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

Key Takeaway

Create a 'home base' - a stable anchor for your attention during meditation. This could be your breath, body sensations, sounds, or even your values. When overwhelmed, practice coming back to this center repeatedly. The goal isn't perfection but developing the skill to return home to yourself, creating stability that allows you to respond rather than react to life's challenges.

Episode Overview

Meditation teacher Jeff Warren discusses his journey from journalist to teacher, emphasizing practical strategies for finding stability and home within yourself through meditation practice.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Working With a Brain That Doesn't Behave | Jeff Warren from 10% Happier. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. If 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 fulllength Monday Wednesday episodes. Plus, he'll be hosting some live sessions over on Zoom. We 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 Cashmir. 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. So, a lot of good stuff in here.

Okay, we'll get started with Jeff Warren in conversation with DJ Kashmir after this. So, we just had a big team summit here at 10% Happier. All of the employees got together in northern Westchester, which is the county to the north of New York City. That's where I live and work. And so the team all got together in my neck of the woods, and we got some homes on Airbnb where everybody stayed together. I actually stayed at my house, but the team members all stayed together in these two homes.

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Get more with Northwestregistered agent at northwestregistered.com/happierfree. Jeff Warren, welcome back to the show. Thanks DJ. Good to hang out with you. It's awesome to hang out with you. So 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 uh still wondering about that. It was never ever on my radar as a uh career plan or life path. I was a journalist and um 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 and 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 just 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 into psychedelics and altered states and but that makes it sound more fancy. I just wanted to get [ __ ] 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 and 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 it 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 my mentation, the way of thinking was very associative and skippy and I was much more distractable 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 love 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 uh and it was very mysterious to me and very frustrating and agonizing but I it gave me this sudden contrast you could say like 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 I had more challenges of anxiety and now many years later I have an ADHD diagnosis and a bipolar diagnosis. So I it's no surprise that but I think part of that was like like I said is related to the head injury along with everything else.

So I had this basic interest and eventually after bunch of years of exploring and living 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. you'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 '9s 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 thought about it.

In the old day, it was like when you wanted to study inner experience, it was all behaviorism. People 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 festoned 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. What 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 Shinszen 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 way to answer there. 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 was my first book about consciousness. I want to write a sequel about the deep end of contemplative transformation. I 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 Shinszen would come around occasionally but it was this different view of what a practice community could look like and but Shinszen kept at me he 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 and 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 Shenzen 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 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? What is your flavor? What is your uh special version of the dharma? Mine's the crazy flavor. I'm 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 [ __ ] 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. You 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 neurode divergent 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 indogenously 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. So I think that's one stickick. And then um 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. So, 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 a minimal to tweaks to adjustments to highlights to what you're paying attention to can change. The 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 I 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? So, 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 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 a kind of big tent for practice and a kind of honesty about the difficulty of the human condition and bringing in your own neurode divergence 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 and 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 um just really started to lean into like the difficulty of this moment in society and kind of starting from that place too. 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. Like that is really interesting to me and it's very mysterious. You know, 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 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. Yeah. Yeah. 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 hearthl like how to find this place to truly be a home. So that's always my focus. But the way into that is through the way we commit our attention.

That's the big understanding or 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 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.

So I like to offer lots of home bases. I like to help people approach it as a adventure like they can move through different sensory locations, different aspects of the breath, different aspects of body sensation, of outer sound, of 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 in the 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 whatever it is for you that feels good and that of course creates It's a stabilizing and a settling and 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 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 practice 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. experience is showing you. So, I like Yeah, 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 and but once you've got a 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 bit better position of 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 that 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. But 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 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 uh yeah, I was going to say come home to yourself. And I think that's fair, but it also sounds like it 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. That's the direction of practice. That's really well said.

Like I I call it as a comeback to center. We're so often overreaching. We're either our attention is focused on the future or like 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. 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 than and you get of course sensitized to that difference. But the as of the opposite of being you're overwhelmed. You're 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're you've lost your as but meditation 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're able to you find you're able to stay with them in a present way more than you could before. That is the measure of how a practice deepens at least a certain kind of mindfulness practice. If I it's bringing to mind for me when you arrive at one of the Plum Village monasteries founded by Zen master Tiknah Han 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 like it's not about the geographical location. That 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?

But you're always going to come out of that center. You'll forget your home. Then 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 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 sometimes 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 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.

And 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. Exactly. But that the first step has to be some level of equinimity 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 equinimity with present moment experience. Meaning it's not saying when people say acceptance in a meditation cons saying accept that guy's in office.

Except that this is happening. That'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 a with whatever it is, with choosing a boundary, whatever it is. And of course, this time is asking us to show up. We need this more than ever so that then we can respond more sely and we can't I feel like it's our responsibility now to actually be like, okay, when I get still and settled, where does the energy want to go? Because I 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 that no I'm just kidding. I'm pretending to be Canadian. Um, and 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 other 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. Does 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. And I would say also the creativity, 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 [ __ ] in there. And I hope that stuff got cut, but it probably didn't. But anyway, it did not. Oh, good. Okay, great. So, they're singing. They have DJ. They're singing. I sing. There's a robot voice. There's a robot voice and there's two singing in two 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. Our values can be a home base and that that's in one of them. our the way we're relating to our home base can we can make it a kind of drizzly druggy sexy embodied situation like I do in that marijuana one the 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 adventure through different very different kinds of meditations is part of what's on on on tap too.

And that's partly because of my ADHD. We're all the beneficiaries of your mind and your practice this month. So, thank you and thanks for coming on to talk about it. Thank you, DJ. Good to hang out with you. Thanks, everybody. Look forward to being with you this month, I guess, for the different live things that we're doing or whatever it is we're doing. All right. Thanks again to Jeff and DJ. Don't forget to check out our live meditation and Q&A sessions. We do these every Tuesday at 4.

The next one will be Tuesday, December 2nd. It will be me and Jeff together. We're doing these on Zoom now, which uh I think is a big upgrade. Also, if you sign up at danharris.com, you can not only get access to these weekly live sessions, you can also hear the custom meditations that we're now doing with all of our Monday Wednesday episodes. So, go check it out, danharris.com. Finally, thank you so much to everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili.

Our 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.