Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Exploring What It Means To “Pay Attention” | A Meditation Party Retreat Bonus With Jeff Warren

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

Recorded live at the Omega Institute, Jeff guides us through two different approaches to being attentive to our experience — followed by a discussion with Dan and Sebene.About Jeff Warren:Jeff makes meditation and practice accessible to diverse audiences in order to help people live more fulfilled and connected lives. He’s taught meditation to suspicious journalists, US Army cadets, burned-out caregivers, Arizona cops, formerly-incarcerated youth, virtuoso popstars, distractible teens, and every other conceivable demographic of freethinker, including squirmy six-year old kids.  He tries to do this in a way that’s rigorous and clear and adventurous. You can find out more about him at jeffwarren.org. 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. Hello everybody. Today we're doing something a little bit different for our bonus meditation. You've probably heard me talk maybe too much about these meditation party retreats that I've been doing with my friends, the meditation teachers, Jeff Warren and Sibene Selassie. We've done it twice so far up at the Omega Institute, which is north of New York City.

It's been really fun. It's a weekend-long thing for meditators who like to curse a little bit. If that sounds fun to you, we've got another one coming up this October. You can sign up to attend either in person or online, and there are scholarships available for BIPOC participants. Go to the show notes of this episode and you can find out more. So anyway, today we're taking a guided meditation from the Meditation Party retreat led by Jeff Warren and we're going to play it to you here. You're going to hear his meditation and then if you want to stick around there's some Q&A afterwards. Also coming up here on the show in a couple days we've got a whole episode based on some

of the hijinks from Meditation Party. Today though, it's Jeff Warren guiding us in meditation. Here we go now with my guy Jeff. In traditional meditation practice, before you ever kind of move into what's considered more the inside of the mindfulness side of things where you're getting more clarity about the different nuances of what's happening in your mind, in your body, in your surroundings. There's often a kind of preliminary focus on settling, grounding, on recollecting, on stabilizing the mind, getting things a little bit more stable and settled so that you can then have more capacity for insight. When you're in the kind of busy of the everyday, it's harder to notice the signal through all the noise.

And this is really just so valuable. I guess the way I think of it is, there's this primordial sort of freedom that we have to choose where we wanna put our attention. And that matters so much. Most of the time, we don't realize where we're putting our attention. And that matters so much. Most of the time, we don't realize where we're putting our attention. We're putting it in our worries.

We're out there thinking about our stresses and things that are coming in the future, and it's triggering feelings in our body, which then creates reactions to what people are saying around us. And we're in this spin cycle up here, and we're paying attention to it. In a sense, we're meditating on our worries.

But meditation is sort of this first part of it, the first freedom is actually I can change what I want to pay attention to in my experience. I don't have to be subject to whatever's happening. I can choose within this whole world of experience, one, something simpler, something more steadying, something more comforting to begin to pay attention to. And this is radical.

What you pay attention to becomes your life. Instead of paying attention to only things that you're worried about, you can start to pay attention to subtler gifts that are arriving in your experience, the sounds that are comforting, the sense of being a body, the sense of connection, whatever it is. So this process of getting settled sort of has two parts. The first part is just choosing something to pay attention to that's not your worries. And we call this a home base. We call this an anchor. Some people prefer just to not choose anything, just to sit and be. In a sense, you're still making a choice.

You're making a choice to just notice your own being, and what it feels like to be present or be in presence. But for some of us, the mind has a lot of momentum. So to deliberately choose something that begins to interest us in some way, even in the most low-level ways, is very, it's kind of an empowering choice. So this first part is the selection. What am I going to attend to? That's not just that worry track. And by the way, you can attend to the worries as a meditation object.

This is maybe a little more advanced, but not as the worries, unconsciously more like, how interesting. The strange voice is in my head with these things, and here's the pauses, and here's the tone I'm listening to. It's like listening to the babble of a brook or something. But generally, we choose something that's going to be settling for us. And for a lot of us, that's some body sensation, going to be settling for us. And for a lot of us, that's some body sensation, the sensation of the breath, maybe at the nose or the belly, or if the breath is a bit unsettling, which it is for a lot of people actually,

the breath can make you anxious or it feels like, oh, am I controlling the breath? And if you're getting into a whole thing like that around the breath, then don't choose it. Choose feelings of warmth in the hands or the sense of your feet touching the ground. And of course other things too. You can choose sounds.

