Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 57: Jeff Warren & the '10% Happier' Road Trip! (Bonus Episode!)

Episode Date: January 20, 2017

Canada native Jeff Warren was a "chronic over-thinker" who got into meditation sort of by accident while working as a science journalist and now he's an established meditation teacher. Warren and our host Dan Harris are hitting the road this month on a cross-country bus tour to host meditation sessions with folks from all walks of life from New York City to Los Angeles. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. 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 come from. And where's Tom from my space? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. A couple years ago, there was an article in The New York Times and it was this article written by this Canadian guy talking about how he went on a one-on-one month-long meditation retreat guy talking about how he went on a one-on-one month-long meditation retreat with a doctor in rural Alabama at a weird long story. I won't give you the whole thing anyway. It was really well written.

So I actually tracked down the writer, the aforementioned Canadian guy, whose name is Jeff Warren, and basically strong armed him into being my friend because the writing was so good. Over time, I learned that he's got a ton of experience in meditation he's actually a meditation teacher and I subscribe to the newsletter for his little meditation group in Toronto and the newsletter itself is so incredibly well-written and it looked like this group was doing so many exciting things I honestly at moments felt like I wanted to move to Canada the name name of his group, by the way, in case you're curious, you can look it up as the Consciousness Explorers Club.

So anyway, the moral of the story is that over time, I've actually become friends with Jeff and have draguned him into participating in my little company, the 10% Happier App Company. And we are launching on the app a new course in which Jeff and I go off on a road trip to nowhere. We just go wandering. And over the course of those days, we have all these interesting conversations. We recorded every minute of it on video and we're with the drones and go pros and we're posting that on the app right

now, which is why he's our guest this week. One more thing to say before I let you actually hear from Jeff that road trip course was so much fun and hopefully you guys will like it and give us feedback about how we can do more and better in the future. We decided to do a cross-country road trip which Jeff and I are gonna turn into a book and also many many, many more courses for the 10% happier app. So anyway, after that long introduction, I'm gonna let you enjoy hearing from Jeff Warren,

who is awesome. Here you go. Here you go. Here you go. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Okay, before we get into deep, weird, let me ask you some basic questions. How do you come to meditation at first?

Wildly indirectly. We were pretty hard partying like crazy guy. Yeah, I was, let's just say I wasn't interested in self-regulation. That was not a priority through my 20s, but I was very interested in consciousness. I got interested in just this sort of nerdy curiosity of what was happening in my mind. Actually, what do you mean by consciousness? And why would you even develop? Okay, interesting that. Right. So the backstory is when I was 20 years old, I was high out of my mind, and I fell out of a tree and broke my neck in that. Right. So the backstory is when I was 20 years old,

I was high out of my mind, and I fell out of a tree and broke my neck in Montreal. And it completely changed my style of processing. So my consciousness changed. I went from being a more linear thinker, although I'd been a bit ADD before, to being wildly associative. And it was a dramatic contrast.

It was like, what the hell has happened to me? What do you mean by associative. And it was a dramatic contrast. It was like, what the hell is happened to me? What do you mean by associative? I couldn't keep my mind on a single track, skipping tracks, skipping tracks, but really, really creative. I could come up with lots of just sort of like, I could connect this idea, this idea, this idea, but I couldn't stick through with an idea

in the way that I used to be. So it was just a different, and I didn't know what had happened. Later I found out from neurosurgeon that there's something called shearing, which is when you have a really, sometimes when you have a serious head trauma, the gray matter and the white matter are different densities. And there can be this thing where they kind of, they shear against each other and it just changes a whole bunch of connections or something. But all I knew from the inside is that I couldn't no longer perform in school the way I did.

I was a good student, even though I had partied a lot. I was able to get what I needed to get done. It just changed my inner experience. So I was like, I got it really interested in what was happening. Like, why are things different now? What's happening? So I started to read books about the mind just to try to understand how to get back to where I was. And that became the impetus. And then I just from there, I was just a

curious guy. So I was, I was, I was interested in everything anyway. I read a lot of science. I was originally a literature major. And I found myself being really interested in people's descriptions of inner experience like people describing ways in which they were aware. I mean, now I, you know, when you look back on it, you see how, you know, people talk sometimes in the quote, spiritual world about seekers. You heard that term, the seeker. It's like somebody who kind of an annoying term. It's an annoying term, but it's a real kind of condition. It's a condition of being like feeling like something isn't right or something is missing.

And then you need to find the answer for it And ultimately it ends up in most cases being a quote spiritual answer meaning it's an adjustment you didn't make in your Interior life and that's what it was like for me like I I knew Something was up and I didn't know how to describe it So I just we'll kind of wildly looking at whatever I could find so I was doing lots of psychedelics exploring those routes I was reading tons about the mind, I was reading lots about neuroscience, I was reading whatever I could get my hands on. And that led ultimately to me writing an entire book about consciousness. Even called the head trip.

Yeah. So which is about waking, sleeping, and dreaming about how they work, but it was really about what are the what are the fundamental ways in which we're aware over 24 hours. And what are those ways in which we're aware have to tell us about who we are and what we know and the way we know. So it was about dreaming, it was about slow wave sleep, about lucid dreaming, it was about the athlete's zone,

about daydreaming, about alertness. And it had a chapter because I felt like, okay, here I am running my consciousness. I got at least gesture to these guys, the Buddhists, whoever they are. So I read a whole bunch of books about Buddhism and started doing a bit of a meditation practice there, just to try to get a sense of it.

