Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris How To Make Time for the Things You Actually Care About | Vinny Ferraro About this episode Our Teacher of the Month answers a common question: how do I find the time to meditate? Vinny turns this question on its head, and his answer might surprise you.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Dan Harris? This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:19 Dan Harris? Happy Sunday. Hope you're having a good weekend. One of the most common questions I get is, "How do you find the time to meditate? And what do you do if you can't find the time?" I know my answer to this question. I've answered this question a million times and I'm always happy to answer it. But I also love hearing how other people, especially other smarter people than I am, how they answer the question. So today, you're going to hear the great Dharma teacher, Vinny Ferraro, take a crack at it. Vinnie is our Teacher of the Month over at danharris.com, which means he's been creating custom meditations to go along with all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes here on the podcast. Those meditations are only available to paid subscribers over on danharris.com. Paid subscribers also now get weekly live
1:02 Dan Harris? guided meditation and Q&A sessions every Tuesday at 4:00 Eastern. I'll be doing the next live session on Tuesday, September 23rd. And if you want to meditate with me in person, I've got a weekend-long event coming up at the Omega Institute in upstate New York. It's the weekend of October 24th. It's another installment of our ongoing meditation party events. I'll put a link in the show notes if you want to sign up. We'll get started with Vinny Ferraro in conversation with our executive producer, DJ Casimir, right after this. 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
1:43 Dan Harris? 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. 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.
2:28 Dan Harris? If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node of sanity and 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.
3:13 Dan 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.
3:25 Speaker 01 Vinny Ferraro, welcome back.
3:27 Speaker 02 Thanks, DJ. It's a pleasure to be here.
3:29 Speaker 01 I'm so glad you're here. I really look forward to these and really excited to hear what you have to say for this particular question today. It's one of the most common questions we get from our community. And the question is, what do I do if I really want to meditate, but I just don't have the time?
3:50 Speaker 02 I get that one from head to toe, bro.
3:56 Speaker 02 I guess my question is like, what's more important than actually arriving in our life, you know? I used to walk around and I always had this sneaking suspicion that something was missing. Like I was late to some appointment I couldn't quite name, you know? Turns out what was missing was my presence, my attention.
4:23 Speaker 02 Because that's where satisfaction is felt, yeah?
4:28 Speaker 02 Not in perfection, not in productivity, but in not missing the damn thing while it's happening. You know, the whole life. I don't have time to meditate is basically the adult version of the dog gave my homework.
4:50 Speaker 02 It's just, it's like an excuse, you know? You don't need an hour in front of an altar with, in your life in perfect order to, to practice. You need a way to connect to something deeper than the hamster wheel of thought. So it's not about checking off another should. It's really about not leaving ourselves behind.
5:15 Speaker 02 Does that make sense?
5:17 Speaker 01 Well, let's see, I think so. You know, when I, when I went on my first meditation retreat ever, I was a few days in and I had this moment where I was like, oh, I have been spending my whole life
5:32 Speaker 01 rehearsing for the real thing.
5:36 Speaker 01 And just this moment of realizing like the curtain's never gonna go up. The audience isn't coming. There is no eight o'clock PM show. There is no script, like whatever I'm waiting for is passing me by. And I was maybe 28 or something, wanting to not have that happen for another 28 years. So that's what comes to mind for me when I'm hearing you talk is just this feeling of like, oh shit. Like my life, it's happening now, it's happening today. Can I be here?
6:19 Speaker 02 Yes.
6:21 Speaker 02 We can't, right? The real practice is how mindfulness walks with us throughout the day, right? It could be the breath before we speak, or a pause while we're waiting in line, right? A hand on my heart when the day feels like too much, right? And we could say that even 10 minutes a day builds the habit of being here. It actually trains the heart to open. It allows the mind to settle a bit. And so that's what I like about the practice is that it's all terrain. These are not throwaway moments. These are pattern
7:02 Speaker 02 breakers, you know, interruptions in the mind's usual playlist. So, so a lot of people think, how am I gonna squeeze meditation in, right? Like it's an add-on. But it's actually a different way of showing up for the life you're already living, right? Brushing your teeth and actually feeling the bristles, you know, drinking the coffee without gulping down three emails on the side, you know, taste the damn food, let the fork hit the plate before the mind bolts to the next meeting, you know. So, yeah, I'm actually recommending
7:42 Speaker 02 that you stop multitasking. Like, your, your life deserves more than half your attention. So, the trick is dropping the fantasy that real practice happens later, well, you know, when things calm down. But life doesn't calm down. You do. No?
8:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, it has not been my experience that life calms down.
8:09 Speaker 02 But the world really trains us to postpone arrival, to wait for the inbox to clear, for the kids to grow up, for the perfect moment to finally show up. But presence isn't some kind of reward for getting it all done. Real practice says, stop running. It's okay to arrive, to meet the moment as it is, and simply do what you're doing while you're doing it. Yeah. That's how we stop missing what matters.
8:50 Speaker 02 That's how we arrive. And you know, I, there's days DJ, there are moments of day where I realized that I'm moving faster than I want to.
9:01 Speaker 02 The good news is I'm close by. So I just slow down and allow myself to arrive. You know, a breath to come back to the body, a step that doesn't rush ahead. You know, a little pause that lets the heart catch up. Sometimes my practice is simply feeling my feet on the floor.
9:23 Speaker 02 Grounded, present.
9:26 Speaker 02 And somehow still okay, even when my mind says otherwise.
9:34 Speaker 01 I was with my daughter on a trip, just the two of us over this past weekend. And this was a trip that we'd been planning for over a year. And there were a lot of moments during the trip where I caught myself being somewhere else.
9:54 Speaker 01 And I had this realization that there was a chance that I could go through the whole four day trip and get back and have missed it entirely. And when I caught that, I would do things like just really look at her and take a deep breath. Or there was this moment where we were like playing in the ocean and I was standing up and she's five and a half, so she's a lot shorter than me. And I would kind of pick her up and fling her around and you know, we're playing in the waves. But I, I just knew I wasn't there fully. And so at a certain point, instead of standing above her, I just kneeled down in the water so that our faces were on the same level, you know? Yeah. And it just felt like things slowed down a little bit.
10:39 Speaker 01 I was still having to bring myself back from like, what's for lunch? How long can she play this game for before she gets bored? You know, like it was still happening, but just trying to do what I could to interrupt it, to show up.
10:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, the mind has a mind of its own. You know, and it's easy to, once we begin to practice, to see how busy the mind is. And how often we go on autopilot.
11:09 Speaker 02 The mind is always in the past and in the future. That's why we have to actually train to be present. It's kind of strange. But when we start to develop a little discernment, we see that often the mind isn't offering up anything helpful. So we redirect our attention. You know, usually I like to land in the body because not every thought is worthy of my undivided attention. And life is better because I'm here for it. So it's not about not leaving. It's about really beginning again, beginning again, beginning again. So you don't think you have time to meditate? Flip it.
11:53 Speaker 02 You don't have enough time not to. You know, your attention is the most valuable thing you got. You know, we got to treat it like we got front row seats to our own life. That this is it. You're not in the nosebleeds. We're center stage. And don't miss it because you're stuck in yesterday's script. Over and over, I have to remember that how I meet this moment matters. We practice how we show up and how we come home to ourselves, even if it's just for a few breaths. That this is our life, not later, not when it's perfect. Like, right now.
12:37 Speaker 02 It's not one more thing to do. It's how you actually remember you're alive.
12:44 Speaker 01 So I have felt this feeling that I don't have time to meditate plenty of times, kids, work, laundry, whatever, sleep, maybe. And I just want to see if I'm understanding. I feel like I'm hearing maybe two distinct threads in what you're saying, but please correct me. One is, we don't have to think of our meditation practice as something that is going to wait until we have the time or until we can sit formally for an hour in front of an altar. We can feel our feet on the ground. We can feel the bristles when we're brushing our teeth. We can turn off the phone while we sip our coffee and just sip our coffee, and that's practice. So that's kind of one thread.
13:27 Speaker 01 And then the other thread I think I'm hearing too is, and it really would behoove you to find 10 minutes if you can. How far off am I with those two?
13:37 Speaker 02 No, I like it. I mean, each of these practice bears a different fruit. Yeah. I mean, formal practice of sitting down in the morning for me, I don't have to do that. I get to do that because I know that the world is going to have its way with me. It's going to like pull me in a thousand directions, but can I just start the day staying close? And saying, all right, we're going to do this together. Right? So I do that every morning because I can and I want to. Cause it's a refuge from all the doing. Can I start with being? And then throughout the day, I have to touch back in.
