Jeff. This is Shannon from Encinitas, California. I have been meditating for a little over two years and most of that time using the 10% happier app. And I've really enjoyed it and have been pretty dedicated in my practice. and I've really enjoyed it and have been pretty dedicated in my practice. I try to meditate every morning for about 15 or 20 minutes. And what I find sometimes, oftentimes, is that my brain seems to go on overdrive.

And then right about the time that the meditation is over, my brain seems to let go a little bit and get into the groove of the meditation. And I found that when I started to run as well. My brain would go crazy and I'd start thinking about everything. And then after a while it would release and I would just get into the groove. And I'm wondering if you have any recommendations other than meditate longer, which I'm having a hard time doing due to my schedule that might help set the calm in earlier versus trying to fight with it for 15 minutes and then write when things are getting good, have it be over. Thanks for everything you do, I enjoy the app and all your interviews and Jeff, you're a wonderful teacher, thank you.

I was with her right up into the point where she said nice things about you and then she lost my man. You're the teacher. So I'm going to let you answer that one. Well, first off, I can hugely relate to this because I've got like a red hot turbine brain that's always spinning out and I'm the exact same way when I sit down. If I just sit cold into a sit when I got a lot of rumination happening, then it's just, it takes a long time for that to kind of wind down. And I'm sitting there trying to do all these like ninja mindfulness tricks and moves and breath things. And sometimes it just plays out at its own pace. So what

I've learned to do is, I would call it a kind of appreciating the transition move, where instead of just going from zero, because it's any wonder, you sit down, you go, you're going at full speed, then you sit down to sit, and you wonder why it hasn't just completely stopped, because obviously the train's going to keep moving. So what I'll try to do is I try to take some time to just get into the groove, like in terms of a transition. So I might, if I know I'm going to meditate, I'll sit down, I'll like the candle, you know, I'll like kind of take my meditation cushion

and kind of deliberately give it a few wax or whatever. Like I'm basically trying to get into a kind of ritual space or like what they would almost more of like an attitude of like doing something deliberately. And it just, it's like I'm making this transition where I'm starting the ritual of doing it. It gives my body something to do something active to do in that transition.

And I find when I do that, when I take a few minutes to kind of do these deliberate things with my physical body. And that also includes, by the way, sometimes doing a little bit of movement stuff. like I might do some, like, Tai Chi stuff or, like, often if I'm really a ton of energy, I'll go for a run first. I'll do, like, some yoga first or I'll do slacklining or whatever, like, a little physical thing to get that energy out. But it's all the same point, which is, like, start to do something physical that gets you in to the ritual of moving towards meditation. that gets you into the ritual of moving towards meditation. And I think traditionally within a contemplative context,

that's where people would kind of set their intention for what they're doing. That's where they would take out their little freaking Buddha statue or maybe it's like a little Steve Jobs statue, get the shoe polished out, give it a little polished, that little bald head, whatever you got to do to kind of get into the accoutrements of it. But it's all about taking care to move into this different space.

And then when you're sitting down, a lot of that energy has already dissipated. That's one thing that works for me. Yeah, I have found that stretching beforehand, yoga stretching or any kind of stretching really helps. Also, Jeff, you talk about this a lot in the book of just starting with a couple deep breaths. It about this a lot in the book of just starting with a couple deep breaths. It just sends a message to the parasympathetic nervous system

like, all right, it's meditation time. And the other thing is just to know, and we talk about this in the book as well, that the quote unquote, bad sits, the tough meditation, that actually in some ways is like a tough workout in that it actually makes you stronger because what are we trying to do here? We're trying to train ourselves to deal with life's vexations and vicissitudes more sanely, smoothly, calmly so that when we're ambushed by anger or restlessness off the cushion in our regular life, we're not so yanked around by it. So that turbulent period of sitting actually can be a period of real growth,

and the wanting of the calm can be a barrier to the calm itself. So I would just say that I absolutely think, see the wisdom, and everything Jeff said, I would just add on top of it, that the danger of expectations creeps in again here. And the point of sitting is not to feel a certain way, it's to feel whatever you feel clearly so that your emotions and neurotic impulses and random thoughts aren't yanking you around all the time.

