Track 2 Compassionate Body Scan

Today’s topic is natural hormones versus synthetics.  Now, this is an area of tremendous confusion, not only for the average person, but also for a lot of health care practitioners.  People just don’t know the difference between a natural hormone and something that is not natural to the female human body.  I’m going to give you the most common examples.   Premarin is a natural hormone for a horse.  It is the most common form of hormone replacement, and it is made from the urine of pregnant horses.  So it’s a natural hormone, if your native food is hay.  

Now, progesterone is found in the human female ovary.  It’s also made by the brain.  It’s even made by some nerve cells.  Unfortunately, in most hormone replacement, the molecule that’s used is not natural bioidentical progesterone, but instead something known as medroxyprogesterone acetate, MPA.

Natural Hormones

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

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

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

A conversation with Will Kabat-Zinn.

In this inaugural podcast, David sits down with meditation teacher Will Kabat-Zinn to discuss his thoughts and insights about trauma-sensitive mindfulness. 

Will Kabat-Zinn has practiced Insight Meditation for over 15 years. He has taught mindfulness and meditation to diverse populations--neuroscientists at the Mind and Life Institute, incarcerated youth in NYC and Oakland, and business and technology leaders in Silicon Valley. He leads retreats regularly at Spirit Rock and at meditation centers around the country and is a member of the Spirit Rock Teacher's Council.

Episode 1 | Mindfulness, Trauma, and Contemporary Buddhism

Drawing on his revolutionary work in health, education, science, business and the arts, Jon Kabat-Zinn offers guidance and inspiration for experienced practitioners and those new to mindfulness alike.

2017-11/04 A Day Of Practice And Inquiry (5 hours) with Special Guest Jon-Kabat Zinn

It's just one minute of compassion for the children suffering and lost in the current ICE immigration system. It's a collective moment to breath, take pause together. Will you join us? 

#MettaMinute

#MettaMinute Meditation with Sharon Salzberg

Philanthropist Nature by Varalakshmi Madam

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.

Mindfulness of Thinking - Part 1

Jeff Warren

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