Dan Harris is not Sam Harris, also an author. Dan is the author of the excellent
It Is A Timely And Wily Book That Is Terrific For Seeing Meditation In Its Current Perspective. Harris Meets With And Mentions Many Of The Leading Figures In Meditation In The U.S.
The book includes both explanation of basic, simple, valuable, inexpensive and quick meditation and frequency asked questions and objections to the practice.
Here are the highlights I made from the book. Many of the very short cryptic ones were mere markers of my reading progress.
10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works--A True Story
Dan Harris
Meditation suffers from a towering PR problem, largely because its most prominent proponents talk as if they have a perpetual pan flute accompaniment. If you can get past the cultural baggage, though, what you’ll find is that meditation is simply exercise for your brain. It’s a proven technique for preventing the voice in your head from leading you around by the nose. To be clear, it’s not a miracle cure. It won’t make you taller or better-looking, nor will it magically solve all of your problems. You should disregard the fancy books and the famous gurus promising immediate enlightenment. In my experience, meditation makes you 10% happier. That’s an absurdly unscientific estimate, of course. But still, not a bad return on investment.
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Eric Barker turned me onto the Dan Harris story and Harris's excellent meditation book "10% Happier"
This science challenges the common assumption that our levels of happiness, resilience, and kindness are set from birth. Many of us labor under the delusion that we’re permanently stuck with all of the difficult parts of our personalities—that we are “hot-tempered,” or “shy,” or “sad”—and that these are fixed, immutable traits. We now know that many of the attributes we value most are, in fact, skills, which can be trained the same way you build your body in the gym.
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I can change myself for the better
Kidding—and ethnic stereotypes—aside,
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I disembarked, rented a car, and with my producer alongside me, began the four-hundred-mile trek eastward. I spent those seven hours in the car experiencing what was, for me, a new and confusing breed of misery. Like all Americans, I was furious and scared. But there was also an overlay of self-interest. This was, in all likelihood, the biggest story of our lifetimes, and here I was stuck driving a “midsize vehicle” across the breadth of Ohio, helplessly listening to the news unfold on the radio. I knew Peter would be in his element, in full-on clarify-and-comfort mode, and it made me feel physically ill not to be part of the team reporting on—and explaining—this news to the country. I knew now that “back of the book” would no longer cut it for me.
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The 9/11 attack and here he was driving a mere "mid-sized" vehicle!
This, fittingly, was how I began the most dangerous and formative years of my life: with a series of douchey gesticulations. I lurched headlong into what would become a multiyear adventure—during which I would see places and things that I never would have had the audacity to imagine as a shaggy twenty-two-year-old reporter in Bangor. I was floating on a wash of adrenaline, besotted with airtime, and blinded to the potential psychological consequences.
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Beginning years of high stress
When I got back to New York,
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While I was unable to hold it together in the face of the crying father, walking out of camera range with a lump in my throat, I was surprised by my overall reaction to the horrors of war—or, more accurately, my lack of reaction. As far as I could tell, I was not that shaken. I convinced myself this kind of psychological distance was a job requirement, like the doctors from M*A*S*H who cracked jokes over the patients on their operating table. I reckoned reportorial remove served a higher purpose, allowing me to more effectively convey urgent information.
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Practicing distance and impassivity
Shortly thereafter, my boss called me into his office to warn me, “People don’t like you.” That meeting
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My superiors expressed sincere concern over the incident. When they asked what happened, though, I lied and said I didn’t know—that it must have been a fluke. I was ashamed, and also afraid. I thought that if I admitted the truth, that I had just had a panic attack, it would expose me as a fraud, someone who had no business anchoring the news. For whatever reason, they seemed to accept my explanation. To this day, I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because it all happened so quickly, or because it was out of character, or perhaps because I managed to get through my next newscast, just an hour later, without a hitch. In the news business, memories are mercifully short; everyone moved on to the next crisis.
