A Meditation For When You’re Melting Down | Bonus Meditation with Sebene Selassie

Recorded live at the Omega Institute, Dan leads us through a loving-kindness meditation, followed by discussion with retreat co-leaders Jeff Warren and Sebene Selassie.

For more information on the next upcoming Meditation Party retreat, including scholarships available for BIPOC participants, visit Omega Institute. 

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We also talk about: whether it is possible to be a failed meditator; grief versus mourning; and meditation tips for parents.

Sebene Selassie is a writer, teacher, and speaker who leads meditation, creativity, and nature-based practices for personal & collective liberation. Using ancient wisdom and modern science mixed with her own relational and relatable style, Sebene helps spiritually curious people explore the profound and sacred truth of belonging. She is trained as a meditation teacher, an integral coach, a practitioner of Indigenous Focusing Oriented Therapy for Complex Trauma (IFOT), and is a licensed hiking guide in New York State. She has taught classes, workshops and retreats online and in person for almost fifteen years. Sebene is a devoted student of mystic traditions, including astrology, and writes the popular newsletter Ancestors to Elements. Her first book, You Belong: A Call for Connection, is published by HarperOne. 

Jeff Warren is a meditation instructor and writer, known for his dynamic and accessible style of teaching. He is the co-author of The New York Times best-selling Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, founder of the nonprofit Consciousness Explorers Club, and co-host of the Mind Bod Adventure Pod. Jeff's Do Nothing Project streams for free every Sunday night on YouTube; his guided meditations reach millions of people through the Ten Percent Happier and Calm apps, as well as through his Substack, Home Base. 

Jeff’s mission is to empower people to care for their mental health, through the realistic, intelligent and sometimes irreverent exploration of meditation and personal growth practices. As someone with both ADHD and bipolar, he is big on destigmatizing mental health issues, and championing a neurodiverse outlook on life and practice.

Tascha Schumann is a Buddhist Lama, writer, visual artist, co-host of The Mind Bod Adventure Pod, and Juno-nominated recording artist whose work has been streamed many millions of times around the world.

Related Episodes:

How to Stay Calm No Matter What’s Happening | Sebene Selassie and Jeff Warren

Meditation Party: The “Sh*t Is Fertilizer” Edition | Sebene Selassie & Jeff Warren

Meditation Party with Sebene Selassie and Jeff Warren: Psychedelics, ADHD, Waking Up From Distraction, and Singing Without Being Self-Conscious

Meditation Party: Magic, Mystery, Intuition, Tattoos, and Non-Efforting | Sebene Selassie and Jeff Warren

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In which Dan gets candid about a major life struggle, the practical takeaways, and a big new project.

In this episode:

• Dan shares news about what’s next for him
• His strategies and lessons from a big career change including how to deal with conflict, anger and insomnia
• What he's learned about the power of self-compassion, the value of failure and how to gain perspective when you need it most 

If you'd like to be a member of Dan's new community but a subscription isn't affordable for you, write to free@danharris.com, and we'll hook you up, no questions asked.

Related Episodes:

Your Sleep Questions, Answered | Donn Posner

How To Sleep Better | Diane Macedo

Kryptonite for the Inner Critic | Kristin Neff

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Additional Resources:

• Download the Happier app today: https://my.happierapp.com/link/download

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This Stanford psychologist has evidence that being a cynic is bad for your health, and offers a non-corny alternative. 

Dr. Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He’s the author of The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World, and his new book is called Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.

In this episode we talk about:

• What cynicism is, and why it’s so appealing
• His own history as a “recovering cynic,”
• How to know if you yourself are a cynic
• A step-by-step guide to start developing the “hopeful skeptic” mindset
• How to get better at disagreeing with other people, including some rules of engagement
• And how to encourage kids not to become cynical

Related Episodes:

How (and Why) to Hack Your Empathy | Jamil Zaki

Reversing the Golden Rule | Jamil Zaki

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Additional Resources:

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Recorded live at the Omega Institute, Jeff guides us through two different approaches to being attentive to our experience — followed by a discussion with Dan and Sebene.

About Jeff Warren:

Jeff makes meditation and practice accessible to diverse audiences in order to help people live more fulfilled and connected lives. He’s taught meditation to suspicious journalists, US Army cadets, burned-out caregivers, Arizona cops, formerly-incarcerated youth, virtuoso popstars, distractible teens, and every other conceivable demographic of freethinker, including squirmy six-year old kids.  He tries to do this in a way that’s rigorous and clear and adventurous. You can find out more about him at jeffwarren.org. 

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We all know that change is inevitable and impermanence is non-negotiable. But somehow it can feel surprising, maybe even wrong, when we personally hit turbulence. The Buddha had a lot to say about this, and so does our guest. 

Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher who has a lifelong interest in blending spirituality and meditation with social justice. Having grown up in an ecumenical Christian community where families practiced a new kind of monasticism and worked with the poor, at the age of twenty-five she entered a Buddhist monastery in the Plum Village tradition and spent fifteen years living as a nun under the guidance of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. She received Lamp Transmission from Thich Nhat Hanh and became a Zen teacher in 2007, and is also a teacher in the Vipassana Insight lineage through Spirit Rock Meditation Center. Today she sees her work as a continuation of the Engaged Buddhism developed by Thich Nhat Hanh as well as the work of her parents, inspired by their stories and her dad’s work with Martin Luther King Jr. on desegregating the South. 