But I had still in your 20s. This is still in my 30s. But I didn't have any, I didn't, before that I had no interest in it. I't have any, you know, I didn't, before that I had no interest in it. I didn't, I found the whole, you know, the kind of culty optics of it off-putting. And I even, I tried it out, went to, I remember going to one class and I just thought, though this is unlike the anti-buda. I was like way to, you know, restless and scattered and, and, and, and, and, and, and

existentially angst-filled. And it was just not going to work for me. you know, restless and scattered and and and and and and and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and a certain way, because I, first of all, the frontal lobe shut up for once. So I could actually be in my experience, though, that a huge running commentary. I don't know, you've talked about that too. But it was also more this sincerity of the fellow meditators, like there was something very moving. You may, I'm sure you've seen it when you're sitting in a meditation hall and you look around and it's just everybody is quiet and it and they're just trying to live with themselves. You know, and there's something really, I found it very powerful. I felt like, wow, they're just sitting down and they're facing who they are and in a way that's really brave, that way that I have never been able to do until then.

I would do anything to get away from myself, whatever I could do at full speed. Yeah, there was a study not long ago that said most people, when given the choice between them, being alone with their thoughts, or getting electric shocks, they will take the ladder. Absolutely. That's definitely how I felt,

because it was, you know, it's a chronic overthinker. You know, continually scheming and, and, and, and, strategizing and planning and how can I make this next moment go okay? And this next moment go okay, it was, it was exhausting. And then, and as you got deeper into meditation, you start to realize what's going on there. You start to see the way in which we're constantly negotiating with our experience, like this

push and pull and gripping and friction. But at the time, I didn't, I just was unconsciously in it. So you, you know, that very first meditation treat just to have it kind of cool out for a bit is, it's a revelation, you know, it's, oh my God, there's another way of being. And that kind of got me on the road of practice. But even then, I was very, I was allergic to the Moorowoo type claims. I just, I looked at it in a very spare sort of seconded way.

And interestingly, that's changing too, that's evolving, because the deeper you go and practice, the more you start to understand what the mystical sides are pointing to, what that stuff, what they might be saying, and at least it begins to make it you more open to it. I'll put it that way. Just had a curiosity, who was leading this retreat?

You went on. They were called the friends of the Western Buddhist Order. And they were like one of these Western Buddhist spin-offs. And they were, this is in Scotland. So it was in this, I wonder if they called fjords. And it was just one of these long lake things with like, but Scottish mountains, highlands, and everything was covered in moss. And this monk named Shr-Math-Shr-Math-Harmor, pardon me, I don't, I can't, I can't even, I could never pronounce

his name then. He had these long orange robes, then they were trailing, they would trail behind him as he walked. They were covered in dirt. And, but he was a lovely guy. And yeah, they were, I think they were formed in the 50s or 60s. You know, I mean, there's been, there's the history of how the West has been influenced by Buddhism and vice versa is fascinating. You know, and this was one of those iterations. And early, before all this current love of all things, mindfulness,

there was an earlier love affair with Buddhism that happened in the West. And they were, it was a product of that. So you did this first retreat, and then you've gone pretty deep into teaching and all this stuff. So did that start right away or what happened? You know, it didn't start right away. So I went to that retreat and then I just kept going.

And the first couple of years it was like, okay, I felt like I had to do something to address my wild out of control ADD and angst and my book came out and I thought that would solve all problems in my life that it would be wildly popular and heralded as a great work about consciousness but it kind of came out and disappeared. And I realized I was sitting there in my life and I didn't, hadn't solved any of the problems

that I wanted to solve. And the only thing I knew how to do, at this point, that I felt that might be helpful, was to continue meditating. So I would just, I started going to whatever retreats I could, I went to IMS for treats at Spirit Rock and in the States, I would go to local weekend sits in Ontario, I'm from Toronto, I would go to local weekends, sits in Ontario, I'm from Toronto, I would go wherever.

And I would just get, and I found when I came back, I would feel calmer, I would feel more present, but then very quickly the anxiety would start up again and I would go again. And I wasn't just doing meditation at the time. I also around that time finally started seeing a psychotherapist, thinking, okay, I'll take whatever help I can get just to help me get more grounded and sane. And but I wasn't really happy with any of the teachings that I got, I guess you could say. I appreciated the effects of the meditation, but every time it came to describing what was happening, I found it was like everyone was speaking, well, they were speaking

Polly or Sanskrit in a sense that they had, it was all this terminology and vocabulary that was reflected of a certain era and a certain time with a certain set of assumptions around how it operated that was coherent and brilliant. There's no question, but I didn't know how to translate it to my experience. And I found that even in the typical, the big teachers of Western Dharma, they still used all the debudus jargon. And I didn't know what did impermanence actually mean as an experience. What was no self as an experience? What is equanimity as an experience? Like, how do those things translate to what was happening at moment to moment for me?

And I didn't find the answers that were forthcoming, that satisfying. It wasn't until I met Shin Zenyung, who kind of became my teacher that he's a super geek, but because he's super geeky and super rigorous, he was able to describe the dynamics of consciousness in a way that I understood. Let me just jump in and tell people about Shins and Young. Shins and Young is a American guy, grew up in LA, but very early on learned Japanese

and then went and studied Buddhism in Japan and now lives in the US and teaches people all over the place. He is, by his own description, a super geek. He's in his 60s now, but really, really smart, really, really interesting guy. You actually are the one who got me into him. He's got a new book called The Science of Enlightenment. And we recently interviewed him for the podcast.

