Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 266: The Case for "Doing Nothing" in a Time of Crisis | Sebene Selassie & Jeff Warren

Episode Date: July 20, 2020

At a time of multiple, mutually-reinforcing dumpster fires, meditation can seem counterintuitive. Instinctively, many of us might prefer to rush to the barricades, or Twitter, or the fetal position. But there is immense value in “doing nothing,” and we are going to explore that theme in this special episode. We’re bringing on two amazing meditation teachers, Jeff Warren and Sebene Selassie, to take your questions about the value of meditation in this difficult time. We discuss: how to work with a wandering mind; how to navigate the social anxiety many of us feel as we start to reopen; whether it’s possible to be mindfully depressed; and we explore the potential for gratitude at a time when it seems like everything sucks. The reason for this special edition of the show is that we at the Ten Percent Happier company are about to launch the Summer Sanity Challenge. It’s a free 21 day meditation challenge, starting July 27. Every day you'll get a short video followed by a free guided meditation to help you establish -- or reboot, or reinvigorate -- your meditation habit. You can do it solo, or you can invite your friends and family and see one another's progress. To receive updates on the challenge, visit tenpercent.com/challenge   Where to find Sebene Selassie online:  Website: https://www.sebeneselassie.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/sebeneselassie Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sebeneselassie Book Mentioned: You Belong by Sebene Selassie: https://www.sebeneselassie.com/youbelong Where to find Jeff Warren online:  Website: https://jeffwarren.org/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_jeffwarren_/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jeffwarren.org/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/jeffwarren1001 Summer Sanity Challenge On July 27, we're launching the Summer Sanity Challenge: a free 21 day meditation challenge. The goal here is to help you build resilience so that you are less buffeted by circumstances you can’t control -- and are therefore calmer, happier, and better prepared to show up the way you want to for your family and your communities. To receive updates on the challenge, visit tenpercent.com/challenge   Additional Resources: Ten Percent Happier Live: https://tenpercent.com/live Coronavirus Sanity Guide: https://www.tenpercent.com/coronavirussanityguide Free App access for Frontline Workers: https://tenpercent.com/care Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/summer-challenge-266 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, at a time of multiple mutually reinforcing global dumpster fires, meditation can possibly seem counterintuitive. Instinctively, many of us might prefer to rush to the barricades or to Twitter or directly

into the fetal position. But there is immense value in, quote unquote, doing nothing. And we're going to explore that theme in this special episode today. We're bringing into amazing meditation teachers, Seven A. Salassi and Jeff Warren, to take your questions about the value of meditation in this difficult time. We discuss how to work with a wandering mind, how to navigate the social anxiety,

many of us feel as we start to reopen in some places, whether it's possible to be mindfully depressed, and we explore the potential for gratitude at a time when it seems like everything sucks. The reason we're doing this special edition of the show is that we at the 10% happier company are about to launch the Summer Sanity Challenge. It's a free 21 day meditation challenge starting on July 27th. Every day during the challenge you'll get a short video followed by a free guided meditation and the whole goal here is to help you establish or reboot or reinvigorate your meditation

habit. You can do this solo or you can invite your friends and family and see everybody's progress. Before we start the episode, special thanks to Seb and Jeff because we actually recorded this episode twice. We had planned to launch this challenge. Some of you may remember back in early June, but then with the racial justice uprisings happening across America, we decided to press pause and reimagine the entire challenge and hence this episode. So here we go with Seven Ace of Lassie and Jeff Warren. All right. Seven Jeff greetings to both of you. Hi Dan, hi Jeff.

Very happy to be here with you too. Yeah, I'm always actually a big boost of dopamine for me to see your faces. And so here's how this episode is going to go. We're going to play clips both from the video sessions that challenge users will see when they're doing the challenge and voicemails from listeners to this podcast. And then the three of us will riff on whatever we hear. So the first thing we're going to play is a clip from day one of the challenge where you're going to hear,

