Working With a Brain That Doesn't Behave | Jeff Warren

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

0:19If you've ever tried to meditate and thought, you know what, my brain is too messy, too busy, too distracted for this. Well, then today's episode is for you. Our guest is my great friend, Jeff Warren. He's an amazing meditation teacher. We wrote a book together called Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. He's also one of the funniest and most refreshingly honest people in the meditation space. Jeff is our Teacher of the Month over on danharris.com for the month of December. That means he'll be crafting custom guided meditations to go with each of our full-length Monday-Wednesday episodes. Plus, he'll be hosting some live sessions over on Zoom.

0:55We do those live sessions every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern. Jeff has lived through some wild stuff, including a life-changing accident and later some very difficult diagnoses of ADHD and also bipolar. But instead of running from his own mind, he has spent decades learning how to work with it. I have watched him do a lot of this work up close. That's very impressive. So what you're about to hear is a conversation between Jeff and the executive producer of this show, DJ Kashmir. In it, you'll hear Jeff talk a little bit about his history, but also he serves up some very practical strategies for meditating when your mind won't shut up, for staying grounded when you're in the midst of big emotions, for finding what he calls a home base, which is a simple body-based way to come back to calm no matter what's happening.

1:40So a lot of good stuff in here. Okay, we'll get started with Jeff Warren in conversation with DJ Kashmir after this. Jeff Warren, welcome back to the show. Thanks, DJ. Yeah, good to hang out with you. It's awesome to hang out with you. Yeah, I've been looking forward to this for a minute now. Yeah, I want to start where we always start, which is how did you wind up here? How did you become a meditation teacher? Oh my God, accidentally. Still wondering about that. It was never, ever on my radar as a career plan or life path. I was a journalist and I was interested in the mind in part because I had always I was just inclined that way as like a nerdy little kid trying to lucid dream in my bedroom and will ham sandwiches to float through the walls.

2:34And I was like, what were my actual powers of mental capacity? And I would have lucid dreams. And now I understand them. I would have these sort of spiritual experiences to spontaneously happen to me while visualizing infinity. So I was primed that way. And then I when I was 20, I broke my neck. I was a big party animal back then. And for a long time, actually, like very so I was very psychedelics and altered states. And but that makes it sound more fancy. I just wanted to get fucked up with my friends. And I climbed this tree and I fell out of the tree and it was like pouring rain and I should not have been climbing the tree.

3:08And I was on high dose of magic mushrooms, as a matter of fact. And I broke my neck in two places and smashed my head pretty bad. And it was a long process of recovery. And in that process of recovery, when I came out the other side of it, basically my consciousness was different and not in a good way, or at least at the time, I didn't think of it as a good way. I had been very ADHD as a youngster, but then as a teenager, I started to integrate. It became less of an issue. And all of a sudden now I was back in super ADHD mode. So my mentation, the way of thinking, it was very associative and skippy.

3:44And I was much more distractible. And I went from being a really, even though I was kind of a delinquent student in Montreal at university there, I was still good at being a student. I was, I loved writing and, but it became much more difficult to get work done. And I was like, what has happened? No one said anything about the head injury. They just put all their energy trying to help my neck. So I got a big scar and I was in the halo and all this stuff and multiple surgeries. But I had this change in consciousness. So, and it was very mysterious to me and very frustrating and agonizing, but it gave me this sudden contrast, you could say.

4:19Like, all of a sudden, I saw my inner life in a different way because it was operating differently than it used to. And I got really curious what was going on. So, from that moment on, I got interested in consciousness. Like, I didn't know anything about meditation. It wasn't on my radar, but I was interested in what does it mean to have a mind and how do you work with this? And all of a sudden, And I had more challenges, anxiety. And now, many years later, I have an ADHD diagnosis and a bipolar diagnosis. So it's no surprise that. But I think part of that was, like I said, related to the head injury along with everything else.