Absolutely. And it comes back to that point I made earlier, which is just It's just to sit down and just to appreciate that you're sitting down and then when I have my mind really turning up I just kind of look at it with this bemusement like she's I'm still getting the basic acceptance of my experience And I'm just and the thoughts are still there, but now I'm just it's like I just watch it It's like oh, yeah, there it is. It's hilarious. It's neurotic. It's insane. And it just plays out. And I just listen to it with this sort of bemusement. And eventually, it kind of will slow down too. So in other words, just what Dan said, you're still developing these skills, even if it feels uncomfortable, or if the mind is still going. And that basic skills,

the skill of equanimity, the skill of just like letting yourself have this experience as it is. Yeah. You know, and this is another thing that you I really learned from you in the writing of the book that there's equanimity, which is just being cool with whatever's happening. And there's also friendliness. You can train up an inner attitude of friendliness toward whatever you're experiencing, whatever you may hate about yourself that pops up all the time in meditation. In my case, it's a kind of restlessness wanting the next thing all the time, which I kind of hate about myself.

But if you can develop an inner attitude of like, oh yeah, that's cool. I get it. Like that's, that's, you give that voice in your head a name, which is what you recommended that I do when we're out on the road trip when I totally rejected it reflexively because I thought it was dopey, but now I actually do it. So whenever you know the little chipmunk in my head starts revving up, just give it a hearty salute and it's like, all right, you know, welcome to the party. It's cool. It's okay to feel this. And that really just changes the way you are with yourself and not for nothing the way you are with other people

I love that this is locked in with you and it makes me so happy. It's true. I actually listen to what you're saying even though I mock you a lot No, it's you've you've really changed my life in many many important ways So let's do fully smell number five. Hey, Dan ways. So let's do foist mail number five. Hey Jan, my name is Sam and I'm a fellow broadcaster, sports broadcaster, so it's always been really cool to me that you are such an advocate for meditation and such a good representative of it and teach it so well to people like myself and get us into it. My question is basically, you know, I've been meditating for about a year on and off. I've had it sometimes, really good for a few weeks,

and then sometimes I fall off the wagon as I'm sure a lot of people do. But then tend to get back on and really enjoy it when I do. I often say to people that the best thing about meditation is that feeling, that sensation that you have, right when you come out of it. And if I could spread that around to the rest of my day, that would be amazing, having that kind of feeling, focus, and mentality. So my question is, how do you go about spreading that feeling throughout the rest of your day? Well, maybe you're just doing things, you get distracted,

you don't have time to sit and actually meditate. Now, how do you really bring yourself back to center throughout the course of a day? And that really seems to be the key aspect to me that I want to achieve. Thanks so much, look forward to hearing your answer. Kev, over to you on that. Yeah, so this is a humongously important question. In a way, it points to how the practice begins to spread out. My teacher, Shinsen, has this line.

He says, hold the direction. What he means is when you come out of a retreat, when you come out of a sit, there is often that centered sane quality and that your job as a meditator, yeah, it's to do the meditation, but mostly it's to recognize when that is present and how to begin to find it in every situation. So he's, you're asking the right question, it comes with time. What I would say is to continually in every moment, look, where is that direction? Is it actually there?

So you're busy doing something, you realize, oh yeah, I am a meditator, I meditate. What is this quality that emerges sometimes when I'm practicing? Actually, it's here. This is the thing that is mind-blowing in a practice. Like, it's both true that you're building up these qualities, and then there suddenly it starts to peer in your parents, in your experience. But it's also true that that quality is subtly there all the time, and it's just about learning how to recognize it. So what he's asking for is actually a practice.

It's a practice of how to make a moment in the moment reorientation to your experience and notice that there is something simple or peaceful that is present or there is something and that's often when I say something like orient to your own being that is kind of trying to do that or orient to something own being, that is kind of trying to do that, or orient to something very simple or open in your practice. That is trying to do that. So everyone's going to have a different cue that's going to work for them. So this is like, I think this is the most important thing other than having a sitting practice, it's to out in life to be exploring this idea of what is my cue that's gonna kind of cue me into

some fundamental simplicity or space or openness, or peace or connection in my life, that it's actually happening right there right now, but can I just begin to see it and notice it, or what's the cue that tips me off of that's there? Yeah, there is that. Oh, sorry, sorry Jeff, I didn't mean to interrupt you go ahead. No, no, I just does that.

Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, there's an aspect of gratitude to it in some ways. I know that's a cognitive sort of addition, but, um, you know, for me, the queue one, one powerful, powerful queue for me to tune into this is, um, when I'm sitting in the tub with my now four year old, I call them three year old, but he just turned four Alexander. And you know, I know he's not going to let me sit in the tub with him that much longer. And I love that guy.

And I was just, you know, we're not even maybe even talking. Maybe he's playing with his toys and I'm just sitting there looking at him and he just gives me so much pleasure, the fact that he's alive and I'm just like tuning into the fact that we're to do sitting in the tub, it's awesome. And little cues like that can create a kind of nostalgia for the present which I have found to, in my experience, would be impossible without the foundation of formal practice, but is a great way to spread the benefits of formal practice into your actual life. The way I talk about that sometimes is just around the idea of valuing simple pleasures,

that we pave over all of these very simple pledges that are available to us with these more dramatic searches for the big special effects or the big peak experience. And when we train ourselves in that way, we stop to see that all around us all the time, there are these little tiny things that we were taking pleasure in. So it's about slowing that down, slowing down the whole, the catastrophization of the brain's negativity bias and just start to actually look around and say every time that you notice, say the light in the trees and you're just like, oh yeah, like take a second to stop and just notice that you, you already appreciate that, can you appreciate it a little bit more?

That will connect you into that. Or you see someone smiling on the subway reading a book, God, I know I'm sounding cheesy when I'm saying this, but it's true. Like some, and you just go, take a moment to appreciate that. Oh yeah, you feel kind of nice to notice that person's happy. Or you see someone do something nice for someone, or I mean, all around all the time,

there are these very simple little pleasures to be taken, or the feeling of the warm sun on your face. But if you don't take the time to just take that moment, then you're not really letting them in. So all of this is connected. As you begin to slow down and try to notice some of those simple pleasures or just take an extra moment with it, those will begin to show you the direction that I was talking about.

I mean, I wish there was a way to make it even more clear, you know, because it's so, it is so elemental. It's almost, it's people overlook it, but those are the kinds of things that the practice, it's both that both generate more of a practice and deepen the practice, and they're the kind of things that practice leads towards. It's both. I thought that was super clear. And again, well said, as much as I hate saying nice things about you. Yeah, really appreciate that, Jeff. Thank you. And again, well said, as much as I hate saying nice things about you. Yeah, I really appreciate that, Jeff.

Thank you, and it was a great question from the caller. So let's get in. Let's see if we can squeeze in a few more calls here. Hey, again, my name is Stephanie Schramachist from New York. I have been using your app and I really enjoy it. I really like the courses because they're so kind of deep. So it's cool that I'm starting to go on my second round as some of the courses just to kind of, and I'm learning more by

going around the second time. My question is that I do find meditation to be so beneficial for my anxiety, but sometimes I find myself, or something about me that wants to go back on autopilot and doesn't want to do mindfulness practice anymore, because even though it's so beneficial, I find it a little challenging at the same time. So I'm just wondering, have you ever encountered a time near meditation practice life that you avoided, you kind of didn't want to meditate.

And why do you think that happens? What is it almost like your mind is babbling with yourself not wanting to be mindful of that makes any sense? Anyway, I just want to, if you ever encounter that in your own practice, and kind of what you do, do just keep meditating on or what works for you. Anyway, thanks for all you do and have a great day. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Thank you. That's a great question. There are things I could and maybe we'll say, but I strongly suspect that Jeff is going to have the more valuable answer to this. So Jeff, why don't you go first? Well, actually, I said another question I really relate to. I can really feel where she's coming from. And I think that maybe one way to say it is, especially if we have a lot of anxiety, we've a lot of difficult stuff going on. When we start meditating, it's like we're opening to that. We're opening to it.

