How To Meditate When You're Freaking Out | Kaira Jewel Lingo

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

0:18Happy Sunday, everybody. Hope you're having a good weekend. Welcome back to our Sunday installment with our Teacher of the Month. This month, it's Kaira Jewel Lingo. So today she's going to tackle a question I get a lot, both when I'm giving speeches and when I'm looking at your comments online. And the question is, how do I meditate when I'm in the midst of like a really powerful, difficult emotion, anxiety, grief, you name it? Kyra has some really practical, very, very helpful thoughts on this question. So you're going to hear that in this brief episode. Before we dive in, I just want to remind you that Kyra has been our Teacher of the Month in August, which means that she's creating customized guided meditations that go with all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes.

0:59The idea, as you've often heard me say, is that these meditations help you pound the wisdom from the podcast into your neurons in an abiding way. Kyra has been creating those meditations all month. I'm really grateful to her for making all those meditations. And I'm very happy to announce that this is really going to become a permanent part of our workflow. We were experimenting with it for the past few months, but now we're really just going to make it a thing we do. So if you're a paying subscriber, you'll get guided meditations to come with all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes. And that's not all.

1:30As you know, or as you may know, I've been doing live guided meditations a couple times a month, once a month, twice a month for the last 11 months or so. And they've been really fun. lots of great attendance and lots of great responses. So we're now going to do them every week, starting Tuesday afternoon, September 2nd at four o 'clock Eastern. That'll be our, the first of our weekly sits. We're now going to do them every Tuesday at four o 'clock Eastern. And the first one will be with me and Vinny Ferraro, who will be our teacher of the month in September. And so every Tuesday at four o 'clock, either I will be doing a live guided meditation or the teacher of the month will be doing it or both of us.

2:08This is something I've wanted to do for a long time to create a real community. I think this is an aspect of the Dharma in Buddhist terms, we call community a sangha. This is an aspect of the Dharma or meditation that is under-emphasized in the West. And so I want to do my little part to remedy that. So come join the party. Speaking of parties, I'm going to be doing another IRL event, an in-person event, which we call Meditation Party. It's an in-person workshop at the Omega Institute. We're doing it October 24th through 26th. My friends, Seven A. Selassie and Jeff Warren will be teaching it with me.

2:42Also, for the first time, Afosu Jones-Korte, another great meditation teacher. Sign up at eomega.org. You can find a direct link in the show notes. All right, we'll be right back with Kyra Juolingo in conversation with our executive producer, DJ Kashmir. I've been a fully adult human male for many decades, but I've never really focused on shorts as something you can wear and actually be stylish. I'm trying to up my shorts game, especially as my family and I have a big beach vacation coming up in the next couple of weeks. And one of my allies in this endeavor, my primary ally, is Quince. I was on the Quince website last night and I was picking out some awesome shorts, some linen shorts to wear at the beach so I can look good and stay cool.

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4:33Hey, it's Dan. I just want to tell you about something I'm really proud of. The new community we are building over on my new app, which is called 10 % with Dan Harris. Here's something I believe with no reservation. Taking care of your own mind is not selfish. It's actually essential if you want to show up for the world, if you want to deal with the various emergencies on the planet right now. There is, in fact, a geopolitical case for you to get your shit together. In other words, taking care of your own mind is good citizenship. I think about it like an upward spiral. You train your mind, that makes you happier and less reactive.

5:09Because you're steadier, that improves your relationships with everybody around you. And because relationships are crucial to human happiness, you get even happier, then your relationships get even better, and up you go. Our mission over at this new app is to guide you through this process with a growing library of meditations from world-class teachers like 7A Selassie and Joseph Goldstein and on and on. Also add free access to our full podcast archive, exclusive live stream events where we guide meditations and take your questions. We do those every week and much more. Head on over to danharris.com.

5:42You can try it for two weeks free. And if you cannot afford a subscription, we'll give you one, no questions asked. Tara Jolingo, welcome back again. Thank you. Good to be here. It's good to have you. I was spending some time this week looking at the notes we receive from our listeners and from our subscribers over on danharris.com. You know, we do these ask me anythings pretty regularly where Dan takes listener questions. And so we've got this trove of months and months and months of questions. And one of the ones that I just saw coming up again and again, week after week after month after month was this question of what do we do in terms of our meditation practice when we're in the middle of really tough emotions, like high levels of anxiety or deep grief, or just in a period where, you know, a very close relative or a child is horribly ill.

