Ten years ago I was a broke writer living in a big community house in Toronto’s Kensington Market. I ran a peer-to-peer community meditation group out of the same living room that hosted dance parties and movie nights and other less reputable activities.
My rent was cheap, my responsibilities were few. My biggest stressor was a book about the so-called “deep end” of meditative transformation that I’d been contracted to write for Random House. No matter how much I read, and how hard I meditated, and how many (ludicrous, rambling, barely comprehensible) pages I wrote, I could get no closer to completing this book, or even — truly — understanding my subject. I do not exaggerate when I say my obsession with the project threatened my sanity. I was trapped in a weird teaching fable about the ineffable mystery of Reality vs human limitation and hubris.
Reality won. I dropped the book. My life went into free fall. A guy named
unknowingly caught me.Dan and I had become pen pals after he’d read a piece of mine in the New York Times, and now, out of the blue, he wanted me to be a teacher on his new app, Ten Percent Happier.
Me: “Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg and … me? I think there's been a mistake.”
Dan: “No mistake. We want a fucked-up meditation teacher that people can laugh at — I mean laugh with.”
Jeff: “I am your man.”
Suddenly I had a career, ish. The friendship between Dan and I deepened. We traveled the US, sharing meditation with various lovable humans and wrote a book about it, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. I recorded video courses and over a hundred meditations for the Ten Percent Happier app. Then came my collaboration with Calm and numerous retreats and a podcast and Meditation Parties and kids and middle-aged back pain and so on and so forth, through the shifting vicissitudes of circumstance.
Which brings me to the subject of this post. Shifting vicissitudes have happened. That app is now called Happier. Dan has moved on to focus on his podcast and Substack (yay!). The Happier team is rolling out a new platform, one that is both more personalized, and more attuned to the on-the-ground challenges of life.
I’m all in on this new direction. Anything that can make the practice more accessible, and meet real humans where they are in their so-called real lives (don’t get me started on Reality — it already beat my ass once!).
One of the app’s new features is called Practice in Action, ie how to bring mindfulness to life without needing to sit still. They sent a camera crew to my house and followed me around for a day as I tried to maintain inner peace while having yogurt splattered in my face. Here is one of the Practice in Action videos, called Grounding on Stressful Mornings (you need to watch on a mobile device).
Today’s guided practice is a classic that I recorded with them many moons ago. It is called “The Most Basic Meditation.” It’s super short, meant to be done in the middle of life, and is defiantly underwhelming in every possible way.
Ok friends. See you next week. Happy to be here!
Jeff
Home Base Hangout - September
On Thursday, September 26, we will host our second Home Base Hangout, a virtual gathering for paid subscribers. It will take place at 12pm ET, for maximum time zone flexibility.
Home Base Hangout is a chance to connect with me and with fellow subscribers. We kick things off with a guided meditation, then go into open discussion, with ridiculousness and possible weeping. Ask anything and everything related to your meditation practice, your mindfulness challenges, your strange neurodiverse brains or your random cosmic yearnings.
If you want to come, click on the button below. Hope to see you there!
THIS WEEK ON THE MIND BOD ADVENTURE POD
The Creativity of Practice with Toby Sola
Toby Sola is founder of the Brightmind Meditation app and an old friend. In this episode, we get all Jedi-mind and try splitting our attention between chatting and meditating, and then explore a beautiful practice of nurturing trustworthiness. These are all ways of highlighting the basic creativity of meditation, how the core skills can be mixed and matched to build practices that work for us.
A COURSE YOU DON’T WANT TO MISS
(This is the ‘I love Sebene’ part of the newsletter)
My excellent friend
is offering her Ancestors to Elements course again this year. I can’t say enough about Sebene as a meditation teacher and human. She’s grounded and wise and real and funny. She’s into the dead practical grounded end of practice, the wild connected spiritual end, and everything in between. Just hanging out with Sebene has deepened my own sense of what’s possible in this beautiful life.Getting too many Substack emails???
Me too! By default, Substack automatically sends lots of emails.
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Practice in Action