"Search Inside Yourself" highlights

by Chade-Meng Tan, Daniel Goleman, Jon Kabat-Zinn 

Free Kindle instant preview: https://a.co/boQuaKJ 

78 Highlights | 13 Notes 

Highlight (Blue) | Location 153 

I felt a bit like yet another of the endless perks employees there 

Highlight (Blue) | Location 153 

famously enjoy, somewhere between a massage and all the soda you can drink. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 4 

For example, where traditional contemplatives would talk about “deeper awareness of emotion,” I would say  “perceiving the process of emotion at a higher resolution,” then further explaining it as the ability to perceive an  emotion the moment it is arising, the moment it is ceasing, and all the subtle changes in between. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 6 

For example, you will learn how to calm your mind on demand. Your concentration and creativity will improve.  You will perceive your mental and emotional processes with increasing clarity. You will discover that self confidence is something that can arise naturally in a trained mind. You will learn to uncover your ideal future  and develop the optimism and resilience necessary to thrive. You will find that you can deliberately improve  empathy with practice. You will learn that social skills are highly trainable and that you can help others love you. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 7 

Search Inside Yourself works in three steps: 1. Attention training 2. Self-knowledge and self mastery 3. Creating useful mental habits 

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 9 

I would like to begin our journey together on a note of optimism, partly because beginning on a note of  pessimism does not sell books. 

another plus for optimism

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 20 

To quote Viktor Frankl, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our  power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.” What a mind of calmness and  clarity does is to increase that space for us. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 22 

More importantly, bringing the attention to the body enables a high-resolution perception of emotions. High resolution perception means your perception becomes so refined across both time and space that you can watch  an emotion the moment it is arising, you can perceive its subtle changes as it waxes and wanes, and you can  watch it the moment it ceases. This ability is important because the better we can perceive our emotions, the  better we can manage them. When we are able to perceive emotions arising and changing in slow motion, we  can become so skillful at managing them, it is almost like living that cool scene in the movie The Matrix, in  which Keanu Reeves’s character, Neo, dodges bullets after he becomes able to perceive the moments the bullets  are fired and see their trajectory in slow motion. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 24 

What the Iowa scientists found is that gamblers started generating stress responses to red decks by the tenth card,  forty cards before they were able to say that they had a hunch about what was wrong with those two decks. More  importantly, right around the time their palms started sweating, their behavior began to change as well. They  started favoring the good decks 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 24 

The basal ganglia observes everything we do in life, every situation, and extracts decision rules. . . . Our life  wisdom on any topic is stored in the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia is so primitive that it has zero connectivity  to the verbal cortex. It can’t tell us what it knows in words. It tells us in feelings, it has a lot of connectivity to  the emotional centers of the brain and to the gut. It tells us this is right or this is wrong as a gut feeling.19 That  may be why intuition is experienced in the body and the gut, but it cannot be easily verbalized. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 25 

Mindfulness in Two Minutes Most evenings, before we sleep, my young daughter and I sit in mindfulness  together for two minutes. I like to joke that two minutes is optimal for us because that is the attention span of a  child and of an engineer. For two minutes a day, we quietly enjoy being alive and being together. More  fundamentally, for two minutes a day, we enjoy being. Just being. To just be is simultaneously the most ordinary  and the most precious experience in life. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 26 

adults. In learning and teaching mindfulness, the good news is that mindfulness is embarrassingly easy. It is easy  because we already know what it’s like, and it’s something we already experience from time to time. Remember 

that Jon Kabat-Zinn skillfully defined mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the  present moment, and non-judgmentally.” Put most simply, I think mindfulness is the mind of just being. All you  really need to do is to pay attention moment-to-moment without judging. It is that simple. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 26 

