Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 421: There’s No Part of Your Life You Can’t Make More Awesome | Jeff Warren

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

It is very easy to think about your meditation practice as being quarantined to those minutes when you’re dutifully sitting down with your eyes closed. But actually the point is to turn your whole life into a practice. Our guest Jeff Warren has a very broad, capacious understanding of the concept of practice. There’s formal meditation practice, but also: movement practice, work practice, relationship practice, sleep practice, art practice, and more. It’s really about the goal, which few of us will ever fully attain, of turning everything you do into something intentional and illuminating.Jeff Warren is a frequent guest and good friend to the Ten Percent Happier podcast and app. He co-wrote a book with Dan called Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. He’s a longtime meditation teacher, and the founder of the Toronto-based Consciousness Explorers Club. He is also the cohost of an excellent new podcast, called The Consciousness Explorers Podcast. In every episode Jeff, and his co-host Tasha Schumann test out a new practice. Be sure to check it out.This episode explores: what it might mean to make your whole life a practice; how to connect with your baseline okayness; mindfulness of seeing; Koan practice; running as practice; being your own teacher; how (and why) to make your practice social; and practicing with ADHD, a condition with which Jeff has lived with for many years. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/jeff-warren-421See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, it's very easy. And this is a trap I've fallen into many, many times. It's very easy to think about your meditation practice as being kind of quarantined to those minutes when you're dutifully sitting down with your eyes closed. But actually, the point is to turn your whole life into a practice. Now, that's the kind of cliche you often hear in meditation circles, you kind of turn your

whole life into a practice. I want to be clear, this doesn't mean you have to be immaculately mindful at all hours of the day. That sounds to me at least like quite a chore, or as a friend of mine once said, it sounds like you're establishing a nanny state for the mind. Instead, what we're going to talk about in this episode is how to, in the words of my guest, make every part of your life more awesome. My guest today has a very broad, capacious understanding of the concept of practice. There's formal meditation practice, yes, but also movement practice, work practice, relationship practice, sleep practice, art practice, and more. It's really about the goal, which very few of us will ever fully attain, of turning

everything you do into something intentional and illuminating. Jeff Warren is a frequent flyer on this show. He's also a close friend. He and I wrote a book together called Meditation for Figuity Skeptics. He's a long time meditation teacher and the founder of something called the Consciousness Explorers Club, an amazing organization based in Toronto. And he is the co-host of an excellent new podcast called the Consciousness Explorers Podcast. He also refers to it as the Mindbod Adventure Pod. You really should go check out this show. It's available wherever you get your podcasts.

In every episode, he and his rather amazing co-host, Tasha Schumann, test out a new practice. Anyway, here on this podcast, in this episode, we talk about what it actually means to make your whole life a practice beyond the oft verbalized cliche in meditation circles, how to connect with your baseline ocanus, mindfulness of seeing, co-on practice, running as a practice, what Jeff means when he talks about being your own teacher, and how and why to make all of your practices social,

as he says, it's all one nervous system. He'll unpack that expression for us. We're also going to spend quite a bit of time talking about something. Many of you have asked us to cover practicing with ADHD, a condition with which Jeff has lived for many years. So he'll hold forth about that. We'll get started with my man Jeff Warren right after this. 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 com. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. 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 did memes come from? And where's Tom from, MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or whatever you get your podcast.

Jeffrey, welcome to the show. Mr. Daniel, good to be here. I should say welcome back to the show, you're a frequent flyer, which I'm happy about. I think I might be getting up there in the points department. Yes, the rewards are basically nothing. So don't get too excited. Oh, my friend, time spent with you. A deep-meditative practice all on its own. Continually coming back to principles of equanimity. Yeah, but enough about me.

You had a chat with the boss of this show, Gabrielle Zuckerman, and there was a sentence you uttered in the course of that conversation, which made its way to me, which was, your whole life can be a practice. What do you mean by that? Okay, we're jumping right in. Well, okay, I guess this is what I mean. That typically we meditate, those meditators out there, we find a time in our day to do a meditation practice or every other day, and it's practicing how to exist. And we're trying to learn how to exist in a way

that's more awake, open, compassionate, and the benefits of that start radiating out slowly to other parts of our life. And there's sort of this sense in which we kind of just have faith that's happening. And we can be deliberate about applying the skills in action as well. So that's kind of the typical framework of how people think about practice. And I share that framework, but I also think that we can be even more intentional about filling out the whole of our life with goodness. And what that looks like is getting interested in how every single thing that we do can become a practice.

Not in this boring, eat your vegetables kind of way, but in this really fascinating, like, oh wow, in this area of my life, I can remove the suffering and increase the insight and joy. And it's just a question of learning a practice that kind of helps me do that. So for example, the practice of communicating with you. I could, it's true, just implementing simple skills

of mindfulness, being more open, being more concentrated, these things are all gonna help. But then there's also the value of like say, learning from a nonviolent communication person or some other communication specialist about specific frameings of how a conversation can happen. Specific techniques of ways of making space or listening, and that's just one example. Another example is, say, is falling asleep. I can just fall asleep or try to fall asleep or just sit there and radically figure it

about my worries. Or I can decide to make falling asleep. I could just fall asleep or try to fall asleep or just sit there and radically figure it about my worries, or I can decide to make falling asleep practice. I can learn about good sleep hygiene, I can kind of ritualize falling asleep, I can maybe do a little protection practice before I fall asleep. Something like that. Like there's no area of your life that you can't make more intentional and awesome by just learning some key practice rules or orientations around it. And I'm really interested in that as just part of a how to live a good life. That's what I mean by making your life a practice. And then I'll say one last thing about it.

