Jeff Warren > Quotes

“I cannot say this frequently enough: the goal is not to clear your mind but to focus your mind—for a few nanoseconds at a time—and whenever you become distracted, just start again. Getting lost and starting over is not failing at meditation, it is succeeding.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“As Mark Twain is reputed to have said, “Some of the worst things in my life never even happened.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“Buddhism is not something to believe in, but rather something to do.”)”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“Here are some key attributes of the voice in my head. I suspect they will sound familiar. • It’s often fixated on the past and future, at the expense of whatever is happening right now. The voice loves to plan, plot, and scheme. It’s always making lists or rehearsing arguments or drafting tweets. One moment it has you fantasizing about some halcyon past or Elysian future. Another moment you’re ruing old mistakes or catastrophizing about some not-yet-arrived events. As Mark Twain is reputed to have said, “Some of the worst things in my life never even happened.” • The voice is insatiable. The default mental condition for too many human beings is dissatisfaction. Under the sway of the ego, nothing is good enough. We’re always on the hunt for the next dopamine hit. We hurl ourselves headlong from one cookie, one promotion, one party to the next, and yet a great many of us are never fully sated. How many meals, movies, and vacations have you enjoyed? And are you done yet? Of course not. • The voice is unrelievedly self-involved. We are all the stars of our own movies, whether we cast ourselves as hero, victim, black hat, or all three. True, we can get temporarily sucked into other people’s stories, but often as a means of comparing ourselves to them. Everything ultimately gets subordinated to the one plotline that matters: the Story of Me.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“Meditation forces you into a direct collision with a fundamental fact of life that is not often pointed out to us: we all have a voice in our heads.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“Equanimity is the capacity to let your experience be what it is, without trying to fight it and negotiate with it. It’s like an inner smoothness or frictionlessness.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“Studies show the more you meditate, the better you are at activating the regions of the brain associated with attention and deactivating the regions associated with mind-wandering.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“When you are unaware of this ceaseless inner talkfest, it can control and deceive you. The ego’s terrible suggestions often come to the party dressed up as common sense:”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“The untrained mind is stupid.” —AJAHN CHAH, meditation master”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“As Sharon Salzberg has said, “We don’t meditate to get better at meditating; we meditate to get better at life.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling the way you feel.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“happiness is not just something that happens to you; it is a skill.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“In recent years, there has been an explosion of research into meditation, which has been shown to: • Reduce blood pressure • Boost recovery after the release of the stress hormone cortisol • Improve immune system functioning and response • Slow age-related atrophy of the brain • Mitigate the symptoms of depression and anxiety”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“Here are some key attributes of the voice in my head. I suspect they will sound familiar. • It’s often fixated on the past and future, at the expense of whatever is happening right now. The voice loves to plan, plot, and scheme. It’s always making lists or rehearsing arguments or drafting tweets. One moment it has you fantasizing about some halcyon past or Elysian future. Another moment you’re ruing old mistakes or catastrophizing about some not-yet-arrived events. As Mark Twain is reputed to have said, “Some of the worst things in my life never even happened.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“Everyone should meditate once a day. And if you don’t have time to meditate, then you should do it twice a day.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“The water represents your nonstop stream of consciousness, which consists mostly of “me, me, me” thoughts. Mindfulness is the area behind the waterfall, which allows you to step out of the cascade and view your urges, impulses, and desires without getting caught up in it all.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“Thinking is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“Then one afternoon…I realized that, actually, things were fine. Better than fine. I felt as though I had atomic vision. My attention was zingy; electric. I noticed everything—bap, bap, bap—flickers of intention before each movement, a vibrating topography of tensions and fluctuations under my belly skin, even my own keenly observant self. Such a good noticer. I noticed my ambition, my self-satisfaction, my disappointment that there was no one around to brag to about my progress (“You wouldn’t believe how hard I can look at that tree”).”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“What was charming and intoxicating over dinner could be suboptimal when filming a course for rank-and-file meditators. For example, he actually uttered the following sentence: “You can just shift into a kind of feeling of your own being, of your own headlessness. That just immediately diminishes the figure of content you were suffering about. You know?”