4:54So I had this basic interest. And eventually, after a bunch of years of exploring and living in different places, I wrote a book about, as a journalist, I wrote a book about all. I wrote a book about the neuroscience of what we understood about consciousness and how it changes. And I can say now that it was like my, it's always, it's funny because like I meet a lot of super secular folks who don't identify as spiritual in any way. And yet they may be very interested in psychology or very, very interested in neuroscience or the mystery of the hard problem of consciousness. And I always see that as that's essentially the seeker translated into secular language.

5:31You're interested existentially in what is this all about and who am I within that? That was the inquiry. So I wrote a book about that and through that got interested in meditation, mostly because when I would go to these science of consciousness conferences, the big shift that happened in the 90s and in the 2000s is the shift towards being more open to subjective experience, to first person approaches to consciousness, they would say. In the old way of thinking about consciousness, no one thought about it. In the old day, it was like when you wanted to study inner experience, it was all behaviorism.

6:06People were like, ah, that's too murky and confusing. We just look at behaviors. And then that started to change with the cognitive revolution and cognitive science. And then by the time I was going to these science of consciousness conferences, everyone was talking about the importance of looking at inner experience and taking it seriously. And who were the authorities there? That were the Buddhist monks festooned with those headsets. All the excitement was around that. So I was also excited about it. It was like, oh, cool. There's all these descriptions of consciousness that are very different than what we understand in the mainstream kind of orthodox framing that have a much more expansive view.

6:42What can I learn here? So I started to go on my own retreats to get a firsthand experience of that. And that started in like 2002 or something. And then eventually I met Shinzen Young, who's a superb teacher who ended up being a mentor for me. And he convinced me to start guiding practice. And then you can blame him for everything that happened after. So that was a long-winded answer. There's more to it, but that was, yeah. I was a writer. I wrote books. I've been working on this sequel to Head Trip, which is my first book about consciousness. I want to write a sequel about the deep end of contemplative transformation.

7:18I want to write the definitive guide that would explain the mystery once and for all. What was the nature of awakening and enlightenment? Which is like the most confounding and impossible subject for any brain to kind of get their head around, especially if that brain has ADHD. so it ended up being it didn't end up paying out but in that time I started a community meditation group and I was encouraged by back then it was like peer-to-peer let's share practice with each other there's no teacher other than Shinzen would come around occasionally but it was this different view of what a practice community could look like and but Shinzen kept at me just say you're good at explaining this why don't you just do more guiding so I would and I found a lot of joy from it.

7:59And that's how it went from there. And then Dan discovered me and blah, blah, blah. And the rest is history. And you've been a frequent flyer on this show and history of small H history. The rest is a small H boutique history for 25 listeners. Just to say, Shinzen has been on the show a few times. We'll drop some links to some past episodes from him and from you too in the show notes. It sounds like you share something in common with, it seems to me, a lot of the best meditation teachers, which is a reluctance or at least an initial reluctance to see yourself in that way, a humility maybe. Can you talk about, now that you are this pretty well-known meditation teacher, what kind of teacher are you?

8:45What is your flavor? What is your special version of the Dharma? mine's the crazy flavor of crazy flavor i don't as nice as you say about the humility and maybe that comes out eventually but i think at first it comes from just feeling like who the hell am i i'm just some dysfunctional dipshit on this planet earth trying to figure out how to get by and so that the reluctance for me was like what would i possibly have to share with to be helpful to anybody but then you realize that is the thing you have to share the insight of a good teacher is that you can only ever share what's true about your experience.

9:22You learn eventually how to not overreach and really stay with what is your direct experience. And I think part of my thing is that since my direct experience has been so intense in terms of different mental health diagnoses and different kinds of challenges that way, I'm able to speak to that and what I've done to manage that. That's partly why I'm so interested in working with neurodivergent folks, because I myself have those differences. And so I think that I wouldn't have said that at earlier days, but the fact that I've had such a wide bandwidth of endogenously caused suffering that comes up internally, I've learned lots of ways of kind of thinking about that and working with that in a broader sense.