It's lovely to work with a tone or it might be a hum in the room or you're listening to birds. You can choose looking at the back of your eyes and just paying attention to the sort of lava lamp-like quality, although that gets a bit dreamy. And what I want to encourage you about this part is I'm going to take you through a meditation that just offers a few different anchor or home-based points and things you may not have recognized or in your experience are, oh, that's interesting. We don't necessarily want to get into a whole thing around am I finding the right thing,

but just it can be a kind of exploration to see what feels like it settles you or what interests you. And it doesn't have to be perfect. It's not like you choose this thing and all of a sudden the thoughts disappear. Often it's sort of like a split attention. You're paying attention to your breath, but you're still a little bit with your thoughts and they're both there and that's fine. So the selection is the first piece.

And then the second piece is more the sinking in. And sometimes this is more available than others. You can always select something to pay attention to, but you might only be there for a micro moment. You know, that is like, oh, here I am, I'm gonna choose this. Yeah, this is gonna be great. I'm making my selection wonderful. I'm gonna be with my breath.

And you're like, the breath, the breath is so, what am I gonna have for lunch? You know, it's like, oh, I got this. So that happens, and that's not a problem. You can notice the rhythm of that. But there is a quality that emerges through practice, through the commitment, through the sinking in. And it's sort of a sensual quality of deciding to be into the thing you're paying attention

to. Not in a straining way, but just kind of letting your interest flow into it. And the more you get into it, the more a little bit the real estate of that thing expands, and the more there can end up being this sort of flow quality where we get into this, we begin to taste a bit of absorption, a bit of that kind of Buddhist term is shamatha, this kind of drizzly, pleasurable, absorbed quality that can emerge a little bit. So that can sometimes happen. Other times it's less available, but that's kind of the sinking in.

So I'm going to guide a practice around a few different options for anchors, and then invite what it feels like to commit to them a little bit. And then in the second part, so we're going to do a 30-minute meditation, I'll just do a little bit on right effort, and I'll say a few things about it now just quickly. Just really straining and being effortful is sort of like very counterproductive in meditation. And it's sort of like a thing you begin to get a sense for.

Like you start out, you're like, it's hard to stay with something. There is more of a deliberate willfulness, and that's fine. But if you ever see yourself really straining, straining in the body and the face just actually creates restlessness in the mind, and it leads to more distractibility. So you kind of want to find the sweet spot for you

between being deliberate and vigilant-ish, not overvigilant, but just staying genuinely present for something in a more Jedi way, between that and being more, a little bit more leisurely and relaxed. So I'll offer some prompts around deliberately getting a little bit more Jedi and then kicking back and being a little bit more like a fisher person, slowly letting your lure out on a long casting line on a river in the middle of nowhere, and there's no rush and you're like

an elder settling into a lifetime of practice vibe. So we'll kind of find where we want to be in that little play. And so this is like an exploration. I love explorations. We're exploring what meditation is for us, what's available for us, and what's going to help us get into that place of kind of availability and good timeness. Sound like a plan? Best explained just in a meditation. Let's do it.

All right, so whether you're here in person or you're at home, you can choose how you wanna be sitting. You wanna be on a meditation cushion, if you're in a chair or if you're laying back, you could lie down too, or you could be standing if you're tired. That can help if you're tired. Regardless, try to, as you breathe in, stretch up or stretch out, lifting the spine. The in-breath is the oxygenating, the finding some alertness, the stretching up.

the oxygenating, the finding some alertness, the stretching up. And then the out-breath, that's the downward motion, the settling and arriving. So if you're feeling yourself to be a bit keyed up or you get the energy of the morning coffee, you can extend the out-breath a little bit and notice that feeling of settling that comes when the diaphragm relaxes. And we can kind of ride that down into a sense of our own bodies here, the feeling of being a body. As you breathe out, more aware of how the body is making contact with the seat to the ground, breathing up from the ground. Take a moment to notice that, that sense of being supported by so simple, but that can be a profound home base or anchor point right there.