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Stress and drugs start to take a toll
At the time of our
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Not only had I been unfair to people of faith by prematurely reaching sweeping, uninformed conclusions, but I’d also done myself a disservice. This beat could be more than just a chance to notch more airtime. Most people in America—and on the planet, for that matter—saw their entire lives through the lens of faith. I didn’t have to agree, but here was my chance to get under the hood and understand what was going on. More than that, I could approach faith coverage as a way to shed light instead of heat. At a time when religion had become so venomously divisive, thoughtful reporting could be a way to take audiences into worlds they’d never otherwise enter, and in the process demystify, humanize, and clarify. It was why I’d gotten into this business in the first place—to both get on TV and do meaningful work.
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Good observation and accurate reporting and comments increase understanding and friendliness
Whenever anyone asked me, I told them I had the best job on the planet. And I meant it. But perversely, my good fortune meant I now had that much more to lose, and thus that much more to protect.
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Success can naturally fear and worry
Up until my interview with
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To make matters worse,
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At first, the book struck me as irredeemable poppycock. I was put off by
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Our entire lives, he argued, are governed by a voice in our heads. This voice is engaged in a ceaseless stream of thinking—most of it negative, repetitive, and self-referential. It squawks away at us from the minute we open our eyes in the morning until the minute we fall asleep at night, if it allows us to sleep at all. Talk, talk, talk: the voice is constantly judging and labeling everything in its field of vision. Its targets aren’t just external; it often viciously taunts us, too.
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Harris begins to see how Tolle's message applies
Certainly Tolle had described my mind to a T. While I had never really thought about it before, I suppose I’d always assumed that the voice in my head was me: my ghostly internal anchorman, hosting the coverage of my life, engaged in an unsolicited stream of insensitive questions and obnoxious color commentary.
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The sort of writing that makes "10% Happier" worth reading:
Then there was an even larger question: Even if I had been able to recognize that my umbrage
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Tolle was forcing me to confront the fact that the thing I’d always thought was my greatest asset—my internal cattle prod—was also perhaps my greatest liability. I was now genuinely questioning my own personal orthodoxy, my “price of security” mantra, which had been my operating thesis since, like, age eight. All of a sudden, I didn’t know: Was it propulsive—or corrosive?
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Worries about keeping his "edge"
We did an interview
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3. This one, according to all of the books I’d read, was the biggie. Whenever your attention wanders, just forgive yourself and gently come back to the breath. You don’t need to clear the mind of all thinking; that’s pretty much impossible. (True, when you are focused on the feeling of the breath, the chatter will momentarily cease, but this won’t last too long.) The whole game is to catch your mind wandering and then come back to the breath, over and over again.
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Give it a try. Helped Dan Harris and me. Short, free and gets easier. It will help you.
It didn’t get any easier. Almost immediately
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Pretty quickly, my efforts began to bear fruit “off the cushion,” to use a Buddhist term of art. I started to be able to use the breath to jolt myself back to the present moment—in airport security lines, waiting for elevators, you name it. I found it to be a surprisingly satisfying exercise. Life became a little bit like walking into a familiar room where all the furniture had been rearranged. And I was much better at forgiving myself out in the real world than while actually meditating. Every moment was an opportunity for a do-over. A million mulligans.
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Mini-meditations matter and make a big difference
This was not some mental parlor trick. Mindfulness is an inborn trait, a birthright. It is, one
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She nailed the method for applying mindfulness in acute situations, albeit with a somewhat dopey acronym: RAIN. R: recognize A: allow I: investigate N: non-identification
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The mind tool of R.A.I.N.
We were back at
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He was here now, backstage in this
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call a cab for the hour-long ride to northern Marin County. As we cross the Golden Gate,
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He’s talking about the power of desire in our minds, and how our culture conditions us to believe that the more pleasant experiences we have—sex, movies, food, shopping trips, etc.—the happier we’ll be. He reads out some advertising slogans he’s collected over the years: “Instant gratification just got faster.
