Rabbit Hole

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.

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 […]

There are two big meditation approaches out there, two buckets, discovered and rediscovered many times in many different traditions. One is active. It’s about bearing down, about trying to get somewhere, to build some skill, to make something happen. The other is passive. It’s about easing off, about not trying to get anywhere or make […]

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, […]

10% Happier asked me to write this meditation for Apple employees. They took my script and recorded it in the voice of the iPhone. Personally, I think the voice should be slowed down by a third, to make it more hypnotic and meditative. The meditation “object” here is the sound of silence, the “space between commands.” […]

This is the first session in my course on the Calm app, titled How to Meditate: A simple 30-day program for everyone. The aim of this course is to show not just how meditation can make you calmer, clearer, more open and compassionate. But also to show how the real training is learning how to be Ok […]

Something a bit different. I created this meditation for kids, aged 5 – 10. It is a meditation designed for kids, not adults, complete with cool sound effects and animated vocals and continuous appeals to the imagination. The idea of Calmland is to help kids move from hyperactive agitation to a more relaxed and self-regulated […]

Forget dissolving my sense of being a separate self. I have two kids now. My boundaries are well and truly dissolved (“trampled” is probably more accurate). What I need now is stability and ground. I need good boundaries, not no boundaries. Here’s a meditation to help with this – for parents everywhere!

Something a bit different. It is a meditation designed for kids, not adults, complete with cool sound effects and animated vocals and continuous appeals to the imagination. The idea of Colourland is to help kids move from the low energy blahs, to more optimistic and cheerful bounce. Should they wish to! They may not; it’s […]

This is the first meditation in the book Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, coauthored by Dan Harris and Carlye Adler. This and the dozen or so other meditations can be found – with video and extra stuff – on the 10% Happier app. Concentration is the foundational skill of meditation. It stabilizes the mind, and eventually it can […]

This talk and meditation are a distillation of some of my core ideas about what meditation practice is, and how we can find the right practice for each of us: the right attitude, the right object, and even the right balance of stillness and movement / activity. It talks about the core skills of every successful practice and how to make sure they are activated in the meditation itself.

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 […]

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 […]

“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, […]

“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 the hard ones. I led this practice at a Monday night Consciousness Explorers Club (CEC) meeting in Toronto, sometime in 2017. It ends with […]

In early 2017, Dan Harris and I met with Chief Moir of the Tempe Police Department in Arizona. Chief Moir is an early adopter of meditation and mindfulness in policing. She uses the skills herself, all day long. Her job requires her to be totally present with person after person as they file through her […]

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, […]

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 […]

Meditation sounds like the easiest thing in the world: close your eyes, relax, and just be.  Except then your neurotic thoughts begin to churn, your legs get all seized-up, and your next door neighbor decides to crank “Who Let the Dogs Out?” on the hi-fi. Suddenly your relaxing meditation has become a comedic test of endurance.