Meditation: Practice nothing

New private playlist

Meditation

JeffWarren_GuidedMeditations

Sample tracks from Sharon Salzberg's, "Real Happiness at Work"

Touch-Point Meditation

Sound Meditation

Drinking Tea Meditation

Sample tracks from Sharon Salzberg's, "Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation"

Body Scan Meditation

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

Breathing Meditation

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

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

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

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.