Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 83: Josh Groban, Multi-Platinum Recording Artist, Actor (Bonus!)

Episode Date: June 9, 2017

This a special pre-Tony Awards episode of the podcast with multi-platinum recording artist and actor Josh Groban, who is nominated for best lead actor in a musical for his role in Broadway's "Natasha, Pierre and The Great Comet of 1812." Dan Harris and meditation teacher Jeff Warren sat down with Groban at the start of their cross-country meditation bus tour back in January to teach this Broadway first-timer how to meditate. 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 podcasts. Tony's are coming up this weekend and we've got a special edition of the podcast because we sat down with Josh Groban who is is nominated for Best Lead Actor in a Musical. He's been starring in a play called Natasha Pierre and the Great Comment. Actually, it's got a longer title that he'll deliver to you in the course of this interview. Anyway, we did this interview back in January as part of the 10% happier cross-country

tour. I was kind of come up with a more colorful way to describe it because it was quite colorful. Anyway, we interviewed Josh on day one of the tour and I actually had never met him before. We had tweeted back and forth. Turns out he's a delightful human being and this was way before he got nominated for the Tony and you'll hear him talk with some bracing candor about the fact that he he really has a lot of anxiety about the course of his career. So just bear in mind the happy ending when you listen to him talk about all of that. We also teach him how to meditate live. So this is a really, this is a great addition of the podcast.

And when I say we, I should say that alongside me helping conduct the interview and then Han showing the teaching of the meditation is Jeff Warren, who is the co-author of this book that I'm working on based on the cross-country meditation tour. The book's called Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. It'll be out at New Years. Anyway, enough talking from me. Here's Josh Groen. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. We haven't met formally, but I don't know, you probably don't remember this, but we actually were next to each other

at the yearnals backstage at Good Morning America one day. How could I forget? I didn't, just so you know. I know. So I've been in your proximity. We actually, we have a few mutual friends who we haven't discussed. One of them actually produced a movie you were in

called Coffee Town. Oh my goodness. So you are just inferred for the people who have been living under a rock for the last 10 years. Josh is a multi platinum recording artist. He's also a great actor and he was really funny in the movie Coffee Town, which you should go see. And he's now on Broadway in the great comment. The great comment of it.

And the Tasha appear in the great comment of 1812. And I'm so thrilled. He brought up coffee town because that like I thought like three people saw that movie. I saw it. And every now and then someone will say like, well, I saw you in coffee town. I play a real jerk barista in that movie

and had a really good time. Yeah, you were great. And you were really funny. Thanks. So you I saw on Twitter that you said something about meditation and me or something like camera world. I had listened to a SoundCloud clip of this very podcast and you were talking about something really important about gratitude and you were mentioning, you know, as kind of cliches

it sounds to just talk about the things like verbalize the things that you're grateful for each night because You know we how quickly we forget and we go about our day and we see things very myopically sometimes and It was just a snippet of something that I just I really needed to hear that snippet when I heard it and so Twitter can be an absolutely evil force that we should be off a lot of the time and then every so often there are Ways to use Twitter that I feel it really effective. And so I thought, you know what, hot damn, this is a great clip. I needed to hear this.

Maybe my listeners would like to, my listeners, my followers would like to, would like those two. So I tweeted it and complimented you at the same time and you tweeted me back and I was thrilled. So I said something like, hey, first of all, I was really sad when I saw this. I was like, this is not every day

that Josh grew up in tweets. I mean, so it's been every day, but I'm glad you finally, I'm glad I finally noticed you. Yeah. So then I tweeted back to you, I said, do you meditate and you said something that the effect of, I've tried it, but it makes me want to throw a lamp across the room.

So then we started talking offline and I was like, come on my podcast, and I will bring in my favorite meditation teacher. And so I say one of even though you are my favorite but you are on the special edition of the show. So and we'll see if we can get you to meditate without throwing a lamp across the room. Yeah, I've noticed that this room is lamp free so thanks for prepping for me. We cleared them all out. Yeah, you've got a fire extinguisher in here,

so you must know when I go Hulk mode, you must understand that's a no. For the Red Hot Head Turbine. Yeah. So let me give you a little background on what we're doing. Yes. So as you know, I wrote this book a couple years ago, called 10% Half of it.