In my classes, after explaining some of the theory and brain science behind mindfulness, I offer two ways to  experience a taste of mindfulness: the Easy Way and the Easier Way. The creatively named Easy Way is to  simply bring gentle and consistent attention to your breath for two minutes. That’s it. Start by becoming aware  that you are breathing, and then pay attention to the process of breathing. Every time your attention wanders  away, just bring it back very gently. The Easier Way is, as its name may subtly suggest, even easier. All you  have to do is sit without agenda for two minutes. Life really cannot get much simpler than that. The idea here is  to shift from “doing” to “being,” whatever that means to you, for just two minutes. Just be. To make it even  easier, you’re free to switch between the Easy Way and the Easier Way anytime during these two minutes. Any  time you feel like you want to bring awareness to breathing, just switch to Easy. Any time you decide you’d  rather just sit without agenda, just switch to Easier. No questions asked. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 32 

Alan, in his deep wisdom, said that in his usual calm, joyful, and understated manner. But to me, that statement  represents a simple yet deeply profound, life-changing insight. It implies that happiness is not something that  you pursue; it is something you allow. Happiness is just being. That insight changed my life. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 33 

To me, the biggest joke is that after all that has been done in the history of the world in the pursuit of happiness,  it turns out that sustainable happiness is achievable simply by bringing attention to one’s breath. Life is funny.  At least my life is. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 34 

I joke that meditation is like sweating at the gym, minus the sweating, and the gym. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 35 

The implication of this insight is that there is no such thing as a bad meditation. For many of us, when we  meditate, we find our attention wanders away from our breath a lot, and we keep having to bring it back, and  then we think we’re doing it all wrong. In fact, this is a good exercise because every time we bring a wandering  attention back, we are giving our muscles of attention an opportunity for growth. A second similarity between  exercise and meditation is they can both significantly change the quality of your life. If you never exercise and  you put yourself on a regular exercise regime, a few weeks or months later, you may find many significant  changes in yourself. You will have more energy, you can get more stuff done, you get sick less often, you look  better in the mirror, and you just feel great about yourself. The same is true for meditation. After a few weeks or  months of starting a regular meditation regime, you have more energy; your mind becomes calmer, clearer, and 

more joyful; you get sick less; you smile more; your social life improves (because you smile more); and you feel  great about yourself. And you don’t even need to sweat. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 35 

Every time you create an intention, you are subtly forming or reinforcing a mental habit. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 37 

In that state of distraction, we may start ruminating, worrying, or fantasizing. Sometimes, I even fantasize about  not worrying. After a while, we realize our attention has wandered away. The default reaction of most people at  this point is self-criticism. We start telling ourselves stories about how horrible we are as meditators and, by  extension, not particularly good people either. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 43 

Remember that letting go is not forcing something to go away. Instead, letting go is an invitation. We generously  allow the recipient to choose whether or not to accept the invitation, and we are happy either way. When we let  go of something that distracts our meditation, we are gently inviting it to stop distracting us, but we generously  allow it to decide whether or not it wants to stay. If it decides to leave, that is fine. If it decides to stay, that is  fine too. We treat it with kindness and generosity during its entire presence. This is the practice of letting go. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 51 

And the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of  judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this  faculty would be the education par excellence.1 (emphasis by original author) 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 52 

There you have it. Mindfulness is the skill that gives you the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering  attention over and over again, and as William James said, it is “the education par excellence,” the best thing you  can learn. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 53 

Renowned meditation teacher Shaila Catherine 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 55 

If you have no other practice but sitting, the mindfulness will eventually grow into daily life and give you a no cost, zero-down-payment happiness boost. However, you can accelerate this generalization process by  purposefully bringing mindfulness to activity. The simplest way to do it is to bring full moment-to-moment  attention to every task with a nonjudgmental mind, and every time attention wanders away, just gently bring it 

back. It is just like sitting meditation, except the object of meditation is the task at hand rather than the breath.  That is all. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 67 

2. Do less than you can: This lesson came from Mingyur Rinpoche. The idea is to do less formal practice than  you are capable of. For example, if you can sit in mindfulness for five minutes before it feels like a chore, then  do not sit for five minutes—just do three or four minutes, perhaps a few times a day. The reason is to keep the  

practice from becoming a burden. If mindfulness practice feels like a chore, it’s not sustainable. Yvonne  Ginsberg likes to say, “Meditation is an indulgence.” I think her insight beautifully captures the core of  Mingyur’s idea. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 73 

