No matter who we are, or what stage of life we are at, we all long for similar things; to be happy, connected with others, in touch with a sense of calm and peace, vital, alive and joyful. And we long to be able to ride out the tough patches that hit all of us from time to time with some degree of grace and dignity.
The good news is that we can fulfil these longings at any time, in any place. They are only a moment away, a breath away. We can learn how to be comfortable with our body, know and understand our mind, and love our heart. It isn't difficult, long-winded or time-consuming. In doing so you'll feel happier in your own skin, less stressed, more confident, more capable and more at ease with yourself and life.
This is what Mindfulness for Women is about. It is a practical guide to coming home to yourself in each present moment. To finding the ledge behind the waterfall. To resting in the depths of the ocean rather than being tossed about by surface waves.
Mindfulness is a potent antidote to anxiety, stress, depression, exhaustion and irritability. It leads to a greater sense of contentment and can also reduce addictive and self-destructive behavioural patterns. This book will enable you to experience the benefits for yourself. It's not designed as a lengthy course but is solutions-based. It's fast - evidence shows that a little bit of mindfulness goes a long way. It's also bespoke - you can read all of it cover to cover, or simply dip in and out, depending on what you want to focus on. You can listen to whichever meditation track suits you at any given time and you can run tracks together if you want to meditate for longer periods. It's designed to suit your life and priorities now and well into the future.
 

Track 7 Open Heart

A series of meditations to calm the mind, investigate the mind and apply the 4 immeasurable practices.
Set aside a couple hours to listen to them over the course of a morning or day.

Compassion For Mental Suffering

Bilateral Body Scan Meditation (14 mins) – Karen Binning

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

“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

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

Exploring difficult emotions and experiences may be the key to loosening their hold over us. Try this 10-minute mindfulness practice from Patricia Rockman, MD.

Tame Feelings of Shame

Recorded by Hannah Bullock. "17 June 2020, 4.30am."

Eden Project - dawn chorus

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.