My whole goal was to try to get meditation to seem less cookie-weird and culty. And in the years since the book came out, I've been pleased to see that, and it's not by no means is it because of my book, but I think it's largely because of the science, that people are, meditation is less embarrassing. People, it's socially acceptable to say you meditate. In fact, there is a meditation room in ABC News now, without having nothing to do with setting up.

So it's like kind of catching on, but I've also noticed that most many people don't do it, even though they kind of want to do it. So I started a company, I am now like a businessman, I started a company, an app that teaches people how to meditate, but still in the process of researching, you know, doing corporate research for the company, we found that there are a lot of reasons

why people don't do it, then we call them like secret fears that stop people from meditating. So then I enlisted Jeff and we're gonna go on a 12-day cross-country tour. This is the first day of the tour and this you are the second stop of the tour. The first stop was with my wife so it also doesn't meditate. No kidding. No, no, no. Interesting. The thing I've learned is if you want to get a lamp thrown at you, it'll lecture your wife on medicine. Don't do it. That's so interesting.

Well, do you, though, but do you believe that there are a couple different types of people? I mean, you, a question for you, too. When it comes to meditation, is it for everyone? Or are there two types where it just doesn't do the same thing for certain people? Great question. Yeah, it's a great question. I think practice is for everyone, meaning some way, some commitment in your life around coming more fully into your experience,

being closer to the people around you, something you're deliberately doing that will make those things happen. Meditation is one way to kind of work on those things. So it's sort of like, I think the question is, how are you living? Where are there stresses that you would, that could be useful to mediate a little bit?

And where would you prefer to have be more effective or where could there be more fulfillment? You kind of have, you begin to have that topography view of your life, and then you look at what practices might be able to address that. And so meditation is definitely one of those. And I think of mindfulness meditation in particular is being a kind of basic core skill

that's pretty interchangeable from between lots of different practices, because it has to do it just sort of really noticing what's happening in your experience. So now that, so once you then introduce the practice, though, there's definitely different kinds of nervous systems. So there's different ways in which you would emphasize

the practice, different. and even within that, you can think of it as like different subgroups of practices within that that are gonna work for different people in different ways. So interesting. What is it about meditation that's interesting or attractive to you? Why do you think it would be useful?

Well, not that you have a stress-free life. For a couple of the reasons that I really connected with your book as well, is that anxiety and expectation have played a huge part in my existence. I was signed at 16, 17 years old. I never got to go to a college experience where you could fail and pick yourself back up and then go party. I had a huge amount of pressure

on me very, very early on. And I had a lot of people around me very early on that made it very clear to me how life or death, death each little thing was, as far as the trajectory of my career. So, you know, beyond that, I battled anxiety in school and things like that. So, you know, there are certain things now

that I'm a 35 yearyear-old that I've taken with me from some of that angsty, you know, beginning that causes a great deal of stress and sometimes puts a little bit of blinders on about certain things in my life and in my career that I wish I could see the bigger picture about. And sometimes it takes me a while to see that. And so I think finding anything and meditation being one of them there are ways obviously when you grow up and you have a certain track record of things that you've accomplished and you have hobbies and things like that, you find things that help you open your mind

more. I like to go play tennis. To a certain degree, performing is very meditative for me. Leaving the street and walking in the stage door every night and putting on makeup and going out on stage and being a character and telling a story centers my mind. I started taking flying lessons. That was very meditative for me. That was something that locked my- I'm a very left brain person and that really got me over to a place where there was no room for

interpretation. I had nothing to do but focus on this very very specific skill set. But beyond, you know, activities and things that are maybe distractions or focusers, the idea of meditation for me was was really about was really about centering and really about seeing my life and seeing the world, I think, in a wider capacity because I get very narrow focused on things when anxiety kicks in. And it's very hard for me to see beyond those things in the moment that it's happening. And so I look at it as a tool. Potentially. I think what you just said is actually incredibly cool, really brave to say, and also really useful,

because for people out there who, to hear somebody of your stats or say, yeah, you too get anxious, that just gives everybody license to feel not, to not feel so badly, but the fact that the rest of us get anxious too. And, you know, so anyway, thank you for saying it. I think it's a common thread with many successful people. I think there is there is that. Look, I wish I were the type of successful person that just viewed, you know, anxiety as I didn't have anxiety or viewed, you know, to criticism and turn it into a positive

or what, but I'm always the harshest person on myself first. But then there are those that, you know, many of them are CEOs that somehow just bypass that gene, you know. Well, I mean, I've used anxiety to fuel much of my career too, so you can fuel. It can be good if you can channel it. In good ways, if it lights a fire under you, because I can also be very lazy.

