Gretchen Rubin is an expert on happiness, and she's spent her career helping people build the habits to achieve it. But she assumed that if something works for her, it should work for just about anyone. A series of chance encounters, and a healthy helping of curiosity, makes Gretchen realize that maybe there isn't one path to happiness after all. That there's no right or wrong way to build a meaningful life, just the way that works for you. 

Learn more at https://gretchenrubin.com/

Find the Happier podcast at https://gretchenrubin.com/podcasts/

If this episode resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you. Please take a moment to share your reflections by rating and reviewing Meditative Story in your podcast player. It helps other listeners find their way to the show, and we’d be so grateful.

Each episode of Meditative Story combines the emotional pull of first-person storytelling with immersive music and gentle mindfulness prompts. Read the transcript for this story: meditativestory.com

Sign up for the Meditative Story newsletter: https://meditativestory.com/subscribe

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

For many of us, the days are stretching out, copies, duplicates of one another. But there is change happening around us, time is moving forward. This meditation, led by host Rohan Gunatillake, is about noticing that change – outside and within. Mediation can help you become an expert on your internal seasons and habits. When we begin to notice that we change, that seasons change, we start to disbelieve the story that ‘things are always going to be like this’ – and that is magic.

If this episode resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you. Please take a moment to share your reflections by rating and reviewing Meditative Story in your podcast player. It helps other listeners find their way to the show, and we’d be so grateful.

Each episode of Meditative Story combines the emotional pull of first-person storytelling with immersive music and gentle mindfulness prompts. Read the transcript for this story: meditativestory.com

Sign up for the Meditative Story newsletter: https://meditativestory.com/subscribe

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

One icy morning on a Vermont farm, Elizabeth Lesser is witness to a miraculous thing: the birth of a bleary, bleating baby lamb. Years later, as a midwife, she is still filled with this sense of awe and wonder at every birth. It’s through that process of coaching new life into the world, she learns how to sit through the difficult – even the painful – moments in her own: a divorce, a new career, even death. She begins to understand that we must all stay open to the wild pulse of life to give birth to our wiser selves.

If this episode resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you. Please take a moment to share your reflections by rating and reviewing Meditative Story in your podcast player. It helps other listeners find their way to the show, and we’d be so grateful.

Each episode of Meditative Story combines the emotional pull of first-person storytelling with immersive music and gentle mindfulness prompts. Read the transcript for this story: meditativestory.com

Sign up for the Meditative Story newsletter: https://meditativestory.com/subscribe

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The chaotic nature and noise of life as a musician — touring from city to city — eventually erodes Andrew Bird's ability to hear the music that is really inside of him. In a courageous effort to understand the faint calling of sound playing in his head, Andrew deserts his Chicago apartment for a rural piece of land where he believes an old farmhouse might unlock his personal renewal as an experimental multi-instrumentalist musician. There inside the reverberating wooden walls of a dilapidated barn, he begins to recalibrate — seeing, sensing, and interpreting the space around him musically. Rather than imposing his vision on the world, Andrew's music becomes a reflection of what the surrounding environment is trying to tell him. He learns that sometimes a sense of connectedness is easier to achieve alone, where you're able to find out what's happening inside you in order to make it sing outwards.

If this episode resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you. Please take a moment to share your reflections by rating and reviewing Meditative Story in your podcast player. It helps other listeners find their way to the show, and we’d be so grateful.

Each episode of Meditative Story combines the emotional pull of first-person storytelling with immersive music and gentle mindfulness prompts. Read the transcript for this story: meditativestory.com

Sign up for the Meditative Story newsletter: https://meditativestory.com/subscribe

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Lehua Kamalu captains a vast, double-hulled ocean canoe crafted to the exact specifications of the seafaring vessels used by her ancestors. She and her crew are making a 2,500 mile journey between Tahiti and Hawaii, the same one original settlers of the South Pacific traversed, the same journeys historians once struggled to believe possible without today’s technology. The stakes are high and they sail the way their ancestors sailed, taking their cues from the water and wind. Lehua stays alert and patient hours on end. It’s only by being grounded in the signs that Lehua can anticipate the possibilities. And it’s only by staying present that Lehua can take in the magic of the open water — and draw from that magic to sustain herself when each journey ends, as they inevitably do.

If this episode resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you. Please take a moment to share your reflections by rating and reviewing Meditative Story in your podcast player. It helps other listeners find their way to the show, and we’d be so grateful.

