Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Embrace the Cheese Factor | Bonus Meditation with Diana Winston

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

This session walks you through a guided visualization imagining immersing yourself in a pond of loving-kindness and letting the water infuse you.About Diana Winston:Diana Winston is the Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center where she also teaches mindfulness practices to the general public.Her easy-on-the-ears West Coast style rests on top of a rigorous scientific mind, and a vast amount of teaching experience. She has developed curriculum and taught mindfulness since the early 90’s in a variety of settings including hospitals, universities, corporations, non profits, and schools. She has taught mindful awareness to health professionals, leaders, teachers, activists, seniors, and adolescents in the US and Asia. A published researcher and author, Diana has also written for numerous meditation publications, where her daughter, Mira, often makes an appearance in her examples of bringing mindfulness to daily life.To find this meditation in the Ten Percent Happier app, you can search for “Loving-Kindness Visualization,” or click here: https://10percenthappier.app.link/content?meditation=9d970c28-16b8-45df-82de-24d61bde4075.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

Young Pueblo, Jonathan Height, and hundreds more. Start listening right now. Look for the Good Life Project on your favorite podcast app. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, happy Friday. Time for a bonus meditation. We're trying something new this week, something gooey and new to my fellow skeptics.

I implore you to give this a shot. Many of you may know that I am a major proponent of something called loving kindness or meta meditation. I have said before that I struggled with this practice initially because it struck me as forced and sappy, but I changed my mind when I saw the science that shows how beneficial the practice can be psychologically, physiologically, even behaviorally. And when I saw what an impact it had on me personally. Today's bonus is a little bit of a different take on loving kindness. I won't say too much about it. I'll let our teacher do sure, do that.

Suffice it to say though, it might be a bit challenging if you're a skeptical person. If that's you, again, I implore you, give it a shot. If you find the practice cheesy at first, I say embrace the cheese, surf the breeze, as my friend Jeff Warren likes to say. And I will note, using the words of another meditation teacher, if you can't be cheesy, you can't be free. Our teacher for this meditation is Diana Winston. She's been teaching mindfulness for more than

20 years. She's the director of mindfulness education at UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center, where she also teaches mindfulness practices to the general public. And here she is over to Diana. Hi, this is Diana, and I'm excited to share with you one of my favorite guided imagery meditations for cultivating kindness. This is a different type of loving kindness meditation that uses some guided imagery to access the feeling of kindness. Let's get started.

Find yourself in a comfortable, upright position. If you're comfortable closing your eyes, you can close them or keep them open with a soft focus on one point. We can begin by taking a few breaths to get settled. Let's bring to mind someone that you love, someone that when you think of them you get happy. This could be a human, an animal, it doesn't matter, but someone that's fairly easy to feel connected with. Ring them to mind and notice how you feel as you imagine them here with you. and notice how you feel as you imagine them here with you.

Maybe you feel ease or warmth or spaciousness. This is this quality of kindness that we're working to develop here. So let's imagine that you and this person or animal are walking together someplace beautiful. Picture a really beautiful place that you might love and know, or maybe you've seen images of. Feel free to choose any natural environment, mountains, forests. Try to really sense the place you've chosen. What kind of sounds or smells? What are the colors? Just get a sense of it, bring it to life in your mind.

So imagine you and this person are walking there, and together you come across a pond. Crystal clear waters in this beautiful pond. You stick your toe in, and you realize that the waters are made of loving kindness. It's the feeling you brought up earlier when you thought of this person that you love for this animal. So imagine how that feels and if you wish, you can jump in. So jump into this pond and in your mind imagine that you begin to swim and rest and float. And just enjoy and rest and play in these waters. And imagine they're really, they're really infusing you with kindness.

So we might bring in some words, may you be safe and protected. May you be happy and peaceful. May you be healthy and strong. May you be at ease. So as we bring the meditation to a close, notice one last time how you're feeling, letting whatever is here be here, or whatever I'm feeling, may I hold this too with awareness and with kindness. There are many different ways to practice kindness meditation,

and this is one that may work for you, or you might prefer a different type. Always use what's useful, and don't worry if you don't connect with it. And whenever you're ready, you can open your eyes or end the meditation. May be happy. Thank you, Diana. We'll see you right back here on Monday for a fresh episode with Zenjou Earthlin Manuel. 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 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. Life is short, and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is short with Justin Long.

If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you, but I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times. But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add free on the Amazon music or Wondry app.

Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares of our freshly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking, oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong, what would we do differently?

And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. or Wendry app.