Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Guided Meditation: Inauguration + Working with Strong Emotions

Episode Date: January 19, 2017

The recent election has elicited strong emotions from people across the political spectrum. In this guided meditation from Dan's "10% Happier" app, Jeff Warren helps us all find perspective on these strong emotions and provides us with a few techniques for navigating the upcoming inauguration. A Canadian and so-called MacGyver of meditation (having a technique to help anyone with their practice), he brings both the right skills and a nonpartisan view to this American stressor. 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.

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the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where names come from and where's time for my space listen to baby this is kiki parlor on amazon music or whatever you get your podcast so it's an auguration time and i think it's safe to say that no matter where you fall in the political spectrum you you may have strong feelings about what's going down. In fact, we just got the results of an ABC News Washington post poll that say that among Hillary Clinton supporters, 65% of them say Trump's election has increased their stress above its usual level. And on the flip side of the coin, among Trump supporters, 31% say that the opposite is

true, that the election has actually decreased their usual stress, their sight. So, if you're dealing with strong emotions, this meditation, this free-guided meditation for my friend, Jeff Warren, may be quite useful. Here it is. Hello, my name is Jeff. Welcome to the inauguration trigger practice. So this is about working with the really strong emotions that may be there for a lot of people this time, whatever their political affiliations. There is a ton of strong feeling right now, feelings of exaltation, of fear, of confusion and doubt, and it's really helpful to have a meditation to help work with this. A meditation that we can do, we're kind of taking care of ourselves, we're letting ourselves have these feelings, but also in the allowing it helps us act more sanely. And the research it draws on is what they call limbic

hijacking. So this is when our emotions get the best of us. I actually remember reading a study that looked at the brains of both liberals and conservatives, while each was listening to the other. And in both sides, their emotional brains just lit up like one of those old-fashioned telephone switchboards. And that means when the amygdala and the limit system, when it's all highly stimulated, there's a drop in IQ and this decrease in our capacity to reason and problem solve. So in other words, when liberals and conservatives interact, you know, it's often the case that neither one is being rational. There's no real conversation. It's just

two monologues, which is actually part of what's got us into this incredible polarization and divisiveness right now. This is a meditation that's about exploring our emotions, where they happen in the body, and a little bit about how they can get the better of us and the idea is that we're gonna learn how to Be in that situation where we don't actually lash out, but we can respond more effectively Okay, so when you're ready close your eyes and take a moment to settle into the chair or the cushion. Let me start by taking a few deep breaths. So when you breathe in,

stretching up the spine and connecting to this quality of alertness and self-respect in the posture. And then on the exhale is the softening, the downward motion, the relaxing. And you can kind of breathe out as you breathe out. You imagine you're sort of softening your eyes and your forehead and the inhale is composing. So the idea is to get some space here. So we start with sending our attention down into our bodies. The juice of an emotion really happens in the body. Happens in body, emotional body sensations, and these are largely along the midline of the body. So each nervous system is configured a bit differently, but in general, people feel emotions, you know, in there, around the eyes, in the jaw, the throat, the chest, the heart,

obviously the gut. So just doing a little sweep down there now. And exploring what's happening there for you right now. Because it may be that you actually have an emotion that you kind of brought in with you to this meditation and just the act of feeling into it. Boom, up it comes. Let yourself feel it. That's the instruction.

I know a lot of people out there are going to be like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't have good clarity about where I have these emotions in my body. I don't know if this is indigestion or if I'm just dehydrated, am I experiencing an emotion? Is this just some weird random feeling somewhere? You don't know. And it's normal.

So if that's the case, we're just kind of feeling in with curiosity. All right, is that what I'm feeling there is an emotional component to that sensation. And if we get still and feel into it, that can become clear sometimes. So this is the part that's going to get a little bit artificial. We want you to have something to work with.

