Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Massive Power of Not Taking Sh*t for Granted | Bonus Meditation with Matthew Hepburn

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

Gratitude, like hope, is a skill. Daily cultivation leads to lower stress levels, stronger relationships, and higher emotional resilience.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.To find this meditation in the Ten Percent Happier app, you can search for “Daily Gratitude Booster,” or click here: https://10percenthappier.app.link/content?meditation=ab981c0f-d353-4c75-a218-42f3255abe75.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. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, it's Friday, time for a bonus. Gratitude is one of those concepts that can easily become a wrote, empty bromide, as I like to say, the kind of thing you kind of see knit onto, throw pillows, but properly

understood, gratitude can be transformative. And there's a lot of science to back this up. Gratitude can help lower stress, strengthen relationships, and raise emotional intelligence. Here today to bring us a gratitude booster is meditation teacher and podcast host Matthew Hepburn. Matthew has spent the last decade teaching meditation in schools, prisons, and meditation centers around the country. He's also worked for many years on the TPH content team. You can actually hear him work his magic coaching meditation students on the 20% happier podcast available exclusively over on the 10% happier app. Okay, here we go's Matthew. Okay, glad you made it here for your daily gratitude booster.

Research says it can build hope in hard times, lower stress hormones, and is the single best predictor of emotional well-being and healthy relationships. No joke. First off, take two deep breaths. In through the nose, out through the mouth, and feel your body relaxing. Go ahead. You can do this practice anytime, anywhere, and if you don't need to keep your eyes open, you can let them close gently. We always start off by taking a moment to pause and acknowledge exactly how you feel. If it's tough, it's tough.

If it's enjoyable, enjoy it. But right now, take a moment to acknowledge and really honestly feel how you're doing. What you're about to do will be effective and yield results over time no matter what mood or emotion is temporarily here in this moment. For the next few minutes, you can give yourself wholeheartedly to this gratitude training session without needing to replace your current emotion with anything else. Bring to mind anything good in the last 48 hours of your life that you didn't earn or create. It could be as extraordinary as winning the lottery, as ordinary as breathing

fresh air, or anything in between. Just notice the first good thing that pops into your mind. When you got it, remember all the sensory details of receiving this experience. Sites, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, emotional feelings. Now, clarify the source of that good thing. Was it a person? Was it nature? Was it something else? When we identify the source, we give gratitude a clear direction. Bring the source of this good thing to the forefront of your mind. Go with what comes easy. Don't overthink it. Now, get in touch with your own authentic sense of thanks and appreciation for this particular good thing that came from this particular source.

Find a set of words that can genuinely express this feeling. For example, I like to keep it simple and just say thank you. Do what works for you. Say the words out loud under your breath if you can get away with it. This will deeply engage your brain when you feel and hear yourself speaking them. Try it for yourself. Alright, High Five, nice work today. Stick with it and highlight whatever benefits you start noticing for yourself. Your homework between now and the next time you listen

to this meditation is to try to be grateful for one thing while it's happening. If your eyes have been closed, you can open them. Thanks for your practice. See you tomorrow. Thank you to Matthew, one exciting announcement before we go. We are launching a new podcast. We've actually launched it already. One of the most intense, important and astonishingly difficult things that has ever happened in my life is having a child. I think this is true for many of us who have kids.

Parenting can be one of, if not the most transformative events of a lifetime. And while there are all sorts of resources out there for helping you do a better job as a parent, there aren't many shows about how to take care of yourself as a parent. We here at 10% happier have now made that show. It's called Child Proof, and it's available now. It's hosted by an amazing person named Yasmeen Khan, a recovering news reporter and mom of two young children. On the show she tackles big questions such as, how do parents take care of ourselves while taking care of our kids? How do we not lose our crap

with our children? How do we give ourselves a break? How do we not pass on our own various forms of dysfunction to our kids? Childproof is available now for free wherever you listen to your podcasts, including Apple podcasts, Spotify, and for 10% happier app subscribers inside the app. Add free. Check it out today. We'll see you back here on Monday with the musical Sivan to Sarah Bare Bareilles talking about anxiety. This is one of the most popular episodes we've run in recent years. We're reposting it because we wanna dive back into this

unfortunately evergreen subject of anxiety. So Sarah Bareilles coming up on Monday. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ 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 free with 1-3-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-survey. Hey, I'm Aresha, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wondery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon Ru Paul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance, but the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Ru off course. In our series RuPaul, Born Naked,

we'll show you how RuPaul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon music or the Wondery app. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna 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 Wundery'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 Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans formed 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.

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 Disenthal wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wonder App.