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

by Dan Harris

The equanimity training here is genuinely wishing for our—and everyone else’s—hurt to end, while being okay with not knowing whether it will actually end or not.

The beginning of compassion is allowing: allowing ourselves to feel what we feel, to be this exact person at this exact time. Just breathing into our bodies and sitting in this accepting way with ourselves.

Now for the self-compassion part. Start by connecting to a simple intention inside yourself to be well. There’s nothing necessarily sentimental here—we’re talking about the extremely reasonable desire to be healthy and not in pain. A short phrase here can help: May I be well.

1. Flop down on the floor, or couch, or anywhere, in a relaxed and perhaps slovenly way. It’s okay if a kid or animal is next to you—we’ll make their presence part of the meditation. 2. Close your eyes, if you like. Big relaxation on the exhale, letting go of any tension. Imagine sinking more deeply into the ground. Lift your arms and legs a bit and then flop them down a few times. Your attitude is “Yeah, nothing to do.” Nothing to do but rest and drift. This is the main instruction.

3. If you fall asleep, that’s fine. If there are thoughts, let them be in the background, like noise from a distant radio. Just lying on the floor of the room like when you were a kid. 4. Open your eyes when you’re ready, and then slouch-walk-groove into your day like a young John Travolta. Taking lazy to the street!

Tennessee Williams is reported to have said, “There are only three great cities in the United States: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. All the rest are Cleveland.”

Although we can obviously have emotionally loaded thoughts, our bodies are the real epicenter of our emotions.

1. Close your eyes and first find home base: some sensation that feels comforting. Maybe it’s the breath, or a relaxed place in your body, or a picture in front of you. 2. Recognize. Now ask yourself: are there any emotions happening? If so, note them: anger, sadness, exuberance. If you can’t find the exact name for what you’re experiencing, note it as feel. 3. Accept. Open to the feeling and let the sensation of it do exactly what it wants to do. See if you can find a quality of caring and friendliness for this emotion that just wants to express itself. 4. Investigate. Now we get curious about our emotion, about where it’s happening and what it’s doing. Is it centered around a particular part of your body? Is the feeling staying the same, or is it changing? See if you can lightly follow the sensation, like you’re a field naturalist. If the emotion starts to get too intense, you have a couple of options. One is you can try to zoom in on one small part of it and notice just that, which makes things more manageable. Or you can swing your attention back to your comfortable place, noting home or rest.

5. Non-identification. Can you let the emotional feeling do its thing without taking it personally? Try to see your emotions like you see the weather: not as something to judge yourself for but, rather, as part of the natural atmospheric conditions of the moment. This is a deeper form of allowing. After you’ve let this happen for a while, go back to the breath or to your home or rest sensation for a bit. Before you open your eyes, take a few minutes to relax and do nothing.

try experimenting with a wider expanse of mindfulness. To do this, let go of your focal attention on the breath or body, and send your awareness out to include any sounds coming and going, and also the wider sense of space in the room, the volume of air above and behind and around you. Note sounds if you like; note space. Let your mind get big and soft. Welcome your big soft mind to the party.

Get curious about the details of what you’re concentrating on. Get as still and stable as you can, and try to notice the edges, the center, the individual pixels of the sensation and the way it changes. This pop-out discernment is the taste of clarity.

the psychologist Abraham Maslow once said, if the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat everything as if it were a nail.

WALKING MEDITATION Option 1—Formal 5 minutes or more Choose your field of operation—a small inside space cleared of obstacles or a circumscribed outside area. Decide: shoes on or off? Get curious about how completely you can stay with the physical sensation of moving, and how unhurried and deliberate you can make each step. The classic meditative focus points are the two feet. Take your first slow step and note: lift as the foot lifts, aware of the release; move as it glides forward, aware of the slightly unstable swing through space; step as it lands, aware of the miniature recalibrations of balance and pressure. And then do the same with the next foot. And so it goes, one foot after the other, a frankly weird and ungainly bipedal spectacle whose automaticity you are doing your best to undo. What is walking? What is this new tingling walking feeling situation? Have a good time. Recruit your imagination. You’re allowed to do this in meditation. Walk on the earth like you’re Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, testing the gravity, pretending you don’t know what’s coming. Can you notice the little differences in each step? Can you be that clear and focused? Slow it down—no rush. Here for the act of it, each step landing in the here and now. Lift, move, step. If your feet are bare, try sampling the textures beneath you, the bent grass or smooth floor, the bumps and depressions, each foot probing and feeling, like a long “downturned hand,” to quote my pal the eco-philosopher D...

