Miami Alex Breakdown is supported by Helix Sleep.
Like so many of us, we're spending a lot more time indoors as winter's in full swing.
Sleep's even more important during the colder season.
It's peak cold and flu time.
So now's the perfect time to invest in a new mattress.
I've had every sleep issue you can imagine.
Night sweats. back pain, motion transfer.
We are so excited when we heard that Helix wanted to partner with us years ago.
After all the incredible feedback we've heard about them over the years.
I've had my Helix for about gosh five years now.
And it's made a huge change in our lives.
Jonathan loves his Helix.
Our kids love their Helix.
We highly recommend taking the Helix Sleep Quiz to find your perfect mattress in under two minutes.
That's how we did it.
Everyone sleeps differently.
We're confident you'll find a Helix mattress specifically designed for your specific sleep positions and feel preferences.
When I took the quiz, I was matched with a midnight, because I like something a little firm and I sleep on my side.
Jonathan though, is a twilight person, but both of our mattresses are a huge upgrade from our last ones.
Their models with memory foam layers provide optimal pressure relief and cradle your body in the areas that need it most.
It's the perfect combination of comfort and support, and Jonathan loves the cooling features of his Helix mattress.
Go to helixsleep.com slash breakdown for 27% off site-wide.
Exclusive for listeners of MindBiolics Breakdown that's helixsleepcom slash breakdown for 27 off site-wide.
Make sure you enter our show after checkout so that they know that we sent you helixsleepcom slash breakdown.
Meditation does not require you to clear your mind or to stop thinking or to stop being distracted.
That's impossible, as I like to joke, unless you're enlightened or you have died.
What we're doing in meditation instead is focusing the mind just for a few seconds actually a few nanoseconds really at a time usually on something simple like the feeling of your breath coming in and going out.
And then, every time you get distracted which will happen a million times You just start again and again, and again, and again.
And this is like a bicep curl for your brain.
And people think when they see how distractible they are that they are uniquely dysfunctional.
But actually, the seeing of the distraction is proof that you're meditating correctly.
Why?
Because the whole point of this exercise is to get familiar with how fucking crazy you are, with how wild your mind is, so that it doesn't own you as much.
That's mindfulness.
Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.
And I'm Jonathan Cohen.
And welcome to our breakdown.
This is the place where we break things down so you don't have to.
Today, we've got someone who is so good at breaking down meditation and making us 10% happier.
We're going to be talking to Dan Harris, author of 10% Happier.
He's an author, podcaster, and entrepreneur.
He's reported from all over the planet.
He's hosted Nightline and worked on Good Morning America.
You probably know him, but...
He discovered meditation and he wrote 10 Happier and he has this podcast 10 Happier with Dan Harris.
He has an app and he has dedicated his life to teaching even the most unlikely among us about meditation.
Jonathan, how excited are we to talk to Dan Harris?
This is a very exciting episode because you open up in a way that I haven't heard you open up before.
There are controversial topics in this.
I think people are going to be excited to hear this.
It's a sexy one.
It's a very sexy episode about meditation.
Meditation is a bicep curl for your brain and mime gets a workout.
Let's welcome to the breakdown, Dan Harris.
Break it down.
Dan Harris, it's really, really exciting to have you here.
I've had the pleasure of speaking with you on your podcast, but we're really excited to have you.
And I have to give a shout out.
You changed my ex-husband's life.
He wants me to tell you that every time I get to.
So he is a person who read 10 Happier and it really really connected with him and really changed his life.
It changed.
I mean, he's a daily meditator, like literally a daily meditator, since since your book.
And I don't want to say that I think your book changed my life, but I actually, as you were logging on, I decided to go ahead and I downloaded the 10 Happier app.
And you should know that I am not a person who like downloads apps.
I don't really use apps for much of anything.
I didn't even tell Jonathan I was doing this, but I just filled out my questionnaire and I would have assumed you didn't know where the app store was.
I found the app store because I went through your book again.
It's the fifth anniversary edition that I happen to have.
You have the fifth anniversary edition.
Oh, I have the fifth anniversary, but there is a 10.
Correct.
But this is the one that I'm holding.
And I also did.
I also read Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, because I don't know that I am a fidgety skeptic, but I'm definitely fidgety.
Something really clicked for me this time around in going over your life and your journey.
So I'm really excited to get to talk to you about.
I wonder if you would do us a bit of a favor and tell us a bit about where we found you we as your readers where we found you when you decided to embark on this journey of meditation which really has, I mean, not only changed your life but the lives of so many.
You were a young professional.
You were a newscaster.
You were in a very coveted place in your life.
Can you tell us about what happened and specifically this diagnosis you had of depression?
Where were we finding you?
No, I'm happy to talk about that.
I absolutely will.
I want to make a mental note.
We can talk about it now.
We can talk about it later.
We can talk about it offline.
But you said something clicked for you.
And I am so curious what it was that clicked.
So we want to do that now?
Oh, we'll get to it.
Okay.
Oh, no, no.
You get to visit us here.
I got a whole list.
It's all in order.
I'll get to it.
I may not be like Dan Harris, the newscaster, but I have a process here.
Okay.
All right.
I will.
But yes, we're going to get, I will answer the question you actually asked me.
I'll try not to be a hostile witness.
I will, I will play along.
Um, it's your fault for saying something interesting.
Um, okay.
So I, you asked me where, where, where, where I was found or where we found me.
Um, I, uh, I feel like I've been laughing to myself recently.
Like I I there are probably very few people in the on the meditative path.
Who who can say that the their work started with a Coke fueled televised panic attack?
Um, but that's where mine did so proud.
Um, yeah, I, I was, um, so just to go back to, let's I'll start the story at age 28.
I arrived at ABC news, where I after working for many years in local television And I got this call to work at ABC News, which was a huge deal for me.
I'd grown up watching Peter Jennings, who was the main anchor of ABC's World News Tonight at that time.
And shortly after I got to ABC and got this big opportunity, their 9-11 happened.
And so I ended up spending many years in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan.
Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, places that are in the news now.
I was in Iraq six or seven times, often for months and months and months at a time.
And I came home in the summer of 2003 after six months in Iraq.
That was just my first trip.
And I got depressed, although I didn't actually know I was depressed.
And I started to self-medicate with recreational drugs, including cocaine.
And then in the summer of 2004.
Wait, I want to stop you because, just like you're looking for some cocaine.
You're asking if I got a number.
Is that where?
No, no, no, no.
You're, you know, you're a little bit older than me, but not a lot.
And, you know, I knew the guys who, I mean, many of us knew, like, the guys that did cocaine.
And, you know, there was a definite kind of profile.
And I'm not saying you're not that profile, but I was very surprised to learn that you took up cocaine.
Like at a point in your life where, like you were developing a career that was like, really important and like had a lot of demands on you.
And you talked in the book about how you were kind of like sneaking around.
Like this was like you had like a legit habit that involved the things that we do when we have addictions.
But this was a time in your life when like you were supposed to have your shit together, Dan.
What happened?
I...
I don't have any defense for this.
It was toweringly stupid.
So if you're looking for me to, you know, justify it, I can't.
I think really it was that I got fucked up being overseas.
You know, I was in very hairy situations.
And I want to be humble about this, because the action that I saw was nothing compared to the people who were actually in.
Right.
I was going to say you weren't in combat.
No, I was in combat, but I wasn't actually fighting.
I didn't have a gun.
Yes.
But I was seeing a lot, you know, people I know were dying and I was seeing a lot of really gnarly things.
And I don't actually think I was traumatized the way we think of trauma now.