If you think of the first thing we're all you ever do is the seated practice and you don't do anything else, it's sort of like the seated practice becomes this like volcano that's rising out of the sea. And it's like it starts to get higher and higher and more and more of your life starts to feel connected to that practice. And that's totally one way to go. But another way to go is to make lots of little volcanoes. So you have your maybe your volcano,

your sitting practice and center, you have lots of other little volcanoes and they're all slowly rising out of the water. And very slowly that archipelago of tiny separate islands becomes a single unified landmass of more awesomeness and clarity and openness and intentionality and joy and free flow. And I'm interested in how to help human beings do that and doing that myself. So there was a phrase you used and I love everything you just said.

The phrase you used was, there's no part of your life you can't make more awesome. I just, I love that. And I'm guessing, I don't know, this is a semi-educated guess that a lot of people at Lysa the show are either meditators or aspiring meditators, but they're perhaps a lot of like one volcano people. And maybe that volcano really is quite pervasive in that you're integrating mindfulness and compassion into lots of things you do. But this more holistic, capacious understanding of turning everything into a practice, that's really interesting to me. I think there's something very joyful about it, that it's a kind of form of existential play, that you don't have to just take this situation, take this part of your life kind

of, you don't have to be unconscious in it. You can actually begin to get interested in what's happening in it and begin to play with the dynamics in order to make them work out better. And I just think that's enormously, it's a very empowering message. It's been a very empowering message for me. And it's also been something I needed to hear, I guess, as someone who does have this ADHD struggle, I have a ADHD diagnosis, that my kind of furious curiosity about all these things, which can have a jumping around quality, that if I frame it in, like, let the curiosity about things become an interest in how to make those things more of a liberating practice, then having

that problem in the first place is less of an issue. Do you see what I mean? So I think it's a kind of philosophy of practice that actually suits a lot of the contemporary world because my issues with attention are issues that a lot of people share. I mean, I'm just sort of an extreme form of what we're all dealing with our technology with the kind of fracturing of attention span that's happening. So I think this is a way to un-fracture it, to reseal that up, to work with where we're at.

But in the working with where we're at, it's like you're slowly ceiling out the whole landscape of your life to be more whole and more complete, more awesome. I want to signal to folks, because we've had some incoming interest in ADHD. So at some point, we'll take a deep dive into that. But in the meantime, I just be curious to get you to describe more examples of practice.

You talked about going to sleep, communication. By the way, while you were talking about going to sleep, you said a protection practice, what is that? And what are the other kinds of practices that you would recommend or that you might have personally explored? Yeah. Okay. So this is a useful segue to one of the ways I'm trying to put

all this into action right now is I started a conscious explorers club like 10 years ago or something in Toronto. And that place was always a place of kind of like ecumenical exploration. Like we explored different practices, we got different teachers and experts to come in, and we do all kinds of stuff there. And I'd always been interested in how to turn that into a podcast. So I've just done that. I guess I spent a couple of years working with my friend, Tasha Schumann.

She also known as Tasha of the Amazon. She's a phenomenal practitioner and rapper, hip-hop artist. And so the whole idea of this podcast is to basically give you examples of what you're just asked. We get different people on from different walks of life, often many meditation teachers, but also movement teachers, voice teachers, sleep experts, dreaming experts, hypnosis people, like you name it, and we get them to come on, and then we get them to guide myself and Tasha and all the listeners through a kind of 12 minute practice.

We call it the mind-bottere adventure pod. So everyone goes together on this adventure in real time. And one of the ones that we got on was around sleep. This sleep expert who basically guided us in this really beautiful, then was Charlie Morley. This really beautiful protection practice, where as you're falling asleep, you visualize. So we're just kind of laying there and sort of half-ing on this podcast and everyone is invited to do that with us. And then we do this sort of visualization where you imagine, I don't know, a cedar tree around you or whatever is going to feel protective of you, maybe you imagine the incredible Hulk or the Buddha or just like you kind of imagine your protectors around you and you feel into this sort of sense of safety. And apparently this practice, I mean, it comes from a kind of deeper Tibetan tradition,

but apparently it's very helpful for putting people at ease, helping them sleep better, helping them have a less kind of neurotic thoughts that Sleep On said. But the idea of the practice is you can try this out for yourself in real time, that we're all doing it together. And then at the end of the guidance, there's a pause and then you kind of hear Tash and I try to reassemble our brains because sometimes we go to these really interesting places. And then try to articulate, okay, why was that important?

Where did we go? What are we learning here about the things I was just speaking about practice? What are we learning about how to bring this into our life? And the idea is that this becomes a forum for how to connect to practices and teachers and resources for sure. But really, the top level is, it becomes a forum for how to become your own teacher, how to learn the skills you need to feel more empowered about all these different areas of your life.

So, I mean, I'll say a little more of the podcast, but just to make it personal, this is what my day looks like. I wake up in the morning, and I'm like, ah, my God, I gotta go, my baby's crying. I gotta get the baby, I gotta do whatever I'm like, okay, chill. And I take a second and I relax, and I remember my the baby, I gotta do whatever I'm like, okay chill. And I take a second and I relax, and I remember my parenting practice,

which is to try to just let my child be a wondrous mystery to me and have equanimity and all that stuff, and I go and I get my guy. I go down, I have breakfast with my wife and our little guy. And I often find myself implementing communication, sort of best practice I've learned from talking to communications people around, not starting in this reactive way,

just like, active listening, letting her really speak about what's going on in her life. And that just makes everything, and vice versa. It just makes the whole vibe feel way better. And then I go into work and I often sit and do a small, a short kind of grounding practice before I start my writing. And that's helpful.

