A Radical Buddhist Approach To Making This The Best Year Of Your Life | Vinny Ferraro

10% Happier with Dan Harris

10% Media, LLC

Dan Harris, Health & Fitness, Mindfulness, Dharma, Mental Health, Meditation

4.6 • 12.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2025

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Contemplating your own death can feel like a massive bummer at first, but there’s good news: how you react to that inescapable fact really matters.

Vinny Ferraro has practiced insight meditation (vipassanā) since the mid-90s. He’s the Guiding Teacher of the Big Heart City Sangha in San Francisco and has led a weekly sitting group for almost two decades.

As a fully empowered Dharma Teacher thru Spirit Rock/IMS, he has taught residential retreats at Spirit Rock, Insight Meditation Society, and the Esalen Institute. Currently, he leads Spirit Rock's Year to Live course and teaches retreats and daylongs through Big Heart City and meditation centers across the country.

He is a respected leader in developing and implementing interventions for at-risk populations. leading groups in schools, juvenile halls and prisons since 1987. He has led emotional intelligence workshops for over 100,000 youth on four continents.

In this episode we talk about:

Why it’s important to think about your own death even if you’re not expecting it anytime soon
The distinction between the actual conditions of your life and how much you suffer
A practice called the five Daily Remembrances, which Dan started doing myself right after we recorded this — and which has made a real difference for him
And some of other practices they do in the class, including the “life review” and “housekeeping”

Related Episodes:

Three Buddhist Practices For Getting Your Sh*t Together | Vinny Ferraro

How Thinking About Death Can Improve Your Life | Alua Arthur

Join the waiting list for A Year To Live at Spirit Rock.

Find out more about the Young Adult Retreat at Spirit Rock (taught by Vinny Ferraro, Matthew Brensilver, Cara Lai, and Hakim Tafari).

Use code TENPERCENT for 10% off these two courses at Spirit Rock:

Anxiety as Teacher: A Dharma and Yoga Daylong

Cultivating the Beautiful Factors of Mind

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free right now.
0:04.7	Join Wondery Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:13.5	This is the 10% Happier podcast.
0:16.2	I'm Dan Harris. Well, hello, my fellow suffering beings, happy new year. Today, we're going to talk about a radical
0:34.9	Buddhist approach to making this the best year of your life.
0:39.8	Because it's a Buddhist approach, it may seem at first like a giant towering buzzkill,
0:45.7	which I think is kind of hilarious. I'll explain that in a moment. But first, let me tell you
0:49.4	about my guest who is definitely not a buzzkill. Vinnie Ferraro is a profane, hilarious, wise, tattooed, soul patch
0:58.3	sporting Dharma teacher. He's the only guest I've ever had who routinely calls me bro. Long way of
1:04.9	saying I love this guy. And so do you, apparently. Last year, when Vinny came on the show for the
1:09.3	first time, I got more comments on that episode than any other episode I've ever done.
1:14.5	So I wanted to bring Vinny back to kick off this new year.
1:17.7	And that brings me to the Buddhist Buzzkill part.
1:20.6	We are going to talk about a course that Vinny teaches called A Year to Live.
1:25.9	So, yeah, we're going to talk about death.
1:29.5	The Buddhists really know how to party.
1:35.3	But, and this is key, this is actually in counterintuitively an uplifting conversation.
1:40.7	We're all dying anyway, so the Buddhists like to bring the issue of mortality into the forefront of your consciousness as a way to make your day-to-day life more vivid and
1:44.6	urgent and interesting, rather than the sleepwalking and autopilot mode in which most of us live
1:50.2	most of our lives. In this conversation, Vinny and I talk about why it's important to think
1:55.6	about your own death, even if you're not expecting it anytime soon, the distinction between the
2:00.1	actual conditions of your life
	...

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