I think what happened and I spent a lot of time talking to psychiatrists about this is that I got addicted to, to the adrenaline.
This is not uncommon among veterans who get way more adrenaline than I ever got.
Um that you.
There's a very unhealthy at a uh um thing that can happen, which is that you life seems bland when you're not getting shot at.
And uh, I think what would happen was I would come home in the, in these, in the, you know, and in it and interregnum between tours of duty and um, Even though my job at baseline was very exciting national television, you know, covering I was covering, I covered the 2004 presidential campaign and that was really fun, but it wasn't it's.
There's nothing that can compare to being somewhere you are absolutely not supposed to be and getting on television in the process.
You know, it was just, it was really thrilling and it felt very important.
And I really wasn't quite idealistic about the role of journalists to bear witness at the tip of the spear to what's being done in our name and with our tax dollars.
So I believed all of that.
And I was, frankly, addicted to the adrenaline of all of it.
And when I came home, I just couldn't handle it.
And I didn't know what to do.
And I'd never done hard drugs before.
And I was at a party one night and a friend of mine had a bag of cocaine.
And You know, I, I grew up during the whole, just say, no, this is your brain on drugs.
They're frying a egg in the frying pan.
And so I was terrified of this stuff, but I really felt like shit.
I was having a lot of trouble getting out of bed.
And I felt ill all the time.
And I had done all of these medical tests to try to figure out what it was and nothing came back.
And so I said, you know what, I'll try a little of this cocaine.
And immediately I felt better.
This is not a recommendation, by the way, for cocaine.
It's terrible.
Terrible.
No, and you're actually just.
You're actually describing the mechanism of what happens with that kind of drug, especially with the way that you administer it.
It is an instantaneous.
It's a rush.
And that is a sustained rush.
But as you describe, you described yourself as having an addictive personality.
And you know what I think is so interesting when you talk about it.
You know you.
You immediately felt like I need to keep this feeling going.
I mean, that is the sort of engine that drives addiction.
Absolutely.
I mean, and this is the this is the problem.
You know way more about this than I do.
So you'll just fill in the blanks here where I mess up.
But, you know, drugs like Xanax that come on fast and go way fast.
That is what is more.
That is what is so addictive.
And cocaine comes on really fast and goes away really fast.
And so that's why people who are doing Coke are like constantly going to the bathroom for a bump.
And, uh, that is one of the ways in which this drug can just get its, you know, uh, claws into you.
And for me, it really did make me feel better.
Of course, in it, I felt awful the next day and was barely functional.
It wasn't worth it.
The math didn't work out.
Um, but I you know, I think we've firmly established that I was being a moron during this period of time.
You also had experience with ecstasy, which is a much longer lasting experience.
But you describe kind of the depletion like there's a neurotransmitter depletion that occurs.
Can you talk a little bit about the ways, you know, I'm not asking for sensationalistic reasons.
I'm asking because I think it's really interesting that these were the tools that you were trying to use to quiet ultimately, the voice in the head.
Talk a little bit about ecstasy and kind of what the differences were in terms of that self-medication.
Well, so I'm, Very down on cocaine.
I think it's something people should not do.
I'm not here to tell you what to do with your life, but you're playing with fire because it is very addictive.
MDMA, which is the active ingredient in what we used to call ecstasy and what we now either call molly or MDMA.
I actually think is quite a powerful drug, potential medicine for people.
And it's being studied quite extensively, especially for veterans with PTSD.
And the results from what I've seen are actually quite promising.
This is not a quick on, quick off, quick hit drug.
It it, it comes on slowly and then it stay, you stay.
The effects last for, from what I can tell, four to six hours.
And, um, Very meaningful things can happen.
It's a drug that's been used in couples counseling.
It really makes you feel a lot of warmth and love.
So I see the potential for MDMA in ways that I don't see for cocaine.
So actually, for me, I don't think it was the MDMA that was screwing me up.
I think it was the coke.
And the MDMA actually now And I don't think I would have said this when the book came out, but I think now I really think that those experiences were onward leading.
They were pointing to something that was missing in my life, which was that I've often I've been described as like a frosty New Englander.
It was natural for me to be an anchorman because I am good at not showing my emotions.
And if you look at the video of me having the panic attack, you can I'm pretty good at keeping my shit together and MDMA, which does bring you out of your head and relax you and help you to get in touch with your emotions.
For me, there was something in those experiences that actually I can come back to now that is valuable.
MindBalance Breakdown is supported by Remy.
If you've listened to our podcast, you know that Jonathan and I both have some teeth issues at night, clenching and grinding when we're stressed.
Our jaws get tired and it's really not good for our teeth.
It's not a fun problem to deal with.
If you're like us and part of the 30 of Americans who grind their teeth, your smile needs protection in 2026.
Remy's custom nightguards are clinically tested to prevent teeth grinding, reduce jaw tension and facial muscle strain and improve sleep quality.
You get the same professional quality and comfort as a nightguard from the dentist, but Remy costs you 80 less, no joke, and is much more convenient than having to go into the dentist's office because
You get the kit right to your mailbox, right to your door, and you follow the step-by-step instructions to get a perfect impression.
Then Remy crafts and ships your custom fit night guard.
Once you receive it, that's it.
You just start protecting your teeth.
Start the new year right.
Use the code BREAK to get 50% off your purchase of a new night guard.
That's 50% off at shopremi.com slash break with code BREAK.
Thank you, Remy, for sponsoring this episode.
Miami Alex Breakdown is supported by Mudwater.
Jonathan and I are huge fans of Mudwater.
I'm very into the turmeric latte.
And if you add a little agave, makes it just a little sweet.
It makes us feel energized without the jitters, which is a real problem for those of us who don't like that jittery feeling.
And I've noticed it makes a huge difference. in brain fog.
It's the best tasting functional mushroom blend on the market and with the best results.
Also, Mudwater's new low-caf coffee is a great go-to for an afternoon pick-me-up.
It's made with organic Arabica coffee, Swiss water decaf, L-theanine and functional mushrooms like lion's mane and cordyceps, so you still get that rich, full-bodied taste that coffee lovers crave, but with only 45 milligrams of caffeine, because research shows that Low doses support focused mood and reaction time, minus the crash or anxiety that comes with a full cup.
And if you want something even gentler, the original blend is still there for you.
The coffee alternative, made with cacao chai, turmeric and functional mushrooms, plus chaga and reishi to support a healthy immune system, and caffeine plus L-theanine, one of the most effective cognitive stacks known in neuroscience.
Every single ingredient in Mudwater's products are 100 USDA certified organic non-GMO gluten-free, vegan and kosher.
There's also zero sugar and no sweeteners added.
To use Mudwater.
You just drop the powder into your favorite mug, pour some water on it, give it a mix.
Some go wild and add creamer, honey, or even CBD.
There's also caffeine-free blends available.
Ready to make the switch to cleaner energy?
Head to mudwater.com and grab your starter kit today.
Right now, our listeners get an exclusive deal up to 43 off your entire order, plus free shipping and a free rechargeable frother, which I love.
When you use the code BREAK.
That's right, up to 43% off with code BREAK at mudwtr.com.
After your purchase, they'll ask you how you found them.
Please show your support for the show and let them know that we sent you.
My MBLX Breakdown is supported by Odoo.
So much of what we talk about here on MBB is about alignment making sure the systems in your life actually support your authentic self and the life that you're trying to live.
That includes how you run your business.
Luckily, Odoo is here to help you in that journey.
Odoo is an all-in-one management software designed to help entrepreneurs and small businesses focus on what actually matters instead of getting buried in admin work.
