A Guided Meditation To Get You Out Of Your Head | Bonus Meditation with Dan

A 10-minute meditation that reminds you that you're not just a brain: there is also a body. This meditation was originally part of one of Dan's recent Ask Me Anything sessions on Substack – join us as a paid subscriber at DanHarris.com https://www.danharris.com to be a part of these live online events as Dan guides a short meditation then takes your questions. Join Dan's online community 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

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?

  Okay, kids. Today, we're gonna do a 10-minute meditation based on some special instructions I picked up from my longtime friend and meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein. Just to say, as many of you know, we're in the middle of doing a lot of experimentation around our Friday episodes. We're trying tons of stuff: guided meditations, behind-the-scenes interviews with my producers, celebrity interviews, and little snippets of the Q&A sessions that I do with my subscribers over at danharris.com. So, we're trying lots of stuff. For many years here on the show, we mostly used Fridays as a time to drop guided meditations

• 0:58Dan Harris?

  from the app formerly known as 10% Happier. But since I'm sadly no longer part of that app, we are, as mentioned, in a period of experimentation. Please hit me up over at danharris.com. Let me know if you like what we're doing. I'm open to both feedback and ideas for new things we could do here. Anyway, today, on this Friday, it's a guided meditation from me. This meditation actually comes directly from one of the live video sessions that I'm now doing twice a month for subscribers at danharris.com. In the sessions, I guided meditation and then take a bunch of questions, although what you're gonna hear now is just the meditation. So, here we go with a guided meditation from me.

• 1:39Dan 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.

• 2:25Dan 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 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.

• 3:10Dan Harris?

  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. I have no idea what exactly I'm gonna do, but let's start by getting comfortable. Some mix, as always, of comfort, relaxation, and just a little bit of

• 3:48Dan Harris?

  uprightness, if that's a word, dignity in your spine. That's not a must if you want to hurl yourself on the floor in a sloppily fashion. That's also fine. Just getting comfortable.

• 4:01Dan Harris?

  Now let's do three deep breaths. Make the inhale as deep as you can go and then the exhale. Try to aim for three or four times as long as the inhale.

• 4:33Dan Harris?

  Do these at your own pace. I've really gotten in the habit of doing some

• 4:38Dan Harris?

  deep breathing at the beginning of my meditation sessions.

• 4:44Dan Harris?

  As Jeff Warren, the meditation teacher, likes to say, some deep breathing can send the message to the body that it's meditation time.

• 4:57Dan Harris?

  Once you've stopped with the deep breathing, you can just let your breath go

• 5:04Dan Harris?

  back to its normal pace and rhythm.

• 5:10Dan Harris?

  And let's meditate using the phrase that Joseph Goldstein likes to use, which is taken right out of the Buddhist texts. And that phrase is, "There is a body."

• 5:26Dan Harris?

  The Buddha talked about four ways to establish mindfulness. And way number one is just being aware

• 5:34Dan Harris?

  of what's happening in the body, the physical sensations arising and passing away in your body.

• 5:41Dan Harris?

  I, as is my want, was a little reflexively

• 5:48Dan Harris?

  negative about this phrase because it sounded to me, as you may have heard me joke before, it sounded to me like something that's said at a crime scene.

• 5:58Dan Harris?

  But actually, if you just drop this phrase into your mind at your own pace, there is body.

• 6:07Dan Harris?

  You can direct your attention

• 6:10Dan Harris?

  out of the spinning habitual storylines that usually take up

• 6:16Dan Harris?

  all the bandwidth and into whatever's happening in your body. Pleasant or unpleasant, it's happening right now. The body's always

• 6:26Dan Harris?

  in the moment, as it were.

• 6:41Dan Harris?

  It's really up to you how often you want to use the phrase.

• 6:46Dan Harris?

  If your mind is scattered,

• 6:50Dan Harris?

  you can drop it every 30 seconds or so.

• 6:55Dan Harris?

  Another way to

• 6:59Dan Harris?

  maintain your focus with this sort of less

• 7:04Dan Harris?

  less formal style of practice, another way to maintain your focus is to use a little bit of mental noting.

• 7:12Dan Harris?

  So there is a body.

• 7:17Dan Harris?

  You feel whatever sensations come up.

• 7:21Dan Harris?

  And then you can

• 7:25Dan Harris?

  do a soft mental note in your mind, kind of whisper in the mind, as Joseph says.

• 7:31Dan Harris?

  Tension, rising,

• 7:36Dan Harris?

  falling,

• 7:39Dan Harris?

  seeing

• 7:42Dan Harris?

  lights behind the eyes, hearing. You don't have to note everything that comes up, that would be impossible, just dropping it in in a kind of not uptight way.

• 7:55Dan Harris?

  And then when you get distracted, you can label that too, thinking, planning, anger, doubt.

• 8:43Dan Harris?

  There is a body. And you can feel your breath within that framework.

• 8:52Dan Harris?

  If you want to focus on your breath at all, instead of getting overly rigid and militaristic about being with the breath at one specific point, you feel it within the context of the whole body.

• 9:20Dan Harris?

  Don't worry about getting distracted. It's not a problem.

• 9:26Dan Harris?

  Every time you notice you've gotten carried away, just make a little mental note, "Oh yeah." Thinking, worrying,

• 9:38Dan Harris?

  and go back to the sensations in the body.

• 10:16Dan Harris?

  I sometimes like to contemplate the fact that

• 10:20Dan Harris?

  if there's anything bothering me right now,

• 10:24Dan Harris?

  any feeling of anything being unpleasant or off,

• 10:28Dan Harris?

  anything I don't like,

• 10:31Dan Harris?

  just means there's something I'm not being mindful of. Because if you're being mindful of it,

• 10:39Dan Harris?

  it can still be unpleasant, but it's not a problem.

• 10:43Dan Harris?

  You're not fighting with it.

• 11:01Dan Harris?

  Physical pain

• 11:05Dan Harris?

  isn't a problem when you're curious about it, examining its constituent parts.

• 11:14Dan Harris?

  Boredom isn't a problem when you

• 11:18Dan Harris?

  get interested in what it's actually like in your mind and your body.

• 12:14Dan Harris?

  You're doing great.

• 12:17Dan Harris?

  There is a body.

• 12:23Dan Harris?

  Check it out. And then when you get distracted, start again.

• 12:59Dan Harris?

  Okay, when you're ready, you can open your eyes and come back into the room.

• 13:07Dan Harris?

  Okay, that's a taste of a little bit of what you get if you sign up over at danharris.com. I've been calling our little group the Renegade Sangha. Like I said, danharris.com. You get not only two live sessions a month, at least, sometimes we do more. You also get ad-free listening to this podcast and full transcripts for every episode. And you just get to help me and my team build whatever this is going to become. Because we're really just at the beginning. I'd love to have you as part of it. Before I go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.

• 13:49Dan Harris?

  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.

• 14:11Speaker 01

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