I don't know if it will have posted by the time this interview posts. Anyway, back to you. So you meet Chinsen and what happens? So I meet Chinsen. Actually, what happened first is I listened, he had an audio series called the Science of Enlightenment and it was like Oh my god finally it was like someone finally explained I mean when I say explain it I mean explain the whole parameter of what a practice is so in the in the kind of secular world of mindfulness

There's lots of wonderful explainers of kind of secular world of mindfulness, there's lots of wonderful explainers of kind of introductory meditation, basic orientations to what to do and what's happening, but there's sort of behind it, there's this whole other, all these other dimensions to practice, the so-called deep end, like the claims around how it changes and transforms you

in a more permanent way. All that stuff is there in Buddhism and it's kind of glossed over in the second or take on Mimiles mostly because people don't know what to make of it, or how to talk about it in a way that's not going to cause a whole bunch of reaction. And what I found about Shinsen Oso-Refreshing is he was interested in talking about everything. And he could describe how you could go from being a beginner meditator to this much, this different place, this deeper place where we want to call it, or a more fundamental place.

And he could describe the dynamics of the qualities of attention, how they contribute to that. And it was through those descriptions I was able to start to come to understand what was going on in my experience, A, but also begin to create a model in my own head for what was happening. And that, by the way, is super important. It's like you're constantly having an interplay and practice between your understanding of what's happening and your actual experience. And you're experienced deepens and then you update your

conceptual model. And then, and then you experience deepens and you update your conceptual model. But sometimes you have an amazing talk with somebody, you update your conceptual model and that allows you to see something more deep in your experience. So there's a two way relationships there. And he finally gave me a framework or a model that I could then begin from. And since then I brought in my own interest and consciousness and my understanding of from talking to other people in other fields to build on my understanding. Some of the stuff you just talked about while really interesting could be a little theoretical to folks, especially you know people who are new to meditation or who or who are not meditating at all. So in very practical terms

what did he say that major meditation practice better? Well the first thing he said is mindfulness isn't some, is too general. That actually mindfulness is built up of specific, attentional skills and the ones that he talks about are concentration, clarity, and equanimity. And each of these qualities of attention, these sort of like, you can think of them as sort of attentional muscle groups, they can be identified and you can actually begin to notice when each of those qualities is activated in your experience.

And so as soon as you do that, now you have a feedback. So now you know when you're actually getting, quote, more mindful, it's not some general abstract injunction to pay or attention to your cereal or to the traffic or to whatever, is to know what it's like to be concentrated, is to know what it's like to be concentrated. It's to know what it's like to be clear. It's to know what it's like to not be a conumist or to not struggle with your experience. Those things became tangible tastes in my experience. And as that happened, it literally accelerated my development as a meditator, because now I could see when I was actually being mindful.

So that was... In order to be mindful, you have to be all three of those. Well, he would say his definition of mindfulness is being all three of those. It's being concentrated, which means you're, which doesn't mean you're in a narrow beam of attention. It means you're able to pay attention in the direction you want to pay attention to. So in my case, I'm paying attention to what you're saying. I'm concentrated. You're concentrated on me.

Fine, that's how it goes. And we know that over the more concentrated we are in any activity, the more inherently rewarding or pleasurable it is. So whether you're, you know, gambling, or you're having sex or you're in a sport, the zone, it's chicks at me high, called it flow. And so it's just so you can, so that's the absorbed direct, the kind of thing about being directed. Now you have clarity, which is really interesting.

It's about noticing the texture of your experience. So that sounds at first glance sort of weird when you're hanging out in everyday life. You're just going along. There's your thoughts, there's feelings in your body, there's sounds around you. As you begin to pay more attention to it, you can begin to notice more texture in the sounds, the thinking process, you can begin to parse apart into images and talk.

And then below that, you can start to notice all these very subtle body sensations that are constantly motivating you to react in this way and react in this way, and little tiny subtle emotional expressions. And so the longer you look at your own experience, the more elaborated that it gets so that the resolution increases. So that's the sanity side of mindfulness where you begin to understand how you're being

driven in all these ridiculous ways by these sensations. So that's a clarity piece. And then the equanimity piece is around not actually fighting with your experience. So It's kind of a hard one to explain. It was the that was the one that really opened everything up for me I realized that until that moment I was there was a constant Kind of inner struggle of you know, you know, I like this. I don't like this I like this. I don't like this, I like this, I don't like this, I like this person, I don't like this, you know, this moment, I'm not into it, I need to do something else,

I need to move over here, I need to move over there, this is like little restless, like, rrrr, and you know, and I started to notice that and then to be a quantumist is to let yourself have that feeling and all the other stuff that's there and as you open to it, it just can empty out. And then it's just not there. It's not there as that motivator.

And what what are you left with? You're left with feeling more spacious and more peaceful. So it was like, so understanding, so his descriptions of those. But then also he described for me what I would call what I still think of as the fundamental dynamic of practice in terms of how it works. And it's a very religious sounding word, although there's an analog, there's a corollary in I think Western ways of thinking about it.

And that has, in the word, is purification. And so in the religious traditions and contemplative traditions, it's associating Christianity with like, you know, these mortifications of the flesh and all this kind of stuff. I think a much more real way to say it is to say it's like working through your shit basically. That the more you pay attention to what's going on in your experience, the more you open to it, the more those patterns can actually kind of get worked through and empty out so they're not motivating you in the same way.

So they would call it catharsis within a psychodep psychology, you know, tradition, a way of working. So you start to understand how purification works, like how the more quantumous you are with your experience, the more you're able to empty out these neurotic patterns to come to a place of comparative spaciousness and sanity. And I got, and that's still where I'm, I mean, I've spent the past 10 years

thinking intensely about and trying to understand how purification works, what it looks like, how to rebrand it, because it sounds frankly creepy. But just, you know, working through your shit and what that actually means, what it looks like, and what kind of places does it bring people to? What's a realistic goal if you're taking this practice? Are you, how, what does mental health look like?