Seb and I talking in my kitchen, we just recorded this the other day, and then we'll talk a little bit about what Seb and I have just talked about on the video clip. If that makes any sense, anyway. So here's the video clip. Just as evidence of what a difficult time we're living in, we're sitting 15 feet apart for social distancing purposes. And the pandemic is just kind of one of the big issues

we're dealing with right now. We've got the pandemic is just kind of one of the big issues we're dealing with right now. We've got the pandemic, we've got the economic decline that's come as a consequence. And then we have the racial justice protests across the country. And not for nothing, we're also in the heat of a presidential election that's going to be highly contentious. So I think a lot of people have trouble with the idea of even sitting still right now, what do you say to folks who are worried about, you know, feeling too twitchy to do this thing? Yeah, even in easier times, I think it can feel really counterintuitive to take time like this,

make space and time, to basically do nothing. We're not used to that. Our minds are not used to that. We're usually really engaged in taking information. Our bodies are not used to that. Our minds are not used to that. We're usually really engaged in taking information. Our bodies are not used to that. We basically only still ourselves when we go to sleep, if we can sleep these days. And so it can feel really challenging and having a challenge like this to structure a way to just make 10 minutes a day, to actually sit still and start to relax the body, start to ease our minds and the transformation that can come from that is to be seen. Okay, so that's a clip from day one of the 10% happier summer sanity challenge.

So you'll see more if you actually take the challenge and I hope you do actually take the challenge, but that's just a little bit of the clip. And so let me start this conversation by asking you, you said, what in your mind, what is the value of doing a meditation challenge in the midst of all of this chaos that we're living through? Well, I think I'm saying something both obvious and an understatement to say the last few months have been really, really intense for everyone at different levels, but no one has not been touched by what's been going on. So I'm a meditation teacher.

Obviously, I'm going to think that meditation can have a profound effect on us to help us support us through challenges. And I think a challenge like this where there's guidance, there's structure, there are great meditations offered, and also there's a sense of community could be really helpful for starting a practice or revving an old practice back up again, we're just giving us a break during the day when we're all just navigating so much. Well said, and Jeff, let me bring you in here, because we talk about in that clip from day one of the challenge. For some people, it's hard to get their heads around the notion of doing nothing, but that is not a tough notion for you.

You have a whole series on YouTube called the Do Nothing Project. So can you just hold forth a little bit on the value of doing nothing? Spreading my gospel of indolence to the masses. Yeah, I mean, doing nothing is actually, it's doing something. It's creating space. It's what allows us to reset, you know, to then come to a place where we feel okay in the moment. So then when we come back into our actions, our life, whatever's happening, we have more clarity, more presence, more appropriateness in our responses. So it's sort of like when we do nothing, it allows, we're kind of like cleaning off the

signal. We're cleaning out all the interference, all the gum from so much activity to kind of come back into a baseline state that we can then more intelligently enter into our life from that place. I love hearing the two of you talk. This is cool. and state that we could then more intelligently enter into our life from that place. I love hearing the two of you talk. This is cool. Let's bring in a voicemail. So as we said, we're gonna be throughout this episode,

we're gonna play little clips from the challenge itself and then we're gonna bring in voicemail questions from listeners. Here's the first question. Hello, now that restrictions have been loosening up where I live, we're allowed to go out and meet other people, obviously, with social distancing, but having been sheltering place for so long, I'm actually in a bit of a panic about going out and seeing friends, even with social distancing.

How do I get through that? This is such a great question. And Seb, I want to go to you first on this question. In part, because I'm in the middle of reading your forthcoming book, which is called You Belong and is really good, and we're going to do a whole episode on the book. But in the book, you refer a couple times to yourself as awkward, which I've never actually seen. You'd be awkward, but clearly that's going on for you somewhere. So what I hear in that question is social anxiety. Is meditation in your view useful on this score?

Absolutely. And, you know, my inner teenager is feeling very held and seen right now. So I appreciate that. I have been navigating in the past week or so, really re-engaging with going out. So I really appreciate this question and this listener acknowledging that, you know, stuff is going to come up for us. We've spent months, many of us, isolated to some degree or another from our usual activities. And it's natural for us to have a response or a reaction even to re-engaging. And I know

for me, a lot of anxiety was coming up the first time I took the subway last week, again, going into Manhattan and sort of witnessing a changed world. And the first thing that we learn in mindfulness is to be aware of what's happening. And while we're doing that, we also bring this quality of allowing our acceptance.

