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Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics
Cover of Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics
Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics
A 10% Happier How-to Book
Borrow Borrow
This book will get you to meditate. Minus the pan flutes. 
 
ABC News anchor Dan Harris used to think that meditation was for people who collect crystals, play Ultimate Frisbee, and use the word “namaste” without irony. After he had a panic attack on live television, he went on a strange and circuitous journey that ultimately led him to embrace a practice he’d long considered ridiculous. Harris discovered that meditation made him more focused and less yanked around by his emotions. According to his wife, it also made him significantly less annoying. He wrote about his experiences in the bracingly candid and extremely funny memoir 10% Happier, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller and landed Harris in the entirely unexpected position of being one of meditation’s most vocal public proponents.
           
Here’s what he’s fixated on now: Science suggests that meditation can lower blood pressure, mitigate depression and anxiety, and literally rewire key parts of the brain, among numerous other benefits. And yet there are millions of people who want to meditate but aren’t actually practicing. What’s holding them back?
 
In Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, Harris and his friend Jeff Warren, a masterful teacher and “Meditation MacGyver,” embark on a cross-country quest to tackle the myths, misconceptions, and self-deceptions that stop people from meditating. They rent a rock-star tour bus (whose previous occupants were Parliament Funkadelic) and travel across eighteen states, talking to scores of would-be meditators—including parents, military cadets, police officers, and even a few celebrities. They create a taxonomy of the most common issues (“I suck at this,” “I don’t have the time,” etc.) and offer up science-based life hacks to help people overcome them.
           
The book is filled with game-changing and deeply practical meditation instructions. You’ll also get access to the 10% Happier app, where you can listen for free to guided audio versions of all the meditations in the book. Amid it all unspools the strange and hilarious story of what happens when a congenitally sarcastic, type-A journalist and a groovy Canadian mystic embark on an epic road trip into America’s neurotic underbelly, as well as their own.
Includes two bonus guided meditations.
This book will get you to meditate. Minus the pan flutes. 
 
ABC News anchor Dan Harris used to think that meditation was for people who collect crystals, play Ultimate Frisbee, and use the word “namaste” without irony. After he had a panic attack on live television, he went on a strange and circuitous journey that ultimately led him to embrace a practice he’d long considered ridiculous. Harris discovered that meditation made him more focused and less yanked around by his emotions. According to his wife, it also made him significantly less annoying. He wrote about his experiences in the bracingly candid and extremely funny memoir 10% Happier, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller and landed Harris in the entirely unexpected position of being one of meditation’s most vocal public proponents.
           
Here’s what he’s fixated on now: Science suggests that meditation can lower blood pressure, mitigate depression and anxiety, and literally rewire key parts of the brain, among numerous other benefits. And yet there are millions of people who want to meditate but aren’t actually practicing. What’s holding them back?
 
In Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, Harris and his friend Jeff Warren, a masterful teacher and “Meditation MacGyver,” embark on a cross-country quest to tackle the myths, misconceptions, and self-deceptions that stop people from meditating. They rent a rock-star tour bus (whose previous occupants were Parliament Funkadelic) and travel across eighteen states, talking to scores of would-be meditators—including parents, military cadets, police officers, and even a few celebrities. They create a taxonomy of the most common issues (“I suck at this,” “I don’t have the time,” etc.) and offer up science-based life hacks to help people overcome them.
           
The book is filled with game-changing and deeply practical meditation instructions. You’ll also get access to the 10% Happier app, where you can listen for free to guided audio versions of all the meditations in the book. Amid it all unspools the strange and hilarious story of what happens when a congenitally sarcastic, type-A journalist and a groovy Canadian mystic embark on an epic road trip into America’s neurotic underbelly, as well as their own.
Includes two bonus guided meditations.
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  • From the cover 1

    The Case for Meditation

    If you had told me as recently as a few years ago that I would someday become a traveling evangelist for meditation, I would have coughed my beer up through my nose.

    In 2004, I had a panic attack while delivering the news, live, on ABC’s Good Morning America. Being a masochist, I asked our research department to tell me exactly how many people were watching. They came back with the vastly reassuring number of 5.019 million. (If you are in the mood for a nice dose of schadenfreude, you can readily find the whole clip on YouTube. Just search for “panic attack on live TV,” and it will pop right up. Which is awesome for me.)

    In the wake of my nationally televised freak-out, I learned something even more embarrassing: the entire episode had been caused by some phenomenally stupid behavior in my personal life. After spending years covering war zones for ABC News as an ambitious and idealistic young reporter, I had developed an undiagnosed depression. For months I was having trouble getting out of bed in the morning, and felt as if I had a permanent, low-grade fever. Out of desperation, I began self-medicating with recreational drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy. My drug use was short-lived and intermittent. If you’ve ever seen the movie The Wolf of Wall Street, in which the characters are pounding Quaaludes every five minutes—it was nothing like that. However, my consumption was enough, according to the doctor I consulted after the panic attack, to artificially raise the level of adrenaline in my brain, exacerbating my baseline anxiety and priming me to have my very public meltdown.

