Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - A Reformed Skeptic Leads A Loving-Kindness Meditation | A Meditation Party Retreat Bonus with Dan Harris

Episode Date: September 15, 2024

Recorded live at the Omega Institute, Dan leads us through a loving-kindness meditation, followed by discussion with retreat co-leaders Jeff Warren and Sebene Selassie.For more information on the next upcoming Meditation Party retreat, including scholarships available for BIPOC participants, visit Omega Institute. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey everybody, time for a bonus meditation. This time we're bringing you another live guided meditation from the recent Meditation Party retreat at the Omega Institute, which is just north of New York City. That is where my friends Seben A. Selassie, Jeff Warren and I hosted a weekend of meditation and conversation. There was even a dance party. I should say that this special bonus episode is your third and final dose.

Not to be overly promotional, but if you're interested in checking out the meditation party for yourself, we've got one coming up in a few weeks in October at the Omega Institute, eomega.org. There are in-person and online options. Check out the show notes. I put a link there if you want to sign up. Okay, back to today's guided meditation. This is a loving-kindness practice and you'll hear me talk about why at first I did not love this practice, but I've now really come around. It's a huge part of my own meditation repertoire. You'll also hear me poke fun a little bit at people who wear shawls. That's a total joke. Some of my favorite people wear shawls. Here we go now with me.

I'm going to talk a little bit about a practice that, as I mentioned earlier, I had a very negative reaction to, but has been incredibly helpful to me. I remember being on my first 10-day silent meditation retreat and one of the afternoons, she was at that time a kind of a junior teacher. Now she's definitely not a junior teacher, quite prominent, and also a great friend of mine, Spring Washam, who's this amazing meditation teacher and just an important person in my own life. But at that time I had no, I never had any exposure to her and she was like wearing dangly earrings and covered in wound in shawls and things like that.

No offense, Seb. And I was like, yeah. Yeah. I was a little judgmental at that time, and she gets up and she's got a kind of sing-songy presentation sometimes, and she's talking about this practice called loving kindness, and I was like,

no, deuces, I am out on this thing. And it didn't get better because the practice, as you'll see, is basically, as I sometimes joke, Valentine's Day with a gun to your head where you just have to envision, or you're invited to envision a series of beings, people or animals, and send them good vibes. I had a very negative reaction to it on the first day,

but then a couple days later, I was like crying during it, and then I hated it again. And two things to say if you have my kind of conditioning. Some people just like completely take to it immediately, and that's great. Let me just talk to the skeptics or the people who might be feeling some aversion. Two things to say to that kind of mindset

that certainly helped me. There's a lot of research on this practice, which I think is under heralded in the mindfulness boom of the last 15 or so years, but there's this whole not very well-publicized body of research on practices related to boosting your capacity for warmth or friendliness, compassion, love, whatever word you want to use.

It really does strongly suggest that short daily doses of this specific type of practice can have a really cool and tantalizing set of health benefits, physiological benefits, psychological benefits, and even behavioral benefits. This practice was taught to preschoolers. Preschoolers who were taught this practice, as opposed to a random practice,

were more likely to give their stickers away to kids they did not like. So there's something to it from a scientific standpoint, if that matters to you. And then also from a technical, meditative standpoint, we've been talking a lot about distraction and dealing with getting yanked all over the place. This is classically considered to be a great concentration practice. I want to be careful and say, don't beat yourself up if you're totally distracted when we do it, which might be the first time for some people. So I'm not promising that it's going to immediately pull you into a state of total absorption,

but it is generally speaking considered to be a great way to tune up the mind and get you focused. And just a couple of ways to think about it if you're feeling aversion to the practice. Just curious, how many people actually do feel like they're not sure about it, or they're a little bit of aversion or skepticism around it?

Not that many, that's great. But not that many, yeah. I guess there's a kind of a winnowing effect that if you sign up for a meditation retreat, you're less likely to. Yeah. But that's great. I honestly think the aversion for me was not helpful.

Let's do it. Basically, the way I practice myself is I start with a round of loving kindness and then open it up to a more insight style practice or a mindfulness practice. with a round of loving kindness and then open it up to a more insight style practice or a mindfulness practice. So I'll try it with you guys. If it works, great. All right, let's assume the position. Oh, I get the bell.

