Anxious? Confused? Powerless? A Four-Part Recipe for Staying Centered From a Buddhist Nun. | Ayya Anandabodhi

This is the 10% happier podcast of Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings, how are we doing? In these chaotic times, it is so easy to lose your center of gravity, to outsource your equilibrium to the gyre, to the miasma, to the phone in your hands. So today I'm talking to a brilliant Buddhist nun, Aya Ananda Bodhi, about four simple ways to reclaim your center. You literally cannot hear this stuff enough.

I think of this as mindfulness 101. And instead of running away from your difficult feelings, like self-medicating with booze or shopping or doom scrolling or denial, the move, and this is counterintuitive, but the move is to feel your feelings fully, to let them pass, and to make a sane decision on the other side. Respond, not react. It's uh one of the venerable meditation cliches and a cliche I actually like.

And it's a decent recipe for becoming at least 10% happier. Aya Ananda Bodhi is the spiritual director of the Paryana Vihara, a monastic residence in Port Townsend, Washington. She was raised over in Wales in the UK. She first encountered Buddhism in her early teens and started training as a nun at the age of 24. In this conversation we talk about what centering means and how to do it when you're in the middle of a tough situation, and she'll have some very practical tips on this score.

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