Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Guided Meditation: Coming to Center (Bonus!)

Episode Date: March 13, 2017

Here's a meditation from one of Dan's favorite teachers on the planet, Jeff Warren. In this simple practice, Jeff guides us in using the center-line of the body as an object of focus. The goal is to inch closer to that illusive feeling of fulfillment. Get more content like this from Dan and Jeff's "Two Meditators in a Car" journey on the "10% Happier" app. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. Okay, we got a free guided meditation for you. This is from a new course that we've just posted on the 10% happier app. It's called Two Meditators in a Car. That's the name of the course. Roughly modeled on Jerry Seinfeld's two comedians in a car getting coffee. This is me and one of the most amazing meditation teachers in the world, Jeff Warren. I call him my man crush. A couple of months ago we went on a wandering retreat where we just kind of wandered around in a car into the

mountains north of New York City and just wired the car up with microphones and cameras and just shot the proverbial, you know what? And so the course consists of our conversations which are really interesting and mostly deal with how meditators use their practice to deal with the fact that we still have problems in our lives. So even though we're meditators, we still have our encounter of the vexations and vicissitudes of life.

And so that's what we talk about in the course. And here's one of the meditations from the course called Coming to Center. And I think you'll enjoy it. Check it out. Hey, this is Jeff. So maybe the most radical promise of meditation is that it can move a person in the direction of being fulfilled and happy, independent of life's changing circumstances and conditions. I'm not sure you can ever get there fully, but you can definitely learn to get more there.

And from this place, we're able to respond to those conditions more skillfully and creatively. So what does that actually mean? What does this notion of fulfillment independent conditions mean? The way I think of it is as coming to center. So for this meditation, we're going to explore a bunch of different ways to come to center and be curious of what works for you and what does it feel like when you're there or you're more there? Was it mean for your nervous system, your particular nervous system to come to center? So this is going to be a meditative tour of different expressions and many techniques that come into center and as an exploration it's about curiosity

parts are going to click more than others and that's okay We're kind of learning about ourselves the ideas that one or two of these ways in will feel more compelling to you and then you may be able to come back to it any time even in really short little meditations. The idea is that you can then use it in any occasion in life that I can help you kind of come into your own center, become a more solid place to stand in. So when you're ready, let's begin. Okay, you can start by closing your eyes. Take a couple of deep breaths.

As you breathe in and stretch it up to spine, finding this composure in the posture, the alertness. As you're breathing out, softening the face and the jaw, the eyes and the forehead, softening the shoulders, diaphragm, relaxes, and the exhale, the hands are soft. The breath come in, comes out, feel yourself to be solid, settled in your rootedness. So, different ways to come to center, we can start with simple presence. What does your own embodied, aware presence feel like?

So, right here at the very beginning, might be this thing we're looking for, just a sense of noticing your own embodied presence, and that's kind of centering your grounding for you. Just take a moment to kind of feel into that. Okay, good. So as we move here into different techniques, we're going to get a little bit more immersive as we go, a little bit more detailed. This next one, call it the mountain. The idea is to deliberately picture in your mind's eye as best you can, the image of a mountain. So make it, you know, majestic and inspiring, like big broad shape,

it's high peak, but a thick base rooted the rocks, like connected to the earth's crust. And the idea is to imagine that you are that mountain. You are that mountain. You're rooted totally still, except for your breath. The sense of uplift from deep inside you, then the pelvis and spine, and with each breath here, more like this, uplifted mountain on wavering in your stillness, beyond words and thoughts just the center-rooted presence. With any of these, if you get distracted, you just come back to the technique of the visualization. 1.5% de la cacura. Okay, good.

I'm going to move on to the next little part of our exploration, our tour. That's we're going to add some breathing to this, some earth breathing. So it's very simple as you sit there feeling rooted. Just imagine you're breathing up from the earth. So you're kind of breathing in the earth's strong, mineral content into your body. You can place your attention below the ground. It's like you're breathing up from there. In the in-breath, your breathing and strength and stability up through the spine to the body. On the out-breath, you're imagining your breathing out tension back down into the earth.

And if you want, you can explore breathing from ever more deeply in the earth, or sending your attention down, deeper and deeper and breathing out from there, setting the intention 1.0.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1. Okay, good. Just going for it here. Even if it feels weird or strange. We can judge a meditation by how we feel after we've done it. Sometimes the most unexpected techniques can be strangely compelling, consoling, centering. If you don't like working with the breath, you can just continue to feel yourself as this sort of centered

presence. Connected to the earth. Okay, so the next one connects to that. Each of these is like a Venn diagram that connects to the one before. So this one involves working with a center line of the body. You can start by rocking your body a little bit, just trying to feel a vertical line through your spine. It comes up in your spine. If it helps, some people imagine the line as being blue, kind of a pale blue, very thin like a strand of hair from the top of your head all the way to the base of your spine. So the idea is that you're trying to visualize the whole line through the body.