So, if the anxiety lights a fire under you to actually get to work and go finish that song or go, you know, think about that next step, then it can be very good. But it's about balance and everything in moderation. And so, yeah. I talk about this a lot. I think that, you know, I was raised by a Jewish dad who said that the price of security is insecurity. So like a great thing to tell a kid.

And I very much used anxiety, you know, to come up in the TV news business, which is super competitive. And it was useful until it wasn't. Right? And then I started doing incredibly stupid things right drugs or whatever and so I actually think I still think that as some anxiety is useful but what meditation is incredibly helpful is that I help you draw the line between useless roomination and what I call constructive anguish exactly and that is that's where I think maybe we can give you a hookup.

Yeah, and I was a skeptic about it honestly until I read your book because I was I was of the mindset that because you know I'd worked with you know producers like Rick Rubin and people like that who have meditated their entire life since they were children. If they don't do it, they feel something's missing in their day. But at the same time he's a very laid back man. You know, and there are people that I know that do it daily, and they are so zen about the world and so laid back about their surroundings. And I feel like that would be, that's not really who I am. I've always been one of those people where the spin has always been my edge, has always, I've always, for whatever reason, right or wrongly, uh, right or wrongly. I felt like that the anxiety has been an edge for me

that has allowed me to, you know, chess game my life a little better, you know, and so the idea of laying back at all is actually, it's a fear of mine that if I sit back too far, I'll miss out. You're a brother from another mother. This is exactly my psychology for sure. For can i just get all jewish grandmother in the first and because

because as anxious as you may feel like i was just reading the new york times reviews of your uh... of your uh... performance uh... in the great comment rapturous they go on and on about your what a golden tenor and then like what absolutely wonderful I believe was the term So I mean you're doing something right right? Yes. I well, yeah, I mean I Like I said, I think that sometimes the The overthinking if controlled can give you a step ahead it can prepare you more

I Was anxious about taking on a Broadway role. It was a dream of mine since I was a kid. I knew there'd be a little bit of skepticism. I was coming from the music world. I didn't want this to be thought of a stunt casting or a gimmick. And I was insecure about going into it because I had an act in a theatrical production since, you know, 12th grade Fiddler on the roof. So, I think that going in and playing a character that I knew was going to be very, very different from the kind of person I am in some ways and very similar in some ways, I prepped, you know, I worried, and that worry made me do extra curricular. So, you know, they're in lies the balance of, you know, when is it too much, you know, I pulled my hair out a few times too. So I wish I could bypass the, the self-flogging anxiety

and go only into the anxiety that just makes you want to do the best that you possibly can. Well, let's see if we can add some value here. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. Your original description of why you're interested in practice and your experience also on the stage was so perceptive. You basically described, I don't know if you realize it two very different styles of meditation. There's one style of meditation that's really about concentrating, committing to a performance, to a direction of attention in a practice, it's about creating very absorbed flow states. So getting in that flow and it's really rewarding and you feel really good when you come out of it. That's I think a kind of meditation that a lot of people can relate to

because you can do it when you're absorbed in an art practice or you're in a conversation, you're making love, whatever it is. But then there's a kind of practice that's about literally panning back the camera of your experience and getting more perspective around how you get caught in certain room-minute of patterns. And that's more than mindfulness piece.

And it is exactly what, you know, it's not, I think a lot of the misconceptions is, if you're only doing say practices that are about tranquility or concentration, there can be a, you do get easy going in all these practices, but there can be a sense in which you're kind of always down- be a, you do get easy going in all these practices, but there can be a sense in which you're kind of always down regulating. But to do a practice that's more about just panning back the camera and seeing what's happening in your experience

is actually to get a cleaner signal around your personality. It's to develop the flexibility to whether you want to be in that more forward driving edgy mode or you want to switch out into a more open You know perspective mode that you can kind of you start to learn which to move between these different settings You can think of it that way. Yeah, so it's just interesting like that. It's it you know You're a really good candidate for for what you call a typical mindfulness practice because it helps give you traction and space around some of that stuff. Should we actually do, or how do you wanna do this? What would be most helpful for you?