1. Choose, inside or out, some circumscribed area you can move comfortably in, shoes on or off. Set the intention to move slowly and deliberately. 2. Bring your attention to your two feet. Take your first step and note lift as the foot lifts, move as it glides forward, step as it lands. Then repeat with the next foot. 3. Enjoy the simplicity. Be curious and clear and wonderstruck by the weirdness of it all. If emotions and thoughts intrude, redirect to physical sensations. Finish when you finish.

1. Wherever you are, notice your body as you walk. See how totally you can commit to the feeling of your body moving. 2. Experiment. Practice walking joyfully—set this as your intention. How does it change the feeling, the action? Or slow it down and keep it simple.

“Expectations,” I said to my new friend, “are the most noxious ingredient you can add to the meditation stew.”

Ambition and striving—the assets that often help us so much in the rest of our lives—can work against us on the cushion.

The goal is to be open to whatever comes up, and to approach it all with mindfulness, friendliness, and interest.

the best measure of your meditation skills is not the quality of your last sit but, instead, the quality of your actual life.

As Sharon Salzberg has said, “We don’t meditate to get better at meditating; we meditate to get better at life.”

Don’t write yourself off as a failure if you are still popping off in anger once in a while. I still get captured by my emotions—but I find that I catch myself earlier, and apologize more speedily.

what is happiness, anyway? For years I asked tons of smart people about this and never got a truly satisfying answer. Then one night over dinner, I put the question to my friend Dr. Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist, author, and meditator. He said, “More of the good stuff and less of the bad.” Initially, I was unmoved. Over time, though, I began to see the wisdom of this modest assertion.

“It’s like, I’m convinced I’m not doing it right, and I’m not doing it enough, and if only I did the right meditation practice…then I’ll finally find enlightenment.” He said he had come to the conclusion that enlightenment is not some magical transcendence. “Enlightenment, I believe, is right where you are, right now. It’s just having a different relationship to it that’s based on kindness and acceptance.”

Moby

We have the same curvy line moving along the x-axis, which is “Time.” But now we also have a third axis—the z-axis—which represents “Depth,” both on the graph and in life. It spreads like a widening ribbon out from both our high points and our low points equally. You could say this ribbon is like a shadow that extends out beyond our life circumstances and conditions, a kind of invisible breadth and volume.

What is that line? That’s the mystery! I can’t really say. It doesn’t seem to be particularly amenable to concepts. Over the years, mystics and meditators have struggled to come up with language to describe the ineffable. So we get jargon-y spiritual terms like “Being,” or “oneness,” or “awareness,” or “God,” or “the moment,” or even “emptiness.” And actually, my diagram is misleading; this thing/non-thing that I’m trying rather futilely to describe has always been there, in exactly the same “quantity.” It doesn’t change. What changes—what gets wider—is how much we notice and live from this place.

But is this just another way to talk about happiness? The point I’m trying to make is that it isn’t happ...

Happiness and fulfillment are the human responses to deepening along that z-axis. And not the only responses—all the other human goodies roll out from here too: more gratitude, more humility, more equanimity, more peace, more meaning, more connectedness, more poignancy, more love, and more Wunderstrukfladen, to quot...

In a really gentle way we’re working to unclench the part of your brain that thinks it needs to endlessly negotiate with reality, to make all these adjustments, to prove yourself and improve yourself. To earn your keep. To get it “right.” But you don’t have to get anything right here, or prove anything to anyone. It’s okay. You are right where you need to be, and you are 100 percent allowed to be here. Forgive yourself for not being perfect at this, and see what happens.

“No one likes writing; they like having written.”

On Having No Head by Douglas E. Harding

Evolving Dharma by Jay Michaelson

Coming Home by Lex Hixon A Path with Heart and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry by Jack Kornfield The Science of Enlightenment by Shinzen Young Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chögyam Trungpa The Making of Buddhist Modernism by David L. McMahan The Progress of Insight by Mahasi Sayadaw Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel M. Ingram Be as You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi, edited by David Godman Waking the Tiger by Peter A. Levine Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama, narrated by Daniel Goleman Waking, Dreaming, Being by Evan Thompson

Radical Dharma by Angel Kyodo Williams, Lama Rod Owens, and Jasmine Syedullah The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa (John Yates) Nonduality by David Loy Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill For the Time Being by Annie Dillard