We're letting ourselves feel it. It's like, oh my gosh, it can seem like a lot. It can seem like it's just going to go on and on and on. It can sometimes feel like, and I've definitely been this, I've longed for a previous state of innocence or something where I could just go back and not have to be inside this stuff, not have to be inside this stuff, not have to be noticing this stuff. And so what I would say is what developed for me is a really important practice where it was, this is where understanding that there are different kinds of practices is important.

So we're teaching meditation here, but there are different meditations. And there is a time to meditate where you're, it's about being really mindful of uncomfortable stuff and noticing what's happening. And if you're doing that, then you definitely want to be sort of pacing yourself. You know, you're going into stuff a little bit and then moving back into more of a home-based sensation. That's more naturally easy. And you may also want other support when you're working through that kind of material.

But there are other times when you really want to just, you want to be giving yourself a kind of gift of something that's simple, something that's enjoyable. So for me, it means that I'll do, like I spend time doing, like I'll do a kind of compassion or loving kindness practice or I'll do a deliberate concentration practice, which is not about kind of noticing my stuff but just about kind of trying to go into the softest part of the breath, feeling the very softest part and going in even

softer, what's even softer than that, like something that can give me, so you're still developing the same skills but you're more on the concentration end, you're more in the kind of like just letting all of your faculties converge into an activity as opposed to being aware of what's going on in your thoughts. Do you know what I mean? So those are two different kinds of techniques. And sometimes also I will, this is really another relevant point for bringing it off the cushion. Sometimes I'm just not in the place to do this stuff sitting down. It just feels like too much to be facing all of this or I don't feel like going into it in a sitting practice. But what I know I need is something just to calm me, something simple for my nervous system, some kind of

some activity like that. And so what I'll do is that's where I'll go and do slacklining or I'll go and do go rock climbing or I'll go for a run or or'll do Chigong. I'd love to do some physical thing and I just try to let it be this very simple activity where I bring all my attention to bear on what my body is doing. What I find is that gives me a kind of like a peacefulness and then the peacefulness starts to kind of radiate out. So I often ask people like, where are you getting the peacefulness in your life? It may be that you get it from the meditation straight up, that's awesome. Or it may be that for you to find that peacefulness, you may also need to be doing another kind

of activity. They're taking a bath. Often it's connected to a self-care piece, but something that brings you into a feeling of just simplicity and peace and all those faculties convergence, because that converging, because that's where a lot of the healing benefits of the practice come from. I love that answer. And just to amplify it, so there may be times, I've definitely had times in my practice so I just don't feel like meditating.

Often for me, it's not so much that I don't want to see my stuff. It's just like, I want to watch Netflix or whatever. But I absolutely relate to the idea that there may be times where just you're meditating because for a number of reasons, but one of them may be, you know, it helps you with anxiety, but you know that when you meditate,

some of that anxiety is gonna crop up and you're gonna have to surf it. So maybe you want to do a different, as Jeff was saying, a different kind of practice. And in particular, I found myself recently gravitating toward the supremely sappy loving kindness meditation, which Jeff, in the book, very wisely, sort of repositions as friendliness meditation or giving a blank about yourself meditation. And you can get those meditations in the book. Actually, if you

get the book, you can get all of the guided audio versions of those meditation on the app for free. But I've found that this creating, and I talked about this a little bit earlier, this inner atmosphere of boosted warmth and friendliness toward your own stuff can just it's like a great vacation and it's really scalable to all aspects of your life and to your relationships with other people and so I would I would highly recommend that as a kind of a different diversification move that you can make on your part to, if you don't wanna face something, if you're worried about meditation because it's gonna be hard psychologically for some reason that you look at other kinds of meditation

or even maybe that day, bail on meditation and do something physical that's gonna calm you down. So yeah, I really appreciate that answer, Jeff. Let's see if we can sneak in at least one more voicemail. Hi, Dan. My name is Joe, I calling from Denver, Colorado. Love your books, love your podcast, love your app. I'm calling with a question about willpower.