Each episode of Meditative Story combines the emotional pull of first-person storytelling with immersive music and gentle mindfulness prompts. Read the transcript for this story: meditativestory.com

Sign up for the Meditative Story newsletter: https://meditativestory.com/subscribe

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

American cultural critic Thomas Chatterton Williams is deeply in love with his French wife, Valentine. Accustomed to exquisite command over the English language, Thomas loses agency over his life when he and Valentine move to Paris. And when they welcome their first child, Marlow, for the first time in his life he finds he can't disclose himself — not fully — to a person he loves through language. When words fail, it's his six-year-old daughter who builds the bridge to her father and helps expand his own sense of self — in language, in life, and in love.

Thomas Chatterton Williams's latest book is Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race.

Follow him on Twitter at @thomaschattwill

If this episode resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you. Please take a moment to share your reflections by rating and reviewing Meditative Story in your podcast player. It helps other listeners find their way to the show, and we’d be so grateful.

Each episode of Meditative Story combines the emotional pull of first-person storytelling with immersive music and gentle mindfulness prompts. Read the transcript for this story: meditativestory.com

Sign up for the Meditative Story newsletter: https://meditativestory.com/subscribe

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jail has a way of warping time. Changes on the outside world are locked away from those inside. Upon his release after serving 17 locked-up years, Jule recounts the moment he first sets eyes on a smartphone. The prison noises he is escaping — the yelling, the constant blaring of the radio, metal-on-metal echoing of cell bars — are replaced by the incessant pings and notifications of his new iPhone. His novice observations about the technology we wrap our lives around reveal a truth that perhaps we can no longer see ourselves.

If this episode resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you. Please take a moment to share your reflections by rating and reviewing Meditative Story in your podcast player. It helps other listeners find their way to the show, and we’d be so grateful.

Each episode of Meditative Story combines the emotional pull of first-person storytelling with immersive music and gentle mindfulness prompts. Read the transcript for this story: meditativestory.com

Sign up for the Meditative Story newsletter: https://meditativestory.com/subscribe

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We all need to love and be loved, we all want to feel not alone in this world. And this is true for all of the living world, says ecologist and author Carl Safina. Carl has spent his whole life interacting with the wild, from raising pigeons on a Brooklyn rooftop to trekking through the frozen landscape of Antarctica and the vast African savanna. And one thing he’s learned is that humans and animals alike, we’re all striving to connect. We’re all craving to establish bonds, to reach out, and to hold someone close. We all want to be loved – and to love ourselves.

If this episode resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you. Please take a moment to share your reflections by rating and reviewing Meditative Story in your podcast player. It helps other listeners find their way to the show, and we’d be so grateful.

Each episode of Meditative Story combines the emotional pull of first-person storytelling with immersive music and gentle mindfulness prompts. Read the transcript for this story: meditativestory.com

Sign up for the Meditative Story newsletter: https://meditativestory.com/subscribe

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Shea Hembrey is 5 years old, walking along the road to his farmhouse on the edge of the Mississippi River Delta, where the floodplains meet the Ozark Mountain foothills. The undulating hills surrounded by dense rows of oak, sassafras, sugarberry, and persimmon trees. He spots a pale, smooth-polished fleck: an egg! “This is a baby bird,” he tells his parents. “And I’m going to hatch it.” From that point forward, his willingness to be patient – to let what is already there reveal itself – opens up the world to show its goodness. We all possess this kind of wonderful intuition, but you must pay attention to that knowing feeling and start to trust it.

If this episode resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you. Please take a moment to share your reflections by rating and reviewing Meditative Story in your podcast player. It helps other listeners find their way to the show, and we’d be so grateful.

Each episode of Meditative Story combines the emotional pull of first-person storytelling with immersive music and gentle mindfulness prompts. Read the transcript for this story: meditativestory.com

Sign up for the Meditative Story newsletter: https://meditativestory.com/subscribe

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

None of us has ever faced a moment like this. It is heartbreaking and exhausting and ever changing and yet ... days seem to blur together. In this Meditative Story, there is no storyteller – but there are stories. Host Rohan Gunatillake is here with a meditation that meets the moment, one that invites you to stop. Breathe. Name the difficult. And maybe, just maybe, find some hope in what is happening right now.

If this episode resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you. Please take a moment to share your reflections by rating and reviewing Meditative Story in your podcast player. It helps other listeners find their way to the show, and we’d be so grateful.

Each episode of Meditative Story combines the emotional pull of first-person storytelling with immersive music and gentle mindfulness prompts. Read the transcript for this story: meditativestory.com

Sign up for the Meditative Story newsletter: https://meditativestory.com/subscribe

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.