They offer a range of applications for managing customer relations, marketing point of sales, even custom websites.
All that, plus your sales accounting, inventory and operations are fully integrated on one simple and easy to use but very intuitive platform with Odoo.
When something happens in one part of your business, everything else updates automatically.
That means fewer errors, less duplication and way more clarity.
We also love that Odoo is scalable.
As you grow, you only add what you need.
No bloated software, no unnecessary complexity.
Invite your whole team.
Keep everyone in lockstep with notifications and chat.
And their plans include all their apps.
Odoo's also affordable.
They offer several pricing plans.
Your first app is free for life, with unlimited hosting and support included and a custom domain name for the first year.
Then starting at $24.90 per month, you gain access to all available applications.
Plus, it's tailored to where you live.
Use our links in the episode description for the best deals possible and get started with Odoo today.
We had Matt Gutman on and you know he speaks very, very colorfully about his.
You know his panic disorder and you know sort of his long history of that.
But the timing of all these things in your life story is what's so fascinating to me.
So this panic attack that you had, I mean also I love that you kept asking your mom for what to do as you were feeling so shitty.
And I think you said it was the third psychiatrist you went to who was like, do you do drugs?
And you were like, yeah.
And he was like, oh, got it.
But this panic attack that you had, this was on air.
You're in this super high stakes, high pressure position.
And essentially you had kind of a cumulative depletion right of what you were trying to balance out between the depression and the cocaine.
And it sort of, I mean, it sort of presented itself in this very public way.
What can you tell us?
A lot of people have anxiety attacks.
A lot of people have panic attacks.
They are distinct clinically.
I'm that jerk that likes to point that out.
Can you describe what, what those body sensations were?
I think it's really important, now that you have a little distance from it, to describe what.
What does that feel like when you're in that, in that acute situation of having that kind of panic attack?
When you're having a panic, it feels awful.
It feels, a lot of people report, it feels like you're dying.
Um the.
For me it's um heart racing.
Mouth dries up, palms start sweating um, your vision gets contracted, sort of a dizziness, heavy feeling in the head.
And so those are the physical sensations, which I often, but depends.
Sometimes I notice those first or sometimes it starts with fear-based thinking.
But then what happens is whether you start with the physical sensations or the thoughts first.
They then get into a noxious partnership.
And as the thinking of, oh, my God, I'm scared.
I got to get out of this as it interacts with the bodily sensations.
They ramp one another up.
And you know, on television.
For you know, I was, I was having the physical sensations and then the mind was registering them.
And then I was unable to talk, which is inconvenient if you're trying to anchor the news.
And then the mind was saying, well, everybody's watching this.
Your career is fucked.
You know, you are you're in a lot of trouble here.
And then the physical sensations would get worse.
And then the mental sensations would ramp up.
And that that for me is, you know, I don't I don't that for me is the is how it goes.
I don't know.
I think I'm describing something that is pretty close to universal for those who suffer with panic.
But, you know, it can take on various, you know, flavors.
You end up going on.
You know this incredibly deep, journalistically fueled kind of dive into the world of what is actually going on in Dan's brain and also in Dan's body.
And, you know, in...
In 10% Happier, you name a lot of the big names.
You name Eckhart Tolle and you talk about Deepak Chopra and you get to sort of start holding court with these people.
And so it's kind of cool, or at least this is the way I saw it.
You kind of got to do this research as part of your job, but it also ended up being this incredible journey of self-discovery.
How many years from that panic attack until this incredible retreat that you ended up going on?
So, yeah, the quick chronology is the panic attack.
I had two panic attacks, actually.
First one, the one that's on YouTube was 2004.
The second one was 2005.
That was less visually interesting.
So I never like put it out there.
But it was after the 2005 one that I went to a psychiatrist.
And then it was.
It was many years before I got interested in meditation and started meeting people like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra.
And that was 2008, 2009.
And then I did my first meditation retreat, which was a 10 day silent death march in 2010.
I was very intrigued.
And that was really kind of my favorite part of the book in a lot of ways, because you know it's very convenient that you're a journalist, because your mind is, you know you are primed for change, for detail, for description and for a level of analysis that's very clinical, but because it's about, like kind of the deepest inner workings of Dan, it's a really thorough, wonderful explanation of everything that happened to you.
So what I really identified with and maybe we'll start there before we kind of get into what ended up happening on day five which, like I'm literally like emotional thinking about your day five experience, even though it didn't happen to me
I wonder if you can talk about.
You know, one of the first things you started learning about was voice in our head, and i think what a lot of people hear about.
Like you should meditate or you need to calm down.
This is a piece that is a critically important part of traditional meditation, the notion of understanding the voice in your head but it's left out of a lot of conversations and it's it's a difficult one, but can you talk about what it, what it means to start thinking about that voice in your head?
Like that voice in your head, you said, told you to do cocaine.
Like that seemed like a good idea.
But talk in general about sort of from you know, from the Buddhist perspective in particular, what's that voice?
Yeah, there are lots of different.
I'm glad you're asking about this, because for me, this was the insight that propelled me forward.
I...
Had the panic attack and started going to therapy.
And that was all very useful.
I stopped doing drugs.
But it wasn't until many years later that one of my colleagues recommended that I read a book by Eckhart Tolle.
He was a best-selling self-help guru.
And I had no interest in self-help.
But I was only reading it because I thought maybe he would be a good story.
Because I knew he was beloved by celebrities and things like that.
So I started reading the book.
Initially, I thought it was hogwash.
And then...
He started to talk, totally did about what he calls the ego, what you could call the voice in the head, the inner narrator.
Buddhists call it the monkey mind.
Just the fact that we all have this nonstop conversation that we are having with ourselves, this voice that chases us out of bed in the morning and is yammering at us all day long.
We're constantly like wanting stuff, not wanting stuff, judging people, comparing ourselves to other people, thinking about the past or the future, instead of focusing on what's happening right now.
And when you're unaware of this noise, which if we broadcast aloud, you would be locked up.
When you're unaware of this cacophony and chaos, it owns you.
And when I read that in Tully's book I thought, oh Well, this is just intuitively true A And B.
This thesis about the human situation explains why I had a panic attack on national television.
Because, as you said, the voice in my head sent me off to war zones without thinking about the consequences for my psyche.
Came home, got depressed, insufficiently self-aware to know it.
Because that's a voice, too.
Depression is like that's a loop.
Well, I think actually in my case, depression definitely is a loop.
In my case it was a weird thing because my body knew I was depressed and it was trying to send me the signal.
But I had a mind that was not ready to receive the package.
And so that was a voice of denial or delusion of of, um you know, being insufficiently you know aware of, of my own intuition, what the body's trying to tell you, which can sound a little new agey, but is absolutely true.
Um, so, uh, so I, I was very interested in what totally had to say.
But when I went and interviewed him I found him very frustrating because he didn't have, from what I could see, any practical advice for dealing with the voice in the head.
He's a little clinical.
He's a little sterile.
Yeah.
I mean, I think he's probably a straight genius.
And at the time, I did not.
Now, knowing what I know, 15 years after having met him or whatever, I actually think he's he's he's, absolutely for real.
He just wasn't speaking my language and he doesn't, he doesn't really give you stuff to do.
And so when I found Buddhism, they do I mean, they meditation like that's what you can do about it.
You can, and there there are very simple ways in which meditation helps you get in touch with the voice in your head and to see it with some nonjudgmental remove and then not be so yanked around by it.
And That is one of the principal value propositions of the practice.
The other thing that I wonder if you can speak to and I understand that meditation for fidgety skeptics is in particular kind of addressing this
But, you know, this is one of the things that I hear the most from people is I can't do that.