These are huge general questions. And how does Buddhist practices get you there in a way that's different than practices from other contemplative traditions versus Western practices of like humanistic practices, philosophical practices, philosophical practices, art practices, you know, it's not like the West has a monopoly on human fulfillment. There's all kinds of ways to work with our inheritance, and so there's eastern ways

and western ways, and so that became my interest is like trying to map all these out like, okay, how do they work? Where are there shared dynamics here? Where is there something that's unique to that tradition or that technique? Is that like the roots of your next book which seems like it may get published in the year 2035 as I've been following the progress of it? But you've been working on a book about enlightenment since before I knew you, which is a couple of years ago. And so you're describing kind of the germs of this book that you've been working on forever and that seems seems to be kind of not yet finished.

And probably they never be finished. Well, no, that book is sort of that book is about the progress of insight, which is a particular, it's a Buddhist way of working. It's an old school, teravata, Buddhist way of working, where it's basically mindfulness, where you pay attention to your experience for long enough, for intense enough durations, you start to see that experience in a new light. They talk about the three characteristics. You start to notice that it's constantly changing.

I mean, literally moment to moment, the pixels of your experience are vibrating in and out of existence. You start to notice how there's a kind of a weird tension in the experience that has... I'm just gonna stop you on the pixel thing for a second, because I think people, that's gonna sound weird to be bold. But really what the Buddhists are talking about in meditation is if you actually get focused enough on your life,

on your experience right now, you'll see how impermanent everything, shh, shh, shh, everything's flying. I have everything's flying by really quickly. I've got a pain in my knee, I've thinking about cheese, I'm feeling cool, breeze on my face. It's just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And then you start, if you really get concentrated,

you will see that it pixelates. It's like breaking a movie down to its 24 frames per second. And so this is an experience that is available to anybody. It is not. You just have to probably sit on retreat for a while and be concentrated just on what's happening in your experience right now. But anyway, that is the first step, I believe, and one of the first steps in what's described as the Progressive Insight. Right. But anyway, that is the first step, I believe, and we're one of the first steps in what's described

as the progress of insight. Right. So the progress of insight is basically, it's a way of describing the developmental arc of a mindfulness practice taken to a very, done in a very serious way over many consecutive days. And so there's a set of insights that emerge from that, among them that the insight into impermanence,

which you just described. And I would just add to that, it's not just that you see that the content of your experience is constantly changing. The form of your experience is constantly changing, meaning it's just like if you go, if you're at far away and you're looking at a TV screen, it just seems like there's the images

and there's the content, the images are changing, but then you go right up to the screen, and you see that all of the images are made up of like red dots, blue dots, green dots, like white dots, all these little tiny dots that are coming in and out. It's the same with our experience. It's just built by the brain.

It's assembled from all this material and put together into like a model. And so you see that the whole model of reality of experience that you're inside is basically, it's constructed. Not saying there's not a real world out there, it's just saying that you notice the construct model of reality of experience that you're inside is basically it's constructed. Not saying there's not a real world out there, it's just saying that you notice the constructiveness of it. And noticing that is actually quite liberating because you can begin to live from the place

that knows that that's just a construction. So I mean, that sounds very abstract, but this is the thing about the progress of insight. You get insight after insight, first into all your own neurotic shit, then and more deeply into how you as an animal construct your experience. And these insights, they're very, very subtle when they happen, but they're profound. And they lead to subtle shifts in the way in their operating assumptions of how you relate to your friends, how you relate to different things. You just see that there's a, you can live from this place that's much lighter and more easy going in a way. You're not so fixated on things.

We're so fixated on this having to go this way or this having to be like this or, the reality is like this or this is like this. It's just, you're just like, yeah, yeah, you know, things are just coming and going, things are coming and going and there's parts of me in it and there's parts of me that aren't in it and I can just be more less a fair about this whole. Yeah, well, because does that make you completely ineffective? No, that's kind of a classic misconception. What it does is it clears the way for you to actually make better critical decisions when

you need to make them, because there's less noise. You get a better signal to noise ratio. Whereas before you're acting often from reaction with all those other shit all happening all around you, all your multi layers of reaction, now it's just a clear, clean signal of what's actually happening in the situation and that allows you to make a clean response. So in that way, it's much more sane

and you can be much more effective. However, in other ways, in so far as you were fixated before, that you were motivated to do these because you were trying to control your experience or in a particular kind of way or you were fearful about this, that stuff does drop away. And then, so whatever motivating things that you had that were driven by those kinds of fixations, that can drop away. So you lose the motivation to do it then. So, and that's something that's actually under reported in the meditation literature. So, for example, I remember I was actually funnier

at parties before I meditated. I was funnier because I wanted people to like me. Like I wanted to be saying funny shit and like making funny jokes and doing all that stuff. And so I was on my mind. I was constantly doing that. So people would say, I remember a friend saying to me, it's like, yeah, you know, you're not as funny right now.