So I'm a primary care physician. It's been a lot of time talking to people about establishing new habits, changing old habits. And often we get to talk about willpower. I find the concept to be awfully slippery and tough to pin down. It's easy to know when you had it, but tough to know how to get more of it if you wanted. You do a lovely job in your speaking about all the important skills that are trainable through meditation, generosity, patience, attention. But I've never heard you talk about willpower in this way. can't really get a lot of attention. I think that's a good way to get attention. I think that's a good way to get attention.

I think that's a good way to get attention. I think that's a good way to get attention. I think that's a good way to get attention. I think that's a good way to get attention. I think that's a good way to get attention. I think that's a good way to get attention. I think that's a good way to get attention. I think that's a good way to get attention.

I think that's a good way to get attention. I think that's a good way to get attention. I think that's a good way to get attention. If so, what do those meditations look like? What do meditation teachers say about willpower? Perhaps what did the Buddha say about willpower? Thanks so much. I appreciate your show, all the work you're doing. Bye. So Jeff, we talked about willpower earlier. Do you have more to say on this?

Well, yeah. I mean, I think that when I hear this guy's questions that I'm thinking about two different kinds of willpower, there's sort of the question of willpower around how we create habits, which we've already talked about, I think, around the value of thinking about more as environmental design and how willpower itself is a kind of perishable resource that you don't want to have to be completely dependent on that. You want to try to make it as much as possible, farm it up to the environment.

But there's another piece here that I'm kind of hearing and that has to do with, and this is stuff that Buddhism talks about. It has to do kind of like with the inner game of practice. Like the what is what they would call in Buddhism, what is right effort. And that is something I can say a little bit about because I think it's valuable for people. And to be honest, this is really where I feel like is my

strength as a teacher is more what I do internally versus because I have a hard time with the external structure stuff. But when I get down to meditation, I least know what to do. And what I try to do is I try to find what the right effort for me in the moment is. And it's rarely a strivy, willful driving kind of effort. In fact, that is most of the time, that just creates, in fact, I would say all the time that creates just more feedback and intentions, I'd body, and makes it harder to meditate. It has to do with this kind of smooth, balanced kind of careful effort.

And I actually had a thought that I could do a little guided meditation around this. Like I could, we could take five minutes. And I can do a guided meditation. It's really about effort that shows the two contrasts of bearing down too hard and then being on one hand and then being kind of a little too lazy on the other and then trying to find the right kind of sweet spot for you.

Should I do that? I think it's a great idea, Jeff. It's a good way to close this thing out. Let's assume the position and do a little meditation. Unless you're driving people, don't do it if you're driving. Yeah, if you're driving, make the meditation be the sounds and sights of the road. So, yeah, we'll do a little practice that kind of shows the contrast between kind of trying to help you figure out what right effort is. So you

can close your eyes or have them open at half-mast if that's how you normally do it. Then we can start by taking a few deep breaths. few deep breaths. As you breathe out, softening and relaxing a little bit. And right away, even at the start here, finding this kind of open-minded, good naturedness, you're not gonna get uptight about distractions. This is after all a very short meditation. You're gonna just have this experimental,

interested quality. And we'll get right into focusing on an object. So for a lot of us that'll be the breath, just the feeling of the breath. And the warmth of it and the nose or through the throat into the belly. Or it might be a feeling of a hands if you don't like working with the breath, there may be sounds around you, especially if they're sort of an ambient sound, a consistent sound. So just choose something and just sort of get into it for a few seconds here. So we'll do a bit of a contrast. Let's start here. I want you to really be vigilant with this object that you're paying attention to, whatever it is. So you're really trying to stay on it. Your brain is deliberate, vigilant quality, you're really trying to stay on it. You're bringing this deliberate,

vigilant quality, it's like you're a ninja or like a Jedi knight, trying to hold your mind to it. So your mind wanders, you bring it right back and really seeing, okay, make it a game, how fully on it can you be, how totally with it and on it can you be? I'm going to really sink into this for the next more of a contrast here, but you know, this is Okay, good. Now normally you'd want more time to get more of a contrast here, but you know, this is a podcast. We can only go so long. So let's do the opposite now.