And when I'm actually writing, I sometimes implement practices around workflow, around writing practices that I know or I don't. I sit there instead of just overthinking everything I'm writing, I just sort of let it come out and what I'm doing right now in this rambling way. Maybe I need an editor. Okay. Note to self. Remember the editor is important. But anyway, and then later in the afternoon,

I might do a voice practice. I have a voice coach that I work with because I get this vocal fry thing happen and she teaches me how to speak from different parts of my body instead of just high up in the vocal palate to having more of a well range of things. Then I might do a Feldenkrais practice,

which I love doing, just as a way to work with some of my injuries. It kind of goes on from there. Maybe once in a day, I might see an actual specials to help me through something or once in a week. The most of the time, there are just things that I've learned that I implement. And it just makes getting through my day way better. What's Feldenkrais? It's very cool. Feldenkrais was a dude who he was in Israeli kind of physicist, anatomist, kind of genius in all these areas who worked out a whole system, I guess you could say, of mindful movement. For himself, it started out with how to work with your injuries, but it became this whole inquiry into how to basically reverse engineer patterns

of movement that aren't serving you. So you get really still and you go into some very simple movement like turning your head and then you start to make all these very tiny adjustments or additions to that movement. And what it does is it ends up helping you discover a path into that movement that's much more healthy for the body and it's very interesting. I mean, that's just sort of my idiosyncratic take on it. I use some of those principles sometimes when I'm guiding actual meditation practice. All of these different practices, they just feed into this greater sense of awareness of all parts and a greater sense of agency

around how to move through those parts with more skill and kind of care. Do you believe that having a seated meditation practice can, this is a loaded question because it's something I think I believe, which is that having a formal meditation practice of whatever length can really fuel all of these other practices because it's the dojo where you really are training your ability to be mindful, to be concentrated, to become equanimous, et cetera, et cetera. Agree or disagree? Totally agree. And I even would say that you don't have to do these all these other practices. Totally agree. And even I would say that you don't have to do these all these other practices. It can happen that just through doing a simple seated practice, all those other benefits

start to kind of happen in their own way. It's very interesting. And the thing about a seated practice is it's a place where you're not fooling yourself. You know, people like to say, oh, running is my practice. And running can be a practice. It can be many different practices. But running can also be a place where your just endorphins are pumping in and you're sitting

and thinking about your worries and you feel better after, but there are ways to turn the dials on a running practice to be a lot more powerful and effective both physically and in terms of mentally. See, other practices where there's a lot going on, you can fool yourself in a way, whereas in a practice where there's nothing going on, just your own thoughts, there's a deep

training that happens there that is hard to approximate in any other context. What happens in life is there's always these pockets of unconsciousness, and you can get really good at one practice and still not touch those pockets of unconsciousness. So it's like we get this expertise in a particular silo and the things we're learning in that silo, they don't translate to other areas of our life. So that's why I think a life of being intentional about practice being curious, okay, where are the pain points in my life or where is there some suffering or where is there a sense that part of my life I could be living more deeply.

That becomes a cue to begin to explore practices within that domain. I think that's really valuable. If we have areas of our lives where we're unconscious, by almost definitionally, we don't know that they're unconscious. So how can we wake up in these areas where we're asleep? Yeah. It's a great question. I have a ticket in the A. I mean, suffering is the great indicator lights, the blinking light on your dashboard.

But the thing is sometimes we don't even realize we're suffering in some area. That's where I think a meditation practice is helpful because it just does give you a more baseline awareness of what's happening from moment to moment. And you can kind of notice, oh, okay, this area of my life, I'm really unhappy in this area of my life. I'm really dissatisfied with how I relate to my work colleagues or I have a lot of terrible sleeps or I know I have all this creative energy, but I don't feel like there's a way in

which I'm actually activating it or there's so many problems in the world and I So want to be part of a meaningful solution, but I don't know what that looks like all those are Questions that can begin a kind of inquiry into what a more deliberate practice in that area might look like which can then really open those things up a couple of expressions from Joseph Goldstein, the meditation teacher coming to mind one, is that he talks about struggle as a feedback. It just gets similar to what you just said about suffering, be like a warning light. And then I remember being on a retreat with him once and realizing, if I'm suffering, there's

something I'm not mindful of. Exactly. Yeah, one of the most simple questions I like to ask at the beginning of a sit is what's coming between me and everything just being fine. You could say that there's a kind of baseline way of being in the world, super baseline, where you're just existing and you're available

for what's happening and you're good. You don't need things to be many other way. And that's an experience you do get a lot in practice and you get in life. And so the question is, if you're not in that spot, well, then what's getting in the way? Because something then, there's some layer that's activated and the process of kind of inquiring into that layer and being curious about it, I mean, it changes

your life. It's like, because you can go right through to the other side and realize, oh, there actually is no problem in this moment. I'm speaking about the moment. I haven't taken the thing you do in the moment. I'm speaking about the moment. I'm talking about the thing you do in the moment. I'm not speaking about the problems of the world. In this moment, there is a way of being that is complete and centered and sane and available. And to reconnect to that is like this deep plunge that nourishes you to then go back in the world

and begin to address all those issues. What do you personally do to connect to the centeredness and sameness that is always there, but it is obscured? I do something very similar to what I just said right there, and I'll do it right now. I connect to my being. So the feeling of being, the sense of being, is more fundamental than any of the content in the being, if that makes sense.

So it's like I pan back the camera. Like I was in a worry stream and now I just come back to the sense of being a body, kind of like this body creature sitting in a chair. And now the thing I was worried about is just like one little small part of the tableau of this bigger thing. And the bigger the being thing is the thing I was talking about, that's the sense of being is being is being.

It's always the same being. So there's nothing that can be in the being part that can be improved on, only in the content. And so I just do that little reorientation. And my worries usually just chain out after that. And then I just sit and exist and feels really freaking good. So the worries have trouble continuing to exist

in the face of the brute fact that you exist right now. When you're paying attention to your worries, there isn't just the worry going by. There is often a kind of sense of fixation on the worry, attachment to it, grabbing on it, fighting with it. When you shift into noticing your worry from this bigger container, that's the part that drops away. It's like awareness gets so much broader that the energy that was in the fixation suddenly dissipates. So, now there's just the worry that you're seeing, but you're seeing it as well as you're hearing a sound, as well as you're feeling your feet on the ground.

