How to Keep Your Cool in a Room Full of Chaos Gremlins | Jeff Warren

0:04This is the 10 % Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

0:18Hey, happy Sunday, party people. Today, we are bringing you a brand new guided meditation from my great friend, Jeff Warren, who's both hilarious and very wise. This meditation is all about how not to be so susceptible to emotional contagion How to be the calmest person in the room during a shitstorm In other words, it's about boundaries You can get more meditations from Jeff and my other meditation teacher friends If you sign up at danharris.com Subscribers also get access to our weekly live meditation and Q &A sessions We do those every Tuesday at 4 Enough shilling from me after the break A meditation with Jeffrey Warren Hey, I'm Jeff.

1:04So I'm a grown-ass adult who moves through the world with great confidence and self-sufficiency, and the very second my tiny six-year-old son squeaks with unhappiness, I fall all over myself trying to make him happy. So yeah, I'm a people pleaser, especially with him. The antidote to people-pleasing is boundaries. It's about pausing, coming back into our own bodies, and learning to handle our discomfort. Then, from this more autonomous place, we can hopefully make a more appropriate response. So this meditation can help even if you're not a people-pleaser, because my friend, you are still a social animal surrounded by annoying humans.

1:51Let's go. Okay, so eyes open or closed, whatever's comfortable for you. And a few slow, deliberate breaths. Stretching up on the inhale.

2:08And settling down on the exhale.

2:15And just breathing here, being a body. letting everything settle for a few beats

2:28if you like to help with this you can rest your attention on the out breath or some other soothing sound or sensation

2:58mind wanders come on back patient not in a rush

3:24Okay, so we're interested in this issue of boundaries, how many of us make other people's business our own and then lose ourselves in the process. So how does this happen for you? Maybe you have a demanding person in your life, so to avoid drama or discomfort, you just give them what they want, whatever that is. or maybe you just want to be liked, or maybe you were taught to always put others first, so you never really learned to attune to your own needs and feelings. I can relate to that.

4:04Or something else. The instruction is to imagine some real situation where you're feeling this pressure, and then get curious. What does that feel like? in your body.

4:26As an example, when my kid is freaking out, it feels intolerable. This contraction in my face and heart that makes me just want to jump out of my skin. Maybe for you, it's more subtle, physical pressure, resentment, feeling of spacing out.

4:52What does this kind of social pressure feel like in your body?

5:10So there's two parts to this. The first is recognizing the experience in our bodies. the second is learning to feel that without acting on it being bigger than the impulse

5:27and we can practice that right now so some person or situations kind of pulling us out of our center instead we come back rooting our attention down in our bodies

5:48feeling your feet or your seat underneath you,

5:55lifting your spine, feeling the support of the ground. And it's like, yeah, I'm not going anywhere. I can stay right here inside this feeling all day long.

6:38Nice. So we're exploring what it feels like to ground in our bodies. that urge to react to pacify to just get something over with that can still be there but now it's happening within this larger bounded container of your body so sometimes to get solid I kind of imagine my skin shrink wrapping around me kind of satisfying tautness no matter what's happening whatever urges come up the urges will pass and still we're just sitting here

7:50endless situations will try to pull us out of ourselves. So there may still be a lingering sense of one of these for you. Practices to come down out of thoughts, out of any knee-jerk responses, and connect to this bigger field of body sensation. Maybe the steady breath Or the edge of your skin Maybe the weight of your body Mind wanders Come back to that

8:56Nice. So you're just sitting and savoring the sense of your own autonomous physicality. And that's one key to healthy boundaries. knowing where you end and someone else begins. So keep sitting there.

9:41Breathing, feeling, patient as sensations rise and fall, sitting in your own sovereignty.

10:17Thank you.

10:35Okay, that's the practice, friend. Go ahead and open your eyes if they were closed. So when you're feeling pulled out of yourself, Instead, pause, breathe, and come back to your body. Sit by sit, life situation by life situation, we're learning to tolerate our own feelings of discomfort in the face of someone else's unhappiness, whether that's real or projected. And over time, equanimity grows. Thanks for being here.

11:18Thank you, Jeff Warren. You're the best. And thank you, dear listener, for meditating with us. If you want to get more meditations from my meditation teacher friends, as I mentioned at the top here, you can sign up at danharris.com. We also do live meditations every Tuesday at four. I'll be live tomorrow with Jeff, who's our teacher of the month this month. That will be really fun. you should join us. And finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.

11:52Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.