How Being Wired Differently Can Be an Advantage | Jeff Warren

What if the problem isn't you—but the idea that there's only one "right" way to meditate? In this episode, DJ Cashmere talks with meditation teacher Jeff Warren about how to build a mindfulness practice that actually fits your brain, nervous system, and life. Drawing from Jeff's experience with ADHD and bipolar disorder—and DJ's reflections on OCD and neurodiversity in his family—they explore why there's no such thing as a truly neurotypical mind, and why one-size-fits-all meditation advice often falls short. Rather than prescribing a single approach, Jeff emphasizes experimentation: noticing what settles you, what feels intolerable, and what helps you come back to presence. That might mean focusing on the breath, opening awareness, moving the body, journaling, or simply taking a walk. They return repeatedly to a simple litmus test for any practice: Is this helping me be here? And they frame that question through three core skills of mindfulness—clarity, concentration, and equanimity—which can be cultivated in many different ways. This episode is especially helpful if you've ever felt restless, frustrated, or "bad" at meditation—and are looking for a more flexible, compassionate way to practice. You can get more meditations from Jeff, our Teacher of the Month for DanHarris.com http://danharris.com/, by checking out our new app, 10% with Dan Harris https://app.danharris.com/membership. Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here https://app.danharris.com/membership Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris Thanks to our sponsor: Airbnb: Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com/host http://airbnb.com/host.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:18Dan Harris?

  Hello there. How we doing? Today, we're going to talk about how to meditate with the brain you actually have, as opposed to the one you wish you had. You're going to be hearing from the great meditation teacher and great friend of mine, Jeff Warren, who is hilariously and also admirably open about his ADHD and bipolar diagnoses. I do want to make one thing clear from the jump here. This is not just a conversation for people who have official labels or diagnoses. As Jeff points out, there may not even be such a thing as a neurotypical brain. Every one of us has quirks, sensitivities, and idiosyncrasies that shape how we show up when we meditate. As you're about to hear, Jeff is relentlessly

• 1:03Dan Harris?

  practical. He's going to break down how to figure out what works for you, whether that's deep breathing practice, open awareness, movement, journaling, just taking a bath, whatever. He talks about why paying attention to your own wiring is not self-indulgent. It's actually a foundation for clarity, regulation, and frankly, being less of a menace to everybody around you. Just a few items of business before we dive in here. First, we will not be holding our weekly live this Tuesday, December 30. I will be back with you live, though, three times during our New Year's Challenge. So I'll be doing the regular live session on Tuesday, the 6th, at 4:00 PM Eastern. We do our live sessions every Tuesday at

• 1:47Dan Harris?

  4:00. But that week, when we'll also be doing our meditation challenge, I'll also be doing live sessions at 4:00 Eastern on the 8th and also on the 11th. Speaking of the meditation challenge, and also speaking of our live video meditation and Q&A sessions, you can get both the challenge and our live sessions, and of course, this podcast without the ads, on our new app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. You can sign up at danharris.com. There's a free 30-day trial if you want to try before you buy. All right, after the break, Jeff Warren in conversation with the executive producer of this show, DJ Cashmere.

• 2:29Dan Harris?

  If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low-stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission,

• 3:14Dan Harris?

  and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low-stakes way

• 3:58Dan Harris?

  to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission, and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Jeff Warren, welcome back.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  DJ, good to be with you, bud.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  So I'd be curious to hear from you a little bit today about how to practice with our own specific idiosyncratic brains, minds, nervous systems. I know you have been very open about your ADHD and bipolar, and you and I talked before starting this recording about how we've got both OCD and ADHD in my little nuclear family unit. And I think the more I learn about neurodivergence, the more I wonder if neurotypical is even a thing at all. And so I would just be curious to hear from you broadly about, yeah, how do we befriend our

• 5:07Speaker 01

  own specific minds and figure out what does and doesn't work for us as we enter the practice?