There's a sense in which the hierarchy that you were previously imposing on it with a worry was the most important thing, that kind of goes away. Now, there's just this wider, expansive. that you were previously imposing on it with a worry was the most important thing, that kind of goes away. Now there's just this wider, expansive. I mean, I don't even know if this sounds weird or what, this is just what I'm doing right now. And it's what I do. In practice, and it's what a lot of teachers

are pointing to in a way. Man, I think through practice, it just starts to happen more easily. You know, it's like something about it is more available. Coming up, Jeff moves through a variety of practices from co-ons to running, to mindfulness of seeing. Also, he's gonna hold forth about his theory that we all need to become our own teachers. That's right after this. Hey, I'm Aresha, and I'm Brooke. And where 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 Rue off course. In our series, Rue Paul born naked.

We'll show you how Rue Paul 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. I just finished a retreat a week or two ago. I noticed myself doing this on this retreat

and then also now in my practice back in the world of quotidian suffering, which is once in a while doing a thing that you've long urged me to do personally, dropping whatever meditation technique I'm doing and just be like, oh yeah, this is all just happening right now. Exactly. And there's a quality of accepting in that that let's go of that fixation. Let's go of the push pull, the trying to change it. It's incredible. This life is incredible. This to take a breath right now and just to stop right in the middle of it. How did he even get here? What is this? Feeling that question with your body, it's like everything else just quiets down.

And then it's like your body's trying to feel its own being. And this is also a way to go deeper and deeper into practice. So this is the basis of inquiry. It's the basis of a colon practice. It's the basis of a kind of non-dual inquiry practice where you just pause and then you kind of feel into that. What is this thing that's happening right now?

Who am I? You just, you kind of feel the question with your whole body for moments, the thoughts, quiet. You're not trying to get an intellectual answer. It's like there are all these frameworks in the mind that are operating. When you do this, it's like you begin to sort of push at those frameworks. You begin to kind of erode them. All these ways in which our habits are trying to constrain us. But when you do something like that, it's like you're moving in the other direction.

It's like, I don't even know why a human being wouldn't want to do this in their life. Because there's this magical sense of the mysterious freaking weirdness of it all that starts to just float out into everything. And I know you know what I'm talking about because we talk about it all the time. Yeah, I can't tell if I'm just going softer, just getting weirder with time because none of this feels that weird to me anymore. Although I it's not hard for me to interpolate back to the 35-year-old version of me would have said, like, what drugs are you taking? But I will add one other thing that for me, for now, at least, that seems to put me into this place that you're describing. And by the way, just to say you said it's hard to put

words to this, yes, it really is. It is like that old joke. It's a little bit like, you know, dancing about architecture. It's very hard to talk about mysticism. One other thing that kind of puts me up against the just overwhelming reality of my existence is being mindful of seeing. Oh yeah, totally. Because that is a thing that many of us who do mindfulness, you can bring awareness to the body moving, you can bring awareness to sounds, to the food you're tasting. But seeing, I don't know, for one reason or another, seeing is something that we take for granted, I think, on an even deeper level. So tuning into the seeing and the weirdness of taking in the world. For me, it helps erode the membrane between my ego and the larger world.

Yeah, me too. I think it's because we're so habituated to walking around with our eyes open, thinking about our problems, worrying about our stuff. So we're only half-seeing. We think we're fully-seeing, but we're only half-seeing because there's this layer of other stuff that's kind of coming in between it. So the deliberate practice of truly seeing can be incredibly liberating. And in the same vein, I do often do a practice of just, it's like, I try to see without knowing that I'm seeing. If that makes sense,

like, I'm knowing I'm seeing, but I'm not like going, oh, that's a tree I'm looking at. Oh, that's a tree, what are trees? It's just like, seeing. I'm letting the tree just be itself. And it's like, you slowly start to kind of erode the label around tree. And it just starts to kind of get more shimmery and interesting.

And then things start to get more beautiful looking. It's like looking at a picture of something a photographer has taken. They framed, even something that is potentially been been now the way it's been seen and framed. Suddenly it lets you see it as an existential truth thing in the world. There's like this feeling of like, oh yeah, barns exist or garbage cans exist or whatever it is they took a picture of. And in the same way, you get this sense of like, oh, wow,

just the looking like that. So this is a great practice for people to try out, try to walk around and just remind yourself to see. And then you'll notice you get kind of floating off, you start going into thinking and you're thinking what the thing you're seeing, and then you just remind, okay, come back to seeing. And just it can be a wonderful practice for coming back to the world and eroding just the things you said. Yeah, this non-conceptual seeing, which again, is very hard to describe in words. The aforementioned Joseph once described it as kind of, I think this is what he was talking about,

but he used this analogy, but like the difference between looking out the window at something and opening the window and looking at it with nothing intermediating it. Oh, beautiful. I've thought about that quite a bit. I don't want to let too much time elapse. There are a couple of things you said that I think might be helpful to either explain or unpack. One of those you talked about Cohen practice. I grew up with a friend named Seth Cohen, one of my best friends to this day, and you're not talking about Seth Cohen. You're talking

about what might be pronounced as coons or KOAN, it's a zen type of practice. Can you describe it just for people who might have never heard of it before? Yeah, well, there's different ways to do coon practice, but the kind of classic thing is you're asking this question that is no intellectual answer. So it's like, what is the sound of one hand clapping, the famous one, or what was your original face

before you were born or something like that? And the idea is that you're just posing this kind of impossible question because what you're interested in is the open feeling of not knowing. You try to connect to a kind of yearning or a wonderment in the question. Really genuinely not knowing.

What is, you don't know, it's like, you pose the question and you kind of find this open ended not know yearning quality in the asking and activating that in your experience, it somehow has this effect of starting to erode some of those structures. So it can be a way into these deep breakthrough moments of practice. These sort of Ken shows that they would call within Zen, like where you literally are, as you keep it up, as you keep it up, it's like it builds up a kind of pressure, a kind of bogglement pressure, that builds and builds, and there can be this sudden kind of break through experience.