The sense of contact with the ground itself. with the ground itself. And the attitude of the mind here at the beginning too is important. Is there this easygoing attitude, like not strict with yourself, welcoming the fact that there will be little sounds coming from around you, from other people, sounds in the there's the sound of my voice. You're not going to brace against it or get uptight against it. And similarly, inside you, there's going to be a certain energy level, feelings, thoughts, sensations. Okay, let's just begin with giving ourselves a break. You're not going to get any battles with anything.

I kind of breathe that out. I have to remember to breathe that out sometimes. So if we are drawn to work with an anchor or home base, some simple thing in our experience to begin to highlight something that's happening in the present, body is a wonderful place to begin. There's the breath itself, the soft breath as it comes in through the nose and through the chest and into the belly. Any part of that column can be something we pay attention to, including the whole column itself, the whole flow of the breath, just lightly with it. Noticing its texture, the subtlety of the breath.

A lot of people enjoy this because it's in the present, it's changing, it's sort of rhythmic. Some people like to count the breath just to help them get settled. Every time you breathe out, that's one, and the next out breath is two to ten and back again, something like that. It's just the slow shift of the real estate from where we were previously to this life of the body. So the breath feels enjoyable for you, like a natural place to pay attention, that's something you could explore. And also it could be that it's not attractive for whatever reason, in which case the reminder

is there's a much larger envelope or ground of body sensations, this larger container, from where you're making contact with the seat, on your chair or cushion, the tingles in the fingers, the soft feeling of the air against your skin, even a point in the body, like noticing the middle of your belly or your heart, the point in the chest, really anything that is noticeable to you. Some things are very subtle. They're not really, they don't pull us in, but other things like, oh yeah, I can put my attention there.

So I'll just be quiet for a few minutes and let you explore the world of breath and body sensation, seeing where you may want to rest your attention..... Mind wanders, especially at first, so it has a certain momentum. It's fine. Come back. That's the rhythm. You come back to the body, the sensation of being a body. You don't have to stop the thoughts.

Sometimes you're still aware of them moving by and through along with sounds, but there's also this beginning to settle into a body sensation. And can you really drop, like you're taking an elevator down out of the head through the neck, really trying to feel a sensation from the inside, as if you were right there on the inside of your abdomen or in your hand or in the breath, wherever it is, feeling it so intimately. For that, it helps to get still. And there's a kind of delicacy in attention, but not a straining. but not a straining.

Almost like you're just softly brushing against body and world......... And it's noticing the experience of being with some anchor in the body or the breath, how that is for you there. It can sometimes feel nice, like it's intimate and it's where your attention likes to be. Other times we might feel like we want to be a little broader, because we're bodies here, but there's also the sense of space around us, sounds and space, volume, air. I'll just offer that as another point of exploration. If you like going broad or wide, you can open your attention up and deliberately pay attention to, say, the sound of that vent or just the sense of space itself becomes something you notice. Maybe with a sense of your own body here in the middle or maybe just that is not part

of what's in the tension, and that's fine. So we can explore that too. It may feel nice to come out of the body to be in this more expanded place. It's the same principle though, when you choose something you're a little bit curious about or you want to spend some time with and you delicately notice the texture or the whatever quality is showing itself and you get into it..... So, whether you're working with a sound or a body sensation or the breath or something else. I encourage you for a few minutes here to really commit to it. Like really how much can you really stay with it? More of that Jedi quality, slightly disciplined, like really staying on it. Not in a straining way, but in a committed way.

Can you be right there for each moment it's showing itself to you? Just explore this side of being a little more effortful or a little more disciplined without the strain.... And good. And so now the imitation is to relax that a little bit. So you're still with your anchor, but now it's much more leisurely. You're really letting it come to you, this sort of unhurried quality to the way we're paying attention...... That's come and go. Sometimes they come up so big, we forget where we were, we're off thinking about something or distracted by something. We notice, we come back. We don't

make a problem with the fact that there's going to be that material, the self-consciousness will come in and out. Even so, we can choose to pay attention to something more simple and more settling. It's like we're choosing to take this break, to deliberately pay attention to something happening in the present that's settling for us or interesting for us, grounding, sensation, breath, sound. And every time we come back, we build up that muscle of concentration.... Can we really accept this is how it's going?