• 5:15Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a huge question. It's the one I've spent my life trying to figure out for myself. I can talk personally about the things I've learned, but maybe just to say generally, it's also very immediate. Like you just said, I have my kids, my partner, I mean, autism and ADHD are a big part of our kind of family group, and I've got my own stuff. So I had to learn this in my practice for myself, and now I'm having to learn it as a parent. Oh, my gosh, what's going to work to settle my guys, you know? And so I'm really interested in this question. I think the most important principle is what works is what works, you know? The right practice is the one that works for you. And there's almost always going to be a period of experimentation around that. Don't believe the monolithic stories, even within the neurodivergence literature that might say,

• 5:59Speaker 02

  oh, you're ADHD, you can't meditate, or you're this, you can't do that, you know? There's different presentations of ADHD, but you may find that as an ADHD person, your capacity to hyper-focus lets you really get into the breath. And it turns out that you're just a natural meditator with that very simple, quote, accessible object that you often hear about in meditation. On the other hand, you may be an ADHD person who it's utterly intolerable staying for more than a minute with something because there's just a claustrophobia of it, you know? In which case, you need to Experiment like that's what I like exploring different meditation objects for. I like to get people to notice what does it feel like to be with the breath? Does it feel claustrophobic or too much? Okay, can we expand out?

• 6:42Speaker 02

  What about the whole body, the feeling of the whole body? Okay, even that, what about expanding out more of an open awareness practice? I mean, my friend Ofosu with OCD, when he stumbled on open awareness practice, it was like, oh, my God. That was the game changer for him. It gave him all this more space. So there's that. I weave in like how intolerable is the restlessness? So let's do a movement practice, you know, let's shake it off. You can totally work with that. There's so many ways to reconfigure the skills of meditation. This core skills are very first framing skill is just the, I care enough about myself to try to learn, to go through this learning, to notice that there's a difference in how I am. I'm going to learn about this. I'm going to read books about neurodivergence.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  I'm going to, you know, pay attention to some boards and hear what other people are saying about that. I'm going to go, oh yeah, that's true of me or I do have that. I'm going to care about thinking about how to implement self-regulation for myself. Like my roommate is autistic and just had this massive autism burnout situation yesterday and had to totally change her plans. But she knows enough about herself to know to do that. Because in the past, she's gone way too far and there's been these downstream causes. So she already has been in the process of learning about that and can say, oh, I can protect myself here. So I can change. So you had this high level caring about your difference, caring about yourself. That's one skill. And then you have the skill always within a practice of where am I at? What do I need? The clarity?

• 8:09Speaker 02

  What can I pay attention to? That's not the usual stuff of my worries. That's the concentration. So maybe I need to go for a walk in nature. Maybe I need to do a journaling practice or listen to some music or take a bath. Like those things can be regulating and some. So the concentration piece is choosing where you want to put your attention. The clarity is learning where you're at, what's happening. The equanimity always super key. That's one that's not represented much in the neurodiversity literature because there's not really a contemplative understanding there. There's like own your identity, be your identity, but the equanimity is like, hold it lightly. Let yourself be in a humble place of learning, you know, notice the changeability of you. How the part of you that's noticing your ADD traits is not actually ADHD.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Or OCD or anything and you can kind of begin to rest back in that. In other words, experiment, learn from others. See it as this necessary part about, oh, how am I wired? Once I can get clarity about how I'm wired, I can begin to communicate that to other people. I can communicate accommodations that I need or I let people know when I first meet them. Like they tell me their name. I'm like, awesome. If I don't write this down on my phone, I'm going to instantly forget it because I'm ADHD and I have like a short term memory buffer. That's like a micro filament thin. I'm not going to remember this, but I'm going to write on my phone. If I don't write on my phone, sorry. I'm going to forget like I can at least communicate that upfront now and having, because I had that insight and that actually creates a lot less suffering for me downstream.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  And so that's a kind of an ADHD answer to your question, but yeah.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  No, I love it. Let me see if I can try to reflect some of it back. I mean, just first to say there are going to be plenty of folks listening who have one of these diagnoses and plenty of folks who, who don't. The folks who don't, that may be because they don't qualify for one of these. And it also may be just because they don't have one, right? But I think everything you're saying is relevant to every single person listening, because every single brain and nervous system is by definition different in the same way that every fingerprint is different.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  Diversity is the rule.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Right, right. So I feel like I'm hearing a couple of important things in here. One is just at a baseline, at an absolute baseline foundational first step is just the learning to give enough of a shit about yourself and have enough warmth towards yourself to start to try to understand how your specific brain body works, suffers, thrives. And then you mentioned this trifecta, which I know you mentioned on the show before. I think it comes from Shenzhen, but correct me if I'm wrong. But the trifecta is the clarity, concentration, equanimity, right? These are sort of the three legged stool of mindfulness and clarity in this context.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Could range everywhere from clarity about your particular diagnosis, or your brain, or your nervous system, or your body, or your family's needs, clarity, and that's broadly, but that's also in a specific moment, right? Like, right now, I need a bath. Right now, I need a walk. Right now, I need to sit. Right now, I need Netflix. So clarity about who you are, what you need. Concentration, however you personally come by concentration, and whatever concentration looks like for you. It could be hyper-focus on the breath, could be a much looser, open awareness, could be something else. And then crucially, you landed on that third leg of the stool equanimity, which is about whatever the answers to any of the foregoing are,

