Anxiety Narrows Your Brain. Here's How to Widen It Back Out. | Susa Talan
5/29/202624 min
Plus: how to handle discomfort, be more present, and remember to be aware throughout your day.
Most of us spend our days somewhere between the past and the future — technically conscious, but not really there. Meditation teacher Susa Talen takes live questions from practitioners on what it actually means to show up for your own life, and how to do it even when you can't sit still, even when you're crying, even when anxiety has narrowed your whole world down to a single racing heartbeat.
Susa Talan is a meditation teacher trained in the insight tradition. She works one-on-one with students around their meditation practice, and she was the Teacher of the Month for April 2026 for DanHarris.com. You can get more guided meditations from Susa in the 10% with Dan Harris app.
In this live Q&A, Susa Talan shares:
- Why awareness isn't hard — what's actually hard is remembering to be aware
- The "what else is here?" technique for working with anxiety and heart palpitations
- Why you don't need to understand why you cry in meditation — and what to do instead
- How to cultivate awareness all day long, not just on the cushion
- Why meditation has nothing to do with sitting still — and everything to do with the whole car ride
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDan Harris· Host0:00
[intro music] This is the Ten Percent Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. [intro music] Hello, everybody. How we doing? We are so often exhorted, encouraged to be here now, to be present, to be in the moment. But then, of course, the question, how do you actually do that? And then how do you remember to do that? That is one of the things we're gonna be talking about today with an ace meditation teacher named Souza Tallon. What you're about to hear is a recording of a live session that Souza did with subscribers to my meditation app, Ten Percent with Dan Harris. We do these weekly sessions that are only available to subscribers, where you can meditate with me and/or with one of our teachers and get your questions answered. So what you're about to hear is the Q&A portion of one of these sessions. Just a little bit more about Souza before we dive in here. She's a meditation teacher, an artist, and a writer who's been studying for nearly twenty years with her primary teacher, a Burmese master named Sayadaw U Tejaniya. I have known and worked with Souza personally for more than a decade. She is great, and I think you're really gonna enjoy this session. Real quick, before we dive in, just a, a rapid plug for my weekly newsletter. I think a lot of you know that I have this weekly newsletter,