Cause I can, I could talk you, I could actually work, we could go through an actual meditation that kind of unpacks the dynamics. We could do, I mean, I guess my question about doing that on my camera, is that does that become an actual meditation, or is it more of a controlled setting that, or can it be done in a setting like this? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

The thing about meditation is you can do it anywhere. It's basically paying attention to whatever's happening right now. Right. So, it's a funny thing, because one of the things we deal with is if people come to us and say, well, I don't need to meditate because running is my meditation or washing the dishes or flying a plane. But sometimes that's true and sometimes it's not.

Like, if you're running and practicing all of the curse words you're going to hurl at your boss, that's not meditation. But if you're running and really just paying attention to the experience of your feet falling on the road, the wind coming in your face That is meditation. So anyway, it's a long way of saying We could if we did it right here. It would be met it would be meditation I've heard though that curse words to the boss are also a good meditation. Well certainly good. Yeah, absolutely They call a mantra right?

Cool, I'm game for anything you guys want to try truly. Yeah, cool. I'm game for anything you guys want to try. Truly. Yeah. I mean, I think people hear about, say, mindfulness and it seems very, it's like, well, it seems so common sense just pay attention to what's happened to your experience and in a non-judgmental way that they can't find. It's almost too subtle.

So the way I like to present it is through a particular teacher of mine, a guy named Shins and Young, who really emphasized the actual skills that are getting built. So we could do a little mini meditation where I'll get you to close your eyes and it'll be directing your attention into your body, into your breath. But what I'll do or whatever body sensation you want. But as we're doing it, I'll kind of just point out what quality is being trained there. Because when you can start to recognize when you're being concentrated,

when you're being clear, when you have a kind of friendly relationship to your experience, when you're being open and economist, then you can start to use that as feedback in your life. So you start to bring the meditation into your life into your theater, into your singing, into your performance, into your relationships.

So it's very helpful to get a kind of taste of what these things are that we're doing and to make it, to kind of ground it in a more concrete way in our experience. So does that sound like it makes sense? It makes sense to me. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, well let's do it. Okay.

Okay, so if you're in a position wherever you are externally out there in the world where you can follow along and you want to close your eyes, you can do that too, so you'll be meditating with us. If you are operating heavy machinery, you're driving a car, flying a plane, flying a plane, probably don't want to do that. You can think of this, it'll be a little bit more of a discursive meditation

than I would normally lead in the sense that, I'll be talking more. Yeah, I'll talk more and I'll explain more what it is. And that way, for the people who are listening, you can just think of it as sort of educational or something. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on page six or do-mo-or-incord.

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Okay, so let's start by closing our eyes. And you can start by taking a few deep breaths. As you inhale, you're kind of stretching up the spine. You want to be in a place where you're kind of alert, so it's good to have a stretched up spine and be sitting with the back straight. And then on the exhale is when you're, it's the, sort of the settling motion. So there's a kind of the diaphragm releases on the exhale and you can kind of ride that down a little bit, letting your body settle in the chair or wherever you're sitting.

And this is the softening motion. So on the exhale, softening the eyes and the jaw and the cheek. And I sometimes think of it as, you come into a meditation, you might have a lot of anxiousness or energy in the body. As you exhale, it's almost like you're breathing out the tension a little bit, softening on every exhale.

So the first thing we do is we choose something to concentrate on. So in this case, we'll work with the body. The breath is the classic quote, object, end quote. That's the thing you pay attention to. So it means the feeling of breathing at the belly, say, or the feeling of breathing at the nostrils or in the throat. throat, meditating along here at home with Josh Groban and Dan Harris. So we're all collectively the many thousands of us noticing

the feeling of our breath and I come in through the nose and into the belly. And if for whatever reason the breath isn't like your go-to, some people might have asthma and they don't like paying attention to it, you can choose another body sensation. So you could choose, say, the feeling of the warmth in the hands or a point in the belly or your feet on the ground, the seat on the chair, anything. But the idea is just to choose a sensation and now decide you're going to commit to it. So this is skill number one. It's concentration.