MEDITATION CIRCUIT TRAINING Let us begin by sitting comfortably in a position that enables you to  be both relaxed and alert at the same time, whatever that means to you. Let us rest the mind. If you like,  you can visualize the breath to be a resting place, or a cushion, or a mattress, and let the mind rest on it.   (Short pause) Let us shift into focused attention. Bring your attention to your breath, or any other  object of meditation you choose. Let this attention be stable like a rock, undisturbed by any distraction. If the  mind is distracted, gently but firmly bring the mind back. Let’s continue this exercise for the remainder of 3  minutes. (Long pause) Now we shift into open attention. Bring your attention to whatever you  experience and whatever comes to mind. Let this attention be flexible like grass moving in the wind. In this  mind, there is no such thing as a distraction. Every object you 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 73 

experience is an object of meditation. Everything is fair game. Let us continue this exercise for the remainder of  3 minutes. (Long pause) (Shift to focused attention for 3 minutes. Then shift to open attention for  3 minutes.) Let us end this sitting by resting the mind. If you like, you can again visualize the breath to  be a resting place, or a cushion, or a mattress, and let the mind rest on it. (Long pause) Thank you  for your attention. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 83 

Those financial advisors learned to identify their own emotional reactions in challenging situations and became  more aware of unproductive self-talk that led to self-doubt and shame. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 97 

Researchers asked 49 college students to take two minutes on two consecutive days and write about something  they found to be emotionally significant. The participants registered immediate improvements in mood and  performed better on standardized measures of physiological well-being. An extended inward look isn’t  necessary, the study concludes; merely “broaching the topic on one day and briefly exploring it the next” is  enough to put things in perspective. Four minutes can make a measurable difference. That exploding sound is  the sound of my mind being blown.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 97 

One fun way of having a daily journaling practice is to write a different prompt on each piece of paper, put them  all in a fishbowl (a dry one, I recommend), then pick out one or two at random each day. Here are some  suggested prompts: • What I am feeling now is . . . • I am aware that . . . • What motivates  me is . . . • I am inspired by . . . • Today, I aspire to . . . • What hurts me is . . . • I  wish . . . • Others are . . . • I made 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 111 

I call it “meta-distress,” distress about experiencing distress. This is especially true for sensitive and good hearted people. We berate ourselves by saying things like, “Hey, if I am such a good person, why am I feeling  this much envy?” This is even truer for good people with contemplative practices like meditation. We scold  ourselves by saying, “Maybe if I was actually a good meditator, I wouldn’t feel this way. Therefore, I must be a  hypocrite and a useless piece of [insert context-appropriate noun].” 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 117 

Jennifer Bevan, 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 124 

In addition to these, if it works for you, you can also try seeing positives in this trigger. 

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 125 

We do not want these unpleasant feelings; we want them to go away. As a result of this aversion, we shift our  thoughts externally toward the other person or environment instead of toward ourselves. 

i can use personal slight or attack as signal other person is hurt or afraid. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 125 

This process is usually unconscious to most of us. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 125 

If, however, through mindfulness and other practices, we bring conscious awareness to this process, then we can  see that our externally directed negative thoughts arise mostly from our aversion. Given that insight, if we also  develop the capacity to experience our own unpleasant feelings, we may tame aversion, which in turn may tame  ruminations and obsessive thoughts. Once we create within ourselves the ability to tame such thoughts, we  increase self-confidence.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 134 

Half jokingly, I think of alignment as finding a way to never have to work again for the rest of your life and still  get paid. The secret is to create a situation in which your work is something you do for fun, so you are doing it  for your own entertainment anyway and somebody just happens to pay you for it (and since you are nice to  them, you do not want to say no to their money). 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 134 

1. The work is deeply meaningful to you 2. It generates a state of flow in you This is, of course, in perfect  alignment with Tony Hsieh’s pleasure, passion, and higher purpose framework. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 136 

