Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Guided Meditation: 'Struggle as Feedback'

Episode Date: April 29, 2016

Want to give meditation a try? This is a great place to start. If you're struggling, it means something is going on that you're not accepting. The struggle is the feedback. Instead of pushing through, ask yourself "What am I not open to?" Often you'll see that the struggle dissipates right there. This is 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. 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. Okay, so we're back with another guided meditation. And again, it's my man Joseph Goldstein who is a really prominent meditation teacher. For some reason, I decided to become my teacher as well,

which is an amatuff case, so that shows what a good teacher he is. And he's also featured very prominently on the 10% happier app. And in fact, this meditation, this guided meditation comes directly from the app. What he's gonna talk about here, and the theme of this meditation is that when you sit to meditate, you'll experience some pleasant things, and you'll experience some unpleasant things,

anything from an itch to a pain in your knee to unpleasant memories. And the trick, the goal is to be mindful of it all, to view it all with some non-judgmental remove. So, once again, here's Joseph. The years ago I was living in India, practicing meditation, and the summer months on the plains of India get very hot. So often, friends and I would go up to the mountains to practice at a higher altitude during those hot months. One year we were going up to Kashmir. It was a beautiful mountain hill station in India. Getting up there required a 17-hour long Indian bus ride. As some of you may know, Indian buses are very hot and crowded.

And it turns out that the only seat available for me was a middle seed sitting right over the crane case. And as I found my seed, I thought to myself, I think what I'm gonna do is simply focus on my breath for the entire trip, trying to keep everything else out. So as we begin the journey, I'm following this strategy, just focusing on the breath, trying to keep everything else out. But at a certain point, I noticed that this effort was creating a huge amount of tension. And I had a certain moment when I realized that a much more effective strategy for creating ease of mind and, in fact, ease of body

was instead of trying to keep all the unpleasant sensations and smells and experiences, instead of trying to keep them out, I could let them in. And as soon as I allowed my mind to open, to open to the whole range of experience, The sounds, the sights, the smells, the uncomfortable sensations of being crowded, the rest of the journey became much more easeful for me. The great lesson in this story is to become open to the full range of our experiences, whether pleasant or unpleasant.

We simply become mindful of them as they are arising, experiencing their flavor, coming back to the primary object or anchor when those sensations are no longer predominant. We'll begin this meditation by again, sitting in an upright posture, gently closing the eyes, and consciously relax the eyes, soften them, relaxing the jaw and the shoulders, softening the belly, settling into the awareness of the body and the body posture,

to sit and to know the 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. As you're being mindful of each breath, you may notice that the breath is not a single experience but rather a flow of sensations, a warmth of coolness, of pressure, of vibration. And when other bodily sensations become predominant and call your attention, they too become the object of your meditation. At that time, you leave the breath and open to the particular sensations that are appearing. It may be the experience of tightness, of pressure, of vibration, of hardness, of heaviness, or lightness.

You can make a soft note of the sensation itself, pressure, pressure, tightness. Pay attention to what happens to the sensation as you become aware of it. Sometimes it may go stronger. Sometimes weaker, sometimes it will fade away. Sometimes it may disappear suddenly or seem to shift position. Simply be mindful of the sensation, of how it changes in the process of being aware of it. And when it no longer keeps the attention, again returning to the body, to the body sitting,

to the feeling of each breath. As you open to different sensations in the body, you'll also become aware of your experience of them as being either pleasant or unpleasant. You can note this quality, or unpleasantness, without reactivity, simply experiencing the sensation as it presents itself, seeing how the sensation arises and passes away. When it's no longer predominant, simply reconnect with the feeling of the breath and begin again. And when you're ready, you can slowly open your eyes

and reconnect with the world around you. You may have noticed that in being mindful of different bodily sensations as they rise, we're learning a counterintuitive approach to this aspect of our experiences. Usually, when pleasant sensations arise, we like them, enjoy them, want them to continue, try to hold onto them. With unpleasant sensations, our tendency is to push them away, to resist, to tense behind them. And becoming mindful of different sensations where the pleasant or unpleasant will learn simply to be open to them, to feel them as they are, to notice what happens to them as we're being mindful of them. And when they're no longer predominant,

we simply reconnect with the breath and begin again. I hope as we continue to post these meditations that you get a sense of what an amazing teacher Joseph is, we'll be posting more meditations from other incredible teachers including Sharon Salisberg who also are featured on the 10% happier app, which you can feel free to check out. The first few days are free and if you like it you can subscribe and we'll be back with another excellent interview in just a few days. See you next time. back with another excellent interview in just a few days. See you next time. Hey, hey, prime members.

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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 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

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