I get the bell, buddy. I always wanted the bell. I always wanted the bell. I think a couple of deep breaths can be really helpful. All right, so we're going to start with an easy person. Interestingly, classically, the first category in this progression is yourself, but in the West, many teachers have tweaked the progression to start with an easy person because so many of us have so much hostility toward ourselves. So the easy person is starting that way as a kind of a contemplative bait and switch where you generate some warmth with an easy person and then slide into yourself.

So try to pick somebody in your life that can be an animal or a person who's just really easy to love. Today I'm going to go with, we have an adolescent boy cat named Curtis who sleeps under my shirts. Sometimes I just reach my arm in there and rough him up a little bit and he purrs. So pick your Curtis. Again, could be a kid, dog, cat, tribal. And you can visualize this person or animal or just conjure some sort of felt sense of them in your body, whatever works for you. Once you have the sense of them or the image of them in your mind,

we're going to repeat silently four phrases I'll give you the four classical phrases, but you can edit these for your own purpose if you want first is May be happy. May you be safe. May you be healthy and strong. May you live with ease. One important thing to say is that part of the brilliance of this practice is that it does not require you to feel any kind of way. You don't have to beat yourself up if you're conjuring this easy person and distracted

or oddly feeling hostile toward the person or me or whatever. That doesn't matter. You're just doing the practice This practice has been done for thousands of years Just trust that it'll work in whatever way it's supposed to work All right, let's move now to ourselves a couple of options you can generate an image of yourself from the last time you looked in the mirror, or maybe if that's hard for any reason, picture yourself when you were a kid. I scream all over your face. Or just, what I do is just a sense of the body sitting in the chair or whatever posture I'm in.

May I be happy? Sometimes when I'm wishing for my own happiness, I even picture a time when I felt happy. So my little family of three people, we sometimes do family hugs. I'll bring that to mind. May I be happy? May I be safe? May I be healthy and in the face of whatever happens? Next category is a mentor, benefactor. So it could be a parent or a relative or a teacher, really good friend. If you don't have somebody like that, you can think of historical figures or public figures, role models.

Just pick one person. Once you have the image or the felt sense, we'll see if we can make these phrases land. May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be healthy and strong. May you live with ease no matter what. Next category is a neutral person, somebody who might see some regularity but tend to overlook. Barista, cashier, somebody on the cleaning staff at work, neighbor who you just doesn't there's not a lot of emotional valence with

Distant colleague distant relative Can be a little hard to generate this image don't worry about it if it's a little fuzzy May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be healthy. May you live with ease. Again you don't need to feel any specific way. The radical notion here is that warmth, friendliness, love, it's a skill. We're just training it. Doesn't mean it's going to be pretty every step of the way, though. Next category is a difficult person.

I strongly urge you to not pick somebody who you absolutely loathe. We can just go with mildly annoying Probably a large menu there, but make a choice and Generate the image or the felt sense and just to say this is not a co-signing on their activity you don't have to give them a hug or invite them to dinner what Seb said about understanding that if you came out of that womb and had those life conditions you'd probably do the same stuff so may you be happy. Happy people tend not to be that annoying. May you be safe.

People who feel safe tend not to be that annoying. May you be healthy and strong. May you live with ease. you Final category is Everybody or Buddhist speak all beings everywhere so you can Sometimes I imagine that famous picture of the pale blue dot, a little earth in the vast gumbo of space. Or you could just picture a tight shot of the planet or do a little National Geographic aerial tour, some sort of kinesthetic or sense in your body of expansion? May we all be happy.

May we all be safe. Healthy. May we all live with ease. Okay, now that the mind might be a little bit tuned up, we'll focus. I'm going to give you a phrase to drop into your mind a little bit and just use this as your anchor. And the first time I heard this phrase from my teacher Joseph Goldstein, I didn't like it. The phrase is right out of the Buddhist

texts, there is a body. Totally natural to get distracted. When you notice it, just come back. And every once in a while you can just remind yourself, especially if you wake up from several paragraphs of an Amazon review or whatever it is little mental notes. What Joseph refers to as a kind of a whisper in the mind, just a little one word. It's the skillful use of thinking to draw your attention to your sensory experience. If you notice discomfort in the body, you can just give it a little label like tightness, hearing, thinking. Just dropping these in in a very playful way can help you stay focused. Not a must.

