Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

by Dan Harris

“The untrained mind is stupid.”

the goal is not to clear your mind but to focus your mind—for a few nanoseconds at a time—and whenever you become distracted, just start again. Getting lost and starting over is not failing at meditation, it is succeeding.

Meditation forces you into a direct collision with a fundamental fact of life that is not often pointed out to us: we all have a voice in our heads.

Willpower is an unreliable inner resource that tends to evaporate quickly, especially when you get hungry, angry, lonely, or tired (four classic discipline-killing conditions, often combined in the acronym HALT).

In the mind it manifests as scattered or persistent thinking, being distracted by everything, landing nowhere, always worrying and making plans. Plans! I love plans. Plans about how to get away from here so I can immediately make a new plan about how to get away from there.

meditation helps me step off the hamster wheel of obsessive thought, so that I don’t get so caught up in the stories barfed up by the voice in my head.

Meditation, per Jeff, is a kind of disembedding from the various trances—of, say, insufficiency or unworthiness—in which we live our lives.