Breathing Meditation Introduction from Sharon Salzberg's, "Real Happiness"

Breathing Meditation Introduction

Here's a clip from Dr. Christiane Northrup speaking at the Hay House World Summit, 2016. Visit hyperurl.co/tirgpq to access full- length interviews with 100 highly respected motivational speakers from around the world.

Sign Up

Dr. Christiane Northrup - Changing The Conversation: Get Out Of The Cage of Age

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eden Project - dawn chorus

Recorded by Domen Finzgar. "07. 2020, 9:30 AM, Along the Mountain Trail of the Beinn Eighe National Nature Reserve. Sunny with no winds."

Coille na Glas-Leitire, near Loch Maree, Scotland

Their lives began together, but their worlds couldn't be more different. After thirty years of missed connections, they're about to meet again... Minnie Cooper knows two things with certainty: that her New Year's birthday is unlucky, and that it's all because of Quinn Hamilton, a man she's never met. Their mothers gave birth to them at the same hospital just after midnight on New Year's Day, but Quinn was given the cash prize for being the first baby born in London in 1990--and the name Minnie was meant to have, as well. With luck like that, it's no wonder each of her birthdays has been more of a disaster than the one before. When Minnie unexpectedly runs into Quinn at a New Year's party on their mutual thirtieth birthday, she sees only more evidence that fortune has continued to favor him. The gorgeous, charming business owner truly seems to have it all--while Minnie's on the brink of losing her pie-making company and her home. But if Quinn and Minnie are from different worlds, why do they keep bumping into each other? And why is it that each fraught encounter leaves them both wanting more? A moving, joyful love story, This Time Next Year explores the way fate leads us to the people we least expect--no matter what the odds. Available for purchase at: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B085N36BPQ?tag=randohouseinc7911-20">Amazon</a><a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/?ean=9780593191217">Barnes & Noble</a><a href="http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-8373827-10747236?SID=PRHD39095A662--9780593191217&url=http://www.booksamillion.com/p/9780593191217">Books A Million</a><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/2186/9780593191200?prhc=PRHD39095A662">Bookshop.org</a><a href="http://www.hudsonbooksellers.com/book/9780593191200?utm_source=prh&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_term=301&utm_content=PRHD39095A662--9780593191200&utm_campaign=9780593191200">Hudson Booksellers</a><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780593191200?aff=penguinrandom">IndieBound</a><a href="http://www.powells.com/book/-9780593191200?utm_source=randomhouse&utm_campaign=randomhouse&utm_content=PRHD39095A662--9780593191200">Powell's</a><a href="http://goto.target.com/c/128773/81938/2092?subId1=PRHD39095A662--9780593191200&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.target.com%2Fs%3FsearchTerm%3D9780593191200">Target</a><a href="https://www.walmart.com/search/?query=9780593191200">Walmart</a><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1502020282?at=11l3IH&ct=PRHD39095A662--9780593191217">Apple Books</a><a href="https://google.prf.hn/click/camref:1011ld4r/pubref:PRHD39095A662--9780593191217/destination:https://play.google.com/store/search?q=9780593191217&c=books">Google Play Store</a><a href="http://click.linksynergy.com/link?id=VD9*lkiWNd8&offerid=258185.12829781935712206&type=2&u1=PRHD39095A662--9780593191217}&murl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kobo.com%2Fsearch%3FQuery%3D9780593191217">Kobo</a>

This Time Next Year by Sophie Cousens, read by Hannah Arterton

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.