I can't sit still.
I can't stop thinking.
You call it, well, we call it Spilkus, where you and I come from and Jonathan as well.
But I think in the book at one point it's called beans.
You got beans, you know.
I know that it's in some ways it's not your responsibility to fix this for people, but also you are, you know, the voice of understanding for so many aspects of meditation, for so many people.
What is the explanation, like for spilkus, or for beans, or for that fidgetiness that feels like it cannot be satisfied?
And what does that mean for the mind?
And are those the exact people who need to be meditating?
You know, you said it's not my job to fix this for people.
Actually I kind of think you know, I used to have a different job as an anchorman, which I don't have anymore.
Um, I actually think my job is to fix this for people because there's a very easy answer.
Well, there's a very comprehensible answer.
I don't know if it's easy to do, but it's quite a simple answer, which is meditation does not require you to clear your mind or to stop thinking or to stop being distracted.
That's impossible, as I like to joke, unless you're enlightened or you have died.
Clearing your mind is not on the menu.
It just, you know, unless you're in a very deep or rare state of meditation.
For most of us mortals, it doesn't happen.
What we're doing in meditation instead is focusing the mind just for a few seconds actually a few nanoseconds really at a time usually on something simple like the feeling of your breath coming in and going out.
And then, every time you get distracted which will happen a million times You just start again and again, and again, and again.
And this is like a bicep curl for your brain.
And people think when they see how distractible they are, that they are uniquely dysfunctional.
But actually, the seeing of the distraction is proof that you're meditating correctly.
Why?
Because the whole point of this exercise is to get familiar with how fucking crazy you are, with how wild your mind is, so that it doesn't own you as much.
That's mindfulness.
And this is one of the aspects of, again, revisiting the way you present this information that I think is critically it's missing it's missing for a lot of people because I think that the notion is meditation is going to teach me to be a different person like literally like it's going to make me not be the person that feels so miserable that I'm looking for books on meditation right I don't want to be that person and I want it to go away we you know fall down nine times and get up 10 and that literally is, you know, the basis and foundation for this kind of practice.
The other thing that I was glad you bring up in the book.
A lot of people say I don't need to meditate.
Blank is my meditation.
And you know there's people who are like gardening is my meditation or like drinking is my meditation, you know, and usually it's people kind of deflecting, like they.
That's often not a legitimate conversation people want to have.
But, you know, I specialize in taking things too seriously.
So I wonder if you can speak to.
You know people who who kind of want to dismiss it, want to act like I don't need that.
And also, you know, it's not for me to go around and say like I think this person is really messed up and they need to meditate.
But what is that in us that has that resistance?
Well, I think there are a couple of things.
One is, whether we know it or not, we might be scared to look at the stuff that will likely come up when we meditate or do therapy or anything that involves deep contemplation.
The other is and I have a lot of sympathy for all of these, frankly.
The other is we're busy and people are looking for reasons not to add something to their to do list.
And I get that.
I absolutely get that.
I don't want new shit on my to do list either.
I think the good news there is, you know, as you know my, my little, I've got these two little slogans.
One minute counts.
I think all the data around habit formation show that you want to start small.
So like one minute.
And then daily ish.
You don't have to.
If you tell yourself you're going to do this every day, for you know, in perpetuity, you will inevitably miss a day.
And then the voice in your head will probably tell you you're a failure and then you quit.
So you need some elasticity, some flexibility.
And again, this is a data backed assertion that that what we know works is to take it easy.
So to get back to your question, I think it's at least two things.
One is fear, conscious or subconscious.
And two, we already feel overwhelmed.
And so many people resist the idea of adding something new.
There's also a difference between something that feels meditative, something that I'm going to lose myself in, like gardening or like cleaning my car, where I'm not hounded by what might be my other anxiety, and actually meditating, where you're sitting only with that inner narrative and understanding how it works.
Yes.
Yeah.
I think that's a great point, Jonathan.
And and I want to be clear, I'm really not heavy handed about this like gardening Netflix, drinking with your buddies.
I'm.
I'm for all that stuff, whatever you know, as long as it doesn't tip over into addiction.
I'm for whatever's feeling good, especially if you're doing it with other people, because that's actually probably the most important variable in human flourishing is social connection.
And so I'm not a meditation fundamentalist saying like you got to do this or you're never going to be happy.
You've got to figure out what works for you.
And some of these other activities that take you out of your morass are really helpful.
And, by the way, there are forms of meditation that are less oriented toward engineering a collision between you and the voice in your head and are more oriented.
I think you know Jonathan, given your own practice more oriented toward focusing the mind in ways that can feel quite good.
Or, in my case, I do a lot of meditation that is actually specifically designed to tune up your capacity for warmth.
That's called loving kindness meditation, which sounds a little cheesy and actually is a little cheesy, but a ton of science to show that this can change your physiology, your psychology and even your behavior.
So there are a lot of flavors on this menu.
I want to turn to this retreat that you get into about halfway through 10% Happier.
And I felt really seen in your description of, first of all, your absolute resistance to going on this retreat at all.
And, you know, your very, very specific descriptions of everything you hated.
And in particular I really enjoyed reading the thoughts that would come to you when you tried to meditate kind of before day five.
Um, you know, it was like you were trying to just do in out, like say in on the in breath, out on the out breath.
And, you know, you said, I can't keep up a volley of more than one or two breaths.
And you wrote in out in, holy crap, I think my feet are going to snap off at the ankle.
Come on, dude.
In.
It feels like a dinosaur has my rib cage in its mouth.
Out.
I'm hungry.
It's really quiet.
And I was like, oh, someone literally wrote down what it's like.
And it doesn't get better.
Meaning at first it gets worse.
Like you literally you start off like angry, resistant and wanting to leave.
And it really gets worse.
That's how you know it's working.
That's right.
In, out.
I wonder if they'll have more of that fresh bread at dinner.
Damn, dude.
In, did someone actually invent and patent the sneeze guard?
Or like math and language, was it devised in several disconnected civilizations?
More or less simultaneously, idiot, incompetent, irretrievably, irrevocably, irredeemably stupid.
So this was literally what your experience was.
And also it was mostly silent.
So like you were just kind of, you said it was like a zombie nation.
You're all kind of wandering about.
But what really, really.
I think for me was this missing piece is that on day five, you literally want to go home, like you're ready to go home, and you at some point you have to speak to different yogis who are there, or you speak to different like leaders and teachers, and you end up.
You end up taking a chair.
I think it's the first time you sit in a chair as opposed to trying to sit on the floor.
And you say that a few minutes in, something just clicked for you.
And what happened is you call it choiceless awareness is what you think you were tapping into.
Once you've built up enough concentration, they say, you can drop your obsessive focus on the breath and just open up to whatever is there.
So every object that arises in your mind, you say, I focus on with what feels like total ease and clarity, until it's replaced by something else.
I'm not trying.
It's just happening.
It's so easy.
It feels like I'm cheating.
Everything's coming at me and I'm playing it all like jazz and I don't even like jazz.
So...
It's not for me to say this is the moment, but like this feels like the moment, because while you've gone through ups and downs in your life, the rest of the retreat was not all sunshine and roses.
You experienced a realization in that choiceless awareness that seems to have awakened something in you.
Tell us what what actually was happening.
What did it feel like?
What did it mean?
I think you're absolutely right that it was the moment.
And the word that's coming to mind is a loaded word, faith.
And in the Buddhist context, faith does not mean what it often means in our culture, like blind belief.
And Buddhism, faith, Buddhism, which was basically designed by a skeptic for skeptics.