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“is about bringing into awareness some habit that was previously unconscious. Insofar as it’s unconscious, you have no perspective around it. It totally governs you; it owns you. You’re being hurtled along automatically by it. As soon as you can start to notice that happening and see it, then it becomes less and less of a problem. So I’m at the point in my life, having practiced enough, that I can now see where most of my neurotic struggles are. And, because I can see them, I can admit to them, and they end up being less of a problem.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“Every time you catch yourself wandering and escort your attention back to the breath, it is like a biceps curl for the brain. It is also a radical act: you’re breaking a lifetime’s habit of walking around in a fog of rumination and projection, and you are actually focusing on what’s happening right now.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“While humans have been bred over millennia to chase the pleasant, run from the unpleasant, and zone out in the face of neutral stimuli, meditation, as we’ve discussed, provides an alternative: the ability to engage with it all fully. This skill allows you, however briefly, to step off the treadmill of getting and doing. Many of us assume that we will finally be happy and complete when all of our wishes are fulfilled—when we hit the lottery, master the Stanky Leg, or get more likes on our Instagram posts. It’s the primordial lie we are constantly telling and retelling ourselves. But this is to confuse happiness with excitement. All of which inexorably leads to another question: what is happiness, anyway? For years I asked tons of smart people about this and never got a truly satisfying answer. Then one night over dinner, I put the question to my friend Dr. Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist, author, and meditator. He said, “More of the good stuff and less of the bad.” Initially, I was unmoved. Over time, though, I began to see the wisdom of this modest assertion.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“Let’s talk about where meditation and mindfulness practice lead. Imagine, if you will, one of those thirteenth-century Scottish fight scenes with Mel Gibson. The untrained and distracted mind is a melee of broadswords, hideous grimaces, war cries, people’s heads flying off. As we practice returning to the breath, we slowly build up the necessary stability in awareness to notice this battle that we’ve been waging with ourselves. We recognize, we accept. We remember. Very slowly, the internal thugs get disarmed. Eventually they’re gathered in a circle, drinking mead and hiccupping and singing weepy Gaelic ballads. A great calm descends upon the land. So that’s one part of it. The other is we start to notice and appreciate the gorgeous green highland scenery that these idiots have been standing in front of the whole time.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“the goal is not to clear your mind but to focus your mind—for a few nanoseconds at a time—and whenever you become distracted, just start again. Getting lost and starting over is not failing at meditation, it is succeeding.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“mindfulness meditation,”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“Thinking is one of the actors that trots onto that stage—along with seeing, hearing, tasting, and touching. When we are mindful, we watch thinking play out from the vantage point of awareness. Awareness is the wider perspective. Most people don’t realize it’s the wider perspective because thinking feels so similar to awareness. It’s perfectly camouflaged. But when we actually start to pay attention to thinking, we can begin to notice the ghostly details of this important actor. We begin to notice that, actually, thinking is often tangible, trackable. It’s made up of vague fleeting images and tumbling inner talk and sudden ideas and tugs of emotions that play out as sensations in our bodies. When we’re thinking, we may even notice a bit of subtle tension in our face and body as each thought performs its part. Fortunately, we can learn to pan back the camera and notice when any of this is happening. To use the metaphor Dan invoked earlier, we can reclaim our place behind the waterfall. And by the way, this move doesn’t prevent us from thinking. It just lets us choose whether we want to reinforce a particular thought-soliloquy or not.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“mindfulness—being able to notice when this has happened, so we can catch our thoughts in the act. Each time we notice, we wake up. To help with this, we’ll use a little note: “thinking.” We say it with friendliness and appreciation, because thinking really can be quite mischievous and wily.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“Most traditions teach a logical progression of techniques, each building off the previous one. That‘s what we’re going to do here, with three basic steps. Step one: We focus and calm the mind by concentrating on the breath. In meditation-speak, we call the thing we focus on the meditation “object.” If you don’t like the breath, I’ll offer some other options. This will be our “home base” meditation. Concentration is key, because you can’t get far in meditation if your mind is skittering all over the place like a frenzied chipmunk on a sheet of linoleum. (Although some skittering is inevitable.) Step two: Once our mind has stabilized a bit, we’ll widen our attention to include our thoughts, urges, and emotions. When you can see your mental patterns clearly, they don’t have as much power over you. It’s a hugely useful skill. Step three: We’ll explore a few specialized meditations: on movement, on sound, on compassion, and others.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“Hurt more, suffer less.” In other words, while mindfulness may mean you feel your irritation or impatience more acutely, it is less likely to stick around and you are less likely to act on it—to turn it into true suffering for yourself and others.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

“Meditation has helped me to sort my useless rumination from what I call “constructive anguish.”
― Jeff Warren, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book