And that's one of the ways it can work. Those break through type experiences, it's so interesting because they happen in so many different ways. They could happen through a kind of co-on yearning quality. They could happen through a more v-passon away where you're just getting super, super clear about your moment to moment experience. And it's like you start to see between the pixels and there can be this figure ground

kind of reversal that's kind of breakthrough. Or they could happen in a backing up way, like in a more self-increue way. Like, who am I? Who am I? It's so fascinating to me that all of these very different ostensibly different practices can have these similar effect of kind of changing how we experience self-in-world and that's just one way one stream of practice that's used within the Rinsize end tradition.

Another thing you mentioned earlier was that it's possible to turn running into something that you would describe as a practice. So how would we do that? Yeah, so first the question is what do you want to get out of your running? Like maybe just want the good physical health, which is terrific. That's enough already. Maybe you also like enjoy the feeling of kind of the endorphins and there's a sense of really getting a break from things and you can have that at the same time. I mean, I think to begin to really deepen the practice

of running to make it both not just a good physical practice but a true kind of psychospiritual cleansing. I think the first thing to do is to get deliberate about what you're paying attention to. So you make an intention at the beginning of the practice. You know what, I'm not gonna just sit here and think about my worries as I run. I'm actually going to pay attention to the feeling of the breath and the body or the sense of movement and energy and the body or maybe I'm going to pay attention to

the soundscape moving around me. So you make this decision to first do that. And that's what's going to help really give you a break from your worries. And that's just the beginning. And that's like the concentration piece. Then I'd say you could kind of weave in this equanimity piece. This is kind of a little harder to describe, but it's like this piece of not fighting with yourself. So how can I kind of bring a sense of almost smoothness

in the running, like in the running itself, but in the way I'm relating to my own body, how can I run in a way where I kind of get out of my own way that makes sense? Where I so let go of myself, there's just the running. There's no runner. You know, and actually any experienced runner will go, I know what you're talking about because I've been to that place. Like this place where you start to get into zone and you let go yourself. And so there's a way to be almost deliberate about that.

It still might be mysterious when it lands. You can't control exactly when the zone will happen or when those things will happen. But the more you're intentional about really giving yourself over to the practice entirely, then it can become this even deeper exploration. You have to take your headphones out for this because I like to listen to music, but that might get in the way.

Well, you could use the music as one of your objects that you're listening to. I mean, I think it depends on the person. You have to ask yourself the question. If you listen to music in the back and it might totally support exactly what I'm saying, or it might be a distraction. It's always like that. You have to kind of explore it for yourself. I mean, that's what it means to kind of be your own teacher.

You're interested in this question of how to care for yourself and other people, and you're paying attention to what you're learning and making changes according to what you discover. Same more about that phrase, be your own teacher. Is that connected to your idea of democratizing mental health? Yeah, big time. So basically, the world is very intense right now. There are a ton of environmental challenges and technology challenges and social justice challenges.

And we need to show up for these challenges. And one of the challenges out there are these incredible challenges around mental and emotional health, what you're seeing, like shooting rates of depression and I mean, it goes on and on. So, I think one of the ways to respond to that is making good practice more accessible to more people and making practice support structures and other kinds of support structures more accessible That is what I mean by the democratization of mental health and part of that is Not waiting for the expert a lot of us have this idea that you get to be born in life and then just coast

And then if something goes wrong in terms of mental health Then you got to go to an expert to get fixed But that's the bad old world. The world we're in now is that we don't have that luxury and it didn't work anyway. It's like you kind of have to be interested in caring for yourself from the get-go and recognize that your own mental health is something that needs to be kind of cared for and stewarded along with your physical health. And so that's what I mean about being your own teacher.

It's sort of like being interested for yourself in how this stuff works. And then sharing what you're learning. Sharing what you're learning with your friends, so it's sort of like a horizontal, peer-to-peer transmission. And while there's a place for experts in that, absolutely, it's, you can't depend on them only. It's about being in a place where we can share practice with each other, talk with each other about practice, and that's how the resources are going to get out there. That's how the best practices are going to get out there.

That's what the podcast that I was talking about earlier is about, too. It's about cultivating this new zeitgeist of horizontal teaching and practice sharing. this new zeitgeist of horizontal teaching and practice sharing. But I guess what comes to my mind when I hear you say be your own teacher is, it's really helpful to have an expert. Oh, no doubt. Yeah, part of being your own teacher is knowing when you need to go to someone who's got more expertise than you. And that's what I mean of all these different practice areas. Go to someone who's got some expertise in that, learn from them, and then integrate what their responses are and then Pass it on however imperfectly. That's what I mean

So yeah part of being your own teacher is knowing when to consult the experts One of the other aspects of turning your whole life into a practice that you've talked about is making it social Yeah, well, that's got to be saying about the thinking it's social. Yeah, well, that's what I was saying about the peer to peer part of it. First of all, sharing about your mental health challenges is itself a practice. It, in and of itself, it makes life better. It helps you not only connect to resources, but it helps you get clear about what it is. You're going on.

