This is a meditation for anyone who needs good boundaries, especially parents. It starts with a few minutes of personal context, then a 30-minute guided meditation (starts at 7:15) on stability, and finally finishes with an eyes-open boundary practice. This latter is one example of how to apply boundaries in the moment.

Stability And Boundaries - A Meditation For Parents

Meditation sounds like the easiest thing in the world: close your eyes, relax, and just be.  Except then your neurotic thoughts begin to churn, your legs get all seized-up, and your next door neighbor decides to crank “Who Let the Dogs Out?” on the hi-fi. Suddenly your relaxing meditation has become a comedic test of endurance.

This lightly-guided meditation is meant to be a prophylactic against the need for perfection. We drop expectations and embrace the chaos, the cramps, the defiant inner and outer soundscape. We welcome all of it to the party, and then we see what happens.

A version of this meditation appears in "Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics", coauthored with Dan Harris and Carlye Adler. Thanks to Ten Percent Happier, who allowed me to publish a couple of my guided meditations on my website, www.jeffwarren.org. Longer version can be found on their app. Enjoy!

Welcome To The Party

This is a busy person’s meditation. Ten breaths. That’s it. A modest one-minute reset intended to take some of the wind out of the sails of whatever story line you’ve been racing around inside. The idea is simple: wherever you are, in any situation or mental state, count ten long, slow breaths.
 
From the book Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, coauthored with Dan Harris and Carlye Adler. The book's dozen or so other meditations can be found on the 10% Happier app. Enjoy!
 
Jeff
For more free meditations, see www.jeffwarren.org

Resources:

Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics : http://jeffwarren.org/books/meditation-fidgety-skeptics/
10% Happier app: http://www.10percenthappier.com/

Ten Good Breaths

One of the admittedly quite counterintuitive skills we learn in mindfulness is the ability to distinguish between thinking and awareness. To use a classic metaphor from consciousness studies, awareness is like the empty stage. Thinking is one of the actors that trots onto that stage—along with seeing, hearing, feeling etc. When we're mindful of our thinking, we have more choice about whether we want to reinforce a particular pattern of rumination or not. This is the beginning; part two [https://soundcloud.com/jeff-warren-5/mindfulness-of-thinking-wdanharris-15min] goes more deeply into the thinking process.
 
Also called "Catch Thinking in the Act", this meditation is from the book Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, coauthored with Dan Harris and Carlye Adler. The book's dozen or so other meditations can be found on the 10% Happier app. Enjoy!
 
Jeff
For more free meditations, see www.jeffwarren.org

Resources:

"classic metaphor": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_workspace_theory
Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: http://jeffwarren.org/media/books/meditation-fidgety-skeptics/
10% Happier App: http://www.10percenthappier.com/

Mindfulness of Thinking - Part 1

Psychologists use a version of this meditation to help people with their addictions, including our technology addictions. The idea is the faster we are at noticing our urges, the less likely we will be to helplessly act on them, and thus the more quickly they can pass, allowing us to reset. 
 
It is extremely hard to reset fully. As with everything about mind, body, and behavior, we are talking about a continuum. We can get better and better at dis-embedding from an urge, but we’re still going to miss some of them, and catch others late. And even with the ones we do catch, the feeling of wanting to act on them can linger for a long while, sometimes causing us to act out all over again as soon as we lose mindfulness. 
 
All of which is fine. Forty percent better, 20 percent better, even 10 percent better—that’s still better. As someone with lifelong impulse control issues, I can definitely say that meditation has reduced my ratio of high-risk behaviors, to say nothing of my blurting-out-stupid-shit-at-dinner-parties ratio.
 
From the book Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, coauthored with Dan Harris and Carlye Adler. The book's dozen or so other meditations can be found on the 10% Happier app. Enjoy!
 
Jeff
For more free meditations, see www.jeffwarren.org

Resources:

Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics : http://jeffwarren.org/books/meditation-fidgety-skeptics/
10% Happier app: http://www.10percenthappier.com/

Mindfulness of Urges

I enjoy recording meditations in studio, but I prefer doing it live, in the company of actual human beings. There’s an immediacy in these situations that can’t be reproduced. Like this meditation for example, guided in a moving car, with my highly stressed-out pal Dan Harris as meditating subject. 
 