And it was true because I didn't care. I probably was still funny in certain ways, but I didn't, the part of me that was being funny because I wanted to be liked, that part got weaker. So then it was just, yeah, sometimes you're funny, sometimes you're not, whatever, who cares? You're not trying to micromanage every moment of your experience in the same way. And so that's the part that

that that can drop away and that can mean that people can get definitely more easy going in certain arenas. So and it's important to know that because insofar as there's a fixation that you have that you think is really important or good for you, that might be affected by a meditation. You know, I would make the argument that most of our fixations aren't ultimately that good for us, but you know, that's up for people to make that decision on their own. Hey, I'm Aresha, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wundery's 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 threatened to veer Ru off course. In our series RuPaul, Born Naked, we'll show you how Roo 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. So what is enlightenment and have you achieved it? Oh my god, dude You're welcome. Yeah First of all, I'm Canadian so I Can I could say that I have whatever enlightenment comes from being Canadian and having a good healthcare system is about the only one I'm ready to claim Enlightenment's a word. It's a word that's used differently in different traditions, by different people, by different teachers,

by different schools. I guess when I first wrote the head trip, I had a chapter all about meditation, and I did everything I could to avoid that word, and to, because the whole thing seemed like a ridiculous sort of movie advertisement for Santa Claus or something, like it was somehow possible to win the game of being human.

But the more I read, at least win at meditation. Or win at meditation or whatever it is, but the more I read about it, and mostly the more I interviewed practitioners and teachers who had been added, like Shenzhen for, in his case, 50 years, but many, many of my friends have been meditators for,

you know, 20, 30 years. The more I began to see that the ways in which people talked about these changes, they all seem to line up in a particular kind of way that I found really compelling. I would say that direction, if you want to call it something, you can call it, that's a direction is realization, that direction is awakening, that direction is enlightenment, that it's not a thing that you arrive at, it's more of a direction that you head in, and the more you go in that direction, the more everyone else is going that direction and is successfully begin to share certain qualities.

And those qualities tend to be a certain amount of peacefulness, kind of an easygoingness, a sort of liberated energy quality, a spontaneity, and basically more and more they begin to operate as though they're just part of a larger system as opposed to one little piece trying to get your way within that system. So I sometimes think of enlightenment as do you remember that show arrested development? The dude, the member of the blue man dude, who suddenly like, he would suddenly move and he'd realize that he was standing in from that background the whole time. So I think of the average human condition is like our insides are like a Jackson Pollock

painting. And then it superimposed over another Jackson Pollock painting, which doesn't actually match it. And it's just like, it's internal discord and external discord. Though longer you practice, the more your internal discord becomes more and more, your mind and body all kind of line up, so you're not fighting with yourself as much. So you get more and more say, with single tone. And then you more and more fade perfectly into the background as also being the same tone So it's like you become that blue man person you kind of become transparent

Meaning not that you you you're not still there. You're still there as awareness But you're just going along with the world in a much more easy going way. You're not fighting with it as much You kind of merge with reality or you synchronized with reality experience whatever we want to call it That's my working model of what's happening. We'll need to human people say that word awakening. And I know almost every meditator I know who's been at it for 10 years is moving along that continuum

in a sense that they're getting more that way. When do you arrive at some final place? Is there some final place you can arrive at? Different people have different opinions about it. I've never, everyone I've ever met, who even, so someone like Shenzhen, who's been meditating for 50 years, he's wildly neurotic still.

There's still, there's all kinds of ways in which he might still act like a d***. You know, I don't think, maybe there's some guy in some mountain in India who's perfectly enlightened. It's possible, I don't know enough about it. But it seems to me that it's more like lots of people just struggling to be better humans

and finding the way into more fulfillment and less suffering. And we really should just get rid of that word because it makes it seem way more grandiose, as opposed to say, hey, there's a continuum of practice that we can get into that is gonna make our lives better. But there are landmarks along the way. There are big experiences allegedly that you can have.

This progress of insight that you were describing before has these very key moments of Nirvana, right? That is a pretty big word. Basically in the Buddhist conception, and this school of Buddhism, the conception is that it's like a cessation moment. The lights go out and your mind is fundamentally altered henceforth. Do you think that is true and have you tasted any of that?

Of course, yeah. Yeah, but that have course. Well, many times on retreat, I've had experiences of like things all disappearing, of things arising in the arising and passing stuff, which happens early, these deep states of equanimity. And then you're in a deep state of equanimity. And there's where meaning like you're absolutely present, but everything that's happening. And then there's a sudden shift, you know, I've never noticed the dropping out for myself. But there's lots of people who will tell you that it doesn't mean it's not, it's like, it doesn't mean it's not

happening. It's like, you could be dropping out in all these different ways and coming back up. The way you know is that afterwards, there's often a surge of energy or a surge of equanimity that'll last for a few months or a few weeks. And so, but I don't, I mean, when you're getting into the world

of comparative experience, how do you know what is this on the awakening? Is this not an awakening, like, or is this just a peak experience? Is it like, I don't know, and there's no, so you may have entered Nirvana and you just don't know. Maybe I entered and didn't know. It's like, everyone I know who's had deep cessation

experiences ends up going back to, the self always comes back as Shins and would say. I mean, but there's something really important to explain here, which is that, these are artifacts of a particular way of working. You are working to boost the sensory resolution of your experience. When you boost the sensory resolution of your experience, so you can see things extremely clearly, for a certain kind of temperament, they can have, they can see so clearly because

they're so concentrated and they're so clear that they can just flicker out. And then they can end up, they can disappear and that feels like a reset button for the mind and they've seen into the fundamental emptiness and yada yada yada yada. And it's wonderful. And guess what? There's a million other temperaments that are never gonna have that.

There's a million other techniques and different traditions that never talk about a cessation. They never talk about any of this stuff. And yet these people, when you look at them over 20, 30, 40 years, they're living more fulfilled lives. They live lives look a lot like the lives that these point-to-list, you know, sensory clarity freak Buddhist monks are living.

So I don't think there's anything special about the Buddhist path of insight that's any more special than any other traditions path of coming more into the world. So the more you get hung up on the special effects of this one path, the more you're just like, you know, you're just losing the plot of what's really actually important.