So you're still staying with your breath, but this time try to have a little bit of a more relaxed, easy going, and a lazy attitude almost. So you're not a Jedi anymore, you're just more like, or maybe you're like a really old Jedi. You're super chilled out. You're gonna paint attention to the breath or sounds, almost like you're casting a line in a fishing hole somewhere, not in a rush, not in a hurry. You're with it, but your effort is much more relaxed. And just explore this for a bit and see if there's a contrast that you notice between those these two positions. nd So not in any hurry.

You're feeling into the sensation, but this relaxed way. appreciating the simplicity. Okay good, so the question is where do you need to be? You know, only you know the answer. Is it right in the middle of these two? Is it more on the chilled out or relaxed side? Or is it more on the vigilant side? It's going to be a bit different for everyone. You know, often if we're more type A, we might need to be a little bit more relaxed.

On the other hand, if we're naturally kind of dreamy and drifty, you may need to be a little bit more deliberately vigilant. So right effort is this thing that what it's really saying is what's right effort for you? What felt like the right thing for you? I'll just do one more minute here and just locate yourself. Either on one extreme or the other or maybe somewhere in the middle. At least sinking into the sensation. And yet, easy going to let all the sounds and distractions be there, not uptight about it. Just appreciating this moment, yes, you are appreciating your being, it's good. Now when you're ready, a couple more breaths. Nice long exhale. You can open your eyes.

That was our mini meditation. A great way to wrap this up. Before we go, Jeff, anything coming up in 2019 that people should know about? Well, the thing I'm most excited about is I've kind of been working on this whole idea of democratizing mental health and empowering people to not just be their own teachers, but to start the whole space for small groups and to learn how to guide and not just be their own teachers, but to start the whole space for small groups, and to learn how to guide and share practices on their own,

which I think is actually much more accessible and than people realize. So I have a whole training around that that I'm doing, I think it's in April and Toronto, it's called how to guide meditation, a training for everyone. And that's really, you know, the idea is that your practice amplifies when you start actually getting into a position where you're helping people guide and that there are simple ways in which you can do it.

That are very safe and relatable and easy. And that actually the act of figuring out what kind of practice to share is this beautiful creative kind of act. And you learn a lot about yourself and it can be really fun. So it's kind of all about that. So that's one thing I would say I'm into doing into talking about. So yeah, I've often said that Jeff is the only person I've ever met who really made me want to move to Canada because I want to be able to do attend all the awesome events you through you put on in Toronto. Awesome.

My idea for that is also to take that workshop on the road. So to start to have a workshop to do it in New York or Boston or whatever, and just basically anywhere where people are interested in learning how to become, to be to guided practices. Like that's something I want to start spreading far and wide. So if anyone wants to have me around to do that, just send me an email and I'll try to come around. Thanks for making the time to do this. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate you, just generally appreciate you.

Glad to have you in my life. Glad to have you written a book with you. So thanks for everything. Oh, so my pleasure. I love doing this. And it's such a, by the way, I love your podcast, man. I always listen to it. It's great.

It's just such a good effect on the culture. I'm just so pumped out in part of it. You're a big part of it, big part of the whole operation and of my mind. So thank you, really. Yeah. Happy New Year to you, Jeff. Happy New Year to all the listeners. I am as grateful as I am for Jeff. I am equally grateful

to everybody who listens to this show. It's just incredibly meaningful to me to do this work. And really grateful to the people who work on it, including Ryan, who's manning the boards right now as we speak. Ryan Kessler, new producer of the show, who's awesome. So if you want to check out meditation for Figuity Skeptics, great! If you don't, also great! But either way, thank you for listening and I hope you keep on coming back because we love doing this work. Thanks again to Jeff and again Happy New Year's everybody!

Okay, that does it for another edition of the 10% Happier Podcast. If you liked it, please take a minute to subscribe, rate us. Also if you want to suggest topics, you think we should cover or guests that we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. Importantly, I want to thank the people who produced this podcast, Lauren Efron, Josh Tohen, and the rest of the folks here at ABC, who helped make this thing possible. We have tons of other podcasts. You can check them out at ABCnewspodcasts.com.

I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.