Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How to Work with "The Comparing Mind" | Bonus Meditation with Jeff Warren

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

Nothing compares to now. Let Jeff help you find freedom and ease from constant comparing by embracing this very moment.   Take a few minutes to help us out by answering a survey about your experience with this podcast! The team here is always looking for ways to improve, and we’d love to hear from all of you, but we’d particularly like to hear from those of you who listen to the podcast and do not use our companion app. Please visit www.tenpercent.com/survey to take the survey. Thank you.   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." 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 y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad.

Where did memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, time for our Friday bonus. And this is a good one.

This is a bonus meditation from my friend, Jeff Warren, who's one of the teachers in the ongoing New Year's meditation challenge that we're running through the 10% happier app. One of the most stressful mind states that I personally have experienced is what meditation teachers often refer to as the comparing mind when we're comparing ourselves to other people or comparing ourselves to the way we used to be.

We're comparing this moment to a moment in the past. It pulls us out of the present. It can be the source of a lot of suffering. Again, I'm speaking from personal experience right now. Theodore Roosevelt once referred to comparison as the thief of joy. So in this guided meditation, we're going to learn how to make a citizens

arrest, if you will, on this thief. Before we dive in, just a quick ask, we would appreciate it immensely if you would take a few minutes to help us out by answering a survey about your experience with this podcast. We're always looking for ways to improve these surveys help us a lot. In particular, for this one, we'd like to hear from people who listen to the podcast a lot, but do not use the companion app. So if you want to hook us up, go to 10% .com slash survey, 10% .com slash survey. This is for anybody. We have particular interest

in people who use the podcast, but not the app, but we'd like to hear from anybody and everybody. So thank you for that. Here we go now with Jeff Warren. Hello, I'm Jeff. The human mind compares the present with the past in order to make better predictions about the future. That's how it works, and it has a lot of benefits. But it also has at least one big downside. It can prevent us from seeing the value

of what's right in front of us. So let's explore this. Eyes closed or downcast, looking at the ground in front of you. You can start with taking a few deep breaths. So taking a big breath in. And as you take that breath, you stretch up. Find a little bit of alertness and the way you're holding yourself. And then the exhale is the downward motion.

The settling, softening the eyes and the jaw and the cheeks, softening the shoulders. So a nice long exhale here to kind of get us in the in the zone. So we can start by choosing something to lightly pay attention to, like the sensation of the breath to say. Well maybe the sensation of some other part of the body, maybe the hands or the belly or the feet, just noticing how this is in the moment. And as we do this, we try to find something of an easygoing attitude, taking this opportunity to relax, to enjoy this break. So, it can happen even in meditation, that in some subtle way, we start to compare our present experience with a former experience or an ideal. And then we start to feel a bit dissatisfied with how things are now.

Maybe we had a kind of idea of how this could go, but it's not really measuring up. And we're a little bit put out by this. So see if you can notice this dynamic happening in any way. Could be super obvious, or it might be really, really subtle, more in the now. Can you open up to how things are right now, without having any kind of bias baked in? And the attitude we're bringing is like we've just been born into this moment, like we're waking up just now into a moment that's exactly right. This moment

right now. Exactly right. This moment right now. Exactly right. Exactly right. There's nothing to compare this moment to because it's completely unique. Can you notice this freshness? Keep exploring with this attitude. to Okay, good. When you're ready, if your eyes were closed, you can open them. I'm Jeff. See you later. Or you can listen early and add free 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 Bellissi. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the build-up, why it happened, and the repercussions.

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