I mean, someone does need to write a book to kind of clarify some of this because there's so much confusion and misconception around it. And even I'm still confused about it. Like I'm just trying to figure it out, you know. What I can say is, I'm less of a a **** in my life. So whatever that means. So well played. Okay, we've gotten pretty weird, which is one of your great gifts, but you also just to give you credit, you really are great at just getting under the hood

with anybody, including me, and talking about meditation practice at a beginner level, intermediate, et cetera, et cetera. So, one of the things you and I did recently that I would love to just get you to talk about was we, there's this new course that's posted on the 10% happier app where just by way of background, I'll step back for a second. On the app for a long time, basically, since we started, which wasn't actually that long ago, but a year ago, all of our courses have been pretty static. It's like me sitting talking to a meditation teacher,

like Joseph or Sharon or whatever, and then we chop it up and we give you a couple minutes of me talking to this person and then on video and then we go right into a guided meditation. I was getting really bored and frustrated with that and our mutual friend, Eddie Boyce, who's been doing some freelance video production for 10% happier, said, hey, why don't we get out of the studio and just, he mentioned that

for years, meditators have been doing this thing called wandering retreats, where they just go off with no itinerary. And I was like, oh, I know the perfect guy for that. Let's do, let's get Jeff. And as it turns out, Jeff, you and Eddie are close friends from a long time ago. So we went off and did this, well, you tell the rest of the story. Well, yeah, so you had this idea that we were going to do a wandering retreat and that meant that we actually weren't going to have any itinerary whatsoever. We were just going to meet and spontaneously decide what to do. So you came to New York City.

So we came to New York City and you had the cameras at and we sat there with the cameras on going, hey, let's spontaneously decide what to do. So you came to New York City. So we came to New York City and you had the cameras at and we sat there with the cameras on going, hey, let's spontaneously decide what to do. And it was hilarious and awkward and we decided to go camping. We got in our car. Which I hate. Which you hate. And we got in the car.

We drove sort of aimlessly around until we found a campground that we liked. And the car is loaded up with GoPro cameras. We had drone. We had like everything. Yeah, we had, Ed brought, he was kidded out. We had all the tech goodies. And then we just basically wandered around for two days and just took every opportunity. Depending on what was happening, we would just decide to spontaneously do a practice,

this kind of a meditation practice or this kind of a meditation practice. I mean, what you realize when your life affords you infinite possibilities to pay more attention to what's actually happening, not just around you, but what's inside you. And so that was I think kind of the theme was to be just spontaneous and responsive and just see where it took us and it ended up being really fun couple of days.

It was, I hate camping, but I love you. So it was a great, we had a great time in the whole crew we were with was super cool to CEO of the The car our app company was there and Eddie boys, so I love and that is Dennis and and what was the camera met Dennis is the audio guy and then the camera guy who I'm so mad that I'm forgetting his name He was great. It was a whole fun crew and you know what I realized doing it as much as I really don't like being uncomfortable And I do like it as much as I really don't like being uncomfortable and I do like staying in nice hotels, you know, the, you remind me of that story, there's this story

where the Buddha's attendant is this guy named Ananda. Ananda comes back to the Buddha after particularly invigorating conversations and says like Buddha or whatever you call them. You know, it's like it like talking to somebody about the Dharma or meditation or being alive is like half the path, it's half the work and the Buddha's like, no, no, no, no, no, wrong. It's actually the whole thing. And that was the feeling I got after hanging out

with you guys and particularly you for all that period of time. And as much time and energy as I spend advancing my practice, like spending two days in really deep and fun conversation about it, you can take a quantum leap in that way. Well, that's what I said earlier about how your intellectual model of what's going on is in constant dialectic with your changing experience. And that actually, the more,

that's why it's useful to read a books about Buddhism, books about practice. It'll refresh your understanding in a way that allows you to see a new thing in your experience. And then you can go deeper into your experience, and then it takes you somewhere where you're, that is beyond what your model had in mind, so then you gotta update the model.

And then you go, so it's like there's a constant back and forth. And some practitioners will tell you, oh, it's you got to update the model. And then you go, so it's like there's a constant back and forth. And some practitioners will tell you, oh, it's all about discarding the concepts. You have to just go straight totally into experience. But you can't discard the concepts. You're a human being. You know, we have a concept all the time of what's happening around us that we actually need.

So I think in my mind, my favorite teachers are ones who teach me to go deeper in my experience, but have thought enough about the model of what's going on that every time I'm in discussion with them, it's enriching my own sense of what's possible. And so hopefully that, you know, so, and that apparently that comes out for you. Yeah, I mean, for me, it's even sort of leaving less high-minded than that in some ways. And this is where I think for somebody who's listening, it's not that you need to go spend two days with some great teacher in order to derive the benefits that I'm describing.

What I'm saying is that if you're really into meditation or even mildly into meditation, it helps to hang out with other people who are into it and or teachers because this stuff runs against the grain of our, of habits that have evolved over millennia, right? To pay attention to what's happening right now, to not be a jerk, to not reflexively pursue the pleasant and push away the unpleasant. These are really fascinating and healthy and but counterintuitive things.

And being around other people who are engaged in the same pursuit can normalize it for you and strengthen your resolve to continue. Whereas doing it on your own, stuck in your bedroom day after day, can I feel isolated? You can get into a whole call to sex,

if doubt about whether you're doing it right, whether it's worth doing it all. So anyway, that's what I hope people take away from, or one of the lessons I think people take, I hope people take away from it. And I just want to say that people, if you're listening to this, you can check out this course, which is my favorite course we've done on, you know, parts of it for free, right on the app, which is available in the app store, or if you don't have, a lot of people are a little bummed at us, because as of right now, we don't have an Android app.

