This is the 10% happier podcast.

I'm Dan Harris.

Hello there.

Happy Sunday. I hope you're having a good weekend.

Today we've got a guided meditation for people who kick their own ass, which is probably everybody.

It comes from Vinnie Ferraro, who's our teacher of the month over at Dan Harris.com.

That means he is creating custom guided meditations for all of our Monday and Wednesday episodes on the podcast,

but only for paid subscribers. Also for paid subscribers, he'll be doing in the month of September

live guided meditation and Q&A sessions, some of them with me. If you sign up, you'll get all

of that stuff. However, today we're giving you a little teaser.

This is one of the meditations he produced for the episodes that we have put behind the paywall,

but actually we're going to take this one here and drop it for free. Hopefully there's a way to

entice you to join us over at Dan Harris.com. Before we jump into the meditation, I just want to

quickly say that if you want to meditate with me in person, I've got a couple of events coming up. One is on September 21st at the New York Insight Meditation Center. It's a half-day thing. The other is a weekend-long thing at the end of October. It's called Meditation Party. I don't want to say too much right now because I want to let you start meditating,

but I put some links in the show notes if you want to sign up for either or both.

Okay, we'll get started with Vinnie Ferraro right after this.

I think many of us are taught to improve ourselves, fix ourselves, or at the very least hide the parts that feel too messy, too needy, too much.

But this practice isn't about self-improvement.

It's about self-inclusion.

So today, we're going to try to meet ourselves with kindness.

Not because we are and did, not because we did something spectacular, but because we can be so hard on ourselves. Sometimes it can feel like,

don't gang up on me, with me, against me, you know that feeling? So we have to balance that out a bit.

...