Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Guided Meditation: Jon Kabat-Zinn (Bonus!)

Episode Date: May 3, 2017

Want to give meditation a try? Here's a great place to start. It's a free, guided meditation from Jon Kabat-Zinn, the creator of mindfulness-based stress reduction. When you're done, make sure to listen to Dan's full interview with Jon Kabat-Zinn, in Episode #75. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a 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. If you haven't listened to my conversation with John Kabbidzen, I highly recommend you do so. But if you have, or either way, really, we got a guided meditation from one of the true maistros of our era. So here it is. This is not about closing your eyes or it's not about like distracting yourself as something else, but see if you can be in touch with your body, whatever it is that you're doing in this moment, as you're listening to my voice, can you be aware of your body standing or sitting or driving or whatever it is, and hold it in awareness?

Of course, part of it will be because it's inevitable that we're breathing. The body is breathing. But the meditation is not about the breath. It's not about any object of attention. It's about, as we were saying, the attending itself, the awareness itself. So see if you can just be aware of this moment, whatever it is that you're doing. And if you can't stop or pull over to the side of road

or sit down in your kitchen or whatever it is, see if you can drop into just being in your space, without having to have anything happen next. your space without having to have anything happen next. And just befriend stillness, befriend silence, befriend the body as a whole sitting here breathing or standing and breathing, walking and breathing. And expanding the field of your awareness to include whatever thoughts might be moving through your mind, and whatever feelings or emotional storms might be arising at this particular moment, whether they're mild or severe, and just allow it all to just unfold in this moment, just as it is without any kind of attempt to suppress anything or generate a story about it or judge

it. worry about it or judge it, but to just recognize that this is experience expressing itself in human form in this moment, your experience expressing itself and being met and being known with this faculty that we're all gifted with, the faculty of the embracing the actuality of things in awareness, just as they are in this moment. And then resting in the awareness itself, with no place to go, nothing to do, nothing to attain, no special state to grab onto or cling to, the recognition that everything you're experiencing is unbelievably special.

Your eyes work, your ears work, your breath works. And you can hold it all as a mother-might hold to her child. In good times, in bad times, in hard times. But that kind of a loving embrace that's simply bigger than the actuality of whatever's happening. And that's the boundless spaciousness of awareness. And it's a place you can actually take up residency. You can live here in this only moment, in this present moment.

And when the mind gets carried away or distracted, you can always come back. Once you recognize it, that recognizing is itself a moment of wakefulness. And if you merely practice this for the next 30 or 40 years, on a regular basis every day, or whenever you remember to, if on the basis of this conversation that Dan and I've been having something that was said, even one tiny little thing resonates with you, I would suggest you trust that and nurture it and feed it and see what happens. And be your own teacher, and that life itself becomes your real teacher and help you remember.

That is possible to actually wake up in B&W's relationship to with things as they are, whether they're pleasant or unpleasant. And therefore, touch base with the potential for learning, growing, healing and transformation throughout the lifespan, starting from the only place any of us ever can, and residing here in this moment we call now. Sometimes that will look a lot, I've used a lot of words to say this, but sometimes it will just look a lot like silence.

Silent wakefulness, and being the knowing and the not knowing, and the knowing of not knowing that awareness offers us when we learn to inhabit it. Just this. Just this. And when you're ready, if you care to, if your eyes have been closed, might gently be aware of inviting them to open. And noticing that you can maintain the same awareness, even when you generate the thought that, okay, that's over now, I'm not meditating, and realize that, like, no, you could turn that around and realize in a certain way that your entire life can be held

in awareness, that it can become your default mode, so to speak, the way that the neuroscientists talk about it. The mindfulness and heartfulness can become your go-to dimension, as opposed to mindlessness and emotional reactivity and self-centeredness. The more you practice, as they say, practice makes perfect. If we're practicing mindlessness, we're getting better and better, getting angry and reactive and ornry and dissatisfied and if we are practicing mindfulness and heartfulness, then as they said, practice makes perfect. And as I also said, since you are already perfect, what you are practicing is actually recognizing,

recognizing, recognizing who you really are and how much the world actually I would say needs every single one of us to show up in our fullness. There you go. big thanks to John Kabatzen and just a reminder that we've got plenty of guided meditations that are free up on the 10% happier app, which is available in the Apple App Store and hopefully in the not too distant future also on Google, but if you don't have an Apple device you can get it on 10% happier.com. Thanks. Hey, hey prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add 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 slash survey.

Hey, I'm Ericia 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 RuPaul 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

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