Rabbit Hole

High energy podcast discussing mental health, shame, equanimity, flow states, ageing gracefully, the practicality of practice, and much more.

From science journalist to meditation teacher. How ADD and bipolar tendencies shaped Jeff’s practice. Falling out of a tree while on mushrooms. The interaction between mindfulness, not-self, and suffering. Defining enlightenment. Varieties of consciousness. How meditation can shift your priorities.

Chris Cole: “As you’ll hear in our conversation, Jeff Warren has an uncanny ability to both dive deep into mystical waters and also articulate the many practical benefits of taking up a meditation practice. I most appreciate his willingness to speak candidly about his experiences with ADHD.”

No Fear practices. Different ways to break out of fear and anxiety. The natural course of Insomnia. The Watch” and how it related to Insomnia. About Jeff’s teacher Shinzen Young. How Hypnosis gives us perspective on ourselves and Trance

How was he experimenting with consciousness as a child? What’s the importance of making people feel better about the fact that everyone’s got their own neurotic stuff? What was the 10% Happier meditation tour? What are the most important concepts for beginning? and more…

Lively talk with Joe Rogan and Dan Harris about self-regulation, martial arts, meditation, managing energy, the paradox of practice, equanimity and qualities of meditation and much more besides.

“Teaching is carrying on your education in public.” I had no idea when I agreed that co-writing Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics would expose a deeper layer of my own peculiar brand of mental struggle: Attention Deficit Disorder (with a generous helping of mood swings).

Many of us are at war with ourselves. We’re divided, we have mixed feelings. We’re of two minds, of four minds, of eight minds. How many minds do we have in there?

Book blurb: “In Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, Dan Harris and his friend Jeff Warren, a masterful teacher and “Meditation MacGyver,” embark on a cross-country quest to tackle the myths, misconceptions, and self-deceptions that stop people from meditating.” Click to read book’s marketing description, plus my commentary.

Dan and Jeff reflect on their January 2017 road trip, in which they traveled from New York City to Los Angeles to talk with people about what keeps them from meditating, and in the process, the two friends discuss how meditation has helped them work through their own personal struggles.

Almost any domain or activity in life can be approached as an intentional practice, and the people who specialize in these domains have learned important things about being human. How can we draw this wisdom out? Introducing the Consciousness Explorers Club’s new pluralistic practice paradigm :)

This zooming out might be particularly useful right now, on the cusp of this anxiety-inducing US election. People – myself included – really are freaked out about the deep divisions in the US. The theory about meditation is it can help us get space around such tough emotions and, in turn, make better – saner – responses.

Twice-born temperaments, on the other hand, are a little more complicated. They can’t wave away the world’s manifestly unfair distribution of hardship, and they’re generally unable to accept so-called “unseen realities” on faith alone. Their journey into spiritual feeling is more hard-won, the result of a lot of agonized fumbling and confusion.

A more realistic take on the so-called “evolution” of consciousness: an increase in discernment and sensitivity, largely driven forward by young people. It’s obvious why young people see and experience bias and discrimination at a level of nuance many in older generations cannot: they aren’t habituated yet.

I have a theory, a theory based on experience. And that’s what my theory is about: the feedback loop between our ideas about reality, and our experience of reality. An exploration and critique of spiritual growth and understanding, with a new ending to make everything extra useless and confusing.

Do these modalities all work, or none, or only some? And what can a person realistically expect as they undertake these different practices?

Think about a time when you were most in the zone, most in flow – not only with some central object of concentration, but with the whole wide world around you.

We are – Buddhist thinking goes – locked into unhelpfully narrow views of reality, meta-trances imposed by the preoccupations and formulations of our conditioning and language and culture.

A true story about almost losing one’s mind.

Sometimes I’m an idiot of a very particular type. When I see a person in any kind of hurt, I experience a seizure of compulsive helpfulness. I say the words, perform the gestures, provide the resources, and sometimes make the commitments I later realize are beyond my power to make and may not actually be that helpful in the first place.