The three elements of true motivation are: 1. Autonomy: The urge to direct our own lives   2. Mastery: The desire to get better and better at something that matters 3. Purpose: The yearning  to do what we do in service of something larger than ourselves3 In his TED talk, Pink tells the fascinating story  of research based on the candle problem.4 The candle problem works like this: participants are given a box of  tacks, a candle, and matches. They are asked to find a way to attach the candle to the wall. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 139 

You know what is really important to you and what gives you meaning. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 140 

The better news is there are also other ways to help you clarify your values and higher purpose to yourself. One  way is to tell them to other people. Things like values and higher purposes are fairly abstract topics, and the act  of verbalizing them forces us to make them clearer and more tangible to ourselves. Another way is to journal.  Once again, a similar mechanism is at work—the act of verbalizing abstract thoughts makes them clear and  tangible. We find that doing these exercises in a structured way can be very effective. In our class, for example,  many participants told us they gained a useful amount of clarity with just a few minutes of speaking to each  other. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 140 

DISCOVERING VALUES AND HIGHER PURPOSE If you are doing this alone at home, do a Journaling  exercise (see Chapter 4) for a few minutes with one or both of these suggested prompts: • My core  values are . . . • I stand for . . . Alternatively, if you have friends or family members to work  with (lucky you), do a Mindful Listening exercise (see Chapter 3) in a group of two or three. Take turns to  speak. The speaker starts with a monologue, which can be any length, and after that, the group engages in a free  conversation when the listeners can ask clarifying questions or make short comments. The only rule during the  conversation is the (original) speaker has preemptive priority, which means he or she has priority in speaking  and when he or she speaks, nobody can interrupt.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 141 

Psychiatrist Regina Pally describes it this way: According to neuroscience, even before events happen  the brain has already made a prediction about what is most likely to happen, and sets in motion the perception,  behaviors, emotions, physiologic responses and interpersonal ways of relating that best fit with what is  predicted. In a sense, we learn from the past what to predict for the future and then live the future we expect 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 142 

In 2005, my friend Roz Savage became the first woman to complete the Atlantic Rowing Race solo. That’s right —one woman, one boat, 103 days of rowing across three thousand miles of open ocean. Her cooking stove  failed after twenty days and all four of her oars broke, but she made it. But that’s just for starters. Roz later  became the first woman to row solo across the Pacific Ocean. She did it in three stages. In 2008, she rowed solo  from San Francisco to Oahu in Hawaii; in 2009, from Hawaii to Tarawa in Kiribati; and in 2010 to Madang in  Papua New Guinea. Roz wasn’t always an adventurer. She insists that before her rowing adventures, she led a  normal, comfortable, mostly sedentary, middle-class lifestyle like many of us. She was a management consultant  and project manager at an investment bank in London, with a steady income and a house in the suburbs.  Sometime in her midthirties, she did an exercise writing her own obituary. What would people say about her  after she died, she wondered. She wrote two versions of her obituary. The first version reflected how things  would turn out given her then-current life trajectory. The second version reflected the life she aspired to live.  She made a very important discovery during that process. She realized that writing the first version drained so 

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 145 

My own dream, for example, is to create the conditions for world peace in my lifetime. 

male drives for recognition need to satisfied 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 146 

I learned that people want to be inspired. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 148 

Success and failure are emotional experiences. These emotions can give rise to grasping and aversion, which can  hold us back and hamper our ability to achieve our goals. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 152 

Failure is the building block of success. Soichiro Honda famously said, “Success is 99 percent failure.” Thomas  Watson said, “If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.” There is even a popular  Chinese proverb that says, “Failure is the mother of success.”

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 153 

What’s more, MetLife had a chronic shortage of agents, so Seligman convinced MetLife to hire a special group  of applicants who scored just below the cutoff point on the normal screening test but scored high on optimism.  This group outsold the 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 153 

pessimists in the group of regular hires by 21 percent in their first year and 57 percent in their second year! 

