Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 471: What Does Interconnection Actually Mean? | Bonus Meditation with Jeff Warren

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

Connecting with the universal world wide web of meditators expands your perspective and helps cultivate a deep feeling of belonging.About Jeff Warren:Jeff is an incredibly gifted meditation teacher. He's trained in multiple traditions, including with renowned teacher Shinzen Young. Jeff is the co-author of NY Times Bestseller "Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics," and the founder of the Consciousness Explorers Club, a meditation adventure group in Toronto. He has a knack for surfacing the exact meditation that will help everyone he meets. "I have a meditation for that" is regularly heard from Jeff, so we've dubbed him the "Meditation MacGyver."To find this meditation in the Ten Percent Happier app, you can search for “Symphony of Interconnection,” or click here: https://10percenthappier.app.link/content?meditation=1255a87a-5d7e-4736-9d6e-750e582f96f8.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 time for a bonus meditation. We're going to talk today about a spiritual cliche par excellence, oneness, interconnection. You hear about it all the

time in meditation circles, but what does it actually mean? Today, Jeff Warren is going to take us there both intellectually and importantly, experientially. Jeff has been a frequent guest on this show. He's an incredibly gifted meditation teacher and also the founder of the Consciousness Explorers Club, a meditation adventure group in Toronto. He's also a great friend. And he and his wife just had their second baby

a few months ago, so congratulations to him. Here we go now with Jeff Warren. Hello, I'm Jeff. One of the great joys that can emerge through practice is the sense of being connected and available to more and more of life. This opening to life is really the heart of meditation. It's also a universal human experience that people have spoken about in every culture and tradition. So, we're going to use our imaginations to try to connect to exactly this universality,

to this lineage of all meditators, all people really. Find a comfortable seat, eyes open or closed, if they're open, keep the gaze soft on the floor in front of you. Start with a few deep breaths. Just breathing in, stretching up as you inhale. And then the exhale is the downward motion, the settling, breathing out any tension. And as you breathe out here, it's like you're landing in the present moment, landing in your body, landing more firmly on the ground. So imagine, as you breathe in, that you're breathing in a connection to all the millions of meditators around the world who right now are sitting with their own eyes closed or open. And as you breathe in, imagine it's like you're breathing in support and energy from all those meditators.

It's like you're connected in a kind of net or a grid, and each meditator is a node in that grid, animate that connection every time you breathe in. Okay, good. So now let's expand this idea of connection. Think about all the meditators from the past, this amazing lineage of practitioners, millions of them. In pretty much every culture and tradition in the world, there's a version of meditation. We're just one version of this really beautiful human impulse. So as you breathe in, imagine you're connecting to that lineage. You sit a little taller, maybe even a little bit more proudly.

This human lineage. And then as you breathe out, you're sending a pulse of connection back through time and space to all the other meditators, so meditating suspended An appreciation of the majesty and the poignancy of this human endeavor. Okay, good. So you're welcome to stay with us practice after the guidance ends. Staying here inside the web, the real worldwide web. Or if you're feeling like the meditation is complete for you, keep the eyes closed and take a few final breaths.

And as you open your eyes, if they were closed, notice the sights. This world right here. Welcome home to where you've always been. Thank you for your practice. I'm Jeff. Thank you, Jeff Warren. We'll see you right back here on Monday for a brand new episode with a meditation master who's also been on the show before Yangi Ming, your Rinpoche, Tibetan monk, who is going to talk about how he personally handles, and panic. 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 ad-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.