Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How to Fall Asleep | Bonus Meditation with Jeff Warren

Episode Date: July 28, 2023

The simple yet effective technique of trusting your body will help you fall into a quiet, restful sleep.About Jeff Warren:Jeff is an incredibly gifted meditation teacher. He's trained in multiple traditions, including with renowned teacher Shinzen Young. Jeff is the co-author of NY Times Bestseller "Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics," and the founder of the Consciousness Explorers Club, a meditation adventure group in Toronto. He has a knack for surfacing the exact meditation that will help everyone he meets. "I have a meditation for that" is regularly heard from Jeff, so we've dubbed him the "Meditation MacGyver."To find this meditation in the Ten Percent Happier app, you can search for “How to Fall Asleep.” More information on the upcoming "Meditation Party" retreat at the Omega Institute with Dan Harris, Sebene Selassie, and Jeff Warren is here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Have you been considering starting or restarting your meditation practice? Well in the words of highway billboards across America. If you're looking for a sign, this is it. To help you get started, we're offering subscriptions at a 40% discount until September 3rd. Of course, nothing is permanent. So get this deal before it ends by going to 10% dot com slash 40. That's 10% one word all spelled out dot com slash 40 for 40% off your subscription.

This is the 10% happy podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, happy Friday, everybody. It's bonus meditation time. This has been a week where we've focused on sleep on the show, which I often refer to as the apex predator of healthy habits. Nothing functions if you're not sleeping. And yet, sleep can be elusive for many of us. We're posting this in the summer when sleep can be harder for many reasons, including the heat and the longer days. So we've got a meditation to help you with sleep. It comes from my friend, Jeff Warren. This meditation is both hilarious and effective.

Enjoy it. Here we go now with Jeff Warren. Hi, I'm Jeff. The body knows how to fall asleep, but sometimes the mind gets in the way. So here's a practice I use at such times. The first thing to do after you get in bed and turn out the lights is deliberately connect to an attitude of easy-goingness. The more uptight you are, the harder this is going to be. So just flop into your bed like you don't care and approach this practice with a sense of relaxed openness.

However, strange this sounds, pretend that you're falling asleep. I do this by breathing like I'm sleeping. So start breathing as though your body were asleep. Your body knows the rhythm of breathing as it sleeps. The mouth may be slightly open, the breath might be slightly audible. There's a kind of even rhythmicity in the in-breath, in the out-breath. If it helps, you can even pretend that someone's watching you and you're pretending to be asleep. So what would you do in your face and your body and your breath to be completely convincing here? Breathing like you're asleep, getting into it, letting the body get into it. The breath shifting into a natural sleep pattern, body

beginning to get absorbed in this rhythm. Just following the body here, following it down and to sleep. As you keep the body relaxed, you kind of let yourself drift, and your attention, your mind drifts with you. And as this happens, you're letting yourself get entranced by the breath, the body's sort of sinking and drifting, floating. And maybe you're noticing images, not thinking take you, a pleasure of the randomness of this. They spool out maybe into little dream fragments or snippets of memory, even dream sounds, and you're kind of going with it, letting them take

you away following the trail of strange images as they pull you towards the dream. Your breath breathing, sleeping mode, and really no resistance in the body or the mind, completely surrendered to the process. Drifting in the images are moving with you. Breathing like you're asleep. Letting go of the need to know even. The images may be there, the breath, and you're following without knowing. Just trusting this process. Rest well.

Thanks again to Jeff. You can find many more meditations like this one over on the 10% happier app. We've got a whole sleep tab just download the app wherever you get your apps to get started. We'll see you right back here on Monday for a brand new episode. This is a great one with one of my idols, the great novelist, Jennifer Egan, who has written huge hits, like a visit from the Goon Squad and the Candy House. We're going to talk to her about writing, creativity, panic, our sense of self, and the future of technology at a fraught moment. We'll see you then.

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