Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Meditation: Simple, But Not Easy | Twenty Percent Happier with Matthew Hepburn

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

Check out this sneak peak into an episode of our new podcast Twenty Percent Happier, available exclusively in the Ten Percent Happier app. About Matthew Hepburn:Matthew Hepburn is a straight shooting, clear thinking, and dedicated meditation teacher. His personal practice caught fire over the course of several extended meditation retreats and volunteering to teach buddhist meditation in prisons in his early twenties. Now he shares his love of contemplative practice with people on intensive silent retreats, through dedicated daily life practice as a core teacher at Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, and as the Editor of Mobile Content for Ten Percent Happier.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. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪

Hey, hey, today we've got something very exciting. It's a sneak peek from our new podcast, which is called 20% happier. 20% happier is my colleague Matthew Hepburn's latest plot to one-up me. Matthew is a meditation teacher and coach. And he's been a driving force behind the meditation content on the 10% happier app. And you may know him, actually, if you're a subscriber from his hit meditation, soothe anxiety to sleep. Here on the 10% happier podcast, as you know, we featured long-form conversations

with deep Dharma teachers and mental health experts about the various ways you can do life better. But many of you have been asking for a deeper dive into how to strengthen your meditation practice. And that is where Matthew's new show comes in. In each episode of 20% happier, Matthew goes one-on-one with an everyday rank-and-file meditator as they seek to overcome a challenge

in either their life for their meditation practice. And today's clip you're gonna hear Matthew talking to Leslie, who during the pandemic really committed to her meditation practice. She took virtual courses, listened to talks, read a lot of books, but even with all of that, Leslie is still feeling a little lost and confused when it comes to making her practice her own and figuring out what actually works for her. To listen to the entire episode of 20% App Year or all the episodes, you can download the 10% Happier App wherever you get your apps, then open it up, tap on the podcasts, tab at the bottom of the screen, and you'll see it right there.

Here we go now with our little sneak peek. What's happening for you in the areas that you're integrating this all into your life or that you're exploring in your meditation practice on the cushion? I think, you know, I was taking all these online courses and they're all talking about compassion and the compassion trainings. Love and kindness, meta, lojong, we're doing Tonglin. And I'm struggling a bit in those areas, so I've been able to sort of see how meditation works for me.

And then when it starts to become about extending that out to other people, it feels like it gets a little complicated in terms of keeping that in authentic compassion practice where you're really feeling as opposed to it becoming an intellectual exercise that can become quite discombobulated. So for me, I'll be listening and they're talking about the part where you're feeling

or you're calling something for your own life or you're focusing on gratitude and you're generating these good feelings. And then we'll come the part where they say something like, and now think of somebody you love. And I love a lot of people. So I can get very caught up in the choosing. And I'm like, oh my goodness, my son, my son did not come immediately to my mind. I mean, I love him the most, but I can't meditate on my son every single time. Okay, who's second best? All right,

my husband, my, no, I'm just kidding. I was, do I love who else is in my circle? Or like my mother, you know, do I want to think about my mother? And my mother and my partner bring up, you know, different kinds of love, different feelings of love. And I'll start to notice a lot about like, oh, the love I have for my partner and the love I have for my mother or the love I have for my sister or my really good friend. I just saw yesterday and we had a wonderful time. They all generate these different kinds of feelings and I can get really caught up in analyzing that as opposed to just picking somebody for the purpose of moving on in the practice. So I think that's where I'm struggling a little bit in really feeling loving, like I think I get it, but I don't always feel like I feel it.

Yes. I don't always feel like I'm feeling the genuine, authentic, compassionate feelings that are supposed to move me through the practice. I get really caught up in the middle part. These particular practices are really nuanced and rich. I think, you know, maybe a big part of the reason is that we're social beings, humans are, and this is a practice that brings in to our meditative life all the richness and nuance and complexity of our relationships.

Yeah. And so it can be really easy when we just open the door to all of that stuff to completely lose the thread of the simpler instructions and intentions of the meditation and really just dive into exploring a reflection on these relationships. One of the reasons that I have found that, I'll say for myself, I'll be curious to ask some things from you about this, but for me the quality of mind and heart that is developed through meditation. The headspace I get into, the heart space that I get into, is a precious one. And it's not always that I'm carrying that around in my everyday life as I'm checking off the to-do list or whatever. And so, when I have the opportunity

to really be embodying that kind of attitude and way of being reflecting on my relationships feels actually really rich. It feels like an opportunity actually to reflect on them from this place. And so it's very seductive to just kind of go into it and be like, oh, where's the, you know, sticking point with this person and, you know, this happened. I feel complex about that and and the whole meditative attitude is like, oh, okay, and I care about this and their space and time to reflect on it. And so it's real easy for me to indulge if I'm not careful. Absolutely, absolutely. And then, you know, that's, so that's just the personal part because then when they start to now imagine

strangers, I live in a city I can imagine a lot of different strangers and starting to wonder about their lives and feeling the guilt of perhaps not noticing or reflecting on them earlier. It feels like there's so many paths of seduction right and every week it feels like there's a new situation that's being brought to my attention that I wasn't aware of that can just really take you down into a road of introspection and trying to understand it. So I don't know to think of them as off ramps. I don't know if thinking about those things more intellectually is me trying to get off of the road of the feeling. I don't know if that's a distraction. I don't know if it's an avoidance tactic.

I just, I start to wonder about those pieces. But even though it feels really important to think about all of those things. Yes, yes. And that's one of the keys. It's one of the reasons why we do it. Because there's a part of us that's like, it's really important to reflect in these ways.

And the mind's not really going to listen to you, if you say, oh, just put that aside, like that's not important, because it is. It is. And so the mind doesn't want to let go, but we don't have to come from a kind of psychoanalytic frame of analyzing why? Is it in avoidance? Is it just a distraction? Is it this? Is it that? The important thing about the outcome is that when we do end up developing this pattern where the mind is going into these more intellectual, ruminative, kind of narrative thought trains as opposed to sticking with the simplicity of the practice.

It's like we're trying to build a little fire and, you know, it gets drafty and we're not keeping close care of it so that the heat can build and it can grow. And so we want to be able to steady and develop in the simplicity of the practice so that the whole thing can grow and flourish more. So this practice really grows through some simplicity, which is really interesting because there's kind of a lot going on. You're bringing people to mind, various categories of people and all kinds of things, and so it's not easy to balance that kind of instruction with just keeping it simple. But I'm very hopeful. I think there's a lot of things for us to do that will help start to build it for you.

Excellent. Thank you, Matthew. Again, that was a sneak peak of the new 20% happier podcast available exclusively over on the 10% happier app download the app today then tap on the podcasts tab to find out what happens next. We'll see you back here on Monday for a brand new episode,

fascinating dude, professor named David Dosteno, who's been embarking on a very interesting little quest that he calls Religio Prospecting, where he goes back and looks at the evidence that shows benefits for many religious practices and rituals, benefits that can be conferred upon all of us, whether we're believers or not. 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.

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