Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Guided Meditation: 'The Training Ground'

Episode Date: September 9, 2016

Want to give meditation a try? This is a great place to start. Meditation can seem simple, even trivial. But the mental muscle we exercise in beginning again (and again, and again) is an excellent training ground for the many times in our everyday lives when things don't go as planned. We've built the skill of beginning again. This is a guided meditation from Dan's "10% Happier: Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics" app, featuring Sharon Salzberg (featured in Episode #8 of this podcast!). A towering figure in the meditation world, Salzberg is part of a small group of people who helped bring meditation over from Asia to the United States. She is a meditation teacher, the co-founder of Insight Meditation Society and the author of nine books. 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. dot 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. So close listeners will know that we occasionally, we probably should do this more frequently, but we occasionally post free guided meditations in this podcast feed.

So here's another one. The previous ones have been from Joseph Goldstein, who's my teacher. But this one is from Sharon Salisberg, who has been on the podcast. She's been a partner of Joseph's in the meditation world for a long, long time as a good friend of mine has been a teacher of mine as well.

And in this podcast, she going to talk about the thing that I think is the bugaboo for all of us, which is that we keep getting distracted when we meditate and we feel like we're failures. And she is vastly reassuring on this point. This is a meditation that comes actually from a course that she recently did on the 10% happier app called 10% less distracted. So if you want more of it, you can go to the app and get it from her there, but here we are. I think of what we do in the meditation is really the training ground for how we live. It's those same skills. And one of the things I've loved about meditation practice is that

skills. And one of the things I've loved about meditation practice is that these really enormous life-changing skills are happening in these anybody little moments. So if you did a meditation session and you ran into a friend and they said, what'd you do? And you said, I felt a few breaths. My mind wandered and I brought it back. I would be like, eh, really? You spent an afternoon doing that? That's weird. That's nothing. But it's not nothing. It's actually huge because so many instances in our life in any ordinary day were called upon to begin again. We've made a mistake or something's not happening the way we anticipated it happening and we have to start over. And the tendency, of course, is to be very self-critical and not to be able to start over that readily.

And so we can spend endless periods of time lamenting the fact that we blew it or things didn't go so well. Whereas actually the most effective, efficient way to get something done or make progress or succeed at something is to know how to begin again. And so when we practice, even in that ordinary way, we're with the breath, our mind wanders, we bring it back, we're doing something tremendous right there. Let's begin the meditation. To start, you can sit comfortably. You want to have some energy in your body. You also want to be relaxed and it is. Feel your way into what seems like a balanced posture for you. You can close your eyes or not, however you feel most comfortable.

Thrides are open, they could be slightly open, find a spot to rest your gaze. Let it go. breaths, relax your body, and intentionally set aside what you were just doing and whatever might be coming ahead. Then allow the breath to become natural. predominantly. this, bring your attention there and just rest. If you're with the breath of the nostrils, you might notice tingling, vibration, warmth, coolness. If at the chest or the abdomen, you might notice movement, pressure, stretching, release. You don't have to name them, but feel them. Just one breath. If something arises, sensations, emotions, sounds, images, whatever it might be. That's not strong enough to take your attention away from the feeling of the breath.

Just let them flow on by, you're breathing. It's just one breath. Everything else can come and go, it doesn't matter. If something arises that is strong enough to take your attention away from the feeling of the breath, or you fall asleep, you get lost in some incredible fantasy, we say that the moment you realize you've been distracted is the magic moment, because that's the moment we have the chance to be really different. Not judge ourselves, not put ourselves down, but simply let go and begin again. If you have to let go and begin again thousands of times, it's fine.

That's the practice, that's the training. Just one breath at a time. You may notice the rhythm of your breath changing in the past, jumping to the future, judgment, speculation, whatever, it's okay. Our practices to let go gently. We let go as gently as we can and simply return. Remember that in letting go of distraction, the important word is gentle. We can gently let go. And we can begin again. And when you feel ready, you can open your eyes and reconnect with what's happening around you. Everything that arises in our lives can and does arise in our practice. We see the same desires and fears and joys and if anything we're learning in meditation

practice how to be closer to our experience and develop wisdom from all the many things that we go through. And my thanks to Sharon for that guided meditation. As I said, if you want more guided meditations from Sharon Salisberg and other great teachers like Joseph Goldstein, et cetera, et cetera. You can check out the 10% happier app. It's free to get started. And all those free meditations you can use in perpetuity. And we'll be back with more guided meditations

and more great guests very, very soon. 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 Wondery 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 there listeners. completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.

Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduka Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discussed their entire journey from day one, and all the skills

they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty. So, if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery app.