Thank you, this really helped me be with my feelings. And I laughed out loud at the "May you be medium strength" 😆🙏

Meditation

Live producer set, 8 tracks mixed live in Abelton of original compositions at the Cascadia campoout September 17th, 2022
Featuring tabla by Michelle Kestrel and Samples of Tippett's inspirational words.

LIVE AT CASCADIA

A mix that to me is about summer and the love it brings - the quixotic love of an obsession, of a partner, of yourself, and of where you came from. As a result this mix means a lot to me, which is probably why I fussed and prodded with it for so long before releasing it (and in the meantime one of the tracks won a Grammy for Best Remix). While a lot of it strikes simply as your typical house music's praising of love, listen to the words throughout and think of what they mean to you, because I feel like there's a story in here that a lot of us can relate to.

A little breakdown in the middle featuring a poem from the inimitable Marie Metaphor Specht, as a little treat in there. Her voice is a treasure and her words can make your heart explode in a billion pieces over and over again.

A lot of re-ups of some classics in here, so if you recognize a tune or two you're probably not alone. And of course some Hip-Hop at the end because I just can't resist.

Also the image (as well as my background image for my profile) are of Forestry Pools, a key place in my raving history, taken by Ser Devlin.

Tracklist:
0:00 Eats Everything & Shermanology - Tell You What It Is (Extended Mix)
5:58 Bodie Lee - I Need U
9:27 Demuir - Rizin' (Extended Mix)
13:41 Lorca - Larry's Bomb
15:26 DJ Hermes & Fly - Sing It Back (Afro Original Mix)
17:55 Discotron & Martello - I Need A Lover (Club Mix)
22:10 B Beat Girls - For The Same Man (Nic Fanciulli Extended Remix)
26:23 Jayden Voss - All The Time (Extended Mix)
29:08 M&S presents The Girl Next Door - Salsoul Nugget (If You Wanna) (Mark Knight Extended Remix)
34:29 Jesse Bru - Yellow Sunshine Machine
34:44 Marie Metaphor Specht - Heartwood
39:36 Steve "Silk" Hurley - The Word Is Love (feat. Sharon Pass) (Alfred Azzetto Classic Re-Work Remix)
43:27 Cassius - Go Up (feat. Pharrell & Cat Power) (Butch Remix)
48:18 Lizzo - About Damn Time (Purple Disco Machine Extended Remix)
51:33 Black Legend Project - Close Your Eyes (Black Legend Extended Remix)
56:02 Louie Vega - Seven Mile (feat. Moodymann) (Extended Version)
59:27 Mos Def - Umi Says

for love of summer

Soul House Live Set 03032023

So happy to share my opening set for Black Coffee at the Junkyard.  This whole experience had a beautiful and surreal quality to it.  

The weather was rainy and stormy but, just as the music began to play, the clouds dissolved, the sun came out and it was a gorgeous time in the city.  I hope you enjoy.

Opening Set for Black Coffee - 5/12/23

Kobalt Severa is a that kind of rascally player that always shows up with a trick up his sleeve and a glimmer in his eye. He weaves sonic tapestries AT LEAST as well as he mixes cocktails. Based out of Seattle, WA, we love what he brings to the party, both sonically and beyond. 

Sink into this mix! It's both kinetic and ethereal!

Guest Mix: Kobalt Severa

Got the crew together to celebrate St. Patty's day in honor of our Irish brothers and sisters. An awesome party as usual and had a great time playing. Decided to go a little more up beat happy disco and house to get the crowd started.

I got to play when I was pregnant with my first baby, I got to channel mama energy again for my second baby in utero. Gotta set the standard for the kiddos :)

Live @ PaddEez Night // 2024.03.16

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

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

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

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

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 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.

Mindfulness of Emotions - RAIN - Long

Jeff Warren

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