What To Do When Your Mind Won't Quit | Bart van Melik
4/3/202627 min
Buddhist tools for forgiveness, boredom, worry, and getting out of your head.
Meditation teacher Bart van Melik leads a live community Q&A — and the questions that come in are ones most meditators have quietly wrestled with for years.
Bart is the guiding teacher at Community Meditation Center in New York, where he leads weekly sessions grounded in Buddhist tradition. In this episode, he takes on four of the most common sticking points in practice: forgiveness, boredom, disconnection from the body, and the spiral of anxious "what if" thinking.
His approach throughout is warm, precise, and grounded — less about achieving a particular state and more about learning to hold whatever arises with curiosity and kindness.
Topics covered:
- Forgiveness — why forcing it can backfire, what it means to "bypass" difficult emotions, and the reframe that changes everything: forgiveness as giving up all hope for a better past
- Boredom — how to get genuinely curious about it instead of fighting it, and what it can teach you about why you reach for your phone
- Getting into your body — why embodiment looks different for everyone, and how to find the activities (yes, even mindful salsa dancing or vacuuming) that make it easier
- Worry and "what if" thoughts — the Buddhist framing of worry as an obstacle to clear seeing, and a simple breathwork technique from Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche — exhale heavy, exhale calm — that works even in the hardest moments
- Community as practice — the Buddha's teaching that friendship and community isn't half the path. It's the whole thing.
About Bart van Melik: Bart van Melik is a meditation teacher and guiding teacher at Community Meditation Center, a global and local community that meets weekly via Zoom. Monthly sessions are donation-based and open to all. Learn more at https://www.cmc-ny.org/.
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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, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing today? If, like me, you've got a mind that likes to marinate in what if loops, what if I panic? What if I always feel this way? What if I can't handle this? If you're prone to that kind of thinking, this episode is for you. You're about to hear a master meditation teacher, Bart Van Melick, hold forth on how to handle these doom loops and much more. Bart also talks about forgiveness and what it actually means not to force forgiveness, how to work with boredom in meditation instead of running from it, how to get out of your head and into your body when you feel disconnected, and he talks about a breathing technique that he uses in lots of stressful situations, including when he's in the dentist's chair. So there's a lot here. Just a little bit about Bart before we dive in here. Bart is a guiding teacher at the Community Meditation Center in New York City. He also occasionally serves as teacher of the month over on my new-ish meditation app, Ten Percent with Dan Harris. Like all of our teachers of the month, Bart, uh, will occasionally do a live session where he takes questions from subscribers. And today, we're gonna play you one such session. Before we begin, a heads up that I've got two live in-person events