It's holding the direction. Yep. If you decide on the breath, I'm going to actually try to pay attention to the breath now for the next five or ten minutes. Inevitably, your mind will wander. You gently bring it back in a friendly way and again, feeling the sensation of the breath. So when we say, using paying attention to the breath, it means feeling.

We know here by feeling, what does it feel like as the breath tickles your nostrils? What does it feel like as the air enters into the lungs, or if there's a slight rise in the belly Getting really curious about the sensation. You're kind of there's a hedonic quality here of this like an into it quality Oh, yeah, I'm feeling my breath or the hands or whatever the sensation is So this is concentration and it it takes concentration, but it builds it. The more we drift and we come back and we feel.

So this is sort of the ground, or up the baseline skill of just trying to hold that attentional line on the breath or the sensation. that attentional line on the breath or the sensation. With the next skill, you can call it clarity. As we first start feeling our breath, it's like, oh, it's sort of subtle or you can feel that it's there, but it's not very rich yet. But the longer we meditate, the more a particular sensation will open itself to us if we're paying attention. So how fully can you feel the breath? How clean a signal of the sensation can you get? And if you're really still, there's a cleaner signal to noise ratio, feeling the center of where the breath

maybe touches your belly or the nostril where the edges are. Is it a soft feeling? Is it rougher? Is it smooth and continuous or are there little breaks? As we commit to our direction, our direction begins to very slowly open, like the resolution increases. That's the second skill is this clarity skill, making discernments. But there's a third skill, which is a kind of pervasive, easygoingness.

I think of it as a lack of uptightness. Because your mind is definitely gonna wander and you're gonna wanna beat yourself up about it. And it's kinda going, oh, you know what? That's okay, it's normal for the mind to come in. I just notice that, I come back. I let myself be okay with the fact that there's gonna be thoughts in the background and distractions and sounds and things won't necessarily

go how I want them to. But I have this mature stance, this poise in the way I sit. And that's equanimity. And it's a very important quality opening to the experience, not fighting with it, having a mature accepting quality. So remembering this, as we focus on the breath or the sensation, smoothing out the face, noticing if a rigid or kind of holding tension anywhere, can you sort of soften ease off, Committing to this breath, this interesting sensation.

Following it in and out. Finding something rich in the experience, the enjoyable. It's just so nice to only need to do one thing here. You don't need to have your mind on all these tracks. It only has to do one thing which is to feel, to feel the breath of the body. It's a nice break, break of appreciating that. Appreciation is important. It's the last quality, the friendliness. Experiencing the breath has this, you know, in this friendly way, something that you enjoy, something you like. There's an important principle here, if your mind does wander and you notice it's wandered,

instead of getting mad at yourself for having it wandering, you instead go, oh yeah, cool, I noticed that. You feel good about noticing. And that trains the subconscious to come back more quickly. So this pervasive attitude of friendliness and easygoingness makes the meditation so much more effective and pleasurable itself. Still with the breath and with the sensation. Breathing in. And what's interesting is even something like the breath, which at first glance might seem really boring, we realize that idea that it's boring, those are just judgments that are

happening over top. But the sensation of breathing itself is complete. It's inherently fulfilling in its own full way and trying to connect to that And how nice to sit here and just breathe into our warm animal bodies How magical, just thinking of all the people out there breathing with us. Everyone's settling, committed to the same direction in their experiences, experience of breathing. with every exhale, the settlement, the sediment settles, and if there is discomforts and intrusions, from distractions and thoughts, just having that easy goingness of letting them be in the background. In this way we make our commitments. I just clear again what part of the breath are you feeling? Can you approach the breath as this thing you care about? This part of you, the sensations are pleasurable.

There's an enjoyment quality we bring to the experience. We don't wait for it to present enjoyment we decide to find it enjoyable up front. Breathing in and breathing out. Breathing in and breathing out. No more complicated than that. Just paying attention to this part of our experience with the quality of openness and friendliness. Being curious about the little pixelated details of the sensations. And overall, through all this, our commitment to holding this direction.

And the more we do this, over time, the more our natural capacity to be concentrated builds to commit to our attention in the direction and our life that we want it to, our discernment around the elements of our experience get clear. We start to notice more our body sensations, our feelings, mature acceptance of our experience in the moment. And then the friendliness, the affable, good nature quality, also a training, these four muscle groups with every sit, increasing in small amounts, eventually spilling out into our lives.

