10% Happier with Dan Harris Folgen

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- There are so many benefits to mindfulness with one of the biggest being the cultivation of more self-awareness. This cultivation can lead to identifying the unhelpful mental habits that can develop over the years. Today we're going to talk to Carol Wilson who offers very clear and practical ways that Buddhist meditation can help us turn down the volume on our unproductive mental habits and be less reactive. Wilson is a guiding teacher at the Insight Meditation Society, where for many years she has taught their annual three-month retreat. She began her insight meditation practice in 1971 in India and in the 1980s she spent a year in Thailand as a Buddhist nun.  In this episode we talk about: How to be mindful throughout the day The concept of 360 degree awareness Noticing when one experiences wanting or aversion  Why Wilson believes that the root of suffering comes from making it all about us How seeing torment can help us experience freedom from the self The benefits of reflecting on your past acts of generosity  Bringing awareness to your motivations And doing a gratitude practice regularly to change the weather pattern in your mind Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/carol-wilson-481

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Many of us may have a reflexive reaction when we notice we're feeling down: we want it to go away. Maybe we think something is wrong with us and we automatically self medicate in any number of ways. But how do we square this with the fact that many of us may also really like sad movies and music? And making things even more complex, how do we compute the fact that the universe is constantly handing us opportunities to feel awe, gratitude, and joy, often at the exact same moment that sadness arises? What's going on with this complex and conflicted relationship we have with a perfectly normal human emotion? Our guest today Susan Cain has written a whole book about this called Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. In this book, she explores how the capacity to tune in to the inherent joy and sadness of the human situation can be a superpower for connection. In this episode we talk about: Whether bittersweetness is a skill you can hone The relationship between bittersweetness and the Buddhist concept of impermanence Why we feel embarrassed about discussing sorrow and longing  How sadness can be transmuted into creativity, and how that creativity can lead us out of sadness And how America, a country founded on so much heartache, turned into, in her words, "a culture of normative smiles" Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/susan-cain-480

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Sit in meditation for a few minutes and you're likely to experience pain, either physical or psychological. Hang around the meditation scene for very long, and you are likely to hear the expression, "Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional."  And that's what this episode is all about— boosting your pain tolerance through meditation. Because pain really is inevitable, but can you reduce your suffering through mindfulness and compassion?  Our guest today, Christiane Wolf, argues 'yes'. She is a physician turned mindfulness and compassion teacher and teacher trainer. She is an authorized Buddhist teacher in the Insight (Vipassana) meditation tradition, teaching classes and retreats worldwide, and she's also the author of ​Outsmart Your Pain: Mindfulness and Self-Compassion to Help You Leave Chronic Pain Behind. In this episode we talk about: Meditation techniques that offer us a better relationship to pain How to work with the physicality of pain The stories we tell ourselves about our pain And seeing pain as an opportunity Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/christiane-wolf-rerun