Home Base with Jeff Warren
Home Base with Jeff Warren
Deep Do Nothing
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Deep Do Nothing

It’s like the lazy bad angel on your shoulder that is actually the really good angel.

Hey friends, I’m back from my meditation retreat. It was deep and helpful and refreshing and I’m working on two posts about all of it, so stay tuned.

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On each episode of

, and I invite a guest to guide us in a unique practice and share a unique perspective. There are practices for every domain of human life, from communication to movement to art to sex to not having sex to flipping backwards off a diving board into a pool of jello. Hallelujah! I am a fan of them all.

You can choose to send your consciousness inside any activity and learn different ways to engage with it. You can learn to extract more pleasure (or less). To get more competent (or less). To learn more lessons about being human (or learn no lessons at all). 

From this perspective, life is a field of play, where the only real limits are our imaginations, and the laws of physics. Bonus: our imaginations are not subject to the laws of physics!

My enthusiasm for practice begs a question: is there anything special about the practice of seated meditation?

Yes: simplicity.

Body still, mind awake. Seated meditation is one of the lowest common denominators of experience. Minimal external distractions and interactions, no special movements to remember or particularly complex tasks to engage in. Even if there’s lots of thinking and internal processes involved, the magic of meditation is that it unfolds in an environment of comparative simplicity.

And, there are some significant things about this kind of simple environment. For one, we’re more likely to notice our background state: stable or distractible, clear or muddy, open or contracted, friendly or emotionally agitated. Wherever we are on the mind-body roller-coaster, we can suddenly see it. We hadn’t noticed before, in our busyness. We thought life was just like that. But now we realize, actually, life isn’t like that. We’re like that. 

Meditation in stillness is an excellent place to notice our baseline, and to calibrate. To tweak the mind-body controls. We can make small adjustments in attention, we can dial up our clarity, and dial down our reactivity. We can settle, and let go, and breathe. 

The many subtle adjustments we learn to perform in the simple medium of a sitting meditation become ones we can also learn to perform out in the world. But we may never sense the possibilities until we take the time to look and learn.

So that’s one side of simplicity – the busy proactive side. There’s another side, one that may be even more significant. That side hears all this talk of “calibrating” and “making adjustments” and is like: “Meh, that sounds like work.” This side is the lazy bad angel on your shoulder, the bad angel that is actually the really good angel. This angel knows the antidote to all this ridiculous self-improvement is … to do nothing whatsoever.

Oh how I love this angel. Thankyouthankyouthankyou I think, when I sit. I’ve never been the religious type, but, in my flawed and frenetic way, I am devoted to the God of Nothing. 

All our life we run and we jump and we act and we try and we scheme and we push push push. And every wise sage who ever lived, and every sort-of-wise one who got paid to write embarrassing copy for Hallmark (or a meditation app), all say the same thing: sometimes the best thing to do is nothing at all. 

In that stillness, in that quiet, in that place of naked simplicity and non-striving … we make space for something to find us. Something deep and true and good that we can feel, but never quite fathom. It gets humbling. It gets spiritual. It gets to be not about us at all. 

And then we open our eyes, and bring that back with us into our busy days.

Thankyouthankyouthankyou meditation. You do nothing for me. And by nothing, I mean everything.

In this week’s guided meditation: the deep practice of doing nothing. 

Jeff

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Extended Version (Paid Subscribers Only)


Online Event: 31 Days of Practice with New York Insight

Thursday, August 1, 12pm ET

New York Insight is launching their first annual 31 Days of Practice, all online, from Aug 1-31, 2024. Lots of interesting teachers – and me! Here’s how they describe it:

“This program is a special opportunity to support and sustain your meditation practice while enjoying these last days of summer. It’s also an effort to highlight our favorite guest teachers, and to re-introduce our community to all of our homegrown teachers who support the many Sanghas, or community groups, we host at New York Insight.”

Register Here


In-Person (or Online) Event: The Power of Meditation

Thursday, August 15th, 2024 | 7:00pm – 8:30pm ET
Location: New York Insight at 115 West 29th Street, 12th Floor, NY, NY (or live via Zoom)
Calvin and Hobbs copyright Bill Watterson

My first in-person visit to New York Insight, also happening online. Here is how they describe the event on their website: “Join us for a special evening discussion with Jeff Warren, meditation teacher and co-author with Dan Harris of the best-selling Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. In this session, we’ll delve into the fundamental skills of meditation and their profound impacts on our lives.”

Nutshell: we do nothing!

Register Here


Have a meditation request for Jeff?

Great – please fill out this form. Write (brief) context about you and your situation, including what’s helped in the past, or where your curiosity comes from. Although I can’t respond to all requests, the act of simply stating a situation – and naming what’s already been supportive – can be clarifying and helpful.

Once a month, I choose one question, and write both a response and a meditation. These make up Hey Jeff, a column available to paid subscribers. Thank you!


THIS WEEK ON THE MIND BOD ADVENTURE POD

This week, we welcome Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, world-renowned meditation teacher, author, and lineage holder in the Bön tradition of Tibet, one of the oldest spiritual traditions on the planet. Today, we take three protective imaginary “pills” – a white pill, a red pill, and a blue pill. “Because in the West everybody loves to eat pills!”

Each pill is both a syllable that we voice out loud and a mini-meditation that addresses a specific challenge. For eight ethereal minutes, Wangyal Rinpoche sings these three syllables to us again and again. Let them wash through you as you sit with us, or even sing along.

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