And so this listener is really already doing the practice to be aware that anxiety is arising. And the challenge sometimes is to not react in judgment or trying to push away or change things basically to bring tension to it. So we want to bring attention to it, but not tenseness. So bringing that quality of just kindness to ourselves is really important. And that's been the thing that's changed so much for me, the anxiety that I deal with.

Jeff, what do you say about the social anxiety and the value of meditation there? Well, I mean, just to respond to the listeners' question, I think first of all, it's normal to be worried about this because we got all these messages about how dangerous it was to go out for so long. And now we're getting messages that, oh, it's okay to go out in these certain circumstances or these kinds of ways.

So that can be a bit of a disconnect. So I think it's normal for people to feel anxious. And then I would just say around the social piece in particular, the great thing about mindfulness is it can actually bring a lot of clarity into what's really going on. So sometimes we have a sort of nebulous sense of fear, anxiety, and it's just sort of generalized.

But if you actually bring it, in this case, the listeners worried about meeting their friends, well, maybe there's a specific thing that they're worried about. Maybe actually, well maybe there's a specific thing that they're worried about. Maybe actually, I know, maybe they're worried that their friends are gonna give them a big hug and they feel like they're too polite to say, no, I don't wanna do that, I'm uncomfortable with that.

So if you can kinda drill down into that anxiousness and get clear about what specifically you're worried about, then you may be able to take some action that can make you feel better. Like, you know, call your friends and say, okay, so let's just agree on a protocol here. You know, I need to know that we're gonna be two meters apart or whatever.

So, I mean, maybe it's a different thing, but just the more specificity you can bring using the practice, the more, the better you can then create a response, the more appropriate response. So along those lines, Jeff, on the subject of anxiety, that's actually something that Seb and I spend a lot of time talking about during the challenge and we have a lot of meditations designed to help people with anxiety, which of course is extremely common in this tumultuous era.

So let me just tee up here another clip from the conversation that Seb and I have as part of the challenge. Take a listen. Yes, yesterday I was telling the story about this little mantra that I got from Joseph Goldstein that when I'm worrying about something, maybe ask myself the question, is this useful, which can kind of jar me out of repetitive rumination?

There are other ways to deal with anxiety through meditative techniques, and a lot of them have to do with the breath. So what comes to mind on that score? Well, a lot of us learn about breath meditation using the attentional quality we've practiced to just kind of be with the breath, pay attention to it when we get distracted, come back, and that's really useful for developing that capacity. But sometimes we want to intentionally relax our body and we can use the breath for that.

So deep belly breathing, really long inhales and long exhales, even sighing can really help us in bringing some ease and some calm when there is anxiety. So that's me and Seb talking during the meditation challenge, which again I hope all of you will sign up for the summer sanity challenge. And another area where we dwell, I think, hopefully, hopefully in the challenge, which is how we can bring our meditation practice to bear at this moment of national and global racial reckoning. So let me just play one last clip from the challenge videos.

This is me and Seb talking, and then we'll get Seb and Jeff to talk about their thoughts on how we can use meditation at this time, on the back end of this clip. Here we go. And it's tough to do, but I think it's just so important to know that you're not a bad person. If you have thoughts that are embarrassing to you,

you're a human person, because as you like to say, there's a great quote that you like to, well, I'll let you say it, what's the quote that you use all the time that you're not thinking your thoughts? Yeah, that's Christian Merty. You're not thinking your thoughts, you're thinking the culture's thoughts. So we take our thoughts so personally, we think we kind of invented them, but we're really everything we've learned, all our thoughts, all our ways of being, we've gotten from that around us, and we live in a racist society. All of us are aware of that and some people are starting

to become more aware of that on a deep level. But yes, we think that we created that racist thought. We think we created it. Of course we didn't and we can by seeing it clearly not be owned by it. And this is a really important, vital, meditative skill. And so Seb, let me just bring you back in here, just to talk about as people

contemplate whether sign up for this challenge, the value of bringing meditation to this moment. I really don't know how we can solve our challenges of race, racism, inequality without mindfulness. Because so much of this is really, you know, that image of the icebergs. We're only seeing a small percentage of an iceberg. So much of it is under the water. And so much of it is under the water, and so much of our conditioning is unconscious.