So we're going to deliberately kind of do a visualization that's going to trigger some activity, then body. And as we do it, let's just kind of remember the self-compassion piece that's so central to meditation. I'm going to be a little bit gentle because for some of us this is a deeply emotional time, very triggering. The fears, the rawness, the sensitivity, it's very real. So I want to try to help you here to give you a way to work with that. So if you've already got that in your experience, even just me saying that triggering it, then you've got something

to work with right there. You can just feel it and notice it and try to be clear about where it is. If you don't, and this is still all a little bit abstract, you can deliberately imagine a scenario where you're getting triggered. In this particular situation, we're talking about politics. Typically, it's the person on the other side of the spectrum who has views that you find dangerous, scary, or annoying, or naive, whatever it is. And at a level that feels okay with you, you can kind of imagine a little bit of that dialogue with that person and let kind of imagine a little bit of that dialogue

with that person and let it trigger you a little bit. So getting triggered about the issues that matter to you. As you're doing that, feeling into your body, okay, what is the reaction that you're having with this imagined person, this imagined situation? Maybe your heart rate has gone up. Maybe there's like constriction in your throat or there could be tightness in your jaw. Like a terrible dread feeling in your gut. So kind of doing this feeling in, being curious, okay, what's going on with me? Where do I feel these emotional responses and reactions?

And can you track them. So the idea is you're not inside them, just reacting instead, You're just feeling them tracking them letting them do their thing So there's two principles here one principle is the noticing and the trying to get clear about it. Like where do you feel it? Is it changing? Is it static? What is the sensual experience of this body, emotional body sensation? And then the other part is the equanimity part. It's the part of allowing it.

You're not trying to suppress it, to quash it down. You're letting the whole thing be there, just this natural human response. In scenarios that are very intense, if you're getting a ton of emotion, there's another meditation strategy, which is to actually focus away, which is totally legitimate. So if you're doing getting a lot of overwhelm and stuff coming up, then you can always shift your attention to some other part of your experience, the breath or sounds and that's also totally legitimate. There may be lots going on, you just choose one little bit of this sensation, you zoom in on it, and you allow yourself to feel it fully.

In the zooming in, it never chains into this bigger, more overwhelming mass. That parsimonious quality of zooming in one part of it makes it much more easily manageable. So trying this now. Staying with the feeling but realizing that you live inside a much wider field. They are not you. These emotions are part of you, but there's a much larger you that's able to contain it. The emotion, turning, changing, expressing, or maybe staying static and just letting that happen. Also, maybe this is totally not working for you. There's nothing going on in which case just letting that be the experience as well. But there is a bigger, more dignified part of you that is able to hold all of this. Good. I'm just tracking, feeling we know here by feeling. Feeling this thing, this movement. I'm

doing it in a caring way. It's like yeah honoring that you have this response. That's part of who you are. Not inside the reaction. It's inside you. Okay, so we're getting ready to finish this meditation. So taking a couple deep breaths, noticing where that emotional sensation is, if it's increased, if it's decreased. In that act of allowing, it can play itself out, it can decrease, but sometimes actually it gets a lot bigger. That's what initially happens. We're not resisting and trying to quash it anymore.

We're actually creating a climate of openness in our experience. So it could be that we've activated something that's larger now. And if that's the case, just being patient with that, letting it play out, letting it express what it needs to express. Okay, so when we're ready, you can start to shift your attention away from that, the emotional body back to the physical body and the solidness of the posture.

Taking a few deep breaths and just feeling the full solid body on the floor of the chair, this big, strong open space in which emotions are allowed to proliferate. They can rise and fall and we're not scared of them. We have this larger courageous stance. They don't govern us. There's a bigger place there to take your stand. I'm gonna a couple more breaths. And when you're ready, you can open your eyes. Okay, and that is our meditation. So keeping in mind that that was a sort of slowed down version. And it's useful to engage with a meditation like that

to begin to build our emotional intelligence or our literacy of where we feel reactions, where we hold them, how they influence us. But of course, we're not going to have time to do these long meditations in life on the fly. The point of this was to be able to give us the information so that when all this stuff is coming up and all our emotional reactions are coming up, we can act more intelligently and more sanely.

You're going to get triggered as you live your life, watching the media, in conversation, all this stuff. And we're really looking at this technique as a way to hold our center, to not freak out, but to be clear in our center. And from that place, respond more effectively. And this is the point here. It's not about suppressing how we feel and turning to some kind of easy going chump. It's the opposite of that. It's not about suppressing how we feel and turning to some kind of easygoing chump. It's the opposite of that. It's about caring so much about the situation that you're going to let your best human quality emerge.

Feeling those feelings fully and letting them on roll out with a much larger envelope of our intelligence and our sanity. So we can then respond in a way that's actually more effective and more impactful. And that's the meditation. I hope you found that useful and you can reuse it as much as you'd like. And there are more free guided meditations on the 10% happier app, which you can download in the Apple App Store or if you don't have an Apple device, you can get it at 10%happier.com. See you soon.

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