• 11:50Speaker 01

  a basic okayness with those answers, and also holding them lightly, because they, like everything else, are also impermanent.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  That was a masterful summary. Yeah, a couple of things in there. The concentration is about what do you want to devote your attention to? That you've chosen for you. You may already, most people already have a sense of certain things that regulate them. It's what's interesting is that we often have a kind of intuitive sense of a practice already, or we do. We know hanging out with this person, or these friends, is kind of like settles me in a deep way. I know going into nature is very settling. So I like to honor where people are already putting their attention in. And that is the name of the game, you know? Don't just put it on your worries. Start to choose where you're going to put it for this period of time. That's what a practice is. It's a kind of protected space where you set the intention, where you're going to put your attention, including you're going to let yourself wander all over too,

• 12:45Speaker 02

  because that's part of it, that learning. But that's one piece in there. And then the other piece, you know, maybe more of an empowering. Well, first of all, there is no such thing as a neurotypical brain. That's, everyone in the neurodiversity literature is very clear on that. Neurodiversity is the rule, just like biological diversity is the rule. The word that may be more appropriate is more neuro-normative, that there are a set of norms about how to function in a culture that some people find impossible to move along with. They really chafe, but others. Feel like there's almost a set of cultural agreements that they can manage or make do with. Those who can make do with it, who can flow along with it are more aligned with a kind of neuro normative sort of way of being like they, of course, they're going to have their uniqueness and differences in the way they're wired, but

• 13:28Speaker 02

  they're not. The reason we came up with neurodiversity in the first place was the way to empower people who felt like they couldn't be in that. There was so much suffering caused by trying to mask or jam your way into this way of operating that where you're just were wired differently. You were like a square peg in a round hole. So that's just a little bit about the, what is neurotypical. It's like no one's neurotypical. We're all neurodiverse, but it's up to us to figure out how we are in order to flow into what's happening in the world. And then there's this, this is the exciting thing to put people in the moment. This is the expansion of consciousness in real time. This is the world we're living in. Enormous demands are placed on us that have not been placed there before. In response, nature is creating even more diversity in nervous systems.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  If these nervous systems are there to be solutions, their creativity, their differences will be solutions to the world's problems, but not if they can't see how to work with themselves. Otherwise they'll just add to the world's problems, you know? We're in this time where neurodiversity is asking us, it's saying, where there used to be a clump of saying, oh, this was, this is what it is to be human, this kind of a person. We get really close up into that fist and we see that it's lots of little spectrums of socialities, spectrums of sensitivities, spectrums of how we pay attention, spectrums of emotionality of arousal levels. Like there is this much more diverse, undulating, octopus person and our, our, our being is spread out through those different tentacles in different ways. And

• 14:56Speaker 02

  can we begin to get clear about what those different spectrums are? Oh, then we can, we know ourselves more. We can reflect back to each other more. We can find ecosystems that we can all fit in. As opposed to the opposite of that, which is like, this is how we got to do things. And then you're either in or you're out. And if you're out, all those resources are not going towards helping the world, you know? So that's how I see the big picture. To have that curiosity this time is the cutting edge of what the world needs now. Cause it'll be turning into the solutions to the world's problems eventually, you know, if you're hopeful about it.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  That was such a rich answer, and I'll be thinking more after we hop about what you said about there's no neurotypical, but there's definitely neuro-normative and what it feels like for people who fall outside of that. That was really helpful. All right, I just want to ask one more question before I let you go here. As I'm listening to you talk about not just the personal, but and this is, I hesitate to say this, but it's kind of a Danism, but you know, the sort of geopolitical case for figuring out your own nervous system. It's putting me in mind of the conversations I've had over the last few months with Kyra Jewell, with Dawn, with Cara, with Vinnie, with Seb, you know, with Christiana, all of these wonderful teachers. And over and over and over, we, it doesn't