This particular technique expands on an earlier meditation [https://soundcloud.com/jeff-warren-5/catch-thinking-in-the-act], exploring the experiential components of thinking as they may present from moment to moment: the imagery, the inner talk, the subtle tensions and body tugs (another important component, emotional body sensations, will be addressed in a forthcoming meditation). This practice is a good example of an empowering meditative principle we can call "divide and conquer." Stress and overwhelm often show up as indistinct blobs of feeling-thinking-tension. Insofar as all this stays blobby and indistinct, then it owns us. But if we can begin to tease apart the various components with our attention, then we may find we can dramatically lessen their collective impact. In this sense, mindfulness is about agency and sanity. It is another meditative superpower.
 
Much gratitude to my teacher, Shinzen Young, who first taught me to deconstruct my despotic inner system. Now it’s all rainbows, peace doves, and old reruns of my favorite 80s TV show, Manimal.
 
Jeff
For more free meditations, see www.jeffwarren.org

Resources:

Dan Harris: https://www.10percenthappier.com/mindfulness-meditation-the-basics/
Shinzen Young: https://www.shinzen.org/
Manimal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ugb_TIpPoWA

Mindfulness of Thinking - Part 2

“RAIN” is a well-known meditation acronym that stands for Recognize, Accept, Investigate and Non-Identify. It’s a helpful way to explore – and, sometimes, process – any sensation, thought, or emotion. Even hard ones. 

The practice helps in a couple of ways. First, it boosts our emotional literacy. Instead of being lost inside a big reaction, we learn to stop and get curious about our own idiosyncratic “tells” – the many subtle tics and contractions that are our particular body’s way of saying: “I’m feeling over here!” In this way, we learn to catch our emotional reactions early, and not, in teacher Sharon Salzberg’s excellent words, “fifteen consequential actions later.” 

And there’s a second way it helps. The fruit of meditation isn’t just less emotional reactivity. It’s also having fewer negative emotions in the first place. The more we practice observing our emotional habits, the less potent they become. 

This process of catharsis (or “purification” to use the creepy contemplative term) is fascinating. We can begin to experience in real time painful bits of old conditioning softening and falling away. In the meditative journey, this is often paired with a lovely feeling of intimacy with the space that surrounds and permeates our experience. Space – and not sensation – becomes the new baseline we learn to operate from. It may sound bonkers, but this is the experience a great many practitioners report. 

A more detailed description of each step of this meditation can be found in the “Pandora’s Box” chapter of Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. And a live, far more intimate version of the practice can be found here [https://soundcloud.com/jeff-warren-5/mindfulness-of-emotions-rain-meditation-2]. 
 
Jeff
For more free meditations, see www.jeffwarren.org

Resources:

Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: http://jeffwarren.org/media/books/meditation-fidgety-skeptics/

Mindfulness of Emotions - RAIN - Short

“RAIN” is a well-known meditation acronym that stands for Recognize, Accept, Investigate and Non-Identify. It’s a helpful way to explore – and sometimes process – any sensation, thought, or emotion, even the hard ones. I led this practice at a Monday night Consciousness Explorers Club (CEC) meeting in Toronto, sometime in 2017. It ends with a loving-kindness practice. 

A longer description of the rationale and effects of this practice can be found in a short version of this meditation, here [https://soundcloud.com/jeff-warren-5/mindfulness-of-emotions-rain]. For now, the most important thing to say about working with challenging emotions is: pace yourself. That means first find a home-base in your experience that you’re comfortable with – maybe a grounding or neutral sensation like sound, or the breath, or the feeling of the floor under your seat or feet. Then, if you’re feeling up for it, you can begin to explore, RAIN-style. I recommend doing so gradually, swinging into the sensation for a bit -  opening, feeling, investigating – and then swinging back to home base. If at any time things get too intense, you can always back off and choose a more neutral sensation, or you can stop meditating altogether. I’ve written more about how to work safely and intelligently with challenging emotions in the CEC’s free guide to community practice.

Jeff
For more free meditations, see www.jeffwarren.org

Resources :

CEC free guide to community practice: http://cecmeditate.com/activation-kit/

Mindfulness of Emotions - RAIN - Long

In early 2017, Dan Harris and I met with Chief Moir of the Tempe Police Department in Arizona. Chief Moir is an early adopter of meditation and mindfulness in policing. She uses the skills herself, all day long. 

Her job requires her to be totally present with person after person as they file through her office. People have all kinds of demands, and exist in all kinds of stressed emotional states. It’s easy to get burned-out in these situations, to get “compassion fatigue.” We need resilience.