I mean, the Buddha often said to people, do not take anything I say on faith value.
Just check it out in your own mind.
His little motto was come see for yourself.
And so faith in this context means confidence.
Confidence that the technology works.
And for me, having this moment of seeing what the gear works of the mind, that we have, this knowing faculty in the mind, this mysterious consciousness or awareness that is knowing what's happening, knowing the sound of my voice right now, knowing the feeling of your body as it sits in, whatever chair you're in or moves through space,
There's this raw knowing power to the mind that lives separate from all of your racing thoughts, all of your judgments about the things you are knowing.
And it is possible to get in touch with that.
And this may sound esoteric or weird, but actually it's really important.
Because we get too entangled with, too credulous of, too ensorcelled by all of our spinning stories, our habitual narratives, our ancient neuroses injected into us by our parents or by the culture.
And we get very unhappy.
And there is a different aspect to your mind.
Yeah. we are classified as a species as homo sapiens sapiens.
You can think of that as the one who knows and knows that he knows.
In other words, we have this capacity for metacognition to be able to see our thoughts with some nonjudgmental remove and not be owned by them.
And that's what I was getting in touch with.
And it's not, you don't have to go on a retreat.
It's just I'm a hard case description that you have that you just that you just shared the notion that it's sort of outside of ourselves in a little way, or or leaned back.
You know we had a conversation with michael singer and he also describes it as that.
Observed the observer as this not outside of ourselves but not sort of in the front of our head, the way we normally operate and um, I was lucky enough to do like about 20 sessions of at home neurofeedback recently.
And it's one of those devices that makes, you have to make the item move across the screen.
And if you're in the non-ideal brain state, you're trying too hard, basically the thing stops.
And so one of the, one of the activities is like a little, uh, Avatar that's seated and it's floating in the air and you're like, why will it not keep floating? and actually the harder i try the less it floats and it's only by pulling myself out of thinking that the brain gets into an optimal place and then whatever the sensor is realizes oh i am not trying so hard so in your description what i want to help people know is like we can actually feel it once you get to that place and you know where it is you you can almost like lock into it and it becomes easier to access.
Yeah, yeah, it becomes easier to access.
And I have spent a lot of time and a lot of suffering trying to quote unquote.
Get back to the moment Mayim just read to us.
And you know, meditation is like a jacked up video game where you can't move forward.
If you want to move forward,
Desire is a principal hindrance in meditation.
So really what the game is, it's very hard for type A Westerners to wrap our arms around this.
But you have to go back to the faith and confidence.
Like, okay, just do this practice.
It will unfold on its own.
Don't push too hard.
What happened for me in those first five days of the retreat is I was clenching too hard, pushing too hard, which is we're bred and raised to do this these days.
And so this is a very counterintuitive activity where you got to learn by thrashing around and messing it up, to take it a little bit easy.
And that's when things open up.
The way you described it, I can't get enough of it.
It's page 138 and 139.
It's like a curtain has been lifted.
It's not that anything in the passing show is so amazing in itself.
It's the sheer rapidity of it all.
The objects arising and passing, ricocheting off one another with such speed.
And then you say it's like I'd spent the past five days being dragged by my head behind a motorboat.
And now all of a sudden, I'm up on water skis.
And this...
Like this description you had is then followed by you know subsequent days where you are kind of, you're brought to tears by the, the stepping back that you're able to do.
And it reveals this observation of other people that I think you know I'm like I'm supposed to be the one who understands the brain.
This seems to be what, for you, is a tremendous example of the physiologically life-changing potential of meditation.
Because it's not just the work that you did on yourself.
And you said you got home and it's not that you didn't have arguments with people or that you and your wife don't have hard times.
But the perspective that shifted in the way that you saw yourself, then shifted the perspective with which you saw everyone else.
That's the part that I'll be honest, I have not experienced.
And I've been trying to meditate.
And like I'm going to start crying because, like I am like in a, I am in a, I'm in the deepest bind with myself.
And when you interviewed me, You said to me, name a diagnosis you haven't had.
Like, what?
And it's interesting because it caught me so off guard.
Not that I haven't thought about it before, but as I read this book, and especially because I knew I would get to talk to you about it, I realized so many of the diagnoses that I've been given, the pills I've been put on.
You know the eat this.
Don't drink that.
You know take this supplement don't take this medication.
So much of that journey has been this fight.
It's this fight with the voices in my head, the stories that I was told and, in many cases, the stories that I was conditioned with.
And for those of us who experienced the kind of life that I experienced which I don't, you know I talk about in some detail.
For some of us, those patterns in our brain are, they're so deeply grooved.
It is like every piece of information that comes in is just there to confirm the deepest, most negative, penetrating stories that I will repeat.
So when I read this, this was the part that I said, I have not had that.
And that is what I need to keep me going back to sitting again.
I think there's a lot to unpack here.
So let's, let's just stay in this zone.
If you're okay with it for a minute.
You you asked.
I really appreciate you saying everything.
You just did.
And I think this is what you were pointing at earlier when you said, when you talked about something clicking for you my, my right about that.
Okay.
So I, I mean, mainly that I'm a gigantic loser.
I don't have what Dan Harris has and I never will.
Okay.
That's a story.
I know.
I know.
I'm kind of getting not really, though.
This might be a good place to start, and then we can get back to the you of it, because I'm very interested in this.
What was happening there for me?
I think there were two things that were happening that are easier to understand than the rather esoteric stuff.
Jonathan and I were just talking about consciousness or awareness or the observer.
I think there are two very easy things to understand in the moment that you just read to us that I think relate directly.
I think relate directly to what's going on with you.
The first was, as you build up your powers of concentration in meditation, as you're doing this exercise of trying to focus on your breath or whatever it is, getting distracted, starting again, getting distracted, starting again.
After a while, you kind of drag your brain and mind into the present moment and you start to see something that we're all aware of theoretically but not aware of molecularly, which is that everything is changing all the time.
Boom, boom, boom.
If you really pay attention to what's happening in your mind right now, it's thought seeing something, feeling my tush in the chair, thinking another thing, hearing something in the corner of the room, thinking about what's for dinner.
Based on that,
And it's very rapid.
The mind is just We don't see most of it because we're distracted.
But you take away all of the distractions and put somebody in the middle of Marin County in August 2010 with nothing else to do and surrounded by a bunch of old men who look like wavy gravy.
You start to see what the mind is actually doing when undistracted by the stories.
So that's the first thing.
The second thing is, As your mind is pulled out of the self-centered stories and more open to the raw data of your senses, you're less self-centered.
You have more bandwidth for other people.
And you mentioned my weeping.
I.
That happened during a round of loving kindness meditation, which I had previously dismissed, as you know, inexcusably cheesy.
Uh, but here I was envisioning people in my life and sending them good wishes.
And I started to weep, which is not a common thing for me.
And so I'm, I'm, I'm saying all of that because I'm wondering whether this combination might be useful for you and for everybody.
One to see how, how the, how rapid everything is in your mind and in the world.
And when you see that you, you can't help but see that all of your stories are impersonal and impermanent, and changing all the time too.
And then, if you can, if you can unhook from some of these stories, you have more room, more availability for what's left, which is the world.
Does it does that is any day these words land for you?
No, no, no.
So that's really helpful.
And I think also, you know, as a person who for most of my life has been in the public eye, right?
Like when people are like, oh, most people don't really care as much about you as you think they do.
And I'm like.
Well, sometimes for some of us, people care disproportionately about what we wear, who we date, what we say, how much weight we gain.