And how does it feel to literally feel centered, to feel that center line? So partly this is imagination, partly it's just a, you know, a body thing. And you can even turn your body a little bit in your posture and kind of imagining that line moving with you. It's like you're at the still point of the turning world. the point of the turning world. Sounds around you. Sensations coming and going. Just exploring it. So with the next piece we're going to see if we can make it a little bit more coherent or clear.

And that's that there are different points along that line that some people like to use to center them. So we're going to touch on the three breathing into each one. The first point is in the very center of the head. Look at it behind your eyes, between your ears. As you breathe very gently through the nose, imagine you're sending the breath into that point. The trick is to inhale very fine and long, kind of working precisely. Breathing into that point.

Tiny little point, like the tip of a needle. Just exploring for a minute. Even if you're not clear where that point is, it's sort of just sending your awareness Okay, good. So the next point is the heart. So just drop down that elevator shaft through the throat, down to behind the breastbone, and begin to orient to that space where the heart is. Then you can use the breath again as you breathe. It's like you're breathing directly now into the heart. It's almost like you got nostrils on your chest, breathing into the heart,

and then gently releasing on the exhale without leaving the heart center. So your tension stays in the heart center in that area. Just be curious. Remember, we're just exploring here. The idea is that we're kind of doing a tool or a different places in our experience that we can rest our attention. And we're seeing if, as we do this tour, there's one that, wow, it's kind of compelling for us. It feels like something we want to explore further.

Certainly have a chance to do that. After this meditation, anytime to go back to anyone part of these and go more deeply into it. So the next point is in the gut, in the belly. So what in Chigong is called the dantian. It's about an inch below your belly button and then inside, kind of all the way into the spine. So putting your attention there, ra, the hara. It's in the word for it, Japanese word for it. It's going of be in the belly, being in the Buddha belly, breathing into it now, and these long, fine, slow, inhales into the belly. And then releasing. And noticing that experience is different than putting your attention in the heart,

chest, or versus putting it in the head. What happens when you kind of put your attention down there, when you be from this place? Down in the belly, just feeling that. 1.5% 1.5% 1.5% 1.5% 1.5% 1.5% 1.5% 1.5%

1.5% 1.5% 1.5% 1.5% 1.5% Good breathing into the belly. This point low down, down by our center of gravity. Letting it center you. Just being open to the experience might be pleasurable. It might be utterly boring.

In which case, just finding some good naturedness around it. We're almost done our tour. Okay, so for our last stop, we keep going down all the way to the ground itself. So just bringing your awareness to the actual physical ground below you, what you're sitting on, the point of contact between your body and the earth, it might be your feet and your butt, both, just feeling that point of contact, noticing how, as the body presses down with its weight, the earth presses back up to support the body. There's a kind of perfect equilibrium there. And this is the real ground.

Ground that stretches out to the part whoever you might be sitting with or people in more distant locations. One ground. Everyone connected, supported by the same ground. Just feeling that ground beneath you. Does it feel like for you? 1.0.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1. Okay, good. And so that's the end of our tour.

So I doubt that all of those will have worked equally well for you, but one or two of them might encourage you to, you know, relisten to the tour, as your experience, it might change the idea that once you find one or two techniques that feel kind of centering for you, then you can just continue to practice it and explore it. And you can explore this wherever. You can do a two-minute version before a meeting say or in the car or anywhere. You just sit in a loose, good-natured way, close your eyes, and like a samurai you come to center. And that's the meditation. When you're ready, you can open your eyes. That's the meditation. When you're ready, you can open your eyes.

So the centeredness is a kind of direction or quality that we can begin to orient to in our experience. When that gets richer and more vivid, the more we pay attention to it. It begins to give us a place to stand in. That lessons are suffering. So our access to it might fluctuate a bit, depending on the intensity of life circumstances and how much practice we're doing and who knows what else.

But the more we connect to it, the more available it seems to become. Okay, and that's our session for today. I look forward to exploring with you tomorrow or whenever the next time is that we meet up. Big thanks to Jeff Warren for that meditation thanks to you for listening to it and like I said if you want to check out more you can listen to or download our course two meditators in a car on the 10% happier app and we'll be back with more guided meditations and more great conversations right here on this podcast stream very soon.

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