There's a few minutes every day to recheck into these qualities. It just seems like such a small thing to do, such large possible consequences. It's like adult school, breathing, and when you feel ready, both you guys in the studio and the lovers listening out there in the ether, you can open your eyes and bring your into the room. Nice job buddy. You're an official meditator, Josh Groven. That's great. Yeah, it's interesting as you're saying the things. You're saying them as I'm you said them right when I needed to hear them when I was thinking of them. So I think the thing that that would make me

frustrated in the past doing it is that the control freak in me would kick in. I would notice myself wandering or quote unquote not doing it right. And then I'd get frustrated. Then the frustration would be you know a little mental plan to seed, and I would just, at that point, I would be thinking to myself, okay, I just got to stop now because I'm just getting frustrated myself. But I think the friendliness aspect of it, the understanding that you're thinking those things, and that's okay, and finding ways to bring it back slowly or quickly, are good. Yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting that that frustrated that when you get frustrated like that, which is a normal response, what you're basically training your subconscious is that it's, oh wow, this guy's frustrated now best not to even notice it all when you're mind is wandered. So it actually makes you wander more often as opposed to doing the opposite, which is to go, yeah, exactly. That really has a strong effect. And I imagine that's probably not uncommon for a newbie to this, because think about all of us that are interested in meditation or doing it trying it out for the first time,

or buying an app and doing it by themselves and their bedroom or living or whatever. I mean, we're coming from a, we have a, we have a, such a distracted, constant world that we live in now. I mean, you know, when you think about the devices that are constantly bleeping at us and tempting us with more clicks of information and the things that we get stressed, we get stressed now, I think, at a much more rapid pace than my parents did, and my grandparents did. So the idea of just taking a few minutes just to do this to my generation, I think,

seems like an eternity sometimes. Because we have so many things around us at all times that are a leash to us, you know. So when you do try and settle and do it, I would imagine this takes practice, right? And it's okay that it takes practice. That is the practice. There's no such thing as like a natural talent. Yeah. Well, there may be, but like, there may be natural talents, but I don't know many of them. And if somebody tells you they're really good at meditation, you should be suspicious, because the whole game is getting lost and starting again. That is meditation. It's not like you're trying to get to some special state. Right. And this is what screws people up. They think because the traditional art around meditation shows people

floating off into the cosmos and all this stuff. People think, oh, I can't meditate because I'm not in a Thought-free bliss field. But if that is the case for you, as I like to say, you are either enlightened or you have died. And actually the whole act of meditation is this mental bicep curl over and over of trying to focus on your breath, get lost, start again, get lost, start again, get lost. Want to throw a lamp, notice desire to throw a lamp. Yeah. Don't get carried away by it, go back to the breath. Right. And why is that useful?

Because in the rest of your life, when you're upset by a desire to scream at somebody or freak out about something, you can notice, oh, I'm starting to freak out or I'm about to scream or about to say the thing that's gonna, as I'd like to say, ruin the next 48 hours in my marriage or whatever, but you don't have to take the bait and act on it. It's the flexing muscle of noticing.

Absolutely, absolutely. Life is gonna hit you with greater and greater and greater intensities. I don't know anybody, even the most hardcore meditators who aren't, at some point, overwhelmed by some intense thing in the figure of their life, but the more time you put an investment in the ground of your life,

the capacity to notice in the first place, it begins to be the place that you live in. It's like you live there, instead of completely identify with what's happening, like you're just like a squirrel on a nut in this inside piece, like, going around, around, around, around. It's a, but at some with what's happening, like you're just like a squirrel on a nut in this inside piece, like, going around and around and around. It's a, but at some point it's like,

and what happens to squirrel, the squirrel's just like, nah, nuts. No, nuts. I don't need this nut. Hashtag. Yeah, nuts. So what do you think, I mean, just final, in the final minutes here,

but what do you, I'm just curious, because I'm just as a evangelist for meditation, you think, I mean, just final in the final minutes here, but what do you, I'm just curious because I'm Just as a evangelist for meditation. Yeah. What do you think just having had a little taste of it? For you, what would it take for you to to To make this enough of a habit that you were getting out of it what you would want to get out of it Well, I think that well for me to get started with it, I mean, it definitely helps to have a guide when you're starting it, doesn't it? I've tried doing it by myself, and that's when I've gotten frustrated, is not understanding what it is that I'm supposed to be thinking or not thinking or what have you.