6:45And this is a, yeah, there's a question that we get a lot. And so I wanted to put it to you and see what you had to say about it. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I think it's important to not expect ourselves to be able to settle in meditation the way we would in a different context. To really soften expectations about what practice looks like in times of grief, in times of overwhelm. and it can look many different ways. One of the things I found really helpful in moments like that is to do walking meditation and if I can to be outside right now it's summertime in the northern hemisphere taking time to walk and walk in mindfulness to be in touch with the beauty to to hear all the different species around us, to connect to the earth.

7:43I think there are times when, you know, what we're experiencing is so heavy or overwhelming or intense that we really need a larger field to hold us in. And sitting alone on a cushion or in a chair inside can really not be that supportive, or it can be too much. What we're trying to hold is too much. Putting ourselves in situations where we can sense ourselves maybe releasing some of that or allowing the earth, the tree, the sky to carry it with us so that we're not alone holding it can be helpful. and just the practice of walking moving with the grief moving with the overwhelm can also maybe sometimes be a more skillful approach than trying to sit still with something that feels really hard but that rhythmic placing one sole of the foot on the ground and then the other and feeling the breath and feeling the weight of the body and being met by the earth with each step can offer a different kind of experience of being held or of being able to focus on what's happening in the present moment than maybe sitting.

9:01And I also would just say that whatever we can do to be in loving community, whether it's a spiritual community, maybe a grief group or a group of people that are exploring anxiety or overwhelmed together in a mindful, intentional way, or just a spiritual group that just comes together to practice. I think sometimes it's different for everyone. None of these things are an answer in all cases, but I think part of the pain of these experiences is that we can feel so alone with them. And so whatever we can do to be in community, whether it's in community of people going through what we're going through or just in a mindful, loving, grounded community, because in those situations, our nervous systems are dysregulated often.

9:58And if we can be around others who have stability, who have calm, who have access to presence, that can help reset our nervous systems because our nervous systems are not separate. There's a collective energy that can help us shift our personal, individual energy. Guided meditations can be very helpful in times like this. It may be that you find your way better in the silence, but if your mind is really loud or something is just really overwhelming, it could be helpful to have someone else guiding you. and so just something where you could lie back and open up to what's above you and just feel the earth holding you and be guided to release and to let go and to be there for those are just things that arise as ways to support ourselves and maybe just let go of meditating in this time has to look like this you might find swimming is your meditation in this time.

11:10You might find dancing is your meditation in this time. You might find crying while you hold a tree is your meditation. So I think it's just so important to not judge ourselves. Oh, I can't meditate right now. That's okay. There are other ways that you can support yourself and come back to the present if it's just too much to sit you know in a still posture if the grief or the anxiety is too much I mean just to say there's such an expansive and practical answer there's so much in there from not expecting the same thing of yourself that you might in a calmer moment to walking meditation especially outside practicing community practicing lying down deep relaxation guided relaxation to zooming out even further on what meditation could even mean swimming dancing I really appreciate that and it's you said something in there about how we we may want to try letting go of the idea that meditation needs to look like this right now and this is a this is a thread that I see in so many of the questions we get and I see it in my own mind too there's this there's this running self-assessment.

12:28Is this the thing? Am I doing the thing? Am I doing it right? I've definitely had moments just in the last few weeks where I'm having some big emotion. I'm like, I should sit. I can't sit. And then it's like this binary thing where I'm like, I guess I'm not going to practice then. And I just appreciate you sort of pushing us away from this idea that, you know, there's one lane and you get a gold star if you do it that way. It's just a much more expansive view of what the point of all of this even is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's such a good articulation that you name that because you say, I guess I'm not going to sit that you assume.

13:08So I can't practice with this. And that's two very different things. But when you say it, that seems obvious. Yes, there are different things. Yeah. And that really, yeah, what you say, it's like the point is to be there for ourselves. in these times in whatever way that looks, whatever way we can be there for ourselves, right? Because walking or dancing or sitting with someone and holding their hands as we pour out our difficulty, that's being there for ourselves. It's not exactly the same as the way we would be there for ourselves on the cushion, but you can sit on the cushion and not be there for yourself also.