14:18 Speaker 02 Many times feel my feet on the floor, really just be with my lunch, whatever I'm doing. So I start with not being far from myself with my formal practice. And then throughout the day, as I feel myself speeding up into the momentum of culture and modernity and all my roles and responsibilities. It's like, hold on, even if it's two minutes between students, two minutes between tasks. It's like, oh, that's right. I'm still here. All right. Yeah. Let myself catch up. Yeah.
14:51 Speaker 01 In those moments, you find two minutes between one zoom and the next, let yourself catch up. What are you tactically doing? Like if I was watching you?
15:00 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:00 Speaker 01 From the outside, or if I was watching you from the inside, what is that two minutes for you?
15:04 Speaker 02 Usually I close my eyes because the world of light and form is pretty distracting for me. I'm a very aesthetic person, so I need to kind of just take a breath and turn my attention inward. And I usually put my hand on my belly or my chest and just feel that embodied feeling. You might see me move my feet a little bit so I can feel the grounded support of the floor. It doesn't have to look a certain way, but for me, I land back in the body and I remind myself that I'm here.
15:35 Speaker 01 And for that morning practice, you said you do it every day. Not because you should, but because you can, you get to, you want to. How long did it take for it to go from a should to a get to? And do you ever, do you ever feel that should even still?
16:00 Speaker 02 Well, I don't know, maybe it was like 15 years ago when I realized, yeah, maybe 12 years ago, when I realized, wow, I'm teaching meditation, but I don't, I get to it at least a few times a week. And, you know, some weeks worse and some weeks a little better, but there wasn't enough consistency for me. So I was like, all right, how about if I switch this and made it not optional? Like brushing my teeth or eating or taking a shower? Could I really just wake up a little bit earlier and have that time in space? And what does that actually do for my practice? And so that's how I started doing it every day to make it not optional.
16:45 Speaker 02 But still, sometimes I don't want to wake up early. I don't want to go sit and I have to remember, okay, this is not optional. And usually the moment I actually make the effort and go sit down, I remember, right? So the mind that doesn't want to get out of bed, doesn't remember. But the body, once I sit down and put my hand on my chest, I'm like, ah, okay, I got this coming, man.
17:14 Speaker 01 Sometimes in these conversations, I think maybe this happened in our last conversation, actually. Matthew Brensiller comes to mind and he's coming to mind here because he says something along these lines where he's like, the whole point of a teacher is to just be a supportive cheerleader until practice becomes not optional. It's like, keep you coming back, keep rallying, keep being in your corner, keep saying rah rah go, you got this, until sitting is the same as brushing your teeth. And I think. That actually is part of our sort of operating theory behind this whole teacher of the month offering is we've got all these people spread across the country and across
17:57 Speaker 01 the world who might not have direct access to a teacher. And so to have you take their hand through the whole month, give them something to keep coming back to, it's just like ever so slightly increasing the likelihood that people can get to that point where it just becomes obvious that you got to find a way to make it fit.
18:18 Speaker 02 Thank you. The last thing I'll say, DJ.
18:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:22 Speaker 02 Is that practice is not what we think it is. You know, this is why we can't depend on the mind for everything. It's basically taking our life back and saying, okay, there's a way I can be here for it, a way I can be present and actually be with what is. There's something deeply satisfying about that.
18:47 Speaker 01 Taking our lives back.
18:49 Speaker 02 That's right.
18:51 Speaker 01 All right. Thank you. As always, I really appreciate it.
18:55 Speaker 02 Yeah. Thank you and the gang for making this happen, y'all. I'm honored to be here.
19:03 Dan Harris? Thank you, Vinnie and DJ. Don't forget to become a paid subscriber over at danharris.com so you can get all of the guided meditations that Vinnie is producing to go along with our Monday, Wednesday episodes on the pod. And also if you sign up, you'll be able to sit in on our weekly, now weekly, live guided meditation and Q and A sessions. The next one is me solo. I'll be doing it on September 23rd, again at four Eastern. And if you want to meditate with me in person, I'm leading the now annual, or apparently annual meditation party retreat with Seven A Selassie, Jeff Warren, and Ofosu Jones-Cortez coming up on the weekend of October 24th at the Omega Institute. I'll put a link for that in the show notes. And finally, as always, Big thank you to everybody who worked so hard on this show.
19:47 Dan Harris? Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. 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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