So this term, unconscious bias and the meditation we have around that, we forget that unconscious bias, the most important part of that phrase is the unconscious part. So those of us who have conscious goals for equality and justice and for not bringing forth those thoughts and patterns and actions and speech into the world, those are conscious goals, but unconsciously and just through years and for many of us decades of patterning and conditioning, that's not what's going to emerge. So, the first thing is really learning to understand that these are not us, they're just

our patterning. They're not necessarily, as I like to say, there doesn't mean that we're a bad person, it means we're a human person that we have these patterns and conditioning. And the practice helps us see that. It's not only through conscious action that this is going to change, but actually allowing ourselves to go a little deeper to understand that unconscious patterning and start to see it clearly and start to release it. So let's talk about another big bugaboo for meditators, which is mind wandering.

We have a voicemail along those lines. Here it is. Hi, I'm asking the question on how to avoid the mind wandering. My mind just goes crazy. I sit down, I hear too many things when I'm meditating. How do I just calm the mind? Thank you. Seb, let's start with you on this one.

I think you're probably a million answers to this question, but where do you go with it? Well, first of all, I think this person was in my mind during this morning's meditation. So this one is so key for practice, because even for me, after years, decades of practicing, I can still slip into that judgment of the wandering mind. It's wonderful to have sort of gathered, concentrated, peaceful meditations, but that's not a goal. It's a byproduct of our circumstances, you know, and sometimes the mind is peaceful and not wandering, and sometimes it is, and both of those are natural. And our task, and really our entire aspiration here, is to be able to bring awareness to whatever is

happening. So when I slip into that judging mind, I know that's really judging of my mind wandering. I know that's an opportunity for me to kind of relax, recognize that I'm aware. Once I know it's happening, I'm not lost in the wandering. I'm actually bringing a certain amount of attention and mindfulness to it. And then to really just allow that, when I slip into that attitude of thinking this

shouldn't be happening, then there's another opportunity to allow and relax. So it's that process over and over again, and getting really, really comfortable with that process is the practice. Jeff, do you want to add anything? Just welcome to the human condition. Your mind wanders. That's what minds do. It's the glorious, beautiful, creative thing that is a mind. I do have a kind of judo move that I use when I have a lot of mind wandering, which is sometimes I actually meditate on the thoughts themselves,

so noticing that auditory part of it, the visual part of it, and just watching them and being curious about them can sometimes make them cool out right there because they get shy or something. And then there's also things sometimes where you can kind of notice the gaps or the pauses between the thoughts. And then that gets really interesting. That can, suddenly you're tuning in that there is actually more space in there than I realize. And the more you notice them, the wider those spaces get, the more you notice them in other contexts too. So having lots of thoughts can actually be a really rich opportunity within a meditation context. Yeah, we do a lot of guided meditations within the challenge itself about mind-wondering. And just to expand on that

slightly, we will also be featuring meditations in the challenge that specifically deal with mind-wondering and the kind of mind-wondering that a lot of us are experiencing during these difficult times. And speaking of these difficult times, there's a question that was sent in via voicemail to us thinking of these difficult times is a question that was sent in via voice mail to us about depression so let's play that one. My question is since everything's been shut down and following the news and as a result of just all of it combined by myself being quite depressed over the last month. It will come and go and so I'm wondering what the strategy should be for being mindfully depressed, how to go about practicing mindfulness and respecting depression and not judging oneself because of it and how to, you know, try to mindfully hope in times of isolation and quarantine. Thank you. Jeff, let me start with you on this one because you've been very open and candid and I think it a really useful way about your own mental health challenges. And I'll just say that

for me, for sure, there have been periods during the past four months where just those beginning tendrils of the, what's sometimes referred to as the black dog of depression, I can feel those tendrils start to come up. Luckily, it hasn't, hasn't been much, much more than that. But I have struggled a little bit with how to do that mindfully rather than just run away from it. What do you think? Yeah, well, it's a learning process. I would say the biggest insight I've had around this is recognizing when that depression is just a natural and normal response to what's going on in the world

and that it's a normal response to be bummed out about it. And when it goes into a place of being really more chronic and extended and like there's almost a sense in which I'm keeping it going. So I can unpack that in a moment. But the main thing is how I deal with these downs is I naturalize them. That means I recognize that this is my body's attempt to just kind of get quiet and rest. It doesn't have the same amount of energies it normally does.