10:03So I think that's one stick. And then, you know, the kind of being real with where we are thing, I really, I mean, any good teacher does that, but I like, it's fun for me to like just punctuate anyone's ideals and be like, yeah, this is my neurotic screwed up life because I just feel like it's true. And although it's it is much less neurotic and screwed up than it used to be on account of the practice since the practice does work. So there's that. And then I think also being bipolar and ADHD, I just have a lot of I'm lucky that I have a lot of creativity available to me. And I like using my writerly creativity to think about meditation.

10:40So I like creating I like making lots of different kinds of meditations, different inroads in. I like thinking about different metaphors and framings. And so it's kind of like the writer in me gets to be in the playground of practice. And I like that. I think it's, I think in a sense, you could say our practice, the practices we develop on our own, the practices we try out that other people offer, it's like the ultimate creative medium. It's like, we think writing is a wonderful creative medium and art is a wonderful creative medium and song, but we live inside a creative medium. Consciousness is amenable to tweaks, to adjustments, to highlights, to what you're paying attention to can change.

11:21The way you're paying attention to can change. You can shift your experience of reality. And so for me, that is very thrilling. And I like leading with that in a way like that there is all this kind of creative autonomy there to a degree that we can play with. And I emphasize that. And I think over time, I've learned how to, where I would have led with that once. I think that's part of it. I now also really like to bring it into, where are we right now in this time? We're in a hardcore, challenging time. How do we translate that, that plasticity of awareness and experience into activating ourselves in service of the present moment and what that looks like?

12:02So I like to, I think a lot about that. That's more the direction of why I would say where my teaching is. And that's where I'm living right now is thinking about how to translate it with that in mind. So I hope that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm hearing there's like a way in which you've brought this vast array of experiences that you've had, some of which have felt neurotic or difficult or dysfunctional, like just a kind of big tent for practice and a kind of honesty about the difficulty of the human condition and bringing in your own neurodivergence, I'm sure means that other people who are in similar boats can see themselves in you in a way that they might not have with other meditation teachers in the past.

12:45And then you've got this whole sort of orientation towards consciousness itself as a creative medium. And then it sounds like over time, you've also just really started to lean into like the difficulty of this moment in society and kind of starting from that place to just being honest about how hard it is to be alive in 2025. Absolutely. And as part of that, our own creativity is so important now more than ever. And by that, I mean like our creative intentions for how we want to show up, believing in what our creativity can do, what's possible, the combination of the way the quiet of the practice lands in us in order to open up new perspectives, new directions for our creativity and our energy.

13:30That is really interesting to me. And it's very mysterious. There's a way in which we can't know what that looks like. People have so many agendas about meditation and practice. They think they're going to do it for this reason to get this way, or they're going to have this set of effects, or going to move through these stages of development. And I think it's much more like you get quiet and the mystery finds you. Can you listen to what it's showing you? Can you learn from what life is showing you? And almost always what it's showing you is a way to be more perfectly activated in this time, if that's one way to put it.

14:05Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about these meditations that you've created for us this month that folks will have access to starting tomorrow. I want to start with, there's a phrase that comes up in a lot of the meditations, which I know is at the very center of your practice, which is this idea of a home base. Can you just talk a little bit about where that phrase comes from for you, what it means and how it can be helpful for folks? Sure. In terms of the biggest picture, meditation is about learning to become a home to ourselves. You know, you start to learn how to be your own home. And it's that beautiful and that hearth-like how to find this place to truly be a home.

14:47So that's always my focus. But the way into that is through the way we commit our attention. That's the big understanding. And one of the big understandings of meditation is that what we pay attention to in life is incredibly important. And most of the time, you could say most of us are meditating all the time. It's just that we're meditating on our neurotic worries about the world. We're meditating on our to-do list, whatever. Like, that's where attention is going. So you learn through practice to notice that's where your attention is going and instead to to reapply it somewhere else. And what I found over the years with working with people is that people have natural differences in the way they're wired, in what they're going to be attracted to and what they find stable and simplifying for them.