It helps you find common cause. I mean, there's a lot of reasons why it's really valuable. And I think being in a practice group with other people who are doing that, who are sharing and trying to talk with their insights, it's like it accelerates the learning. Because someone saying out loud or trying to share about a struggle

or an insight they had, it helps you see things that are happening in your experience. That's why we say the community is the teacher at the Conscious Explorer's Club. Every time someone says something real about what's going on in their experience, it provides an opening for us to also learn something. So you're like, it's kind of like the learning happens

as a group and it's very powerful. But even deeper than that, there's a way in which you start to feel more empowered to be able to share what you're learning with other people. That you don't have to be this perfect, super experienced guide to tell someone about a practice that you do or to even guide someone in a few minute, simple, breath practice. And that the world's problems are urgent enough that we don't have time to wait until we come across the path of a great teacher to help us do that, that we can be kind of teachers

for each other, for lack of a better word, and that can help accelerate the learning and make sure it kind of gets to where it needs to get. Let me raise two possible pitfalls here. One is you talked about sharing, and I I wonder are there best practices there that might help you avoid over sharing. And the second is, well, I agree with you on everything. One of the many benefits of talking to somebody who's genuinely an expert is that when difficulties arise, they can give you good guidance that a civilian cannot. And practice can be treacherous at times and you don't want an amateur giving you advice, you know, if you've wandered into a difficult part of your mind. So you take that and whatever

order you want. Yeah, well, I'll take the second one first because it's totally fair comment and I totally agree. That's why I'm saying you need the experts as well. But I guess I would ask a question to you and really think about it. What is more dangerous to lead a practice badly in an amateur way or to be guided in an amateur way in a practice or to not have access to practice at all in the big picture. What is the greater danger? Well, for sure, it's the latter. For sure, the greater, in my opinion, the greater danger is not having access to these technologies, these inner technologies.

I just think perhaps it's about, if you're going to lead people in practice and you haven't done that many years of training that people like you do, to lead people in practice and you, you know, haven't done the many years of training that people like you do, just to have some humility and a spirit of what a caveat emptor, you know, buyer beware, just to be honest about what your level of experience really is. Absolutely. I mean, I couldn't agree more. That's the main thing that the main advice I give the people around sharing practice is what you just said there. It's about not pretending to know anything you don't know. Also, it is important. I think if you're going to share practice in any actual setting, where you're going to be

guiding meditation to understand the basics of trauma and form mindfulness, there's no question. So I could not agree more with that and also having access to all the professional teachers. But I'm saying in the context of friends, sees another friend having a really hard time and the other friend is like, I'm at the end of my rope to be able to say to them, okay, well, listen, I'm not an expert meditation teacher at all. I'm not even an amateur meditation teacher. I just am someone who does this occasionally, but what helps me in this situation is to sit down and take a few breaths and kind of orient my attention, maybe to my hands or feel my feet on the ground and to be able to just

help your friend with a few tips in the moment, I think every human being should want to or know how to do that for another. And for that, you don't need to spend four years in a Dharma teacher training program. And I think that's common sense what I'm saying. Yes. And so on the social tip, I've been dining out on my own mental health struggles for years. So I'm not casting any aspersions here. But I have been, I think, justifiably accused at times of oversharing. And so how do we draw the line between being open and vulnerable? Well, that's a practice. Like everything else. And it's actually a beautiful equity, many practice.

Okay, when I get present and I make myself available this, in this situation, what feels appropriate. I'm going to share about something that happened to me, but you get a sense of when you've already moved into the space of oversharing. It's just a feeling thing. And are you actually hearing what this other person then is saying, are you sitting in your own head

thinking about your own stuff and you can't wait to jump back in with more reports of your experience? It's the communications of practice. Sharing is a practice. Saying with this idea of community, you had a beautiful phrase that you used, you may not even remember using it

with my colleague Gabrielle when she talked to you before this interview. You said, it's all one nervous system. Yeah, yeah, this is the big picture, but it's super valuable framework. This is the world I want to live in. And I'll tell you what that means for me in my life right now and then what I mean by the big picture. So I have meant to help challenges. The ADHD

bipolar diagnosis too, which is both regulation issues, attention regulation, the other one sort of energy mood regulation. Because I am the way I am, there are certain things that I'm really good at, and there are certain things that I'm not good at. So within my family, it's useful to think of my family as, and my community, right at my immediate community, people who are like extended family as a single nervous system, meaning we distribute functions around that nervous system based on the parts of the nervous system that are good at doing that thing. Like, my executive functions are not very good, and when it comes to certain kinds of planning and whatever it is, but my wife is pretty good at that.

So she's more on that tip for us. I'm really good at X. She's better at that. And then there are certain things that neither of us are good at. So we know when it comes to taking care of our little guy, because sometimes we need to ask for other help. And in turn, having someone else come in, my sister, certain kinds of context, or someone else. And in turn, similarly in my community,

there are friends of mine who are good at something, but not so good at another thing, but in that other thing, I happen to be good at. So then I can step in and kind of help with that. And this is where we're getting more to the bigger picture. Now, we try to live that way within our family, within our communities, within our larger world. I think the better the world will be.

So, each of us is not trying to do everything all the time, but that we're allowed to kind of specialize. And we're also recognizing that we're here to help support other people in that way too. Do you see what I mean? If everyone had an ethic of like being clear about what their specialty was, offering it out into the larger framework of their community or world, but then also letting themselves receive the support for the places where they're not as strong, then that's a kind of interconnected world of service and activation that I want to live in. That's what I mean by that. Coming up, Jeff talks about what it's like to practice with ADHD. That's right after this.

You talk a lot about, I think, very helpful ways about impulse control and executive function. And I actually think maybe it's a challenge for you, but it's also a strength because it's part of what makes you so funny and fun to be around. As part of this, you've described as you already have in this conversation, your challenge is specifically with ADHD. And I mentioned earlier, we've had some folks

reach out to us and ask us to explore this a little bit more on the show. So what kind of practices are helpful for you given your attention regulation struggles? Yeah, great question. Well, one is what I said before, making my ADHD a virtue, letting everything be a practice. That has helped me.