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Joseph Goldstein talks in retreat
“The best one of all,” he says, pausing for effect, in a wait-for-it kind of way, chuckling to himself as he lets our curiosity build. “ ‘To be one with everything . . . you need one of everything.’ ”
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Again Joseph Goldstein on lines from ads telling us to want more
After a day of wondering whether sitting and watching my breath is perhaps the stupidest conceivable pursuit, Goldstein’s talk is a welcome reminder of Buddhism’s intellectual superstructure. His enthusiasm is palpable and infectious. He discusses verses from the Buddha like a sommelier rhapsodizing over a 1982 Bordeaux.
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Dan Harris in 10% Happier listens to Joseph Goldstein
That phrase—“straight torture, son”—keeps bouncing through my skull as I rotate, with the rest of the zombies, between sitting meditation, the Ministry of Silly Walks routine, and waiting in line at the dining hall to fill our bowls with grains and greens. I’m flat-out loathing this experience.
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Dan Harris wrestles with his retreat
I am dying to hear how he convinced his Jewish mother to meditate, but I don’t have that kind of time.
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Even meditators can be on tight schedules
She says we’re going to
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About a month or so after
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“People stopped coming to the group because I came,” he told me, laughing. “You’ve probably been to groups like that, where there’s that one person who doesn’t shut up. That was me. Finally, one of the monks who was leading the group said, ‘Joseph, I think you should try meditating.’ ” So he did. Alone in his room, he set an alarm clock for five minutes, and was instantly “hooked.” “I saw that there’s actually a systematic way of becoming aware of one’s own mind,” he said. “It just seemed so extraordinary to me. Before one is clued in, we’re living our lives just basically acting out our conditioning, and acting out our habit patterns, you know?”
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Seeing a systematic way to use your mind better
Fortunately, Nightline and World News continued to provide me with opportunities to do work that put me firmly back in my comfort zone. Wonbo and I did a piece where we interviewed evangelical pastors—whose faces and voices we agreed to alter in order to protect their identities—who had secretly become atheists but hadn’t yet ginned up the courage to tell their flocks.
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The military’s interest in a practice that was seemingly anathema to the world of warfare was fueled by an explosion of science. Forget the blood pressure study that had made me willing to try meditation in the first place; this new research was on the next level. It was creating some surprising converts—previously hardened skeptics who were now employing mindfulness in ways that would revolutionize my approach to work, and drive a stake through the heart of the assumption that meditation made you, “like, totally ineffective.”
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Evidence persuades military authorities to look into meditation
On my travels to various Buddhist seminars, I had started to hear mentions of scientific research into meditation. It sounded promising, so I checked it out. What I found blew my mind. Meditation, once part of the counterculture, had now fully entered the scientific mainstream. It had been subjected to thousands of studies, suggesting an almost laughably long list of health benefits, including salutary effects on the following: • major depression • drug addiction • binge eating • smoking cessation • stress among cancer patients • loneliness among senior citizens • ADHD • asthma
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Value of meditation for body and mind
Another study, out of Yale, looked at the part of the brain known as the default mode network (DMN), which is active when we’re lost in thought—ruminating about the past, projecting into the future, obsessing about ourselves. The researchers found meditators were not only deactivating this region while they were practicing, but also when they were not meditating. In other words, meditation created a new default mode. I could actually feel this happening with me. I noticed myself cultivating a sort of nostalgia for the present, developing the reflex to squelch pointless self-talk and simply notice whatever was going on around me: a blast of hot halitosis from a subway vent as I walked to work, the carpet of suburban lights seen from a landing airplane, rippling water reflecting sine waves of light onto the side of a boat while I was shooting a story in Virginia Beach. In moments where I was temporarily able to suspend my monkey mind and simply experience whatever was going on, I got just the smallest taste of the happiness I’d achieved while on retreat.
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Meditation practice affects the mind 24/7, sharpens awareness of moments of beauty
This orthodoxy was now replaced with a new paradigm, called neuroplasticity. The brain, it turns out, is constantly changing in response to experience. It’s possible to sculpt your brain through meditation just as you build and tone your body through exercise—to grow your gray matter the way doing curls grows your bicep. This idea contradicted widespread cultural assumptions about happiness that are reflected in the etymology of the word itself. The root hap means “luck,” as in hapless or haphazard. What the science was showing was that our levels of well-being, resilience, and impulse control were not simply God-given traits, our portion of which we had to accept as a fait accompli. The brain, the organ of experience, through which our entire lives are led, can be trained. Happiness is a skill.