15:34So I like to offer lots of home basis. I like to help people approach it as an adventure. like they can move through different sensory locations, different aspects of the breath, different aspects of body sensation, of outer sound, of inner sound, inner mantra. I mean, there's so many things you can pay attention to and anything can become a home base. And what's important there is that it's something that you find you can be settled with, more or less, that you can connect to. And out of the stream of all these things you could be paying attention to, which is so overwhelming, you select one stream and you sort of begin to devote yourself to that stream.

16:16Whatever it is for you that feels good. And that, of course, creates a stabilizing and a settling. And then from there, it's only from that relaxation, that stability, that the clarity then can emerge around getting insights. And even just the stability and the relaxation in and of itself has a huge value of just interrupting the stress cycle and helping us feel more grounded. But traditionally in Buddhist practice and in other practices too, it's just really the beginning because now you can see and be available to and notice and hear what life is showing you, what experience is showing you. So I like setting it up as a kind of adventure for people to find what their home base can be and you can switch it up.

16:58And once Once you've got a home base, then you can do your departures and come back. Once you've got your home base, you can then be in a better position when your stuff comes up and it's overwhelming to disentangle from that and go back to your home base. It's like in trauma world, they might talk about your resources. I think that overlaps with that idea. But yeah. So I think I'm hearing there's like at least two levels here. So in meditation, we might focus our awareness on an object like the breath or sound or the feeling of just making contact with the earth or whatever it might be. And for the duration of the meditation, the 5, 10, 15 minutes, that might be our home base.

17:46But then there's this other level, more macro level, more day-to-day level that's about figuring out what it looks like for you as an individual person to find some sense of home in yourself. And the meditation is an on-the-cushion training for that, but the upside is really happening throughout your day-to-day life, that you're finding some way to, yeah, I was going to say come home to yourself, and I think that's fair, but it also sounds like, I guess it could sound a little gauzy or a little cliche, but it's actually really powerful that this ability to regulate, to settle, no matter what the world is throwing at you.

18:25That's the direction of practice. That's really well said. I call it a come back to center. We're so often overreaching. Either our attention is focused on the future or stuck on something in the past or in the present moment, we don't trust ourselves to be able to manage and we're in this panic to reach out from your center. Whereas practice is teaching you, come back. Just the way you can put a hand on your chest to settle you, it's come back right here into your own center from this place, begin to meet life. Do you know what I mean? It's such a different feeling then. And you get, of course, sensitized to that difference.

19:00But as of the opposite of being, you're overwhelmed, you've lost your center, you're embedded in someone else's experience or energy, you're in this, you're in a fawning response, you're in a fight flight, you've lost your, but meditation is like, come back, come back, come back, come back. and then come back to right here. And of course, the more you learn what right here feels like, the more you're sensitized to what this is, the more often you can find it. And the more often you can find it, the more you can begin to broaden the number of different contexts in which you can stay there. So life offers greater and greater intensities and you find you're able to stay with them in a present way more than you could before.

19:44That is the measure of how a practice deepens, at least a certain kind of mindfulness practice. It's bringing to mind for me, when you arrive at one of the Plum Village monasteries founded by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, whether it's the one in France or the one in Mississippi, the one in California, often one of the first things you'll encounter is this calligraphy that says, I have arrived, I am home. And I've gone to those monasteries a handful of times. And I think early on, I experienced that as, oh, yeah, these monasteries feel like home in a certain way. But then you keep going and you realize it's not about the geographical location.

20:26That is not the point of the calligraphy. It's really about this is a place where you learn to come back to the present moment. And the present moment is home. Your own body is home. And I just think that can be so powerful for so many of us. We live thousands of miles from where we grew up. Our family is estranged or our family has passed away or home the way we grew up thinking about it is complicated in myriad ways. And just to reorient towards that word as something that anyone can have access to, no matter where they are, no matter their history. That's, there's a lot to that. Oh my God. It's aspirational too, right?

