Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 432: Cut the Strings of the Malevolent Puppeteer | Bonus Meditation with Dawn Mauricio

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

It’s super normal to want what feels good and avoid what feels bad. Unlock your unconscious habits to make wiser & more thoughtful choices.About Dawn Mauricio:Dawn Mauricio discovered the practices of Buddhist meditation in 2005, and from then on, did what any well-intentioned perfectionist would do — plunge in head first! Since then, she's graduated from several teaching programs, including Spirit Rock's four-year Teacher Training. Her teaching style is playful, dynamic, and heartfelt, and she teaches extensively in her home-country of Canada, as well as the US, to teens, people of color, and folks of all backgrounds.To find this meditation in the Ten Percent Happier app, you can search for “Making Conscious Choices,” or click here: https://10percenthappier.app.link/content?meditation=dbf8b791-9110-4200-b473-54e9e0872fdb.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What does it even mean to live a good life? Is it about happiness, purpose, love, health, or wealth? What really matters in the pursuit of a life well lived? These are the questions award-winning author, founder, and interviewer Jonathan Fields asks his guests on the Top Ranked Good Life Project podcast. Every week, Jonathan sits down with world renowned thinkers and doers, people like Glenn and Doyle, Adam Grant,

Young Pueblo, Jonathan Height, and hundreds more. Start listening right now. Look for the Good Life Project on your favorite podcast app. This is the 10% happier podcast, Dan Harris. Hey gang, happy Friday. It's bonus meditation time. As humans, we have three habitual programmed reactions to whatever comes up in our minds. We want it, we don't want it, or we don't really care. At the most basic level, life is just a ceaseless river of pleasant, unpleasant

and neutral. And when we don't see this process playing out, we're dragged along by our unconscious desires, mindlessly wanting, rejecting, or ignoring. One of the amazing things about mindfulness meditation is that it wakes you up so you can cut the strings of this puppeteer. So let's practice this now with Don Mauricio. Don is a teacher on the 10% happier app. She discovered Buddhist meditation back in 2005 and from then on did what any well-intentioned perfectionist would do. She plunged in head first. She went on to graduate

from Spirit Rocks four-year teacher training program and she now teaches in her home country of Canada as well as in the United States over to Don. Hi, this is Don. You might not realize it, but a lot of your choices are rooted in wanting more pleasant experiences and less unpleasant ones. This is totally normal, of course. and yet it's worthy of exploration. When you begin to see this pattern more clearly, you can take a moment to pause and choose your response instead of living in reaction. Settle into a practice posture in which you can feel at ease. If you like, you can close your eyes

or you can keep them slightly open with your gaze downward. Give yourself a few moments to settle into your posture. Feel the ways your body is touching down on the ground. At the same time, notice how the ground is gently pressing up to support your body. Begin the subtle practice of softening. Relax your body. Relax your effort. Meet let in any sensations, feelings, or thoughts that may arise. As best you can, try not to get caught up in any storylines that accompany them.

Instead, notice if you have any subtle reactions of liking, disliking, or feeling relatively neutral about what's coming up. Your reaction to whatever is present, your liking, disliking, wanting, not wanting, shows you whether you find it like, and not feeling much for what is relatively neutral, is a natural and conditioned reaction. What noticing and being mindful of it allows is a moment to choose. Do you need to adjust things so this goes away, changes or stays? Or can you simply be with it as it is? When you realize that you want more pleasant,

less unpleasant, or are just checking out, notice any urges that come along. Before you act on this urge, ask yourself, with this serve my mindfulness right now, it may or may not be obvious and that's okay. If you choose to act out your urge, tune into your body or breath afterwards while asking yourself, did that serve my mindfulness? This isn't about getting the right answer. It's about sensing into what's most supportive in any given moment. Explore this lift your gaze. Thank you for your practice.

Until next time. Thank you, Don. We'll see you right back here on Monday. We're going to be talking to brother Fap Young, who's been on this show before. He was a senior student to the recently deceased Tick-Not Han, the great Vietnamese Zen Master, who died in January, and we're going to look back at Tick-Nought Han's life. And brother Fap Young is going to walk us through some of the most practical learnings we can apply to our own lives from the teachings of Tick-Nought Han.

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