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10% Happier with Dan Harris
A Guided Meditation To Get You Out Of Your Head | Bonus Meditation with Dan
00:12:20
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 to be a part of these...
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- [00:00]
Joseph Goldstein
Foreign.
- [00:04]
Dan Harris
This is the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Okay, kids, today we're going to 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 and A sessions that I do with my subscribers over@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 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@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@danharris.com in the sessions, I guided meditation and then take a bunch of questions. Although what you're going to hear now is just the meditation. So here we go with a guided meditation for me.
- [01:40]
Joseph Goldstein
I have no idea what exactly I'm going to do, but let's start by getting comfortable. Some mix, as always, of comfort, relaxation and just a little bit of 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 slovenly fashion, that's also fine. Just getting comfortable. 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. Do these at your own pace. I've really gotten in the habit of doing some deep breathing at the beginning of my meditation sessions. As Jeff Warren, the meditation teacher, likes to say, some deep breathing can send the message to the body that it's meditation time. Once you've stopped with a deep breathing, you can just let your breath go back to its normal pace and rhythm. 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. The Buddha talked about four ways to establish Mindfulness and way number one is just being aware of what's happening in the body, the physical sensations arising and passing away in your body. I, as is my want was a little reflexively 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. But actually if you just drop this phrase into your mind at your own pace, there's body can direct your attention out of the spinning habitual storylines, they usually take up all the bandwidth and into whatever's happening in your body, pleasant or unpleasant. It's happening right now. The body's always in the moment, as it were. It's really up to you how often you want to use the phrase. If your mind is scattered, you can drop it every 30 seconds or so. Another way to maintain your focus with this sort of less, less formal style of practice, another way to maintain your focus is to use a little bit of mental noting. So there is a body. You feel whatever sensations come up and then you can do a soft mental note in your mind to kind of whisper in the mind, as Joseph says, tension rising, falling, seeing 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. And then when you get distracted, you can label that too. Thinking, planning, anger, doubt. There is a body and you can feel your breath within that framework. 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. Don't worry about getting distracted. It's not a problem. Every time you notice you've gotten carried away, just make a little mental note. Oh yeah, thinking, worrying. And go back to the sensations in the body. I sometimes like to contemplate the fact that if there's anything bothering me right now, any feeling of anything being unpleasant or off, anything I don't like just means there's something I'm not being mindful of. Because if you're being mindful of can still be unpleasant, but it's not a problem. You're not fighting with. Physical pain isn't a problem when you're curious about it, examining its constituent parts. Boredom isn't a problem when you get interested in what it's actually like in your mind and your body.
- [09:34]
MIDI Health Representative
It.
- [10:23]
Joseph Goldstein
You'Re doing great. There is a body, check it out. And then when you get distracted, start again. Okay. When you're ready, you can open your eyes and come back into the room.
- [11:16]
Dan Harris
Okay, that's a taste of a little bit of what you get if you sign up. Over@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. Come because we're really just at the beginning. Would 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 Vasily. 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 Bad Islands wrote our.
- [12:21]
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- [13:20]
Joseph Goldstein
Com.