Rewire How You Talk To Yourself | Ofosu Jones-Quartey

10% Happier with Dan Harris

10% Media, LLC

Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.6 • 12.2K Ratings

🗓️ 31 December 2025

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Buddhist strategies for taming that nagging voice in your head.

Ofosu Jones-Quartey, a meditation teacher, author, and musician hailing from the Washington DC area, brings over 17 years of experience in sharing mindfulness, meditation and self-compassion practices with the world. Holding a bachelor's degree from American University and certified by the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program, Ofosu is a graduate of the Teleos Coaching Institute and is the male voice on the Balance meditation app, reaching over 10 million subscribers.

Ofosu leads meditation classes and retreats nationwide, having taught and led retreats at the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, The Insight Meditation Society, Spirit Rock, Brooklyn Zen Center, Cleveland Insight, Inward Bound Mindfulness and more.

As an accomplished hip hop artist under the name "Born I," Ofosu released the mindfulness-themed album "In This Moment" in 2021. Born I's most recent album, "Komorebi" (2025), has been hailed by listeners as "a missing piece in hip-hop," praised for its meditative flow and spiritual depth. The companion book, "Lyrical Dharma: Hip-Hop as Mindfulness" (Parallax Press), arrives with a foreword by Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker, further cementing Born I as a unique voice at the intersection of art and contemplative practice.

Beyond music, Ofosu is an author, releasing his self-published children's book "You Are Enough" in 2020 and "Love Your Amazing Self" via Storey Publishing in 2022. He lives in Rockville, Maryland, with his wife and four children.

In this episode we talk about:

The relationship between self-compassion and a successful meditation practice
All the reasons people resist self-compassion, and his rebuttals
Whether self-compassion is selfish
How to do self-compassion off the cushion, including practices like journaling, written reminders, establishing accountability partners, and simple questions you can drop into your mind when all else fails
How to do self-compassion on the cushion, including practices like body scans, metta, and a check-in practice you can use at the very start of your sits
And how to teach self-compassion to children

This episode was first aired in April 2024.

Related Episodes:

Think You Suck at Meditation? This Conversation Could Help. | Ofosu Jones-Quartey

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:18.5	Hey, hey, everybody. How we doing? I have often remarked that if anybody talk to me, the way I talk to myself, I would likely punch that other person in the face. This is super common, a harsh inner dialogue. It's been described as a kind of addiction, a habit that we believe on some level keeps us safe, but it
0:38.6	really doesn't. It actually degrades our resilience. It burns us out and it can mess up our
0:43.1	relationships with other people. So today we're going to talk about some Buddhist strategies for
0:47.8	rewiring your inner talk track. And my guest is Afosu Jones Corté, who's a great Dharma teacher.
0:54.3	He's been on this show a couple of times, and he's always great.
0:57.2	This particular episode was published back in the spring of 2024, but it's always a good time to talk about self-compassion.
1:04.0	So we're pulling it out of the archives and reposting it.
1:07.2	In this episode, you'll hear us talk about the relationship between self-compassion and a
1:11.0	successful meditation practice. All the reasons people resist self-compassion and Fosu's
1:16.4	rebuttals to those reasons, whether self-compassion is selfish, how to do self-compassion off the
1:21.9	cushion, including practices such as journaling, written reminders, and establishing accountability
1:27.2	partners, how to do it on the cushion in your meditation practice, including practices such as body scans, meta, and a check-in practice that you can do at the start of your meditation sessions.
1:38.4	And finally, we talk about how to teach self-compassion to children.
1:42.9	Just a little bit more about Fosu before we dive in here, he is the male voice on the
1:46.9	Balance Meditation app.
1:48.5	He's got a new book or a newish book called Lyrical Dharma, and he's a hip-hop artist
1:53.6	who records under the name Born I.
1:57.1	Before we dive in, a quick plug for the new meditation app that I've just launched with my team, it's called 10% with Dan Harris.
2:05.0	We'll be doing a New Year's meditation challenge in early January, seven days with the great Joseph Goldstein, who gives a kind of master class, an incredible on-ramp to Buddhist meditation.
2:17.3	This on-ramp is good for beginners and
2:19.0	experienced meditators. I was in the room with Joseph as he recorded all of the sessions. I got a ton
	...

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