Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris on Apple Podcasts
dishpat
,
I have something that I need to do for a little over an hour every day and for years I’ve been listening to podcasts during that time. Occasionally when I’d listen to an especially good podcast episode, I would make a note in my phone so I could listen to it again someday. I can’t remember how or why exactly but a copy of your book “10% Happier” came into my life and I really really loved every bit of it. So once I finished it, I looked up your podcast and started in with episode #1. I am now only 12 episodes in and I quickly realized that I would need to drop the notion of making note of especially good episodes because all 12 were striking me that way. I have a feeling once I get to the end and I finish the current episode (many hundreds of episodes from now), I will just start over again with #1. A friend taught me TM in the 1990’s and I did it for about 6 months and then stopped because it seemed like it was vaguely relaxing but that I wasn’t getting any more out of it than I could get from taking a 15 minute nap and resting my eyes. At the time he said that he did it for several years and didn’t notice much benefit until he went on a retreat and meditated all day for a week. I remember filing that idea away for future consideration. Your book and podcast are making me reconsider the idea of starting to do it again. And if I don’t notice much benefit, maybe the answer is to do it more, not less.
Edited: After 2-3 weeks of meditating, I had worked up to doing 20 minutes but then I noticed tension building a lot until it was just unbearable to do 20 so I cut back to 5 minutes and even that was pretty much a white knuckle experience to get through it. Around that time I listened to episode 83 with Josh Groban. I made a mental note that there is a guided meditation in #83 between minutes 22-38. I had been thinking guided meditations weren’t for me and had never done one. But since I was struggling I thought I’d try it and it was a really good experience with one caveat. A few minutes into it, there are a few really obnoxious ads that pop up and you have to fast forward past them in the middle of your meditation. I seriously recommend that you take those ads and move them after the end of that guided meditation. Maybe you weren’t anticipating that people would go back to that episode and replay that guided meditation when they needed a little encouragement.