Enter compassion meditation. That compassion can lead to more resilience may seem counter-intuitive, but it is what both the science and the practice of meditation demonstrate. It has to do with distinguishing between pure empathy on the one hand – where we literally feel someone’s pain – and more active compassion on the other, which is more about being solid and present and intentionally wishing someone well. You can explore how it works for yourself in this short practice. 

Our meeting with Chief Moir is described in Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. This and other meditations can be found on the 10% Happier app. 
 
Jeff
For more free meditations, see www.jeffwarren.org
 
Resources:

Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: http://jeffwarren.org/books/meditation-fidgety-skeptics/
10% Happier App: http://www.10percenthappier.com/

Compassion for Chief Moir

Concentration is the skill of undivided attention, the super power of committing our attention to what we want at a given time, and nothing else. When all our faculties converge in a single activity or direction, the mind and the body are happy. Our background worry programs often fade, and we can find ourselves in “flow” states of optimal performance. The opposite is having our minds pulled in a dozen discontinuous directions, forever finding and making new problems, never collected, never satisfied. The research is clear; to cite the title of one famous paper, “A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind.” Over time, concentration leads to more stability and peace in the rest of life. Somehow, the flow flows out. For this reason, concentration is the foundation of many meditation practices. 
 
This meditation is the first in the book Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, coauthored with Dan Harris and Carlye Adler. The book's dozen or so other meditations can be found on the 10% Happier app. Enjoy!
 
Jeff
For more free meditations, see www.jeffwarren.org

Resources:

A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind : http://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6006/932
Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics : http://jeffwarren.org/books/meditation-fidgety-skeptics/
10% Happier app: http://www.10percenthappier.com/

Concentration 101

There are two big meditation approaches out there, two buckets, discovered and rediscovered many times in many different traditions. One is active. It’s about bearing down, about trying to get somewhere, to build some skill, to make something happen. The other is passive. It’s about easing off, about not trying to get anywhere or make anything happen. Both have their place. But in our culture of type-A over-achieving workaholics, I think it is safe to say that many of us could benefit from the second approach. We all need a place or a practice where we can just let ourselves exist without having to endlessly prove or secure ourselves. It’s exhausting.

Hence this practice, which is all about putting goal attainment on hold. And, as we surrender – paradox of paradoxes – we may find inner resources we’d have trouble recognizing otherwise. Not that you need a reason!

Thanks to my teacher, Shinzen Young, who taught me to do nothing in the best possible way. I still remember his words: “If you can give up the compulsive need to know and act, you may start to know and act in a whole new way.”
 
Jeff
For more free meditations, see www.jeffwarren.org

Resources:

Shinzen Young : https://www.shinzen.org/

Do Nothing

10% Happier asked me to write this meditation for Apple employees. They took my script and recorded it in the voice of the iPhone. Personally, I think the voice should be slowed down by a third, to make it more hypnotic and meditative. The meditation “object” here is the sound of silence, the “space between commands.” If you do the practice, really try to direct your attention in this vague direction: the ambient hum of space, the thick absence of silence itself.

Resources:

10% Happier: http://www.10percenthappier.com/

Space Between Commands

Something a bit different. I created this meditation for kids, aged 5 – 10. It is a meditation designed for kids, not adults, complete with cool sound effects and animated vocals and continuous appeals to the imagination. The idea of Calmland is to help kids move from hyperactive agitation to a more relaxed and self-regulated state. Should they wish to! They may not; it’s their choice. Calmland is a companion to Colourland, which helps them move in the other direction.

This track is one of many I’ve created with my friend Kirsten Chase at  Kid Evolve.  Our plan is to build an app to teach kids mindfulness and other social-emotional skills. Children’s minds are enormously powerful and open to suggestion; in many ways, they have the capacity to guide their own development and healing.

Resources:

Kid Evolve: http://www.kidevolve.com/creative-mind-journeys/

Calmland

Something a bit different. It is a meditation designed for kids, not adults, complete with cool sound effects and animated vocals and continuous appeals to the imagination. The idea of Colourland is to help kids move from the low energy blahs, to more optimistic and cheerful bounce. Should they wish to! They may not; it’s their choice. Colourland is a companion to Calmland, which helps them move in the other direction. This track is one of many I’ve created with my friend Kirsten Chase at  Kid Evolve.

Resources:

Kid Evolve: http://www.kidevolve.com/creative-mind-journeys/

Colourland

So this is a short talk and guided meditation, recorded at the beautiful Harmony Hotel meditation zendo in Nosara, Costa Rica. The meditation begins at 12:40 if you want to jump to that.

