Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 440: Meditation for Short Attention Spans | Bonus Meditation with Sharon Salzberg

Episode Date: April 22, 2022

Collect yourself in the morning to start off on your best foot. If you start collected, you’ll have better luck staying collected.About Sharon Salzberg:A towering figure in the meditation world, Sharon Salzberg is a prominent teacher & New York Times best-selling author. She has played a crucial role bringing mindfulness and lovingkindness practices to the West.Sharon co-founded the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) alongside Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield and is the author of nine books, including Lovingkindness, Real Happiness, and the most recent Real Love. Sharon lives in New York City and teaches around the world.To find this meditation in the Ten Percent Happier app, you can search for “Get Going with Focus,” or click here: https://10percenthappier.app.link/content?meditation=3bd1a8a1-84f8-4be9-8f67-14eb4e0ec5feSee 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. I'm Dan Harris. Happy Friday, y'all. It's time for a bonus meditation. On the show this week, we've been focused on the issue of focus. Sorry, that's a little cute. Anyway, we've been talking about focus and why it's increasingly hard for so many of us. We've got our noses and

social media. We're praying to the false god of multitasking or we're convinced that we are somehow uniquely unable to stay on task. Whatever else you, we've got a simple antidote today from the great Sharon Salisburg co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, New York Times bestselling author and one of the founding teachers on the 10% happier app. and one of the founding teachers on the 10% happier app, Sharon, over to you. Hi, this is Sharon. If you consider how scattered, how distracted, how out of the moment we may ordinarily be, you can see the benefit of gathering that energy, gathering our attention. So even though we take a very simple object and ordinary object, like the feeling of the breath, it has the effect of really bringing us

to a sense of wholeness, a sense of empowerment. It is a very powerful way of beginning our day. You can sit comfortably and relax. Let your attention settle in the feeling of the breath, at the nostrils, at the chest, or the inner and out breath. We don't try to make the breath deeper or different. Just however it's appearing and however it's changing. Because it's so common in the beginning of practice to get quite distracted, one of the fundamental techniques that's used in many traditions is counting the breath. So let's get started. As you breathe in, you can make the silent mental note of in. As you breathe out, you can count the out breath starting with one and going up to ten. So let's try it together. Breathing in, note in, and breathing out, count one.

And again, breathing in, note in. And breathing out, count two. Keep going. And when you get up to 10, you can begin again with one. The number can be very quiet. Most of your attention is on the actual feeling, the sensation of the breath. Both in order to end and the number are really a support for that awareness. We say that the moment you realize you've been distracted is the magic moment, because that's the moment we have the chance to be really different. And not judge ourselves, not condemn ourselves, but simply let your eyes and relax.

Thank you for your practice. Thank you to Sharon. We'll see you back here on Monday for a brand new episode with the guy named Aaron Flores, who's one of the few men in the space of intuitive eating, which we talk about a lot on the show, how to break out of diets and tune into a sort of simple alternative, which is listening to your body about when you're hungry and when you're full. That's coming up on Monday with Aaron Flores. Hey, hey prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or 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 slash Survey.