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 154 

This is also true for other aspects of our lives. Barbara Fredrickson, a noted pioneer in positive psychology,  found that it takes three positive experiences to overcome a negative one, a 3:1 ratio.10 In general, each negative  feeling is three times as powerful as a positive one. 

chade-meng tan quotes barbara fredickson 

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 154 

If you put that in perspective for a moment, let’s assume you live a life in which you have twice as many happy  moments as unhappy ones, a 2:1 ratio. It is like some rich uncle gives you two dollars for every dollar somebody  else takes from you. Dude, you win! Objectively, it would look as if you are very lucky and have a very good  life. Subjectively, however, since your 2:1 ratio is still well below Fredrickson’s 3:1 ratio, you would think, “My  life sucks.” 

worth using daily 

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 154 

Specifically, whenever you experience success or failure, first bring mindfulness to your body. Next, bring  mindfulness to the emotional experience, remembering that the body is where emotions manifest most vividly.  Finally, bring mindfulness to your thoughts. How are you explaining the event to yourself? Do you feel powerful  or helpless? How are your thoughts related to your emotions? If this event is an experience of success, bring  mindfulness to the tendency to downplay it, or if the event is an experience of failure, bring mindfulness to its  disproportionally strong effect on you. 

ex. of good wording, good psych 

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 165 

It is possible to understand another person at both an intellectual and a visceral level with kindness, and still  respectfully disagree. Aristotle said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without  accepting it.” Disagreeing with empathy is a lot like that. It is the mark of a developed mind to be able to  understand and accept another’s feeling without agreeing to it. 

a major key

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 171 

One study even suggests that performing one kind act a day over just ten days can measurably increase your  happiness.9 In other words, kindness is a sustainable source of happiness—a simple yet profound insight that  can change lives. 

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 179 

1. Practice giving people the benefit of the doubt: Most people do what they do because it feels like the right  thing at the time, based on what they want to accomplish and the information they have. Their reasons make  sense to them, even if their actions do not make sense to us. Assume that they are making the right choice, even  if we do not understand it or might make a different choice ourselves. 

just what w.e. deming said 30 years ago 

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 183 

Remember that people generally do not like to be told how they feel, even if you are right (you can try this one  at home if you need confirmation: “Clearly you’re feeling hurt.” “I am not!”). So, ask about feelings, or at least  remember to start with “This is what I hear” and give the speaker a chance to correct you if you haven’t got it  exactly right. 

especially if you are right 

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 185 

Later, on a subsequent set of harder problems, those praised for being smart performed significantly worse than  the other groups, while those praised for their effort significantly outperformed the other groups. Being praised  for being smart is bad for you. 

i will change my practice 

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 189 

There are many reasons why this can happen. One common reason is that people implicitly value different  priorities. For example, one engineer might place higher priority on meeting the delivery schedule, as she might  think it is better to deliver a promised product on time even if it means cutting down the number of features.  Another engineer might place higher priority on completeness of delivery, as he might think it is better to give  the customer everything he was promised the first time, even if it means delivering late. In this case, they may  each be correct and reasonable, and still they may get into an unending disagreement, unless each is able to  understand and internalize the other’s implicit priorities. 

weighting aspects differently

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 197 

Matthieu was the first subject whose identity was unintentionally leaked to the public, which earned him that  nickname. Another subject whose identity recently became known is Mingyur Rinpoche. Mingyur is similarly  nicknamed in the Chinese-language press as the “happiest person in the world.” 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 204 

MULTIPLYING GOODNESS MEDITATION 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 207 

TONGLEN MEDITATION 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 210 

According to neuroscientist Evian Gordon, 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 212 

In Your Brain at Work, David Rock 

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 212 

your brain treats them in the same way it treats survival issues. And because they are so important, each is a  major driver of social behavior. These five domains form a model which David calls the SCARF model, which  stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness. 

aspects of social brain 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 212 

The good news is there is a good way to increase your own status without harming others, and that is what  David calls “playing against yourself.” When you improve a skill (such as improving your golf handicap), you  activate a status reward relative to your former self. This is perhaps why mastery is such a powerful motivator  (see Chapter 6). When you gain increasing mastery over something that matters to you, you activate a status  reward, at least when compared against your former self. 