This is how it is. Lots of mind, very little mind, lots of feelings or a few feelings stable in attention or more distractible. All meditation happens over this larger ground of just accepting where we are, welcoming every part of the experience.. Last few minutes, like literally two minutes, just what happens if you just let go of all that and just be, let yourself be as you are. Sort of coasting on this momentum...... Thank you for your practice. We're going to do some sharing, but first we're going to have a little chat about what that experience was like for us to kind of warm up the room and then we'll open it up for questions and reports according to our

curriculum that Sebe and I did all the work on. It says we're going into a conversation with Seb, Dan, and Jeff sharing. Am I allowed to be part of the conversation? You are absolutely allowed. So how was that meditation for you Dan? It was great. Yeah didn't sleep that much last night so a little sleepy but didn't fall asleep. I actually turned my mic off in case I started to snore. I appreciate that. But I didn't snore and I didn't fall asleep. In some ways I find that the sleepiness if I just give myself permission to fall asleep it's less likely to happen. Isn't that interesting? Just don't struggle against it.

It's cool if I fall asleep, that's just the thing that's happening. Anyone else have that experience ever? Yeah, it's weird. You have that? Ever? I had a meditation teacher many years ago tell me if I fell asleep in meditation, that would be progress. Wow.

I was so goal-oriented and achieving. So I was like always trying to get somewhere in my practice and reaching for Samadhi, for concentration. How did you turn the corner so that you're not goal-oriented now in your practice? Failure. Yeah, a lot of suffering. That was not pleasant. Me too.

And it was actually when I started laying down in practice that I think that taking that for me because I learned so much through my body, lying down is the posture of surrendering and releasing for me. And so that was helpful. So I was not at risk for falling asleep, lying down the way other people are. So that probably made it easier to, not that I've never fallen asleep

doing lying down meditation, but that's not my tendency, I would say. Yeah, I relate to that. I had a, for years when I first started meditation, I had a teacher, Shinzen Young, who's an amazing teacher, Toby's teacher too. Maybe a few people in here know Shinzen. He's really a character, but he's very nerdy and very hyperkinetically interested in curiosities of the mind, as am I. So when I was learning meditation from him, which really landed, it was always like,

wow, what's going on over here? It was basically just more of the same, more of what I was already doing in my life, but now translated to meditation. And it gave me great clarity about the topography of what was available. But it was so up energy all the time. It actually ended up being kind of dysregulating for me, like I just would feel more restless from it, or more blown out. And it wasn't, it took years to realize

that that can happen spontaneously, but more I back off that and just come into my body and don't make it into some big deal, that was really the more of the medicine that I needed. But I think some people have the opposite. Some people are maybe so relaxed and in their body, they could use some of the- Or checked out.

Or checked out, yeah, exactly. They could use some of the... Or checked out. Or checked out. Yeah, exactly. They could use some of the more deliberate, animated, in-career curiosity to enliven things. And that's kind of part of the process of meditation, seeing where you're at and like, what is the medicine that you need in this moment? Yeah. That's why I love your meditation. You're such a great teacher because you really speak to so many different experiences. And this practice is so much about getting to know our own systems, our own bodies and

what they need. And so it's very hard to give instructions because there's 260 people in here. There are 260 meditations going on. And so for us to say, do this, do that, might not work for you. So it really is this process of attunement to ourselves to know what's needed and that takes time. It also changes. I'm not that striving tight,

kind of goal-oriented meditator and hopefully person anymore. And so that now I focus on other things. What about you, Dan? What? It's bossy dress over here. Bossy dress. I still strive.

I have a lot less experience than you guys, so I definitely get caught in trying to get somewhere. Where would you say you're trying to get to like concentration? Yeah. You're trying to get that absorbed. The end of the meditation. And it's either something I had to like also recognize the sweetness in that kind of striving because we've tasted something that was really peaceful or powerful for us. And so we're trying to recreate that.