So, I think, like you mentioned, to be able to have a tool that allows me to be more in tune when I'm not meditating throughout the day towards what it is I'm feeling, if I get stressed about something, you know, like I said, flexing that muscle of bringing yourself back, I think is something that is deceptively difficult in today's times. I think that we let ourselves get, and I certainly do, I'm very easily distracted. We let ourselves get thrown into a million places, and then those places have a huge amount of power over how we make decisions over the course of our day and how we feel joy and happiness and gratitude and all those things throughout our day. To have this as a way to send her myself and to flex that muscle, I think would be very,

very good, not only for the days that I'm not working, but for the ones where I am as well. Is there a particular, is like, when you think about meditation, is there a particular direction that interests you in terms of something to meditate on, a certain quality you wanna build more of? So definitely I hear that centering.

If we were to make a customized meditation, adjust, grow in meditation for you, like, that's his way of saying, I'm going to make you a good. If you want, what would you want to pay attention to? And what, what, what, what, what, what's, what is a natural thing that you're really interested in trying to build up? A couple of things. Well, I guess part of my answer is a question in which case I would like to ask, what does it mean sometimes to creative people, to writers, to songwriters, to people who does meditation

ever, is that it ever uses a tool for people who use their minds to conjure things from thin air and are also distracted all the time as well? You're asking on behalf of a friend that says, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, asking for a friend as they say. Right. Well, you can tell this friend, I mean, are you kidding me? Because I was going to say one of the things I would use it for is to put myself in a head space before sitting in the piano, perhaps, and writing.

Well, I mean, this is what it's all about. I mean, the reports across the board with practitioners that when you can get still, there's more place for creativity to emerge. Creativity doesn't just emerge from the associate of connections in the noise. It actually emerges from the quiet. Any great writer will tell you, and great musician, that there's entire books written about this exact experience.

The thoughts without a thinker, the things that emerge fully foreign, but they only will emerge if you give yourself space for that to happen. If you're just crowding your head with the violence of your own anxious neurotic preoccupations, how are you ever gonna mind deeply fertile experiences?

It's just you're blocking it. It's so interesting. The similarities between something that I had never done before and something that I've done a lot of in the songwriting. And so when I talk to young writers and I sometimes we'll put them through a course where they have to collaborate when they've ever collaborated together and they start, you know, they start self-editing and getting frustrated. And my comment to them is just sit in the quiet, play the melody that you have, and then be quiet. And what is it that find that space? It's in the silence, it's in the place where you're not trying to micromanage your own creativity the things start to happen.

You're teaching them to meditate. That's the lightning in the bottle. That's the intangible thing that every writer has a quest for. Is that moment where, honestly, some of the times you feel like you've written the best thing, you say, you said, well, I didn't write it. I was quiet, and it came. And so that's a huge thing, that's so much of that is based on the same mentality. So what if we did a practice called sit in the quiet?

That was actually deliberately meant to be used before you sit down to compose or before you, for anybody who wants to, before they do something creative. As a place to kind of get yourself centered, it would still have the value of resetting in that deeper way. The thing with these, when you understand meditation, what it's doing, that it's building up these attentional qualities,

the more you do it, the more reps you do, the more it spills out in your life. It's just a,'s just a numbers game. It's time and nature doing that process. So you'd still be getting all the benefits of practice, but it'll also be preparing the ground for the ticket to creative work that you're doing. Yeah, I think that'd be hugely helpful. Yeah, so we'll make something for you in Sanity.

Sweet. You're the best. You're the best. You're awesome. Seriously, it's so cool to meet you. You too. Very generous of you to give us your time. We really appreciate it. No, it's something that's been on my mind for a long time.

And as I said, I think you've been a really great advocate for many of us that have gone through some of the same stresses about life and career and thoughts about meditation. And the fact that you went through it and talked about it has been usually helpful for a lot of us so it's great to great to come in here and chat with you and Jeff great to see you too thanks so much you're the best 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 F. Ron Josh co-hands 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 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. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey

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