So there's this notion that you know, for me and I think this kind of came up when I got to speak to you and when you know, you sort of you know, asked me those kinds of questions, like I think that there's there's a real sense, I think, when we look at celebrity in general, of like gosh, it's such a self-centered culture.
And Hollywood is, you know, like it's a lot about.
Like, let me talk for an hour about my hairstyle that I'm going to wear for, you know, the Emmys or whatever.
It's a very self-centered culture, that kind of celebrity culture.
But then I think, for for those of us who happen to be very sensitive people you know I'm a highly sensitive person and I have this platform, you know, where I do talk often about things that are going on.
There's a real self-consciousness, because it does feel very self-indulgent.
You know to say like oh, I go to therapy and I do this treatment and I try this modality and I'm trying to fix myself.
Right.
And I'm getting to talk about it in this public arena.
But I think that that hit on something so important is that We all have that.
We all have this self-centeredness, which we often hide as, this is my diagnosis.
This is what's wrong with me.
You should feel sorry for me, right?
It can manifest in so many different ways.
But I think that is getting more to the root of it.
Is that this kind of meditation and doing it with regularity because it is a muscle?
You have to practice it.
That is a skill that you then get to learn, which allows you to take that focus off of yourself right.
I mean, that's the goal.
Yes.
I'm sure my staff has a drinking game on this, because I say it all the time, but I think it's so beautiful.
This is why I say it all the time.
In Tibetan, the word for enlightenment roughly translates into the following a clearing away and a bringing forth.
And if you can clear away your stories about yourself, your stories about the people you resent, if you can just start to see those as ephemeral bursts of energy in the mind, you don't have to attach to them as much.
That doesn't mean that they don't have any relationship to the truth, but you can not be so you can just turn the volume down on them.
Let's say well then, what remains as a social species, as an, as a species?
That that, you know, natural selection, you know, primed us for connection with other humans, because that's how we survive.
I think what, what's left, what's there to be brought forth, once you stop thinking about yourself so much is other people, and You know, you on this show, and me on my show, I on my show, we talk a lot about the ways to get happier.
But from what I've seen in the data, the number one most reliable way to get happy is to have good relationships with other people in your life.
And it is hard to do that if you have your head up your ass.
You know, if you're just constantly thinking about yourself and we can call that ego.
And often when we use the word ego, we talk about positive stories.
But ego can be negative, too.
It can be a bunch of stories about what was me or or I'm broken.
I'm not as good as this person.
I'm stuck in a comparing mind, which, by the way, social media is.
Dan, get out of my head.
You can't play that game with me.
You know, social media is terrible for all of this.
And I have sympathy.
I have not just sympathy, empathy and compassion for this.
You know, like I feel have these feelings, too.
That full human repertoire is available to me just as as it is to you.
And but I'm not here to criticize.
I'm just saying it's painful to be stuck in these stories.
And meditation is one of many ways to get out of it.
I just had one last thing to say about daily meditation.
Daily meditation is incredibly helpful.
We have a ton of evidence to show this.
And you don't have to go on a meditation retreat if that sounds horrifying for you.
I wonder if you can talk about the concept.
You talked about what we can be taught through meditation.
And what I'm really kind of moved by is this is not a book about how to get happy.
Your platform is not about happiness, right?
The notion that we can be 10 happier is The goal of meditation though, is not.
It's not any one particular thing.
It's the sort of like evolving process.
But you mentioned that happiness is a skill that we can learn.
And that really stuck with me.
Like you said, we can teach old dogs new tricks, but it doesn't just come, you have to work at it.
Can you talk a little bit about what that exercise is, that you have found through meditation and that things like your app, which again just signed up for?
What are you actually teaching?
Meaning?
What are we learning that leads us to say this is a skill like being happy.
Being 10 happier is something that I can learn to get to.
Yeah.
I mean, I think of happiness, uh, it's such a loaded word.
Talk about loaded words.
Um, I think of it as like an overarching term that includes everything from calm connection, generosity, gratitude, um, uh, equanimity, um, love uh so it's it's just a catch-all term it's not it's not to be confused with like the dopamine hit you get from winning the lottery which is i think what people think of when they think of happiness but so how does how does met were you learning through meditation i think there's there it has it has many different benefits and one of them is we are so distracted and part you can blame evolution for this because Having a racing mind kept you alive and got your DNA into the next generation.
We were primed to be looking for threats and food and sexual partners.
And and so we the mind is kind of flitting all over the place.
And that is exacerbated by technology these days.
And so meditation, this process of just trying to focus on one thing, usually the breath, and then getting distracted and starting again and again and again and again, it changes, it rewires the part of the brain that regulates focus and attention.
And so that's one thing you're learning.
The second thing you're learning is, um, we, I keep using this word mindfulness, which is just like the self-awareness to see what's happening in my head, to see how wild it is in there without acting on it.
And so you know, I think most of us were just controlled by the malevolent puppeteer of our thoughts and um.
You know we we, we have the thought Oh, I should say this clever thing
That's going to ruin the next 48 hours of my marriage, or I should eat that sleeve of Oreos.
And then we just do it.
There's no buffer between the stimulus, like our urge and then our blind reaction to it.
And what I think meditation teaches you is to react, to respond wisely instead of reacting blindly.
And that's a, a huge skill.
And I think if you take these two together the um, The increased focus and the lowered emotional reactivity what that also ladders up to is an increased sense of well-being and calm in your life.
And it's not perfect.
Like, as you mentioned before, I mean, I have bad days.
I still get into fights with my wife or have business disputes.
Or earlier today, I kind of didn't really snap at somebody, but I expressed some frustrations.
And the point person pointed out, like, you're actually spiraling for no good reason.
I was like, oh, yeah, you're right.
I am spiraling for no good reason because I hadn't gotten enough sleep or whatever.
I think all that stuff's going to happen.
It just happens for me less frequently.
And I'm much quicker to apologize.
So I think that's just one path that one can go down.
If you learn to meditate on my app or anywhere here's since you said it's your job to fix things for people about meditation, I'm going to bring something else up that I'd like you to fix.
I mentioned, you know, falling down nine times and getting up 10, which is this lovely notion that you know, I'd love to say is like that's the story of my life.
But there is something about meditation that that I think is really tripping me up.
And this came up kind of throughout the book and I kept seeing it over and over.
You say with extreme ease, like, oh, if your mind goes elsewhere, don't be judgmental about it.
Just bring it back and just start again.
There's something about this that, like literally makes my stomach feel like it's getting tied in a knot.
And it's like it rises up.
There's something about this notion that feels like failure to me.
And I think this literally might be the place that I keep getting stuck.
Meaning every time I meditate, every time I'm trying to meditate, it kind of feels like the first time.
And I keep doing it.
I keep doing it over and over.
And I keep saying like just one breath, have one breath where I can follow the in and the out right.
But there is something about this level of just start again.
It's okay.
That makes me feel like it's not worth it.
I can't do this.
I am not... Whatever benefit is waiting, it is beyond my reach.
And I'm reaching and I'm reaching and I'm like, I'm doing vagal breathing while reaching.
Like I'm doing... all the different things.
But I think this is a place that you make it sound very easy.
And this is not easy for me.
I don't think it's easy for anybody.
So if I made it sound easy, that's a mistake.
It's a it should be simple, but not easy.
That's the cliche.
But let me let me get let's let's let's get under the hood here.
When you, when you say So, so when you get distracted in meditation, and then you notice the distraction instead of just blithely going back to your breath or whatever it is that you've chosen to focus on in your meditation.
Right there, you just start feeling like a huge failure and that causes resistance.
Right.