In addition to writing We Were Made for These Times: Skilfully Moving through Change, Loss and Disruption, she is also the editor of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children. Now based in New York, she teaches and leads retreats internationally, provides spiritual mentoring, and interweaves art, play, nature, racial and earth justice, and embodied mindfulness practice in her teaching. She especially feels called to share the Dharma with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, as well as activists, educators, youth, artists, and families. Her newest book, co-written with Marisela B. Gomez and Valerie Brown, is  Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy, and Liberation.

In this episode we talk about:

• waking up to what’s happening right now
• trusting the unknown (easier said than done) 
• A Buddhist list called the five remembrances 
• how gratitude helps us in times of disruption
• And accepting what is (and why this is different from resignation or passivity)

Please note: There are brief mentions of domestic violence, abuse, the suffering of refugees, and war in this episode.

Related Episodes:

3 Buddhist Strategies for When the News is Overwhelming | Kaira Jewel Lingo

How to Keep Your Relationships On the Rails | Kaira Jewel Lingo

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Cognitive scientist Maya Shankar talks about how to get comfortable with uncertainty in an ever-changing world. 

It seems like a design flaw in our species that we live in a world of constant change yet most of us are not comfortable with uncertainty. 

In this episode, we talk to Maya Shankar about how to get better at dealing with change and to stop seeking what scientists call “cognitive closure.”

Shankar is a former Senior Advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded and served as Chair of the White House Behavioral Science Team. She also served as the first Behavioral Science Advisor to the United Nations, and is currently a Senior Director of Behavioral Economics at Google. She is the host of the Pushkin Industries podcast A Slight Change of Plans, which was named Best Show of the Year in 2021 by Apple. 

In this episode we talk about: 

• Why humans are so uncomfortable with uncertainty and change
• What a behavioral scientist actually does in the world
• Why even the host of a podcast about change isn’t immune to the uncertainties of life 
• The benefits of cultivating a more malleable sense of self
• Why humans are such bad forecasters
• The importance of auditing yourself when you’re undergoing a big change
• How to take advantage of big reset moments
• The concept of cognitive closure and why encouraging an open mind can make us more resilient  

Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/maya-shankar-466

Where to find Maya Shankar online: 

Website: mayashankar.com

Social Media:

• Twitter 
• Facebook
• Instagram

Books Mentioned:

• The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language 
• Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness
• Stumbling on Happiness

Additional Resources:

Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/install

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This is the first time you’ve ever been here, now. Pascal invites you to discover the vivid and mysterious experience of this new moment.

About Pascal Auclair:

Pascal Auclair has been immersed in Buddhist practice and study since 1997, sitting retreats in Asia and America with revered monastics and lay teachers. He has been mentored by Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Massachusetts and Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California, where he is now enjoying teaching retreats. Pascal teaches in North America and in Europe. He is a co-founder of True North Insight and one of TNI’s Guiding Teachers.

To find this meditation in the Ten Percent Happier app, you can search for “Rediscover the Familiar.”

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Cultivating resilience in the face of whatever comes up.

Ethan Nichtern is the author of Confidence: Holding Your Seat through Life’s Eight Worldly Winds and several other titles, including the widely acclaimed The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path. A renowned contemporary Buddhist teacher and the host of The Road Home Podcast, Nichtern has offered meditation and Buddhist psychology classes at conferences, meditation centers, yoga studios, and universities, including Brown, Yale, and NYU. He has been featured by CNN, NPR, the New York Times, Vogue, and Business Insider and has written for the Huffington Post, Beliefnet, Lion’s Roar, Tricycle, Buddhadharma, and more. He lives in Brooklyn. Visit him online at http://www.EthanNichtern.com.

In this episode we talk about:

• Authentic vs performative confidence
• The line between humility and confidence
• A Buddhist list called the Eight Worldly Winds
• A slew of little practices you can do in order to boost your confidence (or resilience or equanimity)
• The meaning of self-confidence in a tradition that argues the self is an illusion

Related Episodes:

• A Buddhist Approach to Money Worries | Ethan Nichtern
• The Dharma of the Princess Bride | Ethan Nichtern
• How To Get Ahead At Work, Buddhist-Style | David Nichtern
• #574. Do You Feel Like an Imposter? | Dr. Valerie Young (Co-Interviewed by Dan's Wife, Bianca!)

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Smart and practical strategies for living, in Maria's words, wonder-smitten by reality.

Maria Popova thinks and writes about our search for meaning — sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children's books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials, author of Figuring, and maker of the live show The Universe in Verse — a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry, which is now also a book.

In this episode we talk about:

• Wonder as a tool for improving all of your relationships
• The tyranny of the word should
• How the hardest thing in life is not getting what you want, it's knowing what you want
• Why she doesn't believe in making meditation a tool, even though she's been practicing for 14 years
• The illusion of certainty
• The immense value of intellectual humility
• Strategies for outgrowing your old habits
• Her new book, The Universe in Verse, which is a combination of science and poetry

From The Marginalian: How to Love the World More: George Saunders on the Courage of Uncertainty

Related Episodes:

• Bill Hader on Anxiety, Imposter Syndrome, and Leaning Intro Discomfort
• The Science Of Getting Out Of Your Head | Annie Murphy Paul
• George Saunders on: “Holy Befuddlement” and How to Be Less of a “Turd”
• The Profound Upside of Self-Diminishment | George Saunders
• A Radical Approach to Productivity, Self-Compassion Series | Jocelyn K. Glei

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