And if I can tease apart the storyline in my head, which is I shouldn't be bummed out, I shouldn't be tired. I'm so, this is, I can't believe this is happening that whole kind of storyline of suffering and just stick to what it actually feels like in my body to be down, which is the achiness, the low energyness.

And just stay with that, then it becomes much more manageable. In fact, it becomes an opportunity to put a different story in, which is that this is actually my body taking care of me. This is my body saying, I need to get nurtured and rest and chill and that that's where I'm at right now. And if we can see that as something that's actually nurtured and rest and chill and that that's where I'm at right now. And if we can see that as something that's actually quite beautiful and healthy and caring, then that changes the whole experience of those downs.

So that's kind of my main piece. And then just to what I set off the top, there it comes a problem with our mental health stuff where all of a sudden we realize we're in a really deep chronic loop around something. And that might be a time when you may need to get a little bit of extra support. You know, you don't feel necessarily resource in and of yourself to do it. To have someone else, the talk to about it, someone else who has a framework around working

with it. So I've seen in the past trauma specialist when I realized that some of my chronic stuff was related to things that happened from when I was younger and related to injuries or things like that. I worked with specialists to help work out some of that stuff. So people should just know that's an option and that's also, it may happen in your life that you'll get to a point where you realize, okay, I need to actually do something a little stronger than just sitting and opening to this experience and meditation.

I hear also in that question, you know, a question about what's affecting our mind states and our moods and you mentioned news and just taking information and also isolation. And our practice is really, as I often say, we're not practicing to become good meditators. We're bringing this capacity for having more awareness in our lives and more kindness and clarity into our daily habits and what's affecting us. And I've noticed that with the increase of intake of news or social media, my moods are wildly affected by that. And the same goes with contact with others, who I'm in contact with, what kind of conversations I'm having. So you might want to bring your practice, your awareness to, you know, what is affecting your mood

and what might need to be mitigated or even eliminated in order to help support your wellbeing. We talk a lot in the challenge about powerful emotions and how to handle them from a meditative stance. So let me just play up a little clip of me and you talking about this very issue. Today we wanna talk about emotions. Not for many men at least, myself included,

emotions isn't the most attractive subject, but here's the deal, emotions are non-negotiable. They're there no matter what. And if you pretend they're not there, they're going to own you and drive you blindly. So I think there are traditionally, we either fight or feed or try to numb out in the face of powerful emotions, but meditation provides an interesting alternative. Can you say a little bit more about that? Yeah, the power of mindfulness is in this practice and building the capacity to be with our experience,

to pay attention, but also to meet it with kindness or at least not with judgment. But so often when we feel a strong emotion, especially something we don't want to feel, we judge it, we try and control it, we try and push it away. Like you said, we might grab it and indulge it. And that actually leads to more tension,

it leads to the perpetuation of these emotions. Mindfulness offers us a new turn to actually just be with an emotion and kind of magically, paradoxically in that process, we're able to allow the emotion to release and sometimes even resolve. That's another clip from me and Seb chatting in my kitchen. That clip will be one of many, many that clips

that you'll get if you take the summer sanity challenge and it actually leads into a great meditation on emotions from Joseph Goldstein called, it's okay to feel this. Much more of my conversation with Seb and Jeff right after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page 6 or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud,

from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other, and it's about

a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. We got a question about strong emotions sent in via voice mail to us. So let's play that and we'll hear from Jeff and Seb on the back end. One of the questions I have has to do with how you deal with strong emotions coming up for things you might not come dealt with. So let's say in my case, the depth of a parent that still brings me a lot of grief and when I'm meditating sometimes I feel deep, well, a sadness coming up. And I wonder sometimes if the act of sort of saying,

oh, you know, I recognize this sadness and sort of, you know, sending it on its way, is also kind of not dealing with it. And I wonder where you and the other thinkers come down on this matter. Seb, this is such an interesting question because I think a lot of people struggle with the difference between letting go and dissociation. Yes, and sometimes we can use our practice to cut ourselves off from feeling, which is not the point, and hopefully, you know, with continued awareness, we can start to remedy that tendency, which many of us have, especially in this culture. And grief is a tough one, because we don't have sort of a lot of healthy avenues

for releasing grief. Our practice can be a place as the solicitors describing to start to allow those strong emotions of grief and their great practices in the app and in the challenge for working with difficult emotions, different techniques that you can use to start to recognize and allow and also get kind of deeper underneath what's actually going on for us. And again, this practice helps us bring our awareness into daily life. And sometimes we need to process grief in very particular ways. We need therapeutic processes.