• 16:09Speaker 01

  seem to matter what the question even is, we keep coming back to this same central tenet of the importance of being present enough with yourself and open enough with yourself to figure out what genuinely works for you. And that comes up in the context, whether we're talking about like, how do I choose which meditation to do? Or what do I do when I'm in pain? Or how do I meditate with anger? Right? Like, the answer is always shot through with some sense of like, well, it depends. Learn to listen to yourself. And I guess, as I've heard that answer come through again and again over the last several months, I'm putting myself in the position of a listener who may be wondering something

• 16:51Speaker 01

  like, okay, but does that just mean like, everything is on the table? How would I know when it isn't practice anymore? How would I know when the experiment isn't working? How would I know when trying on everything is taking me too far from myself, you know, and I need to pick something and try it for a while, go deep instead of go wide? Can you just speak to that side of it to wrap us up here?

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, the whole point of all of this. Is to locate yourself where you are. You're back here, you're not overextended, you're right, present and available. It only ever asks that you're available in the fraction of this moment, that's it. From this place, what is the signal that wants to come through about? Where you want to put your attention, how you want to respond, it's always coming back to this place. So that's what you're looking for in a practice. Whatever practice you're trying out, does it bring you to that place? Does it help you find that place? And that's it. That is the measure of a successful practice.

• 18:00Speaker 02

  It's not any special effect happening inside the meditation itself. It's not some, it's, is that ever more true for you? And so some people are going to find that through, they devote themselves to one thing, to the breath in a particular tradition, and they're finding that this is true. They're ever more present in that way. Great, ain't broke, don't fix it. There will be a necessary time of devoting yourself. We're talking about you have to first get settled so that you can find that sense of presence. So whatever will settle you. If that's not you, you know, you may need to be a little more exploring to figure out what's going to work. And that's just because you're wired that way. You know, it's not obvious what that thing is, but the litmus test is in life, are you more available?

• 18:45Speaker 02

  And present for the signal of what wants to come true? What wants to happen? You never need to go beyond that. You only ever need to live in the micro thin filament layer of the moment. Boom, back here, more settled. What wants to happen? Back here, more settled. What wants to happen? Whatever will support you in that, that's your practice. It might be a journaling practice. It might be your yoga practice, you're flowing with the breath, it helps you feel more settled, you know? And so you, you, you work with what you already know about yourself. But it's true, at a certain point, the way I get through my ADHD, I jump around all the time with different practices, but I'm always cultivating those skills. I know what they are.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  I'm always coming back to accepting what's happening in this moment. What am I noticing here? What do I want to devote my attention to, you know? Is that helpful?

• 19:36Speaker 01

  It's really helpful. Yeah, I think what I'm hearing, at least in part, is you can have a litmus test that you apply, whether it's to the one practice that you always do, or to the 40 practices you're trying this month, right? And maybe that litmus test sounds something like, is this helping me be here? Is it helping me be settled? Is it helping me see more clearly about what wants to happen next, right? Or to go back to your framework from a few minutes ago, that maybe the litmus test is like, am I more clear, more concentrated, more equanimous, right? But some version of not overcomplicating what it is that we're shooting for here, which is a kind of presence, a kind of calm, a kind of clarity.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Availability is what I like to say. Availability. I love that. And you can ask that of whatever it is you're trying today. Exactly. Well said. Love it. Always such a pleasure. Thanks, man. Great to DJ.

• 20:39Dan Harris?

  Thank you to Jeff, thank you to DJ, thank you as well to our incredible intern, Malika Tattavarti, for her editing help on this episode. Don't forget, we will not be doing our regularly scheduled live meditation and Q and A session this Tuesday, December 30th. I will be back live, though, three times during the week of January 5th. That's the week of our seven-day meditation challenge, our New Year's meditation challenge, led by the great Joseph Goldstein. I'm going to do a live session on Tuesday, as I always do, at 4 Eastern, and then two more sessions, one on the 8th and one on the 11th, to hear your take on Joseph's meditations, answer your questions, et cetera, et cetera. If you want to join the challenge, and if you want to join our live sessions, you've

• 21:24Dan Harris?

  got to sign up over at danharris.com for our new app, 10% with Dan Harris. And finally, thank you to everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

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