Compassion practices have been really important because when you have ADHD, you get into this pattern of letting a lot of people down because you overcommit because you're not good at figuring out what you need to get done in the right order and all that. So self-compassion practices are super valuable. Not all ADHD people are the same. There's all kinds of sub-tites of ADHD. If you do have an ADHD diagnosis, you kind of have to explore a few different meditation

practices to see what clicks. If you do have an ADHD diagnosis, you kind of have to explore a few different meditation practices to see what clicks. Some folks find typical concentration practices really hard for the obvious reasons, but others have a kind of hyper focus so they can get into say a concentration practice and that actually can be good medicine for them. However, you have to learn how to shave off the fixation part

of the hyper focus if that makes sense. Like, it's like you're focusing, you could like depends on it because it does depend on it because you've so many times let people down by having your attention go all over the place. So you're actually holding on to your attention in this desperate way.

So you gotta let go of the desperateness. So there's a learning there. I think non-dual practices are very helpful for ADHD folk, meaning coming back to just present moment awareness, because you're always coming back there anyway if you're ADHD, because you're just popping back out of whatever the thing that you were supposed to be committed to. You're like, oh, but here again, you can't even forget where you were. And so you can make a virtue of that.

Normally when you're ADHD, you pop back into the present moment and you're like, and you pop back full of fear and loathing around what you just forgotten what you think you should have been doing. But if you can pop back into the present moment and not activate that particular fear and loading circuit, then you're in the refreshment of the present moment. And this is a whole space of profound insight. What is this present moment awareness? Who am I?

That can be a very profound direction of inquiry for anybody. But the point of this is, it doesn't matter what your neuro unique situation is. We're all neuroatypical to a degree. And your diversity here can actually be a virtue in the sense that it almost always shows that you have an area of competency in some domain. That can then become a place that you really zoom in deep on. You use to bootstrap it a deeper practice. And then you can also do balancing practices to try to even that out a bit. But that's kind of what I have learned through this, that every mental health challenge

you could say is also kind of a window into a particular style of practice or a particular direction of inquiry. Is one potential pitfall of turning everything into a practice that you're just jumping around too much and you're okay? Definitely. Yeah. I mean, that's why understanding what's unique to all that is valuable. What's unique to all that is its awareness. It's opening to what's here. It's, it's valuable. What's unique to all that is it's awareness.

It's opening to what's here, it's seeing what's here. That is the glue that binds all of these. How where are you at now with your challenges around attention regulation and how have these practices helped, how have they not helped? Like they've helped massively. Like you, obviously. If I just look at my life right now, my suffering is a fraction of what it used to be,

a fraction. I just don't get into the suffering loops in the same way. First of all, I have compassion for my own attentional style, so I don't let that be. The fact that I jump around, I'm just like, I try to just let the virtue of it be there. And I try to create structure in my life that makes it okay for me to be like that. And I very clear and transparent with my friends and family. That's who I am. So I feel like the people who are in my life accept that. And I still do shalom at the type practices that

I find help make me more regulated. So that's the ADHD. The age part, the hyper part, which is related to the hypomania and the ups and downs, that's really changed too, because I have so much more awareness when these start. I could feel the very beginning of these endogenous shifts that want to lead me into a hypomantic place, and I can come off that and let it just play out without having to feed it. And I know what to do. I can find structure. I'll go to sleep early or I'll go, I know I need to exercise now. So I have these like structures in place. And similarly, when I go down in the other direction,

I have reframing so I can do where I'm like, okay, that's just part of how this goes. And actually, can I experience this low as this kind of like a nurturing thing like my body's going here anyway so can I let myself be in the dark here if you know what I mean so I don't even know that I think I'd be alive really if I didn't have these practices to smooth all this out and of course it gives you so much compassion for everyone's dealing with versions of this. And then that also is great. You know, just feeling all this compassion for humanity makes you feel really connected to

people. And that's just a great mediator or something. It seems to me that what I just heard you describe is a kind of walking the walk on your advice to be your own teacher. It reminds me of something that Chris Gurmer, the academic who spends a lot of time studying self-compassion set, which is he said that the central mantra, the central rallying cry, the central question that somebody who practices self-compassion should be asking themselves frequently

is, what do I need right now? Yeah, absolutely. What do I need right now? Yeah, absolutely. What do I need right now? What is the world need right now? Balancing that what do I need right now? Change or accept? What is the world need right now? Change or accept?

That's the grid around and around. And then eventually there's this sense in which it just feels like even those questions integrate. And there's just this being available for things and the right response, seeming to come. Everyone says that. It's the weirdest thing. You used to try to be crazy. What do you mean? What does that mean? It's just like so. What do you mean? What does that mean? It's just like so. Like, it's just so annoying.

It sounds like just some zen riddle. But I think it just means you're not overthinking stuff. Right, I mean, the Zen folks talk a lot about freshness and spontaneity. And I think it goes back to this Tibetan phrase that I love about the point of practice being to clear away and bring forth. If you just can clear away the

junk, then the good stuff underneath this availability can shine forth. Totally. What's your practice like right now? I just went on this retreat by the time we posted this. I guess it will be a couple of weeks ago up at the Insight Meditation Society with Joseph. And I was struggling a little bit to integrate two kinds of practices. One is the stricter, more programmatic style of retreat where you've got a very strict schedule. You're sitting walking, sitting walking, lunch, sitting walking, sitting walking, sitting walking, dinner, and a style of practice that I learned from Alexis Santos and other, like you as a teacher on the 10% happier app and his teacher is a

Burmese guy named Saida, who Taisania and Taisania's style is really like there's no schedule or maybe there's like a few things to anchor the schedule, but you're really supposed to listen to your intuition about, am I sitting now? Am I walking now? Am I like, or maybe even reading a book or it's complete bedlam. You can even check your phones, really sort of very unstructured. I was trying to combine those two a little bit and I got confused at one point. Joseph was like, you're being ridiculous. It's like, it's all the same thing.

It's all just waking up. And that's been really helpful for me. My mind rebelled against my own tendency to push too hard for a whole long period of, where I was meditating two hours a day, it was very militant. Now, I don't really time my practice, but as a result, I look forward to it a lot more. And so I just naturally find spots in the day without any external or internal pressure to sit and meditate. Yeah, it feels more natural.

