This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

Hello, everybody. How we doing?

One of the most common and most insidious complaints of meditators,

both new meditators and experienced meditators, 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 to use this term before, but I're bad at it because their mind is all over the place.

You've heard me to 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.

Shaila Catherine is a Dharma teacher and the author of a book called Beyond Distraction.

She has practiced for more than 45 years, including nine years cumulatively on silent retreat,

long way of saying this is a person who has put in the work. Shaila also produces meditation

courses, which you can access through boodycourses.org. I'll drop a link to that in the show notes.

In fact, this summer, Shaila will be dropping a whole course on the subject of distraction, and again, there's a link in the show notes.

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