Five Ways to be Less Distracted | Shaila Catherine

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody, how are we doing? One of the most common and most insidious complaints of meditators, both new meditators and experienced meditators, is is distraction.

I cannot tell you how often people come up to me and say that they want to meditate, but they're bad at it because their mind is all over the place. You've heard me use this term before, but I often call that the fallacy of uniqueness. People tend to believe that they have some sort of bespoke lunacy that only their mind is chaotic and cacophonous, but actually it's really just the human condition. It's very common. And you can blame evolution.

We were likely wired to have these racing minds that are constantly on the lookout for threats and food and mates. In any event, I'm not here to argue that distraction isn't real, it's very real, and it can be frustrating and difficult in meditation. It's such a common problem that the Buddha himself laid out some very detailed practices for dealing with it. And today we're going to talk to a master meditator about five strategies straight from the Buddha. And these tips are good not only for meditation, but also for the rest of your life, where for many of us, distraction is a massive issue.

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