When You Can’t Follow Your Breath | Bonus Meditation with Sharon Salzberg

10% Happier with Dan Harris

10% Media, LLC

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

4.6 • 12.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 November 2024

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

An alternative for people who have trouble meditating on the breath.

About Sharon Salzberg:

Sharon Salzberg is a meditation pioneer, world-renowned teacher, and New York Times bestselling author. She is among the first to bring mindfulness & lovingkindness meditation to mainstream American culture fifty years ago, inspiring generations of meditation teachers and wellness influencers.

A co-founder of The Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA, Sharon is the author of thirteen books, including the New York Times bestseller, Real Happiness, now in its second edition, and her seminal work, Lovingkindess.

In 2023, Sharon released two new books: Real Life, available from Flatiron Books, and Finding Your Way, a small gift book from Workman.

To find this meditation in the Happier app, you can search for “Meditating with Touch Points.”

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.
0:13.9	It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:30.7	Hey, everybody, time for a bonus meditation.
0:36.7	A lot of us, when we first get into meditation, we hear the instructions to focus on the breath.
0:38.3	And those instructions can work for some people, and for others, they don't quite land for one reason or another.
0:44.8	So today, we're going to explore an alternative or maybe even an augmentation.
0:50.0	We're going to focus on something called touch points.
0:52.6	I let our teacher du jour Sharon Salzberg explain, but I have found this to be a really helpful technique, especially when I'm struggling to focus on the breath.
1:03.5	Many of you know Sharon, but for those of you who don't, she is one of the co-founders of the Insight Meditation Society in Barry, Massachusetts.
1:11.5	She's also written 13 books, including a New York Times bestseller called Real Happiness,
1:16.7	and her seminal work, Loving Kindness.
1:19.4	Here we go now with Sharon Salzberg.
1:22.6	Hi, this is Sharon.
1:25.5	This meditation serves as a skillful alternative to the breath,
1:30.3	and is a great practice in and of itself.
1:33.8	If you have asthma or emotional experiences that somehow affect your breathing,
1:39.9	you might find that the breath is not actually serving as a good concentration object,
1:47.0	in which case it's fine to choose another object.
1:51.6	To begin with, you can sit comfortably or lie down, and you can close your eyes or not. Bring your attention to your hands.
2:04.3	Notice that the direct experience we have is not a fingers.
2:09.1	It's different sensations.
	...

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