Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Guided Meditation: 'Simply Begin Again'

Episode Date: April 1, 2016

The three most important words for a beginning meditator may be, "Simply Begin Again." This short episode is a bit different. It's a guided meditation from the 10% Happier: Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics app, featuring Joseph Goldstein. Joseph is the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society. He is also Dan's teacher (which means he knows firsthand how crappy a meditator Dan is). Joseph is one of a handful of western teachers who brought mindfulness meditation to the west 40 years ago. So, if you'd like to give meditation a try, this is a great place to start. 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. Hey, this is Dan, and if you've been listening to this podcast, you might, might want to give meditation a try. So, this episode is a little bit different. No interview here. We're going to give you a guided meditation

from Joseph Goldstein, who is an important figure in my life. He's my meditation teacher. He's also one of my partners on the 10% happier meditation app. Its full name is 10% happier meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. Joseph is a pioneer. He's one of the people who helped bring meditation to America. Many years ago, he's been meditating for 50 years. He's also a mensch. So here it is. Here's Joseph leading a meditation. And I'll talk to you again on the back end.

Three most important words in mindfulness meditation are simply beginning again. You give the mind a simple object of meditation, simply beginning again. We give the mind a simple object of meditation, like the breath, and then we find before too long our mind gets lost in thoughts, of fantasies, or daydreams. This is not an unusual phenomenon. We hop on these trains of association. And often we don't know that we've hopped on the train, we have no idea where the train is going.

And then sometime later it may be a minute or two, it may be five minutes, maybe ten minutes. We wake up to the fact that we're thinking. It says if we hop off the train. In that moment of becoming aware that we are lost, we can actually delight in that moment of awareness of remembering, rather than judge ourselves for having been lost. And in that moment, we recollect the breath and simply begin again. We'll begin this meditation by again sitting in an upright posture. The back erect but not stiff or tense. Gently closing the eyes. Softening and relaxing the eyes, relaxing the shoulders, softening

the belly, settling into the awareness of the body and the body posture, to sit and to know that we're sitting. And as we're aware of the body posture as we've settled into the body, you will become aware of the sensations of the body breathing. Connect with the sensations of the breath. I'd rather have a place in the body, you feel it most clearly. Again, it might be the sensations of the breath at the nostrils, or the sensations of the air passing the nostrils, you can use a soft Out, in, out. If you're feeling the sensations of the breath in the rising fall of the abdomen or the chest, you can make the soft mental note of rising, falling, rising, falling. If you've noticed that the mind has hopped on trains of association, gotten lost in a train of thought, as soon as you become aware, the mind is thinking, notice that, reconnect Reconnect with the breath and begin again. Staying aware of the body posture, and become aware of the sensations of your body breathing.

Feeling the sensations of the air passing the nostrils or the sensation of the movement, the chest or abdomen. Breathing in, know your breathing in, breathing out, know your breathing out. When you notice that the mind is wandered or gotten lost in a thought, simply reconnect with the feeling of the breath and begin again. When you're ready, you can slowly open your eyes. And as you open your eyes, you can reconnect with the world around you, become mindful that you're seeing. Become mindful of any movements the body makes in adjusting your posture. Become mindful of what you're hearing as you re-engage with the world.

You may have found that this meditation was simple but not always easy. It's simple in that we are just connecting with the breath as it's arising and paying attention to it. But it's not always easy because of the great tendency of the mind to get lost and thought, to go off in wandering. And when we remember this, when we see this, we simply reconnect with the breath and begin again. Okay, so welcome back. If you're anything like me, your mind may have gone completely nuts during that meditation. That is totally fine. The whole point is to notice when you've become distracted and start again. I've been meditating for six and a half years, which isn't a super long time, but long enough. My mind runs all over the place every time I meditate.

The point is not to reach some sort of special state where all thoughts cease. That's only going to happen if you're enlightened or dead. The point is to catch yourself whenever your mind is wandered and to begin again. As I like to say, it's like a bicep curl for your brain and it shows up on brain scans. Not for nothing, it's also a radical act. You're breaking a lifetime's habit of walking around in a fog of projection and rumination. If you want to learn more about how to meditate you can check out the 10% happier app which features me in Joseph and many other teachers. You can download it and the first seven days are free and frankly if you get

through those first seven days you will know how to meditate but if you really like what we're doing you want to subscribe you can do that. Every day you get a video where I talk to Joseph or one of our teachers and ask them skeptical, sometimes annoying questions, and then you get guided through a meditation by the teacher. And you also get a coach, somebody who can answer your questions,

a real live person, because beginning meditators have a lot of questions. So we'll be posting more of these guided meditations in the future. Next time though, I'll be back with the fresh interview. Thanks. 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 one rep. 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. Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders

behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduka Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Koto Paxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time. Like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discuss their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges and how to lead through uncertainty.

So, if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery app.