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 214 

Humans are the only animals known to voluntarily injure their own self-interests to punish the perceived  unfairness of others. Other primates are known to punish unfairness, but not at the expense of their own self interest. For example, say we are in a game (known as the Ultimatum Game) in which person A (the “proposer”)  is given one hundred dollars, which he must distribute between himself and person B (the “responder”). If 

person B accepts the deal, they both pocket the money as distributed by A, but if B rejects the deal, they both go  home empty-handed. If person A distributes ninety-nine dollars to himself and one dollar to B, objectively, B  has no reason to reject the deal. If B accepts the deal, he gets a dollar, and if he rejects it, he gets nothing. There  is only one economically rational course of action for him. Yet many people in the position of person B will  reject the deal out of being offended by unfairness. In contrast, a chimpanzee playing a similar game (using  raisins as the object of value rather than U.S. dollars) will rarely reject that deal.8 To a chimp, forgoing raisins is  just silly. The moral of the story is to never underestimate a person’s sense of fairness; it is overwhelming  enough that he often may sacrifice his own self-interest for its sake. (The other moral of the story is to never  count on a chimpanzee giving you a fair deal. Nor an elephant, for that matter.) 

what is fair and who is smarter, human or chimp? 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 219 

Difficult conversations are conversations that are hard to have. They are often important, but because they are  hard, we would usually rather avoid them. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 219 

Conducting difficult conversations is a skill, an extremely useful one, indeed. According to the authors of  Difficult Conversations, who make up part of the Harvard Negotiation Project, there are five steps to conducting  a difficult conversation. Here is my brief of those steps: 1. Prepare by walking through the “three  conversations.” 2. Decide whether to raise the issue. 3. Start from the objective “third story.”   4. Explore their 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 220 

Prepare by Walking Through the “Three Conversations” A powerful first step in improving our ability to  conduct difficult conversations is understanding their underlying structure. In every conversation, there are  actually three conversations going on. They are the content conversation (“What happened?”), the feelings  conversation (“What emotions are involved?”), and the identity conversation (“What does this say about me?”).  The identity conversation almost always involves one of these three questions: 1. Am I competent?   2. Am I a good person? 3. Am I worthy of love? 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 221 

The first key insight is that impact is not the intention. For example, if we feel hurt by something somebody said,  we may automatically assume that the person intended to hurt us. In other words, we assume that the impact is  the intention. Usually, we judge ourselves by our intentions, but we judge others by the impact of their behavior  because we do not really know their intentions, so we subconsciously infer their intentions based on the impact  of their behavior. In many situations, however, the impact is not the intention. For example, when Henry’s wife  told him to stop and ask for directions, he felt belittled, but she honestly did not set out intending to belittle his  sense of manhood; she merely intended to arrive at the party on time. Her impact was not her intention. Let her  know the impact on you, Henry, but do not start a fight with her. She meant no harm. (True story, though the  name has been changed to protect every husband in the world, except Henry.)

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 223 

PREPARING FOR A DIFFICULT CONVERSATION 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 230 

Hence, in 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 236 

Dan and I subsequently became friends. Through Dan’s and Larry’s connections, I got to know two more  amazing people, Mirabai Bush and Norman Fischer. Mirabai was the executive director of the Center for  Contemplative Mind in Society, a very compassionate woman who was a very close friend of both Dan and  Larry and who, like Larry, gave her adult life to the service of humanity. Norman is one of the most famous Zen  masters in America today. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 236 

While sitting in a room with Mirabai and Norman, I realized all three of us were radiant beings. Mirabai radiated  compassion, Norman radiated wisdom, and I radiated ambient body heat. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 240 

I once took a long walk with Zen master Roshi Joan Halifax, a dear friend who is like a sister to me. I sometimes  joke about her being my “little sister” because she is only thirty years older than me. 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 246 

Jill Stracko advised me on various aspects of writing and gave me her time to edit various iterations of early  drafts. Jill used to head the White House writing staff, so I feel really honored to be on the 

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 250 

Kabat-Zinn,