13:50That posture doesn't mean X, Y, and Z is happening. So wherever you can find, you know, and for some people, it may be sitting shorter for a few minutes, just to even take the posture to just say, I'm going to be here for myself for 10 breaths. You know, I'm not going to ask more of myself than that. Or, you know, maybe, maybe for some people sitting through the discomfort of, I can't get my mind to calm. Nothing's happening here. I hate this. But then you sit there for long enough and things do start to settle. I mean, for some people, paradoxically, it may be sitting an hour is what helps. Maybe it's after that 30-minute threshold that something starts to settle.

14:37That's definitely happened for me where I've been like, nothing's happening. This is terrible. And then out of nowhere, some calm settles. So it's mysterious. It's hard to say, you know, how it will be for anyone in any given practice period. But really the point is to be there for ourselves, however we are, and in whatever way we can access that. but certainly all the indigenous wisdom says that when we are in grief when we are in times of overwhelm we really need other people that's we're not meant to go through those experiences alone or other beings like just to open ourselves up to you know the the benevolence of of the world around us.

15:30And I know many people might disagree with that characterization, but this sense of connection, this interwovenness that just is our reality, tapping into that. So if we don't have people around us, but if we have, you know, this sense of sitting somewhere and just feeling, you know, the tree's shade is a kind of love. The bird's song is a kind of solidarity. You know, The clouds doing their thing in the sky is a kind of, it's a source of nourishment for us that we can really turn towards when we feel really adrift or bereft. One last question. As I'm listening to you talk, I'm reminded of the conversation we had on the pod a couple weeks ago.

16:22And there's this thing that you do where you're both... deeply compassionate and there's like a soothing element, but there's also a real pushing happening too. Like what I'm hearing from you is both that we can expand what we think it means to take care of ourselves, that we can be gentler with ourselves and that we actually have to work harder at listening to ourselves and trusting ourselves and opening ourselves up to other people. And so there's this way in which if I'm not listening too closely, it all sounds really comforting and easy. And it sort of is and it isn't. There's a real sort of against the stream pressure in what you're saying too.

17:11And I guess I just want to acknowledge or see if this lands for you that this whole thing of opening ourselves up to other people or even just listening to ourselves really hard. Anyway, does that make any sense to you? Totally, totally. And it is really hard and it is going against the stream because all the things around us that are reflecting back to us are saying, check out and you could do this all by yourself. You don't need other people. I mean, that's so much of our our consumer culture is saying western culture you know just the whole individualism so it's a huge thing and it's very vulnerable to open ourselves up to anything that's not our habit and our our personality but to to really you know lean on someone let ourselves lean on it and risk the possibility of not being met or to open up to this possibility of real intelligence in other species and other life forms that may really be as interested in us as we can get interested in them.

18:28We're not taught to think that way, but there is real healing. I've just finished a book called Raising Hair, Chloe Dalton in the UK. it's all about this experience she had in the pandemic of meeting this leveret, this tiny baby hair, and rescuing it not to tame it or domesticate it, but just to save its life. And anyway, it's all about their relationship and how that hair decided to live of its own accord, partly in her house and partly in the wild. and it's a really beautiful story memoir but it the impact of the hair on this woman was was incredible and i just think about all the ways that many species around us are ready to instruct us if we will listen and it takes a real slowing down and a different way of orienting to be able to open to that but there's so much healing i mean this woman totally changed her life because of the hair.

19:33I want to thank you again for joining us. As I was listening to you, I was reminded of something. Larry Ward, who's also a student of Thich Nhat Hanh, like you, he was recounting a way someone had described Thich Nhat Hanh years ago. I don't remember who the person was. So this is like third hand at this point, but the description was that Thich Nhat Hanh had the serenity of a cloud and the force of a Mack truck. And there's something about that that I feel like lives on in you in some way that I feel like I'm hearing these answers. And I just, yeah, I really appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you so much, DJ.

20:09That's a compliment. All right. Thanks for doing this. We'll talk again soon. Okay. Thank you.

20:19Thank you to Kyra Jewell and also DJ. Don't forget, you can join me for an in-person meditation party at the Omega Institute. It's October 24th through the 26th. You can find a link in the show notes or just go to eomega.org. And for year round practice, remember to sign up at danharris.com. It's your gateway to exclusive companion meditations that come with all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes, and now weekly live guided meditation sessions on video, which will be launching on September 2nd. Finally, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili.

20:56Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren 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.

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