Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Four Most Important Habits in Life | Bonus Talk with Jeff Warren

Episode Date: May 14, 2021

Practices like meditation help us cultivate habits that help instead of hurt. Here are four of them. 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 talk in the Ten Percent Happier app, you can search for “The Four Most Important Habits in Life,” or click here: https://10percenthappier.app.link/content?meditation=6748a2ec-017c-4176-8de6-545df0792793. We want to deeply thank and recognize mental health professionals for your support. For a year's FREE access to the app and hundreds of meditations and resources visit: tenpercent.com/mentalhealth 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 [♪ From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪

Hey, it's Friday, so we're dropping a bonus. Today is not a meditation, though. We're dropping one of the talks from the 10% happier app. Many of you may not know that aside from hundreds of guided meditations on the app and also courses that combined video and audio, we also do these short little, what I like to call wisdom bombs, like 10-minute little talks from scientists and meditation teachers. And today's is from Jeff Warren, who is one of my favorite people. We wrote a book together called Meditation for Figuity Skeptics. He is a meditation teacher based out of Toronto, where he founded a group called the Consciousness Explorers Club. And he's gonna talk here about what he calls

the four most important habits in life. These are the four fundamental qualities that human beings can cultivate in order to make a positive difference in their life. So here's Jeff. Hello, this is Jeff. You may have heard teachers call meditation a practice. Sometimes, we just call it the practice.

What do we mean? What is a practice? The simplest definition of practice is some action, mental, emotional, physical, social that you choose and repeat, so that it can become a habit. A practice is the deliberate cultivation of habits you want. These habits may begin in a narrow domain, on the meditation cushion, in the gym, maybe in the artist studio, but it becomes a true practice in the broadest sense when the positive effects of the practice begin to move out into the rest of your life.

When it comes to habits, we tend to think of them as external behaviors, but actually our internal ways of being and relating are also habits. We think and relate to the world in certain ways, and the more we repeat these thinking and relating patterns, the more entrenched they get. As the saying goes, we are literally creatures of habit, and for the first big chunk of our lives, we don't get to choose what inner habits we're building. If we're lucky, we may have good role models to emulate, but even then we all acquire some unhealthy habits.

It can't really be avoided. Habits of stress and reactivity and impatience and self-pity and furious overthinking and defensiveness and all the rest. These habits don't stay the same either. They get deeper and more entrenched the more they're repeated. And for most of us anyway, eventually our unhealthy inner habits catch up with us. All of a sudden we realize that this thing that we do, this once subtle habit of dissatisfaction or avoidance or worrying that we've had kind of going on in the background is now screwing

us, screwing our relationships, our work, our life, whatever. And that is our wake up call, the call to practice, to practice habits that help rather than hurt. Meditation and other contemplative practices are powerful ways to do this. They help us rehearse a different way of existing. They're very ambitious. It's like going to the existence gym. The setting is simple.

The comparative distractions are few. You close the eyes, or maybe you keep them half open, and practice being cool with your life. You practice noticing the details of your experience, you practice being satisfied by simple sensations and prioritizing sanity and rest. These are deep habits that have a powerful effect on the rest of your life.

The part that's super important to realize here is the skills and habits we build in meditation can be built up in any activity. That's how you unbundle meditation. You start to realize that the external form of a practice is less important than the inner skills and habits we bring to it. So what inner skills and habits? This is a riddle I think about a lot as a journalist, as a writer, as a meditation teacher. What are the most fundamental qualities a human being

can cultivate that will make a positive difference in their life? And how do I impart that? There's no master list, obviously, and the pie can be cut in many ways. What's more, a lot of this will depend on our personal intentions, our cultural values, but four skills or habits in particular seem to come around again and again. At the very least, they underlie all the mindfulness and meditation

and artistic and movement practices that I both teach and do myself. I have my own teacher, Shenzhen Yang, to thank for making three of them explicit for me. Here they are. First, concentration. The skill of calm, of devoting attention to some object or in some direction. When we focus, there's a tendency for the thing we're focusing on to become more stable. And if we hold our attention long enough, we can have the experience of flowing and merging with that activity or object.

Concentration is also the great protector, because when we apply ourselves in this way, our anxious thoughts have less room to make an appearance. Concentration leads to more peace and stability. Examples of concentration in a practice are really any kind of absorption, like getting absorbed in a sport, or in a writing or drawing practice, or even getting absorbed in a sport, or in a writing, or drawing practice, or even getting absorbed in a good conversation. It becomes a practice when we make this activity deliberate. Second, clarity. The skill of discernment, of awareness, that leads to insight. This is the part of us capable both of panning out to a broader perspective and zooming in to notice previously unconscious habits of thinking and responding. Over time, if we pay close attention, it can lead us to deep insights about the nature of mind

and being. Clarity leads to more wisdom or perspective. This gets trained in insight meditation, but it also gets trained in therapy practices. It gets trained in journaling and relating in communication practices. Anything that teaches you self-awareness around your stuff is boosting the habit of clarity. Third, care. This is the skill of appreciation, of bringing respect and even gratitude to both our actions and our perceptions. It leads to doing things well, to treating people well, including ourselves. It's the habit of front-loading love into what we see and do to the degree that feels honest to who we are.

When we choose to care for what we see and do, we take a stand that these things matter, that they're meaningful. So care leads to love, to connection, and we can exercise it in tons of activities. Anytime you do something well, you're exercising the care habit. Anytime you notice the humanity of the people around you, you're exercising the care habit. Anytime you write a letter of appreciation

to someone in your life, same thing. And finally, my favorite, equanimity, the skill of non-interference, of receiving, but also of letting go. Equanimity is paradoxical. It's a kind of disappearing into presence. It's the habit of getting so still and smooth inside that we're finally able to respect and honor ourselves and the world as it is, thus paving the way for healthy change. It's the basis of vulnerability and humility, and leads again and again to more appropriate and intelligent action. When we're vulnerable in a conversation, we're exercising equanimity.

When we trust the creative work that's coming through us, we're exercising equanimity. When we trust the creative work that's coming through us, we're exercising equanimity. When we breathe out and trust our life, we're exercising equanimity, it's the ultimate existential habit. And those are my candidates for the core skills or habits that we exercise in any effective practice.

Concentration, clarity, care, and equanimity. You can increase these in meditation, but why not try to spread them out to other activities as well? That's how life becomes our practice. Ironically, I bet your grandpa could have explained all this to you. Though maybe not with so many fancy words. He just say, do things well, pay attention, be humble. Don't make it complicated. Find your practice, your movement, your breath, your work, and commit.

The rest will follow. Practice well, my friends. One quick order of business before we go here as you may know, may is mental health awareness month. Over the past year, mental health professionals have been doing heroic work, helping people in the midst of so much upheaval and a huge uptick in anxiety and depression and addiction. And so we want to recognize all these mental health professionals and thank them for what they're doing.

And also to offer some support. So if you fit into the category of mental health professional and you want a year's free access to the 10% happier app, where there are hundreds of meditations and other resources, go ahead and visit 10%.com slash mental health. We'll see you back here on Monday for a brand new episode. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today.

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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 Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them.

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