We might need more kind of community ritual processes. Grief is very complex. And so to try and resolve it all on the cushion or in our formal practice, I think is putting too much pressure on it. So let's go to the practical now, the light and things up just slightly. There's a very practical question that was sent in from a listener named Julie. Here we go with that. I am new to this world of 10% happier. So my question is, are guided meditations inferior to meditations that are not guided? I have some judgments.

I have discovered that guided meditations aren't real meditations. So I'd love to get your opinion. All right, so guided meditations, you should take whatever any of us says with a grain of salt because we are all involved with a guided meditation app. Welcome, first of all, to the world

of inferior meditation guidance. I'm a inferior meditation is more generally. Yeah, so I mean, I think they're both great. You know, it's sort of apples and oranges, they're both slightly different. They both have advantages and they both can have disadvantages sometimes. So I think it's useful to be able to have a facility in both. The great thing about a guided practice is sometimes it can, first of all, not all guided practices are the same.

We explore all kinds of different themes and different techniques and sort of approaches and a guided practice that has some structure can help you orient to things you may not do on your own that you may not ever think to notice. And on top of it, it can be a kind of, it creates a structure that allows you to, that prevents you from wandering more than you might wander on your own. I love your me, and I'm meditating on my own, God knows where my mind goes sometimes. So there's a lot of reasons for doing a guided practice. On the other hand, it's also useful to know how to just sit on your own and not have to

depend on it, because the whole point of meditation is eventually it becomes a set of skills that bleeds out into every part of your life. And so it is to know how meditation is working, to know how to make the necessary corrections in your own mind and body on your own and then out in life is a very, very useful skill. And the guided practices can help teach you that and the practicing on your own can be a forum where you're also exploring that. So that's my rather elaborate answer. They're both fine.

Well, someone who did all of the challenge meditations in preparation for our shoot the other day, Dan, I was just absolutely amazed at the power of these meditations. I don't often listen to guided meditations. I do sometimes in the 10% half because they're such great teachers, but it was really amazing. For about a week, I only did guided meditations. I even listened to my own, which is really weird. It's just so bizarre to listen to your own voice guiding you and it's humbling and kind of horrible, but it really was sort of a different practice to really attentively listen to the guidance and allow it to take me somewhere. Because we can get stuck in ruts when we are just kind of doing our own practice over and

over again. Yeah, it's really humbling for me because I started meditating before there were apps as we all did, because we're all old. And I had in my mind this kind of inferior, superior, dialectic, which are false binary, but every time I do a guided meditation or if I'm in the room with one of you and actually hearing it live, I remember how much I've forgotten. And it's so useful to get these reminders for somebody who's traveled the path more than you have. So there's another super practical question that resonated with me as a meditative striver.

That's often to my own detriment. This question comes via voicemail. So let's play this one. So oftentimes when I meditate regardless of the length of time, I feel like it wasn't long enough. So, I find myself avoiding meditation altogether just to avoid that seemingly inevitable frustration. So, my question is, if you guys ever suffer from this problem, order some tips you might have on dealing with it.

Thanks. Like I said, a striving question which I deeply relate to. So Seb, what's your take? This is something that I think is very cultural too. So, you know, I'm very interested in how we show up as cultural beings to our practice. And it's one of the reasons actually I do lying down meditation. Because in an early retreat of mine, I noticed that I was leaning forward in my practice,

especially when I got really concentrated, and I think it was Tara Brock at the time, the teacher pointed out to me that I was trying to get somewhere, you know, just physically that image of me kind of leaning in. And that's, you know, that is this culture. We are constantly trying to make something happen, trying to do something, and as Jeff so beautifully described this practice is so much about doing nothing. So it's kind of built into our systems because of the way we've been conditioned and trained. So finding ways to continually, as a process, over and over again, allow ourselves to release, to relax, to let go.