Just a couple more minutes here. Nothing to do, nowhere to go. Using there as a body occasionally dropped into your mind as a kind of anchor remind you to drop into your physical sensations and then when inevitably you get carried away you can just put a, you're seeing it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. as much anymore, and it was really such a sweet surprise to see who came up for me. And that alone, like, brightened my mind,

energized me, even the difficult person. It was really lovely, and it reminded me that a long time ago now, maybe like 20 years ago, I got the assignment to do, from one of my teachers, meta only for myself for six months. That was my practice. And how hard that was. And some of us have trouble with doing metta for others,

and I think a lot of us have trouble doing it for ourselves. We want to give that love out, but we don't want to give it to ourselves. That was a reminder that came up. Was that ever difficult for you to give metta to yourself? The whole thing feels forced and awkward. It's clunky. It's clunky. I've always experienced it as clunky.

Because it's... Even people who are not skeptical about meditation and shawls and whatever. I'm not skeptical about anything. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But it's a clunky practice. It is a clunky practice.

But I often compare it to going, if you were an alien and you landed on this planet and you went to a gym, people were just systematically picking up and putting down heavy things and running in place for 45 minutes. It is, but I find that very comforting, again, just with my conditioning that this is a skill, this is a training, and that this ethereal

and culturally loaded term of love, you can think of it as a skill. And that is, I think, an incredible, it's incredibly good news. Jeffrey? Yeah, I mean, I think the most, like the, I really appreciate what you said is that you don't have to have a specific feeling come up.

I think about my little sons, and especially my youngest is so freaking cute. He's this hilarious little koala bear, rolls around like a dog. He's like, ah! He's so happy, it's like impossible not to feel, smile, and feel something. And then, but then you move into other people,

it's sort of like, I feel nothing. I know I should try to feel something here, but I feel nothing. I just feel neutral, to feel something here, but I feel nothing. I just feel neutral or I'm mildly annoyed, especially with the annoying person, I'm just like, psh. But the practice is you're inclining the mind to think about someone else and to care about someone else. And it's just, you're so often in your own stuff thinking about yourself.

No, I'm going to think about this person. I'm going to orient my attention to this person and I'm going to, and what I find is when I stay with it, I just, I try to really see them. Sometimes I have a clear visual, and sometimes it's just not, it's more the idea, but like I try to see the character in their face, the way their eyes look, or how they look when they're surprised, or when they're sad,

or I just try to connect to the humanity. And that, that, there's a moment when I connect to the humanity that is, that there's a moment when I connect to the humanity that is in a sense, if I'm looking for something, that's what I'm looking at. I'm not looking for a warm feeling of love or connection or care. Although that can arise too. It's more like, can I see them as human? Can I see them as a person who, who has their own life and their own struggles? And if I had grown up in that same situation with those same, I would be that person and can I see the fellow humanity in that? Shinzen used to talk a lot about, my teacher, he used to have this great

phrase he said, our job is to love the unlovable. Can I see underneath the contempt I have for this work to what, to the real human underneath who's, there's a kind of innocence even in the most, I'm not gonna make some generalization with the nature of evil, but you're trying to see... the human. So I appreciated that. I just want to amend something I said, because I said it is clunky. It feels clunky to me.

Yeah. Because it might not feel clunky to other people. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that one of the reasons why it feels natural is because I have a very consistent and formal gratitude practice. And that might feel clunky to other people, but for me, that feels super natural to like every

morning write gratitude, text them to friends. It's just become such a natural part of my life. And so the people who actually arose in my mind for the meta practice were people show up constantly on my gratitude list. So for me, there's some correlation there between that and love, really. Thanks to Seb and Jeff for co-leading the Meditation Party retreat with me. Like I said, we've got another one coming up in October. You can sign up to attend either in person or online.

And you can always find more meditations over on the 10% Happier app. Just download the app wherever you get your apps to get started. If you like 10% Happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts.

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