When I was first asked to create guided meditations for the Ten Percent Happier app back in 2016, I was doubly suspicious. My first suspicion was meditation apps weren’t going to be a thing. It seemed ridiculous to me that smart phones — these pocket monsters of hyper-distractibility —could ever be a delivery system for meditative settledness and sanity. My second suspicion was that ten minutes of daily meditation might not make a huge impact on a person’s life anyway. At the time, I only went on week-long retreats. My daily sits were between thirty and sixty minutes long.
How wrong I was, on both counts. There are now over 2,500 meditation apps, used by millions of people around the world. And they work. My collaborations with Ten Percent Happier (now called Happier) and Calm have been incredibly rewarding, in part because I receive hundreds of notes from subscribers explaining exactly how a ten-minute per day guided practice has changed people’s lives. The apps are also what allowed me to connect with so many of you, something I’m still kind of amazed about.
For this “Hey Jeff” column, I thought I’d share one of these notes. It’s from Heather, whom I met at a recent in-person retreat. I love how clearly Heather describes the changes that have come about from her ten-minute daily practice. I’ve created a customized meditation for her on “staying the course,” included here. Heather also asks how she might take her practice to the next level, so I’ve written about one particular path that may play to her strengths.
How have meditation apps influenced your practice? What does your practice look like – ten(ish) minutes a day, or something different? Do you wonder about taking things to the “next level,” or has this level turned out just fine, thank you very much? Let us know in the comments.
Warmly,
Jeff
Heather’s Note:
Hi Jeff,
I began meditating about 8 years ago. After a lifetime of managing anxiety and worry I had made a conscious decision that moving forward I did not want to make my life choices based in fear, my hope was to make my life choices that focused on what I WANTED in life rather than choosing my life’s path by avoiding those things that I feared most.
I began by listening to 10-minute meditations 4 to 5 times a week. Over the years the shift has been subtle but profound. I like to say that meditation has changed how my mind works. The tendency to think anxious and extreme thoughts had become a superhighway in my thought patterns. I credit meditation with helping me to break this very prevalent thought pattern. Worry is no longer my “go to” response. My mind in general is clearer, calmer and quicker to recover when life does throw something troublesome my way. These changes occurred quietly, they did not arrive as dramatic moments in time but rather as calm moments of realization in everyday life.
I believe meditation has provided me with a foundation on which I have been able to make a number of shifts in my life. I have seen an improvement in my mental, emotional and physical health. I have learned to see myself (and others) with more compassion and empathy. It is from a place of strength and understanding that I have been able to take a clear look at who I am, how my past has brought me to where I am today and how I would like to move forward from the present. I am continuing to become my own best friend while learning unconditional love for myself. For me the most unbelievable part of this journey is that it all happened in just 10 minutes a day!
As the years have passed my meditation routine has really not changed very much. It has remained just a daily commitment I make to myself in honor of my own well-being.
As I type all of that I realize that the meditations about staying the course have played a part in my journey. The concept of meditating in all kinds of weather was a huge revelation for me. As I stated above I have wept through meditations, I have been pissed off and angry throughout a meditation, I have been like my own little Buddha during meditations … and through them all I have stayed for the 10 minutes. And I think that practice in itself has had a notable effect on my staying power for any and all life’s situations regardless of them being pleasurable or excruciatingly painful.
Is there a “next step” you would recommend if I wanted to expand my meditation practice? I spoke with you at the retreat about experiencing my breath becoming so slow it seems almost nonexistent and this is a depth of concentration that interests me. Would you have any advice for pursuing this kind of meditation?
With thanks and gratitude,
Heather
Heather, I love this, it really captures your down-to-earth voice. Your commitment is impressive. I’ve never been able to stick consistently with a daily sit, my pattern is more binge meditate, fall off wagon, binge meditate, fall off, etc. Weirdly, it seems to have still worked, insofar as I’m now more habituated to the settledness and the sanity, and can find it in more situations and conditions than before. I plan to keep at my various practices, because they keep me pointed in the right direction. The difference now is I tend to do most of them because I enjoy them, as opposed to practicing out of a sense of duty, or because I’m desperate to fix my deranged self.
Do we need a “next step” in our meditation journey?
Entirely up to you. Ten minutes a day clearly works; you could do that for the rest of your life and it would in all likelihood keep deepening. The practice – especially the equanimity and surrender – gets down into your nervous system, so that at a certain point the changes take on a momentum of their own. More and more of life gets folded into your practice, without you needing to do anything about it. It’s awesome – like finally getting on the good side of a mental health feedback loop.
So it’s important to know that you don’t need to level up in any way. And, since you have a knack for seated meditation and are curious about expanding it, I say go for it. There are many possible meditation paths to explore. Your report of getting absorbed by the breath tells me you have good concentration, so I’ll say a bit about the juicy and quite pleasurable path of concentration.
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