So so I'm going to, just I'm going to pick an arbitrary.
You know you talk about kind of raising that, that you know the the, the baseline point.
Right.
So let's say I'm just going to give you a number.
Let's say I'm at a 50 when I start.
Right.
Every time I get pulled away, it feels like it's taking me down a notch.
And I get pulled away so much that it's like I never feel like I'm getting the chance to meditate.
It feels like I'm never starting.
It feels like it's always getting interrupted.
And there's likely a story I'm telling myself about that.
But I never, this is it.
I never feel like I'm returning back to where I started.
I've been taken down a notch.
And that keeps happening.
So then instead of 50, you know, by the end of a five minute meditation, I'm at like 22, you know.
OK, so this this this is a you're actually doing a public service by asking these questions.
So I appreciate it.
Let me say a couple of things and then you tell me if any of these land, and if they don't, we can find something else.
One is I hear in what you said.
Some expectations about how you want to feel.
Me?
Expectations?
This is very common.
So I'm in no way criticizing you.
And this is a rabbit hole I've gone down many times.
And we were saying before that meditation, like one of the big hindrances is desire, like wanting to feel a certain way.
But meditation isn't about trying to feel any way.
It's about feeling whatever you feel clearly.
Say that again.
Say it again.
Okay, meditation is not supposed to make you feel a specific way.
Mindfulness meditation in particular is not supposed to make you feel.
You don't want to go in with a goal of feeling calmer or whatever.
You want to go in with the goal of feeling whatever is there.
Why?
Because the better you get at just being cool with whatever is happening, the easier your life is going to be.
Because the problem in your life is rarely the problem itself.
It's your resistance to the problem.
And meditation helps you.
Just sit with whatever's happening and you'll see like you don't need a defibrillator.
You're OK.
You can feel this thing you don't want to feel.
And that is enormously empowering.
The second thing is when you notice the disappointment, the feeling of failure, the judgment, instead of getting lost in it.
That's just another thing to be mindful of.
You can make a little mental note in your mind.
This is a meditation technique.
Be paying attention to your breath.
And then every time you get distracted, you can notice oh my God, I'm really beating the shit out of myself.
Just make the little mental note in your mind of judgment.
Judgment, just put it.
It's like a little soft, as my meditation teacher says, whisper in the mind.
That's judgment.
And maybe even sit with that for a second.
What does judgment feel like?
Is it a sinking feeling in my stomach?
Is it my head feel heavy?
Let's just let's just sit with this for a second.
In so doing, you're not you're.
You're kind of knocking yourself out of your identification and wallowing in the judgment.
And you're actually just journalistically interrogating what is judgment like and then once that passes you can go back to your breath and then the third thing to say is you said i never feel like i'm getting to the actual meditation but what you're doing is textbook correct gold star level meditation that is the practice starting it's humiliation after humiliation except for I'm saying that jokingly because after a while, it won't feel like humiliation.
It will just feel like, oh, I'm getting to know my mind better.
And that what you are meditating correctly, the Olympic level, perfect meditation.
It should be this process of just seeing what the mind is like over and over and over again.
It dropped the expectations, dropped the goals.
It's just being with whatever's happening.
And that is produces equanimity, a kind of an armor, like a bulletproof calm.
It's not.
I mean I'm overstating it because you know I've been doing this for a few years and I still lose it sometimes, but it just.
It gives you this resilience in the face of whatever's happening in life.
That is incredibly valuable.
Does it, do any of those words make sense?
Yeah.
Um, I mean, What I hear is I mean, it's a little bit circular in that I'm doing it right, but I don't think I'm doing it right.
So the actual wrong thing is that I think I'm not doing it right.
The wrong thing is the expectation to feel a certain way.
That's what I mean.
And that's another thing you can note.
Just note it as desire.
Because that's what it is.
You're wanting to feel a certain way.
But that is the primary obstacle, and so anything can be co-opted and included in your meditation.
Whatever you're seeing, just let's give it a little.
My meditation teacher, who's um, you mentioned sharon salzburg she she, she lives in a house that is connected to another house where my, my teacher lives, joseph goldstein.
Uh, and joseph talks about it like um, like a dharma shootout, like a little like like a gentle nerf gun.
You're firing at all of these neuroses, just like judgment wanting.
And just you're firing off these kind of humorous little notes.
And the more clearly you see these things.
That's the getting up on water skis that we mentioned before.
Okay, so that's what I was going to ask you.
So let's say I'm able to... you know, start quieting some of these expectations, right?
I can, and also the sort of psychology term for what's happening is these are all parts, right?
Like an internal family says, these are all the parts of you.
Like we have a part that's judgmental.
We have a part that feels weak.
We have a part that feels lonely, right?
So once these parts, you know, kind of take, take a backseat, right?
For this period of time.
What, what one would hope happens is that, with regularity, meaning with some form of consistency, the app will tell me what I need to do.
With some form of consistency, what are my goals here, Dan?
It's going to get easier, more pleasurable.
I'm going to feel better.
Like, what am I looking for?
Over time, the mind does get better at staying focused and less distracted.
That happens.
Okay.
And that's just because that's just like a muscle.
It's like if you want to lift a heavy weight, you start light and you consistently work up to it.
Believe you can do it.
Do other things that support that, meaning like don't drink smoke and eat junk food.
So like that's just going to happen.
That I think also is something people don't understand.
Like you have to practice it.
It's like a muscle.
Yes.
And then the other thing that's going to happen is not that it's going to get more pleasurable.
I can in no way guarantee you that.
And wanting that is a problem in and of itself.
What I think will happen is you'll get more okay feeling whatever it is you're feeling.
Also because of practice.
Yes.
Yes.
But that's distinct from...
Well, it's related to, but not the exact same thing as boosting your powers of non-distraction or concentration.
So separately, you will probably also boost your capacity for mindfulness and equanimity, which is seeing clearly what's happening in your mind and being okay with it.
And actually this is not a bad little speaking of Joseph Goldstein.
One of his little slogans or mantras that he recommends to people is it's okay.
So you could be sitting there meditating.
And feeling shame, doubt, self-criticism, frustration.
And then if you can just remember to say, it's okay.
I can feel this.
I'll be fine.
I felt this my whole life.
And actually, I've been running from it and self-medicating and with whatever.
And I just didn't want to feel this.
But like, actually, this radical turning in place and just being with it. is OK.
And I think what's going to happen to you over time is if you adopt this attitude and keep up with the practice.
By the way, your persistence is admirable.
I'm nothing if not persistent.
Jonathan's smiling.
If you, if you just stick with this, I think what's going to happen is you're going to get better, not only while meditating, but in the rest of your life, of just feeling the things you don't want to feel that often propel you to behaviors that are not working for you.
I do think it's important because Mayim paints herself a certain way, and I'm not saying that what she's describing is not true and not her experience.
However, as an outside observer, I've seen, over even the last three years, drastic differences in her In terms of reactivity, in terms of general overall peace of mind, going from someone who definitely was a self-admitted workaholic filling every ounce of her day, especially with a TV schedule and then podcasting and parenting, where there was almost no time to have downtime.
And she's also one of these people who has an enormous awareness of how she's feeling when she does settle into herself.
If you get her in a contemplative moment, her vocabulary about what's happening in her inner world is so vast that I think it's important to just qualify some of her self-deprecating humor, as with the intensity of work that she has in the awareness that she shows off and off camera.
Yeah no, I'm glad you said that because I can be like Mayim in that.