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Meditation builds better brains and minds
My mother—the original skeptic in my life, the debunker of God and Santa Claus—was very impressed by the Harvard study showing gray matter thickening in meditators. After reading about it online, she asked me to give her a meditation guidebook for Christmas. A few weeks later, she sent me an excited email saying that she had read the book and had decided, during a taxi ride to the airport, to give it a try. She was able to follow her breath all the way to the terminal without breaking her concentration. She then started sitting for thirty minutes a day, something that had taken me a year to achieve. The rough breakdown of my emotional response to this information was: 80% validated, 17% humbled, 3% resentful.
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Dan's mother gets into meditation
When the PR woman in the leopard-print blouse started dropping phrases like “letting go,” and “turning in to your emotions,” I really knew meditation was breaking out of the Buddhist ghetto.
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I'm telling this simple (not always easy) practice is everywhere, for good reason
Instead, I pictured a world in which significant numbers of people were 10% happier and less reactive. I imagined what this could do for marriage, parenting, road rage, politics—even television news.
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Meditation is making a difference and it is going to continue doing so
When I walked off the set after my live shot, members of Diane’s team were abuzz. Was it really that simple? How many minutes a day did they need to do to change their brains?
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10 will do nicely but one Chinese-American software engineer uses 2
There was cutting-edge science to back up the Dalai Lama’s advice about the self-interested case for not being a dick.
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There is good evidence against being a dick
From a traditionalist standpoint, my approach to meditation—and that of most Western practitioners—was backward. In the Buddha’s day, he first taught generosity and morality before he gave his followers meditation instructions. The logic was self-interested: it’s hard to concentrate if your mind is humming with remorse over having been a shithead, or if you’re constantly scrambling to try to keep various lies straight.
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In ancient days, kindness first.
His emails—evocative little
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Very quickly, my strategy—or lack thereof—began to backfire. When massive
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Sharon happened to give a very timely talk on the subject of mudita, the Buddhist term for sympathetic joy. She admitted that sometimes her first instinct when trying to summon this feeling was “Ew, I wish you didn’t have so much going for you.” The meditation hall erupted in laughter. Sharon said the biggest obstacle to mudita is a subconscious illusion, that whatever success the other person has achieved was actually somehow really meant for us. “It’s almost like, it was heading right for me,” she said, “and you just reached out and grabbed it.” More laughter, as everyone in the room enjoyed one of the most satisfying of all dharma delicacies: an accurate diagnosis of our inner lunacy.
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Sharon Salzburg common reaction good things happening to others
It reminded me of how soldiers and police officers I’d interviewed described their reactions in emergency situations. They would almost always say something to the effect of “My training kicked in.” I also thought, with a degree of self-satisfaction, that having a calmer, more compassionate mind was allowing me to take a dry-eyed view of the situation, unclouded by unhelpful emotion. Rather than take it personally, I tried to see it through Ben’s eyes. He was just doing the best he could to turn the news division around. Maybe I just wasn’t his cup of tea? I comforted myself with the conclusion that I was engaged in a healthy acknowledgment of reality that would ultimately allow for the virtuous cycle of less unnecessary straining and better decision making. My loving wife, however, thought I was being a total wuss. While she was glad I wasn’t losing my cool, she was bewildered by the fact that her husband seemed so suddenly gelded.
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More compassionate or gelded
was the last piece
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In meditation, instead of succumbing to these deeply rooted habits of mind, you are simply watching what comes up in your head nonjudgmentally. For me, doing this drill over and over again had massive off-the-cushion benefits, allowing me—at least 10% of the time—to shut down the ego with a Reaganesque “There you go again.”
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Apply Reagan's words to your inner self's antics
admire named Jeff Warren, who
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Try to meditate every day. Regularity is more important than duration.
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Harris and everyone you know is meditating. Get started!
compelling. Here are
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