The talk and meditation are a distillation of some of my core ideas about what meditation practice is, and how we can find the right practice for each of us: the right attitude, the right object, and even the right balance of stillness and movement / activity. It talks about the core skills of every successful practice and how to make sure they are activated in the meditation itself.

Below is a summary of the main points:

“You are what you repeatedly do.” There is no neutral setting in life – most existing is a doing, a doing that is changing you and deepening both healthy and unhealthy habits.

Meditation practice – and arguably all “spiritual,” artistic, and body-based practices – train how you want to exist. They are acts of deliberately choosing what habits you want to train and reinforce. In this sense they are very empowering.

What matters in a practice are the qualities of mind and heart and body that we train. The qualities we explore in this meditation are: concentration, clarity, equanimity and friendliness / intimacy

We can make this work for us based on our natural interests. Everyone is different. YOU DO NOT NEED A SITTING PRACTICE. If you don’t like sitting, choose a movement practice. You can practice the above qualities in slow deliberate movement, and that’s what we do at the end of this guided practice. This is how we bring meditation into life anyway – we make life our practice. This is good news for people with ants in their pants.

We can also let our interests guide what we want to pay attention to. That’s the other bit of good news. The breath is one option among many. There are other options that may be more appealing to us. Interest in a particular option / object is our anchor. We use our interest to slingshot ourselves into the practice, into the training. As we get more experience, we eventually learn to let go of our anchor, let go of the form. This is what it means to bring our practice into life - all of life becomes a meditation.

Oh, and one last crazy paradoxical thing: it may be that not ALL existing is a doing. Contemplative traditions argue, in their own ways, that there is a kind of setting or direction in experience, where no new habits are formed. In a complete experience of equanimity, the forces of conditioning seem dramatically weakened. At least, this is the experience – an experience of pure being. 

See for yourself!

Finding the Right Practice

Here’s a 5-minute guided meditation called "The Most Basic Meditation,” from the 10% Happier app. It’s about staying open and centred even when we’re tense. You can do this meditation sitting, or while walking around.

Just a few minutes can feel like a mini-reset.

The Most Basic Meditation

This 17-minute meditation was recorded in Costa Rica on March 19th, 2020. My retreat co-leader Scott Davis and I had been up all night taking care of someone in great distress. Scott is a Chinese Traditional Medicine practitioner; he has a very grounded and comforting way of putting his hands on people, feeling the pulse in their wrist, gently administering his acupuncture needles. I was very moved as I watched him tend to this person, and afterwards – feeling quite cracked open and raw – I came directly to the meditation hall and guided this practice. It's all about how to hold ourselves – and each other – with care.

For more free meditations, see www.jeffwarren.org

Resources: 

Scott Davis: https://scottdavisholistic.com/

Caring Hands

This 25-minutes long practice was recorded in Costa Rica on March 17th, 2020, in a time of great anxiety about coronavirus. It describes how to face emotional intensities and/or sensorial challenges in a paced and responsible way: the pendulation between opening and expanding capacity, and then moving back to safety and comfort and knowing our limits. Fear, like the virus itself, is contagious. It is also workable – in a sense, treatable. But first we need to understand the medicine. 

This meditation is more educational than relaxing, and it meant to be that way. Hopefully it will also be helpful.

For more free meditations, see www.jeffwarren.org

Pendulate

This is the first session in my course on the Calm app, titled How to Meditate: A simple 30-day program for everyone. The aim of this course is to show not just how meditation can make you calmer, clearer, more open and compassionate. But also to show how the real training is learning how to be Ok with any moment. It’s the incredibly brave practice of being with the world exactly as it is, being with the changing highs and lows – inside you and outside you – and from there, beginning to embody a basic availability and humility that can never be taken away.

You can find the rest of the course on the Calm app. Use this link to receive a 40% discount on a year subscription: https://www.calm.com/campaigns?coupon=jeff&vanity_url=/jeff

Resources:

How to Meditate course on the Calm app: https://app.www.calm.com/program/mVcvqWcR8C/how-to-meditate

The Big Idea

Jeff Warren is a writer and meditation teacher. He is the co-author of The New York Times bestselling Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, author of The Head Trip - a travel guide to sleeping, dreaming and waking - and founder of The Consciousness Explorers Club, a nonprofit meditation adventure group based in Toronto.

Jeff Warren

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