Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How to Meditate with No Agenda | Bonus Meditation with Jeff Warren

Episode Date: September 24, 2021

Free your creativity with this light meditation and see where the momentum takes you. About Jeff Warren: Jeff is an incredibly gifted meditation teacher. He has trained in multiple traditions, including with renowned teacher Shinzen Young. Jeff is the co-author, with Dan, of the NY Times Bestseller "Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics," and is 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 “The Art of Creative Freedom,” or click here: https://10percenthappier.app.link/content?meditation=60216495-f77b-491e-b1c5-ad1de8eda6dc.Here are the steps for sending us a question for our upcoming Work Life Series:1. Go to a quiet place and open the default voice memo recording app on your phone.2. Hold the phone about 8-10 inches from your face, then tap “record.”3. Tell us your name, where you’re from, and what your question is. Try to keep it to about a minute or so.4. Stop the recording, then check it to make sure it sounds clear.5. Email it to us at: [e-mail] by September 27, 2021.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. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey everybody, whether you're brand new to meditation or you've been at it for years, you've probably experienced some version of the following conundrum. There you are, carving out some time to sit in silence, follow your breath, ease your

mind, and yet not only are you still stressed about whatever you are already stressing about, but now you're also stressed about the meditation itself. You start second guessing whether you're doing it right. If this sounds familiar, don't worry. It's very, very common. And today's meditation is designed to help you deal with it. It comes from TPH fan favorite, Jeff Warren. Jeff is a great friend.

He's a phenomenal meditation teacher. He and I co-wrote a book together a few years ago called Meditation for Figuity Skeptics. And in today's meditation, Jeff invites you to relax your vigilance, his words, as you explore. Again, his words here, the art of having no agenda. I love that. Before we dive in one item of business, if you've been listening to the show for a while, you've probably heard me talk about our companion meditation app, which is also called 10% happier. The app is a place you can go to practice, what we talk about here on the podcast, and you can do so with meditations that are led by some of our most popular podcast guests.

It's sort of like science, class, and college. The podcast is the lecture, and the app is the lab. So whether you're interested in treating yourself with a little bit more compassion, having hard conversations without hurting your relationships or pausing and taking a breath instead of snapping at your children, you can learn about the skills here and then practice them over there in the app. But just like that college lab section, motivating yourself to actually put in the practice time is hard.

Those few milliseconds between closing the podcast app and firing up the meditation app are rife with possibilities for distraction, a new email, a breaking news alert, the temptation to doom scroll on Twitter, whatever. It can all derail you pretty quickly. That's why this show, the 10% happier podcast, is now available inside our companion app so that you can toggle seamlessly between listening and practicing, learning and doing. So now, when you subscribe to the app, you'll be able to transition very easily to meditation right after listening to the podcast. Not to mention, you'll receive access to our many courses, which contain a whole lot of video, our sleep meditations,

and the podcast episodes are ad-free. And good news has promised the ad-free podcast is available now, both on iOS and Android. So to get started, download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps and then tap on the podcast tab at the bottom of your screen. Okay, here we go now with Jeff Warren. Hi, this is Jeff. One of the things I've noticed in my writing is the more focused and tight I am about getting things right, the less I'm able to do good work. On the other hand, when I deliberately go into a work situation with

lightness, let the willingness to make mistakes even a lack of agenda. And I find I'm able to be smoother and more effective and more creative. This meditation is designed to get us into that headspace. Let's go. You can start by having the eyes closed or sort of half open, looking at the ground in front of you. Get yourself into a space where you're feeling comfortable. You can stretch up the spine on the inhale. And the exhale is this longer settling motion. So we're going to explore a meditation that itself has as little agenda as possible.

It begins with just choosing to lightly pay attention to something. It may be that you're noticing your own awareness. It's that loose. Or maybe you're lightly focused on the breath. Or maybe you're noticing the sounds around you, but in a light way. We're exploring a kind of lazy person's meditation. No agenda, mostly just being Whether you're lightly focused on the breath or on sounds or just sitting there being aware or fine, the key is to stay with it in the lightest possible way. There's almost a delicacy in the way you're paying attention. Nice, letting it be easy.

Imagine softening the front of your brain, letting it collapse back into the back of your head with this grateful sigh. No agenda, no need to control. Let your attention just go where it goes, relaxing your vigilance. Okay, now wherever you are, take a minute or so to come back to the sensation of your body. Nice. Welcome to the art of no agenda. One of the best ways to free our creativity.

When you're ready, if your eyes were closed, you can slowly open them and check back into your surroundings. Awesome. Good luck with your work. This is Jeff signing off. Thank you, Jeff. One last order of business before we let you go. And this is an invitation to participate in our show. We hear on the 10% happier podcaster very busy preparing a series of episodes that will be posting in the coming weeks about how to navigate one of the most complex

and dominant forces in many of our lives work. Many of us spend more time with our colleagues than our family. And yet sometimes we forget to treat these relationships with any level of intentionality. Add into the mix the changing nature of work, at will employment, remote work, the gig economy, and you have a recipe for frustration, burnout, and more.

So in this series of podcast episodes, we're going to explore how to better handle your coworkers, boost your resilience in the face of what can sometimes seem like a sycophine mountain of work and how to cultivate skills to handle the combination of these two dynamics. We don't want to do these shows without your participation, however. So we're right now, officially inviting you to send us some questions so that we can learn more about what kinds of challenges you're facing so that we can better craft these episodes to help you out. And we'd like to hear your questions via voice memos so that we can play

the questions right here on the show for our experts. To submit a question, just follow the five easy steps that are listed in the show notes. Thanks, I encourage you to participate. We'll see you back here on Monday for a brand new episode on Stoicism. We've never done an episode on that before, and my guest is Nancy Sherman. We've never done an episode on that before, and my guest is Nancy Sherman. 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- 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. Celebrity feuds are high stakes.

You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle and we're the host of of Wonder Woman's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy

pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans form the free Brittany movement dedicated to fring her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Britney. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondering app. 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, pure 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. 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 Wondery app.