There is this positive goodness in that. And it's how to not turn that against ourselves. Maybe once or twice in my meditative career have I had, you know, what for me were kind of peak experiences, what for you might be like a Tuesday afternoon, but for me, they're like, wow, I'm like really seeing it. She's very clear. I think those were incredible, but also a bit of a curse because I can fall back into wanting that again, of course. I don't know if this story would land, but it's just

coming in my head. So I'll say it, but I was doing during the pandemic, when there were no retreats, I organized this just with two friends of mine, a little retreat with a teacher named Alexis Santos, we were all just sitting around at my friend's house and the morning of day four or five, one of my friends described this incredible meditation and the other friend who's this very tall, morose, very serious German man without looking up just said, you will never feel that way again. Oh, man.

Yeah. It's actually one of the core learnings, you know. It's inevitable that you're going to want to go back to a particular feeling or a particular experience that you had. But the litmus test of whether a meditation is successful, whether it's landing in your life, is how you are in your life. Your experience is constantly going to change. And I like there's a teacher, Kenneth McCloud, yeah, Kenneth McCloud, he has this great metaphor

around running. He said, think about exercise. You decide to go for a run and one day you feel invigorated and powerful and you're able to just, it's terrific, it feels terrific when you exercise. But another day you're exhausted and you ache and you, you know, it's the worst thing ever. Yet in both cases you say you're building

your cardiovascular health. It's just the experience of running changes from moment to moment or day to day. And it's very true with a sitting practice. You're always meeting the practice of where you are and you have different things going on in your life. Sometimes you're going to feel really clear and settled and concentrated. Sometimes you'll have peak experiences that are like, wow, this is it. But other times you're blown out. Sometimes after you've been meditating a long time, you feel like, I'm really getting this meditation thing. And then all of a sudden

you're terrible for months. What's happening? It's like you're going back hill, uphill or whatever the metaphor is. Again, that's natural. There's always gonna be these changes that are happening and we're always in a sense, every time you sit and practice and come and meet your life, you're building that deeper habit, that kind of the equivalent of the cardiovascular health of what a practice gives you,

which is more capacity, more of a life. And the litmus test is in your life. Is that true? That's why I actually really appreciated the question last night. We didn't take it there. But walking practice to me, if anybody juggles here, you know, you first learn to juggle with two balls and then you add more balls. And it's like walking is adding more balls to our practice. Because then we open our eyes, we're moving, and it's more challenging, as you mentioned last night, but it starts to help us take it off the cushion or off the seat so that this isn't the only place where we can feel like that, but we can start to bring this kind of awareness and understanding into all parts of our lives. And there are other practices like

relational practices and insight dialogue. It's like a practice where you talk with a partner and bring the same awareness to your experience. So there are all sorts of ways for us to start to apply this into being together in the world and not just in our meditation cave. That's kind of the idea that we're treated to. Yes. I live with a nine-year-old and anytime somebody says

the word balls, he falls out of his chair. So what you're saying is that there are like two, there's like the, we can have a goal, quote unquote, a long-term goal of sanity, calm, doing life better, training the mind. Yeah. Or intention, as you said last night. Intention, yes. But don't get hung up on a short-term goal of this sit must be awesome. So it's just like one of your favorite words, a paradox, two things being true at the same time. You can have a lightly held aspiration, intention, direction, but don't get too hung up on making

progress in any particular sit or retreat or weekend. Yeah. And the balance, like Jeff was talking about, like tuning the string. If you make it too tight, it's going to snap. If you're too loose, you can't play anything. And so you're always finding that balance of that intention and how you hold to that intention because it does take some effort.

And it's about your life. Practice is your life. That's the big picture. You have your whole life to explore it and there will be seasons, it's going to change. You have to have that big picture. Over the big picture, over time, the more you come back to the practice, there's a kind of tendency to be able to be with more and more. There is change, but it's a slow build for most of us. I think part of it is beginning to connect to the pleasure of the practice for in and of itself, regardless of what's happening, become a key moment. You're less so instantly need this kind of reward

in the practice, but you're like, you kind of start to sit for its own sake. ["Soul of the Heart"] Big thanks to both Jeff and Semenay Selassie, who you heard in there as well. As I said earlier, in a couple days we've got a full episode, which will be drawn from some of the exchanges from Meditation Party. And then next Friday we're going to drop another bonus meditation guided by me. As always, you can find more meditations, hundreds of them 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 Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.