And we need to understand ourselves. You know, there's that metaphor of practice being like tuning an instrument, a stringed instrument. So if you've ever tuned a violin or guitar, if it's too tight, it's going to snap. And it's going to give you a really sharp note. But we also don't want to get too loose, right? And so we have to constantly be in that process of balancing. And we talk a lot about this and the challenge, you and I, Dan, of what is balancing in the practice.

So I can relate to. I'll just sometimes it's helpful when I'm in a similar experience, which I have. And certainly when I was younger, I think about the skills-based approach to practice that, you know, just the act of sitting and trying to open to experience that's building up the second-emity muscle,

trying to be aware and notice what's happening, that's building up my clarity, trying to stay on track, mind-wondering, coming back, that's building up concentration, and that's building up regardless of what's happening in the sit and regardless of how long or short I sit. So to know that the meditation is quote working, even in these short meditations, even in meditations that don't feel like there may be a settling or as comfortable as you'd want them to,

is that kind of takes care of that whole question in a way. You recognize that every meditation is progress in a sense. If you want that progress model. Okay, but Jeff, just to play devil's advocate here, this episode is designed to encourage people to do the challenge, but can't a challenge, I mean, the very word challenge isn't that, you know, sort of catnip for this striving mind.

And so how do we handle doing a 21-day challenge without having that drive us crazy? You know, I've got to do every one of these 21 days and I need to do X number of minutes, et cetera, et cetera. What are your thoughts on how to work with that kind of thinking? Well, I just think of what Seb already said, about getting that right, having that balance. It's all about using the impetus

and the structure of the challenge to try to do it and having an intention around that and using some of that energy. And that's terrific. And it can be a great goad and impetus. But on the other hand, having a kind of relaxed attitude about it, it may well happen that you'll have a day or two that you'll miss and you don't want to get

so bent out of shape on it. So you kind of need to have perspective around it as well. So use the good of it and try to notice when you're slipping into the bad of it, I guess, is what I'm saying. Let's queue up a listener voicemail along those lines. Here it is. So I have two questions for you.

The first is the basic one, which is that whenever I tried to notice my breath, you know, during the meditation, I realized that the active noticing seemed to be controlling the pace and the depth of the breath. So I wonder if you have any advice for getting out of that breath controlling mode. I also have a second question which is that one of my favorite meditations from Jeff is one called centeredness in which you teach one of the techniques is to breathe into the belly as a way of centering oneself. But whenever I try this, I just feel like so much more breath, like the air is in the chest area.

And it's almost like the cylindrical shape where not very much air ends up in the belly at all. So I was wondering whether either of you could, you know, comment a bit on the belly breathing technique. So Jeff, there's so much here. There are the questions that she asked. And then there's also the fact that for some people, the breath is just super triggering because COVID has pulmonary implications and because some of the

final words of George Floyd were, I can't breathe. So, can you just talk about all of this trickiness when it comes to the breath? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, maybe in response to what you just said, the most important thing here is that if the breath is triggering, you don't need to work with the breath. You can work with a different object. You can work with sound, you can work with the feeling in the hands or the sense of the whole posture sitting.

And it's actually pretty normal. I've found probably in over the years that, you know, maybe even a quarter of people that I need to meditate find some, there's some kind of challenge around working with the breath. So, it's fairly common. It's mixed in with trauma, actually. Our traumatic responses are all mixed in with our breath. So, to know that you don't need to necessarily go there

is maybe the place to start. And then I can unpack a little more about the breath. So that question is a great question in the first part of it, the thing about controlling the breath. That's actually very common too. I hear that a lot where people find that the act of noticing is sort of entraining the breath itself. And it's actually a stage in practice. It's so common.

