View meditation practice as a radical act of sanity and an absolute necessity for waking up and navigating the current moment.
Practice meditation and take care of your own mind to navigate difficult moments more skillfully, potentially impacting the course of events positively.
Meditate to avoid missing your moments and the entirety of your life by being too lost in thought or on devices, rather than constantly striving for a ‘better moment’.
Use meditation to explore if you are not already whole and complete, instead of believing you need to meditate for years to become ‘more okay’.
Learn how to relate to thought in a way that prevents it from becoming imprisoning or blinding, which can lead to a caricature of who you truly are.
Don’t automatically believe everything you think; instead, hold thoughts in awareness first and ask deep questions about their validity.
In challenging times, focus on reclaiming your mind or discovering its full dimensionality, as this is when it’s most needed.
When fear arises, put out a ‘welcome mat’ for it and investigate if your awareness of fear is itself frightened, cultivating a wise relationship to it rather than being tied up in knots.
Be aware of your anger, recognizing that unchanneled anger primarily harms yourself, and then consciously channel it as a creative energy.
Practice self-governance by noticing impulses like greed, othering, or violence, and working with them skillfully to prevent them from becoming unleashed and causing harm.
Be mindful of the tendency to identify only with people like yourself and to ‘other’ those who are different, as this dualism is the opposite of wisdom or compassion.
When feeling anger or contempt towards others, remember that they also experience these emotions and, like everyone, ultimately desire to be seen, recognized, and to feel like they count.
Metaphorically ‘swallow the hot iron ball’ by truly digesting and metabolizing difficult societal contradictions and realizations, leading to a reconstructed understanding of living together.
Understand that meditative awareness leads to embodied wisdom, which is an active impulse to move towards suffering, relieve it, and amplify well-being, effectively ’taking a stand’ in the world.
View formal meditation as a radical political act because it refines your mind, making you more spacious and clearer, which can then positively influence your actions in the world.
Take responsibility to refine your own being (your ‘instrument’) through practice, allowing your actions to develop sympathetic resonances with others and contribute to world change.
Commit to a ‘first do no harm’ principle in all aspects of life, including politics and education, by paying attention to the effects of your actions and impulses.
Recognize fear as a powerful form of intelligence, but don’t let it overwhelm your other intelligences; use mindfulness to cultivate access to your full range of inherent intelligences.
Seek dialogue not just with people in your own thought bubble, but specifically at the interfaces with those who see things very differently from yourself.
Continuously ask ‘what is right action?’ and identify ways, however small, to contribute to the well-being of the world and community from a collective ‘we’ perspective, not self-interest.
Get out of your own way by not allowing yourself to be imprisoned by routinized patterns of thought and emotional reactivity, including fear.
Recognize that you are already complete, and use the present moment, regardless of age, to discover your deepest self beyond the narratives in your head.
Periodically stop and drop into the present moment without trying to fix or solve anything, simply to pause and remember your true self.
Make tiny contributions to further beauty, compassion, and care in your family, work, and the wider world.
Recognize your own privileges and hold the suffering of others in your heart, using this awareness to gestate new ways of contributing.
Wake up to recognize the incredible, miraculous beauty of your own human life and its functioning, which is often taken for granted.
Practice self-care, like putting on your own oxygen mask first, to ensure you are well enough to be of genuine use and service to others, making meditation a selfless act.
Recruit others to collectively inquire into how to best care for individual and collective domains, fostering shared understanding and solutions.
Sign up for the free 21-day New Year’s Meditation Challenge via the 10% Happier app or 10percent.com to kick-start your practice and cultivate self-love and self-compassion.
Download the new 10% with Dan Harris app for guided meditations, live community sessions, and ad-free podcast episodes, with a 14-day free trial available at danharris.com.