The Peter Attia Drive - January 15, 2020


Qualy #94 - Comparing the two broad types of meditation, and Peter's favorite meditation apps

Hosted by
Peter Attia
Mentioned
Joseph Goldstein Jeff Warren Sam Harris Qualis
Qualy #89 - Cortisol and healthy aging #89 - AMA #11： All things fasting

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

149.5

Word count

1,082

Sentence count

57


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this bonus episode of The Qualies, Dan and Sam talk about the difference between noticing what is arising and not noticing at all in meditation, and how to cultivate mindfulness in general. They discuss the benefits of mindfulness and how it can be applied to everyday life.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Welcome to a special bonus episode of the Peter Atiyah Qualies, a member exclusive podcast.
00:00:16.100 The Qualies is just a shorthand slang for qualification round, which is something you
00:00:20.120 do prior to the race, just much quicker. The Qualies highlight the best of the questions,
00:00:25.320 topics, and tactics that are discussed in previous episodes of The Drive.
00:00:30.000 So if you enjoy the Qualies, you can access dozens more of them through our membership
00:00:33.520 program. Without further delay, I hope you enjoy today's Qualies.
00:00:40.560 You've talked about this idea of noticing what is arising versus not noticing at all.
00:00:44.880 Can you elaborate on this? Yeah, well, so I guess I should define mindfulness, which is really the
00:00:51.780 target state that one is trying to cultivate in at least this, probably what's the most popular
00:00:59.040 type of meditation now. I mean, there are different, as you alluded to, there are different
00:01:02.440 types. There are two basic types of meditation where the distinction is between being lost
00:01:09.760 in thought and being clearly aware of whatever the object of meditation is. So that's true
00:01:16.320 for all types of meditation. Thought really is the obstacle one is overcoming when one is learning
00:01:23.520 to meditate. Because our natural, our default mode is to just be lost in thought. We're telling
00:01:28.820 ourselves a story all day long, and we're not aware of it. So once one begins to meditate,
00:01:38.800 one is trying to pay attention to something. And this is where the two different types diverge.
00:01:44.540 The first that you alluded to, like a mantra-based or a concentration-based object of focus is
00:01:51.940 the attempt to pay attention to one thing, to the exclusion of everything else, right? You want
00:01:58.840 your attention to be absorbed in that object. And in many of those practices, the explicit goal
00:02:06.460 is to do that so well that thoughts no longer arise, right? So you're really trying to get rid of
00:02:12.340 thought in some basic sense. The arising of thought in that context is a sign that you're not
00:02:19.240 meditating hard enough or one-pointedly enough. Those types of practices can produce extraordinarily
00:02:25.620 positive states of mind that you can feel bliss and rapture, and you can actually use as an object
00:02:33.460 of meditation specific states of mind, like loving-kindness, which is called metta in the Buddhist
00:02:39.520 tradition, or sympathetic joy or compassion or equanimity. You can cultivate specific attitudes,
00:02:45.480 which if you can focus on them to the exclusion of anything else, you're inhabiting that state to a
00:02:52.100 degree that most people would find unrecognizable. But the second type of meditation, which is the type I
00:02:59.060 have spent much more time doing and is almost universally considered the more fundamental or the deeper
00:03:07.920 practice, is often described as mindfulness because that's the state you're using in the Buddhist tradition to
00:03:16.340 cultivate it. Mindfulness comes from a practice called vipassana, which is insight meditation. And there you're not
00:03:25.960 trying to selectively notice one thing or another. You are trying to break the spell of being distracted by thought.
00:03:33.560 So you're trying to be aware of everything without perceiving things through this discursivity or this
00:03:41.900 conceptual lens in each moment. But your attention can be much more choiceless. I mean, you can just notice
00:03:50.900 whatever, in fact, you notice. You're noticing things all the time, sounds and sensations and moods and
00:03:56.260 thoughts, but you're not noticing them clearly because you're thinking every moment of the day.
00:04:02.600 Mindfulness begins, for most people, as a training on one object like the breath, but very quickly it
00:04:11.100 becomes something that you apply to the full range of your experience. And what's nice about it, apart
00:04:17.420 from all the benefits of doing it and all the things that can be realized by doing it, this type of
00:04:25.160 meditation is clearly coincident with any experience you can have. I mean, there's nothing that is
00:04:33.160 excluded in principle from the meditation. You're not, you can be working out or watching a movie or,
00:04:39.040 I mean, there's no, there's no, there's no thing that in principle does not admit of mindfulness.
00:04:44.820 And that's not true of other types of practice.
00:04:47.900 Yeah. Just sharing one example, because the other thing that I remember you said at the time,
00:04:51.580 I said, you know, Sam, I want to really shift this practice and sort of, I want to figure out a way
00:04:57.020 to experience that, you know, more and more. And you actually said, look, there are a bunch of apps
00:05:01.640 that are already out there that are all pretty good. I mean, obviously you're producing yours
00:05:05.000 because you think it's going to offer something additional and I'll just make my plug for it here.
00:05:09.060 I've used every one of the apps out there and I do find yours the best, but I also realized that
00:05:14.380 there's no one thing that's the best. It's the way you explain things just resonates with me and it
00:05:19.200 might not resonate with the next person. But the other app that I really liked that you recommended
00:05:23.120 was 10% happier, which is Dan Harris's app. No, no, no relation, of course. And even within Dan's
00:05:29.500 app, there are many teachers, but there are a couple that I really like, Jeff Warren and, um,
00:05:35.780 Joseph, Joseph Goldstein, Joseph Goldstein. Yeah.
00:05:39.640 Hope you enjoyed today's special bonus episode of the Quali. New episodes of the Qualis are released
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00:07:12.240 Thank you.
00:07:13.240 Thank you.