    Through a strange and circuitous series of events, the panic attack ultimately led me to embrace a practice I had always dismissed as ridiculous. For most of my life, to the extent that I’d ever even considered meditation, I ranked it right alongside aura readings, Enya, and the unironic use of the word “namaste.” Further, I figured my racing, type-A mind was way too busy to ever be able to commune with the cosmos. And anyway, if I got too happy, it would probably render me completely ineffective at my hypercompetitive job.

    Two things changed my mind.

    The first was the science.

    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

    Studies also show meditation can reduce violence in prisons, boost productivity in the workplace, and improve both behavior and grades for school children.

    Things really get interesting when you look at the neuroscience. In recent years, neuroscientists have been peering into the heads of meditators, and they’ve found that the practice can rewire key parts of the brain involved with self-awareness, compassion, and resiliency. One study from the Harvard Gazette found that just eight weeks of meditation resulted in measurable decreases in gray matter density in the area of the brain associated with stress.

    The science is still in its early stages and the findings are preliminary. I worry that it has provoked a certain amount of irrational exuberance in the media. (“Meditation can cure halitosis and enable you to dunk on a regulation hoop!”) However, when you aggregate the most rigorous studies, they strongly suggest that daily meditation can deliver a long list of health...
About the Author-
  • Dan Harris is the co-anchor of ABC’s Nightline and the weekend editions of Good Morning America. He wrote 10% Happier, a #1 New York Times bestseller, then launched the 10% Happier podcast and an app called 10% Happier: Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. He lives in New York City.
     
    Jeff Warren is a writer, a meditation instructor, and the founder of the Consciousness Explorers Club, a meditation adventure group in Toronto.
     
    Carlye Adler is a journalist and co-author of many books, including three New York Times bestsellers.
Reviews-
  • AudioFile Magazine Fans of Dan Harris, described as a "meditation antihero," will love his turn as narrator of his book on how to meditate. The former broadcast journalist is an energetic speaker, so his natural enthusiasm spills over into the hows and whys of mindfulness. His own somewhat reluctant and dubious acceptance of meditative practices makes this a unique listening experience for this genre. At times the breaks in the audio segments occur at abrupt intervals rather than when you might expect them. But this production quirk hardly detracts from Harris's unvarnished account of his panic attack on live television, told with his characteristic honesty, and his ensuing long road to embracing mental fitness. M.R. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
  • Publisher's Weekly

    October 16, 2017
    Harris (10% Happier), an ABC Nightline coanchor, teams up with Warren, a meditation teacher, in this entertaining and useful guide for the beginning meditator. Following Harris’s on-air panic attack in 2004, he embarked on a quest for an effective antianxiety cure, eventually hitting on meditation due to the studies testifying to its effectiveness and his realization that there is nothing “weird” about mindfulness meditation, a “simple, secular exercise for your brain.” This book offers a number of carefully crafted meditation practices explained in detail by Warren (such as the “Walking Meditation” and the “Giving a Shit About Yourself Meditation”). Harris’s first-person narrative also follows him and Warren on the 11-day cross-country 10% Happier Meditation Tour as they pay calls on folks who might particularly benefit from a crash course in mindfulness (e.g., former prison inmates, cops, military trainees). Throughout, Harris also ponders the nature and value of meditation, sharing with readers, among other things, his fear of losing his edge at his highly competitive job. Meditation newbies will particularly benefit from the topics covered: how to find time, how to sit, how to overcome self-judgment, and other FAQs about the powerful, life-changing practice the authors strive to unpack and promote in this clever guide. Agent: Luke Janklow, Janklow & Nesbit.

  • Publisher's Weekly

    April 23, 2018
    Both authors of this practical guide to meditation have experience with public speaking, and it pays off in the excellent audio edition of their book. Harris, an anchor on ABC’s Nightline, sounds clear and affable as he reads his sections, which consist of anecdotes from his time traveling the country and extolling the benefits of meditation to parents, cops, and former prison inmates. Warren, a meditation teacher from Toronto, intervenes intermittently to lead a series of guided meditations designed to address common obstacles—such as a lack of time—that prevent people from pursuing a regular practice. Warren sounds fittingly tranquil and reassuring as he leads listeners through quick and easy exercises. At various points, the authors refer to previous sections, which are difficult to navigate to in the audio edition, but the added benefit of learning the meditations in the audio format with Warren softly imploring “breathe in, breathe out” more than mitigates this problem. Listeners looking for an easy introduction to meditation will be more than satisfied with this audiobook. A Spiegel & Grau hardcover.

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A 10% Happier How-to Book
Dan Harris
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