And then I can, In a desire and I think largely a helpful desire to normalize difficult feelings and various diagnoses and conditions, in a healthy desire to do all of that and to get some help for myself, I can talk about my experience and my behavior and my being in the world in ways that are maybe a little too hard on myself.
And maybe that's happening with Mayim a little bit too.
First of all, thank you.
And I wonder if you can be even one more level of specific for me and I don't just mean for me, but I mean for someone like me who's struggling with certain aspects.
In meditation for fidgety skeptics, there's meditations throughout meditations I've never even thought of.
They all start with the same kind of basic premise, but there's different focus for each one.
And I was particularly intrigued by the do-nothing meditation And it had never occurred to me that that's a style of meditation.
And throughout the book, there's also little icons that I think relate to the app.
So you can actually pull them up, which I'm really excited to do.
But I wonder, I was very interested.
Well, investigating patterns was interesting to me.
Do nothing was interesting to me.
Surf the urge was interesting to me.
Given what I've told you about things that are challenging for me, Is there a type of meditation that, in your experience, might be a good one for someone like me?
To start with, someone who really struggles to get past the first breath?
Yes.
I'm glad you're asking this, because because the thought I've been having all along is actually does go back to loving kindness, meditation.
Oh, Jesus, Dan.
Well OK well, let me let me give you an alternate way to do it, because a lot of people struggle as a result of the fact that traditionally, the instructions are start with yourself and send yourself loving kindness.
That actually comes from Asian cultures, where people don't actually hate themselves as much generally.
In fact, there's a classic story about the Dalai Lama being asked by Sharon Salzberg what is his advice for self-hatred.
And he turned to his translator.
He didn't understand the concept.
So in the East it makes sense to start with yourself, but in the West, a great hack is to begin your loving-kindness meditation with what's called an easy person.
So I would say so for my own loving-kindness meditation.
I will sit quietly, close my eyes.
I will bring to mind I actually do two easy people to start my practice.
So I start with, we have a new kitten, his name is Curtis, I start with Curtis and I envision him.
And then maybe like lazing in a sunspot.
And then I repeat the four phrases.
May you be happy.
May you be safe.
May you be healthy.
May you live with ease.
Then I got a little bit of juice flowing.
And then I actually go to my son who's nine and he's hilarious.
He loves to make fun of his dad.
And I picture him and may be happy, safe. healthy, live with ease.
Then I do a little bait and switch.
Then I put myself in and then I go on with the progression to um uh a mentor, my dad, um a neutral person, somebody I might overlook, like uh uh, who I see all the time but I might overlook.
And then finally, Then there are two more.
A difficult person best not to pick.
Like Pol Pot or somebody like really really horrible, like mildly annoying, is the right framework for that category.
And then finally, all beings everywhere.
And there are a couple of reasons why I recommend this.
First is this technique is really good for?
Distractibility is classically used as a practice that helps you hone your ability to stay focused, which is one of the frustrations I'm hearing from you in your breath oriented practice.
And so this, this might be a good on-ramp for you because it's great for concentration.
And the second is it's gonna, it may be annoying at first.
And for me, it's still annoying, but over time.
And again, there's been a lot of scientific research into this particular practice.
It's been shown to change people's physiology, psychology, and even behavior.
Preschoolers who were taught this practice are more likely to give their stickers away to kids they don't like.
Over time, this will make your inner weather balmier.
And so it requires a little faith, a little stick-to-itiveness.
But if you're feeling frustrated and stuck around this meditation practice that you're doing now, I think this would be a great place to start.
You don't have to listen to me, but... Oh, I'm going to listen to you.
It's nice because it's active.
You know, there's a creative activity there that...
Involves both the mind and and your emotions and the interplay.
But sometimes, when you just have to sit in silence and try to not think or only focus on the breath, it can feel overwhelming where something like this is a little bit more active.
I agree totally.
And one quick thing to say that that a transformative experience piece of advice to have in your head as you go into this practice is you don't need to feel any specific way.
Even when you're picturing the easiest person and you might find that you feel nothing.
That's totally fine.
The goal here is not to gin up any specific emotion.
It's just to do the practice, let it take care of itself.
So don't worry if even even if you were like it's not uncommon for people to do this practice and feel nothing or negative or whatever it that that doesn't matter.
It's just do it.
And over time, it's like you're working.
I was on Nick Cannon's erstwhile TV show a couple months ago.
And I said, this is a practice that helps you grow your love muscle.
And he said that sounded pornographic to him.
But you get my point.
Yes.
Dan, it has been such a pleasure to get to talk to you.
And I really appreciate you letting me literally pick your brain and use you as my meditation therapist.
If you have not read 10% Happier, I have to tell you, it's time.
It is time to read 10 Happier how I tamed boys in my head, reduced stress without losing my edge and found self-help that actually works a true story.
And also meditation for fidgety skeptics is delightful and follows literally a road trip that Dan took to bring his meditation to the masses.
And it has all of these incredible, really helpful meditations throughout.
It's really such an honor to get to talk to you more.
I appreciate your candor and really allowing us to be so open with you and very vulnerable.
I'd like to say that your book taught me to do that.
So thank you so much.
Thank you so much for having me on.
This is super fun.
And I appreciate your candor.
You beat yourself up for this a little bit, but you know, because I think maybe you think you're whining or something.
I have the opposite view.
I think that when people have a public platform and they're brave enough to use it to talk about what's going on for them, it gives everybody else permission to be a mess, because that's the human condition.
And so I see this as a public service on your part.
So it's great to talk to you and Bravo.
I did not expect to talk to Dan Harris about the things that I just spoke to Dan Harris about.
I treated him like he was my freaking meditation therapist.
I had to.
You know when you're talking because normally I'm your therapist.
On this show I heard a lot of expectations and rewriting of narratives that you're bumping up against and you're sitting down, you're meditating.
There's no reason why you should have to be so hard on yourself.
You know, I really I think, I think we need, I think I'm going to start using the app and I think we need to start cataloging this, because I think it's a journey that I feel, for some reason, when I read this book and revisited it, I was like I get a thing that's missing and, in the gentlest way possible, I'm going to try and do it.
I also think we should catalog all the narratives that you have while you're meditating.
Bring them to the podcast.
We'll do a short form where I rewrite them for you, and then you have to say them aloud.
There'll be a new form of mantra specifically designed based on your personal narratives.
Jonathan, I think first of all that that would be an amazing book that possibly only my mother would purchase.
But I also think that it's such a boutique thing.
We could have people send us their horrible narratives about themselves.
Jonathan will turn them inside out and will send it back to you.
And we will fix people through meditation one person at a time.
I'm so into this.
Everything is changing all the time.
Just because you believe something one minute doesn't mean that you will believe it the next.
Also, that man's got a great head of hair.
I'm really sorry he's not on television anymore.
Great head of hair.
Great voice.
Great head of hair.
I mean, I feel like he was three years old and he had that voice.
It's like, what else are you going to do in life besides become a newscaster?
It's unbelievable.
Captivating.
If you're not watching this, you didn't notice how he leans in when he's paying attention.
Great.
Just like the Dalai Lama did when the Dalai Lama met him.
We didn't get to ask him what MDMA provided that he was missing, but we'll do a follow-up.
Maybe we'll do an Instagram live.
No, but he hinted at it.
He hinted at that sense of love, that sense of bigness, that sense of being of service to other people as an act of meditative love.
I totally get it.
And I also think meditation is a much more predictable way to get there than ecstasy.
But that's just my opinion.
From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time.
It's Mayim Bialik's breakdown.
She's gonna break it down for you.
She's got a neuroscience PhD or two.
And now she's gonna break down.
It's a breakdown.
She's gonna break it down.