21:04You're always going to come out of that center. You'll forget your home and you come back and realize it's here. And a lot of it is what I hear you saying is that it's also about trust. there's this sense in which to speak to my own experience when I to feel at home here is to feel that I'm in the right place I have what I need for this moment for this life I can begin to trust my responses I can trust even when things are hard circumstantially around me that this is the product of endless causes and conditions there's a kind of there's a rightness to the now no matter how challenging the now is.

21:43Sometimes I think of it as everything in the right place. You know, that radio head song, everything in the right place. It's like even this, like me here at this time, this is my curriculum. This is my experience. I can begin to trust that there's a rightness to this and I can show up to this. And it's like, that's the home base. That's the deep home base. I think sometimes people when they hear a message like that the rightness of right now this is how it is right now being okay with right now it can feel it can be misinterpreted as just like surrendering to whatever putting up with injustice putting up with abuse and I heard something not too long ago from a meditation teacher that really helped me and I just I wonder how this lands for you, which is basically just that like coming back to home, accepting the present moment is really about, it's about this exact moment.

22:40And what we do in response to this exact moment and whether we stay in the situation we're in is sort of a different thing. It's the next thing, but that the first step has to be some level of equanimity with this exact moment or else you can't respond skillfully to it. You can't extricate yourself if that's what's needed. You're fully stuck if you're fighting with the now all the time. Exactly. It's equanimity with present moment experience, meaning it's not saying when people say acceptance in a meditation concert, they're not saying, except that guy's in office, except that this is happening.

23:13That's not what they're saying. They're saying this exact thin slice of the sensory moment is what's here. We carry around all this secondary resistance and struggling and suffering with how things are. And that's like in our experience in the moment. You can start to see that and you kind of let that go. You drop down into the truth of this hard thing is happening. This person is reaching out and asking for your help instead of being reactive like boom. I see this is the truth of what's happening. Now I'm settled in my center in my now from this place. How do I want to respond with anger with strength with with with whatever it is with choosing a boundary whatever it is.

23:53And of course this time is asking us to show up. We need this more than ever so that we can respond more sanely and we can't. I feel like it's our responsibility now to actually be like, OK, when I get still and settle, where does the energy want to go? Because I want to be part of the solution to this time and not just dig us in deeper. So your your meditations, December happens to be a month where there's five full weeks, which means just the way the calendar works, we get 10 meditations from you, which is an unusual treat. Sorry. And yeah, no. I'm just kidding. Pretending to be Canadian.

24:33And yeah, I think this home base, to me, having worked on these with you a little bit, this is one of the through lines of these meditations that folks will be doing with you in their ears over the course of December. How do you find your home base when a lot is being demanded of you and you feel the need to people please? How do you find your home base in the face of your own suffering, in others' suffering, in the face of others' suffering, when you're out and about in the world, even when you're under the influence of a substance? It's a very rangy group of meditations, but there is this sort of how-to home base shot through it.

25:08Does that land for you, and is there anything else you want to say about the practice that people are in store for before I let you go? Yeah, the home base is, sure, that's a through line. I would say also the creativity of what those can be. there's so many creative ways to frame a practice so i like trying to like be putting a bunch of ridiculous shit in there and i hope that stuff got cut but it probably didn't but anyway it did not oh great okay so they're singing they have dj they're singing i sing and there's a robot voice there's a robot voice and there's two singing into the robot voice but lots of things can be a home base you know our own best intentions can be a home base like a sense of what is really important to us.

25:45Our values can be a home base. And that's in one of them. The way we're relating to our home base, we can make it a kind of drizzly, druggy, sexy, embodied situation like I do in that marijuana one. Yeah, we can have, you can use our imaginations as a home base, like in the robot heart one. That can be part of it too. There's nothing in human life that can't be a home base. It's just like what you're paying attention to. So I think that, yeah, a little bit of a fun adventures for different, very different kinds of meditations as part of what's on tap too. And that's partly because of my ADHD. We're all the beneficiaries of your mind and your practice this month.