At least some practice should talk about it as a stage. So I would say the issue thing there is don't make it a problem. If that's happening, fine, just don't worry about it. Just observe the breath and observe yourself controlling it, like without an attitude of it being a big deal. And that can often sort of start to get, well, a couple things can happen there. Sometimes it can just sort of work itself out. If you don't make a big deal out of the controlling, the controlling this kind of falls away. But the other thing that can happen is you can start to actually see where you're, you are coupling with the breath. Where the, your desire to change or to anticipating whatever it is, whatever that's gumming your attention up on your breath,

you can start to see more clearly where that's happening, and then you can get a genuine insight, which is, wow, I'm interfering with this process, and if I bring my attention and my equanimity and my patience to this, there can be a kind of release that can end up being quite significant. So it's an opportunity there as well. And then I guess I would just say to the second part, that's also very common when we start to bring our attention into what is the experience of breathing in the body. We can start to notice where there is actually some constriction that it doesn't feel like there's this full, natural,

easeful breath. That we maybe it's more easy to breathe into the chest, or maybe it's more easy to breathe into the chest or maybe it's more easy to breathe into the belly or the sides. And some of our patterns of kind of trauma and challenge are trapped in the way we breathe. So we may be a high breath breather for example. And that and we may be someone who has a lot of quite a bit of anxiety. We notice we're always breathing in the upper chest. There's a relationship there. So as you begin to open up the breath capacity and start to breathe more deliberately into a relationship there. So as you begin to open up the breath capacity, it starts to breathe more deliberately into the belly,

then you can actually begin to address that anxiety. And it just unfolds from there. So it's a really rich exploration. There's a lot to explore. One thing that's helped me to bring more relaxation to the body in general and also to the breath is to lie down during meditation. So when I'm lying down, you know, there's no... it's very hard to have constriction in the body.

Often when we're sitting up, there's some tension being held, even in just trying to sit up right, because we know that we're supposed to sit straight up right when we're meditating. And so that can even add tension. So you might want to try that. Well said, and Jeff, do you So you might want to try that. Well said, and Jeff, do you have anything you want to add before we close? Well, I just feel like 70 said it so beautifully. I would just maybe the only thing to add

is just the self-compassion piece, the compassion and the self-compassion. You know, and then the ways we generate that compassion, you know, we generate it from meditation. We also generate it from reading. Reading narrative, learning, hearing people's stories, I feel like this has been such an amazing time for education. Just the number of books I read on this subject now, it's just expanded my learning in such a huge way. And that's a great way to also expand your insight, expand your compassion. And for myself, I need to remember when I come up against

what seemed like these biases. And when I hear these happening all around me, I need to remember this very core, I guess, practice understanding, which is that we're brilliance obscured by ignorance. And that there's this something indelible and dignified and beautiful in everyone. And I just think that that has to be there alongside with the clarity.

There has to be that deeply compassionate understanding. So James Baldwin had this amazing line, and he said, quote, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they've become. So that double edge of the simultaneously being able to understand that there is this beautiful thing about being human. And then there's this very real dumb thing that happens in our conditioning and that we're never gonna,

that the job of seeing into that on an individual level and a cultural level is never over. Incredible way to close this. Yes, reminds me of the Tibetan phrase for enlightenment that I'm always quoting on the show, which is, I think it roughly translates into a clearing away and a bringing forth. Many ways of saying the same thing, I think.

Seven, Jeff, thank you for your wisdom, your nerdiness and your patience, really appreciate it. Thank you both, it's been great. I would love to do this every week. Hahaha. Be careful what you wish for. Big thanks again to Seb and to Jeff, really appreciate their time. And don't forget to sign up for the challenge. You can follow the links in the show notes here. And it starts on July 27th. It goes for 21 days. We spent

a lot of time by we, I mean, people not named Dan Harris within the 10% happier company. I spent a lot of time carefully curating the guided meditations so that it follows a really thoughtful and logical arc fully designed to help you boot up or as I said, reestablish or reinvigorate your practice and really help you to create the skills, the resilience, the calm, the compassion you need to handle these difficult times in the best way possible. I want to thank the team who worked so hard to put this show together, Samuel Johns, as our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman as our producer, our sound designers are Matt Bointen and Ania Sheshik of Ultraviolet Audio.

Maria Wartel is our production coordinator. We get a enormous amount of input from TPH comrades such as Jan Poient, Nate Toby, Ben Rubin, Liz Levin. And finally, as always, thank you to Ryan Kessler and Josh Kohan from ABC News. We'll see you on Wednesday for a fresh episode. I'm Kessler and Josh Kohan from ABC News. We'll see you on Wednesday for a fresh episode. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ you can listen early and add free with Wondery 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-survey.