And so what am I actually doing? I often start with a little bit of loving kindness practice and which is very good to settle the mind at least for me. And then just open up to a more open awareness. And there's a little question that Alexis's teacher, Tasia Nia, tells people to ask as their practice, instead of focusing on the breath or noting everything that arises, just ask yourself, are you aware? And then when you drift away, you ask yourself that again. The analogy

that you use is like pushing a kid on a swing, you push, and then the kid goes out and then you push again, but after a while, you don't have to push as often. I often joke that it's like when I push my kid on the swing, sometimes when he returns to me, he farts in my face, and so that's what waking up can feel like at some time, especially the beginning of a retreat. But anyway, I said a whole lot there. I wasn't planning to, but I'll see if you have any reaction. Well, I think it's good for people to hear. It's good just to be a regular person talking about where you are in your practice and

what you're doing. I think it's a good practice. I mean, it's amazing to me that awareness is a kind of solvent. It just dissolves everything after a while. You just sit, if you just sit and just be aware, eventually everything will dissolve. But we don't stay there. That's the thing. And so we have other ways to dissolve what's in the way.

But you could just sit and be aware. And eventually the process of living, things will come up that in the awareness you notice. And that whole approach kind of just trusts, it has faith in awareness to notice the thing at the right time, as opposed to specific practices which are deliberately intended to help generate insight about a specific thing and bring it up

But there's the barebone is just beating the awareness. I think it's a beautiful practice. I know loving kindness too It's just you can't do enough of that. I do the I'll start with just I just put my hand on my chest because there's something about touch that's just very Settling it's like the animal body, that's what it wants. It doesn't know about a weakening. Any of those things, it is a wake. But it knows what touches, you know,

your hand on your own knee, you know, or it's just, boom, that simple gesture. And you see when you're apparent, just the power of it. You know, this touch thing, Kristen Neff talks about it. She's kind of the godmother of self-compassion research and she talks about putting your hand on your heart or your chest, whatever it is, kind of hacking into the mammalian care system. Bammles need to care for our young and obviously, as everybody knows, in order to keep

the DNA alive through the generations. And when I first heard people talk about rubbing your chest or putting your hand on your heart, because I am, as my son often calls me, a jerk face, I completely rejected it. But now I do it on the regular. And it's really, I mean, my experience is really helpful. And there's data to suggest that it is. I would also say about that, that it's incredibly empowering,

because what's happening, like when you put a hand on your chest or whatever your version of settling the nervous system, it's like you settle and you start to feel your ground underneath you, and now you can stand up from inside your own resources without having to reach outside of yourself. So there's something very, it's very powerful to know how to do that.

Yeah. I'm used that all the time. I use that in the middle of the night when my guy's wailing. And I'm just like, oh, I don't know. I do this situation. I'm like, just losing my mind days since we slept and it's like three in the morning or something. And it's like, okay, I'll just put the hand on my chest and go settle down, buddy. And then it's like, I feel the whole nervous

and the go, boom, boom, boom, boom. And now from that place, now I can come for them. But before it was like we were just lost together. Well said. Before I let you go, let's go back to the mind bud, adventure pod. You guys have done an art doing so many different kinds of practices. Art, hypnosis, voice, movement, sleeping dreaming. Is there anything you wouldn't do? Well, Dan, I would say there are two primary demands that we want to. One, I won't be doing any sex practices on air.

And your lizard is going to thank me for that. No, but we probably will talk about tantra and different kinds of breathing related stuff. But the other thing is, we had this idea back in the day when we were kind of just, I mean, I've known Tasha Rages, we've been asking around in the kind of party scene before we were meditators. I mean, we were actually both meditators then too, but there was a long time where it was kind of an overlap of going to dance parties. And so we do still have this idea that it would be fun to do a podcast where we take a different drug and then just real-time narrate the experience of the drug kicking in, thinking that would

be kind of fun to do. However, that won't be happening. I don't really do any of that anymore and a dad, and it's probably illegal, and especially the states and those whatever reason, it's just not good sense, but that would be kind of fun. I'll lead some young types, some younger folks to do that. And it's available everywhere? Yeah, totally.

iTunes, Spotify, all the spots. And yeah, we're just curious what people think of it. So listen to it and if you like it, write a review or whatever, subscribe. And I mean, it's all a labor of love. We did it all kind of on our own. So we're hoping that if it gets enough support and people like it enough, then they'll be waiting for us to keep going with it because we have a zillion ideas and it's very joyful to do it.

Yes, and she's great. Anything else you got going on? Retreats or writings that you're putting out into the world that people might want to access? Well, the stuff I do at 10% happier, of course, I do stuff for calm. I have my do nothing project on Sunday night, which is a free YouTube live meditation,

super pare-down is a really great community people who join me for that and anyone can do that. And then I guess the big picture is I'm just, I appreciate the opportunity to blab in this kind of directionless way of a practice. I am trying to synthesize all of it into some kind of coherent work that just sort of lays out a kind of philosophy of practice, I am trying to synthesize all of it into some kind of coherent work that just sort of lays out a kind of philosophy of practice, you know, like what is practice, how

it connects to the deep end of the transformations that we hear, but also just the mundane end of just like living a more thoughtful life in all these areas. So I'm always interested in other people's thoughts on this and I'm just writing this book about that. So that's people's thoughts on this and I'm just writing this book about that. So that's what's going on with me. I'm looking forward to that book and you're not giving yourself credit. You're way more coherent in this conversation than you might think. Thanks for coming on Jeff.

Appreciate it. Always great to hang out Dan. Thanks for having me on. Thanks again to Jeff. Always great to talk to him. Go check out his new show, The Consciousness Explorers Podcast, or The Mind Bud Adventure Pod. Also before I go, just want to thank everybody who works so hard to make this show a reality

two and a half times a week. Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davy, Kim Baikamma, Maria Wartel, and Jen Plant and Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus. 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.