We only have an Apple app, but if you don't have Apple device, you can see it on 10%happier.com. The other thing I wanted to say, though, about that really shown through from me, but spending time with you on this retreat, was that you have a fundamentally playful attitude about meditation. So, I just love to get you to free associate about that a lot,

because I think it's a very, to use a low-determin, it's a liberating approach. You really don't treat meditation as this grind that we need to plow through. You really try to frame it as an exploration, in fact, the name of your meditation group in Toronto is the Consciousness Explorers Club. So that will give people a sense of the spirit which you're approaching it. So I'm going to shut up and can you talk a little bit about that?

Sure. Well, meditation is two things. It's in my mind. It's an exploration and it's a training. So it's just kind of paradoxical because you're going in there and you're exploring, you're learning things about who you are, but as you're doing the exploring, the exploring is changing who you are. So there's a there's a change in this happening too. And I think that the two sides of it are the exploring side is just there is so much more going on in your experience than you realize. And if you just stop long enough to take a look, it just opens in all these really interesting ways. And that in itself is fascinating. And you can go get into all kinds of, really interesting insights and areas of learning.

But the other side of that is it's a training, which means that you don't have to just take your freaking human condition. For like, here it is, this is how it is. And I guess I got to just stay in this neurotic body with this neurotic stuff. It's not like that at is. This is how it is and I just I got I guess I got to just stay in this neurotic body with this neurotic stuff It's not like that at all, you know practice is play you can play with how you relate to the world around you You can read cognitively reframe it you can you can boost up certain qualities and lower down other qualities like

It's like the Westworld they do with the robots like you you think they just do a lot of slide on the computer to make you more aggressive or Whatever it's like I you think they do a lot of slide on the computer to make you more aggressive or whatever. It's like, I absolutely, it's like that. I think that sometimes it's being like a DJ that here's your life and what you can start to choose the kind of tempo you can choose to bring this effect in, you can choose to bring this down. It's like, you're basically in this sort of special effects

studio of your own experience. And once you learn what you're doing, you can start to adjust the levels, exactly like you're saying. And you can adjust them and how do you want to adjust them? You can adjust them whatever is important to you, but obviously if you're smart, you're gonna adjust them to make life more fun.

Because what else are you gonna do? You're gonna make your life so you're more fulfilled, so you have a better capacity to respond to challenges, so you can be a better friend, so you can, you know, it's just that you start to see that, and you can adjust your playfulness, so you're relating to the people around you, to the world around you in a way that's more buoyant

and playful, and that's just a practice like anything else. There's not a, how do you do that practice? Like what would you actually do to adjust the playfulness? Well, these are kind of more top down practices. Okay, to find that though. Okay, so bottom up practices are like, you're slowly building up your levels of concentration. So you focus on the breath, and every time you get distracted,

you come back to the breath, and then that actually is the rest of your focus. So you're doing reps, you're slowly building up your ability to pay attention more, or you're slowly building up your ability to pay attention more, or you're slowly building up your ability to be clear. So you're slowly making these changes to the organism, just like you would if you were working out in a new way, or you're doing a new sport. So that's coming up from the bottom.

Coming down from the top is instantaneously in the moment, deciding to experience reality in a slightly new way. So for example, I mean, just give you a totally made up example. I, I decide to relate to you that you're the Buddha. Okay, there's Dan in front of me and he's the Buddha. And all of a sudden, I'm seeing, I decide to see you as the Buddha or I say, see, everybody around me

as the Buddha. And then it becomes kind of comical and hilarious because everyone around you is sort of like the Buddha. And there's the Buddha falling on hard times. He's like a, he's, there's the bum over there and there's the Buddha who's hitting on another Buddha, and everything just becomes kind of comical. It's just a mental set that you bring into your experience,

and you decide to try to hold that mental set for as long as you can. And then like any other practice it fades, and then you reestablish it. So this is a very more of a Hindu way of working. Like you hear these kinds of practice a lot in Hinduism, but you can do things like, for example, you change the mental set to experience life as fundamentally friendly.

So reality is friendly. And reality likes you. It cares about you. And you just practice what it would be like to feel that. And at first, it's like you're faking it. It seems like, oh, that's weird, but you just keep trying to do it. And the more you do it, the more it starts to actually feel that way. I mean, we are already walking around

in our own set of prejudices about how we think reality works. We're already in one. I mean, people think that they're quote, neutral. They imagine that they've just like, that they're actually totally balanced and neutral, but they're already, they've already inherited a set of assumptions from the culture,

from their upbringing, but how to relate to the world around them. So because that's true, you can change it but how to relate to the world around them. So because that's true, you can change it. You can choose to make some new ones. For me, most of those are kind of like, they tend to be kind of top-down things. I'll just play for something for half a day. And the more you do it, the more they kind of stick.

So that makes sense. I mean, I know this is weird. We always end up in these weird, like we do where we have to go into these weird conversations. We can talk about the breadth. We can talk about something very ordinary, but you bring out the weird and make us you wanna hear it. Yeah. I don't know how hard I have to work

to bring out the weird and you as soon as. It's pretty much right there. But speaking of weird and playful, where so now we're inspired by this road trip thing that you and I did, which was kind of a flyer, where we were just testing out to see if it worked to go like big. So we did two days of camping. Now we're doing 12 days of a cross-country road trip.

We're planning it out right now. We're leaving soon to go from New York to LA with like a bunch of stops in the middle. And then we're going to write a book about book about it which is gonna be kind of what we want to be the best how to meditate book for beginners and even for people are doing it ever and it's going to be short like you figure pocket uh... and the goal is we're gonna go across country and try to figure out like what is stopping people from meditating like a lot of people know they should do it

but what but don't do it. Like my wife, for example. So what's, who's gonna be one of the, she's gonna be the first person we talk to on the road trip. We're gonna go have breakfast with her and my son, who's two and definitely doesn't meditate. What is stopping people from meditating? And also like what is it that's kind of,

if they're meditating, what's, you know, keeping them from going deeper, doing more, upping their game. So we're gonna go out there and like, you're my, I'm not a teacher, so you're like the meditation McGiiver as I call you and we're gonna like unleash you on folks and do a little plumbing. So you have any like thoughts about what we should do

or how it's gonna go, et cetera, et cetera. Just hoping that we don't cause any brain injuries. Well, I'll stay clear away from, we'll steer clear of some of the weird stuff for sure. No, no, no, no. Well, at least in the conversation between, I mean, you will go pretty weird. Yeah, and I'm just open to whatever happens.

I mean, I work with all different kinds of people and I like people, I like trying to figure out what makes them tick. I like trying to figure out where they're, what part of them is fighting with what other part. It's like, when you start teaching after a while, you start to see patterns in how people come to you. And the kinds of struggles that people have,

you begin to realize that there are certain techniques that work better for certain kinds of temperaments, for certain kinds of, and I haven't written a book yet that lays out the different flavors of that, but when I meet somebody, I can almost, within a few minutes, as they start talking about their experience, I can at least begin to see where there are potential areas to work with.

And then once they get into a practice, there's gonna be a natural, certain people are going to naturally be drawn to working with the body. That's going to be a place that they're going to want to go to. Some people are going to look much prefer working with sound. Some people are going to want to do more like, surrendering practices, whether or not actually doing anything, they're just sort of like letting themselves be.

Others are going to need more of a type A discipline. So you start to see that there are all these different ways of working that, but once you're interacting in real time with people that you can start to give them the right feedback, hopefully. I mean, a lot of it's just, is probably luck and chance and all these other things too. So, that's what I'm excited about. We're going to run into every kind of random person in any kind of different situation, and it's going to be, in my mind, like like how to make this practice potentially relevant to them.

But doing it in a non-creepy, non-procetalizing way, it's just more about, we're not gonna like tell people, we're not gonna finger wag and say people should meditate. Definitely not. It's very annoying. It's more like if you're suffering in some way in your life or you're just curious or whatever it is,

let's explore to see if there's a practice that I'll actually work for you and because there's lots of different kinds of practices. So I had one idea that we should make a booth that says something like, we can help you meditate. And we should set it up at random places because we're gonna be driving across country. So we could be in front of the world's largest ball of yarn.

Or we should be at a NASCAR racer, we could be at a gas station in wherever, and just set it up, and maybe it'll be crickets, maybe nobody will care. That's fine, or maybe people come up to us and talk to us, and we can really get under the hood and see if you're interested in doing this, well, how can we help?

Yeah, that sounds good. I mean, for me, the one thing I don't like is this idea of somehow having to impose this style of working or this style of practice. What I've found when I meet people is that often people do, they may not have a meditation practice, but there's some way in which they're doing something deliberate in their life to work on something about how they are that's already working. There's some way that it's not working. And that can happen in meditation too.

You get into things where things will really help you in a whole bunch of areas, but then there'll be some area of your life that you're just completely screwed still. And no matter how much meditating you do, you can't seem to change that pattern of behavior. You need to go to a different modality. So I think it's not going and saying,

hey, we've got the elixir, this is it. It's more like, can this, can this be a complement to things you're already doing? Or maybe it's something new that can help in this way? You just kind of got to read where people are at. Yeah, well, that's why we call the thing 10% happier. I mean, we definitely not over selling. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, that's what I like about you. Where can people find out more information from you about you? I can tell people one place where they can get more information, which is 10% happier app, because you're all over that thing. But where else, like if people want to learn more about you, where can I go?

The main resource is my website, which is jfforen.org. And you can kind of read about what I'm about there. There's some articles I got like this for treatment I'm doing in Costa Rica, which is going to be wicked. But then there's my passion project, this meditation, think tank, and community hub, and Toronto called the Consciousness Explorers Club. That has its own website. It's a bit of a disaster now.

It's going to be updated, hopefully, by the time this comes out. But that's really a resource for people anywhere in the world to read about practices and how they work and consciousness. And we're going to eventually going to have, you'll be able to listen along to different You know guided meditations and and there's other really good people in that community good writers and thinkers about meditation

So those are the two spots I would say I encourage everybody to actually sign up for your newsletter Even if you don't live in Toronto, which I don't and most people don't a lot of people do But most people in the world don't live in Toronto and and most people don't, a lot of people do, but most people in the world don't live in Toronto. That's true. And, because I signed up for a year ago, and made me want to move to Toronto, because you're writing in these newsletters, which are kind of sporadic. They have come once in a while, is amazing.

And I'm not overselling this. Read these newsletters are really good. Also, you have a bunch of articles up at some web publication called Psychology Tomorrow, which are those articles are phenomenal. So I encourage everybody to go check those out. Also, there's the book, The Head Trip. Jeff Warren, thank you very much. And Harris, good to be here, bud. Okay, there's another edition of the 10% Happier Podcast. If you liked it, please make

sure to subscribe, rate us. and if you want to suggest topics we should cover or guess we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. I also want to thank Hardly, the people who produced this podcast and really do pretty much all the work. Lauren, Efron, Josh Cohan, Sarah Amos, Andrew Calp, Steve Jones, and the head of ABC News Digital Dan Silver. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. 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 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.