Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 113: Jeff Warren, After the '10% Happier' Road Trip

Episode Date: December 13, 2017

Meditation teacher and writer Jeff Warren and our host Dan Harris reflect on their January 2017 road trip, in which they traveled from New York City to Los Angeles to talk with people about what keeps them from meditating, and in the process, the two friends discuss how meditation has helped them work through their own personal struggles. Their new book on their journey, written with Carlye Adler, is called "Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-to Book," which is on sale Dec. 26 and available for pre-order now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Dan, we have Toronto on the line. Say hi to Jeff.

Jeff, who? That's so funny. Hey, homie. What's up this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. I don't know how much I've talked about this or alluded to it, but 2017 was not a super easy year for me. I had some personal stuff go on, that was tough, and some professional stuff, that was tough. Personal stuff go on that was tough and some professional stuff that was tough and on top of that I did

I'm glad I did it but it was a bit of a boneheaded thing where I agreed to take on this massive extra curricular project in the form of a book that's coming out on December 26th called meditation for fidgety skeptics and We basically we I'm saying we because I wrote it with a few other people, including one of whom you're going to hear from in a minute. We wrote it on an incredibly tight deadline. I mean, it just absurd. And it was layered on top of my very busy day job, where I've, you know, two shows that I do here at ABC News,

and, you know, two shows that I do here at ABC News and, you know, this podcast and startup company, the 10% happier app, and I also have a wife and a child. And this book thing just, I didn't think through how much work it was going to be. And it really almost broke me. And so in this conversation with Jeff Warren, who is my principal co-author on the book, we'll get into the whole story because, so Jeff and I, along with Carly Adler,

who came in to sort of help us, he can't keep the trains running on time, we decided to write this book, which is kind of a companion slash follow on to 10% happier. The idea is, you know, in 10% happier, I told a funny story that I hopefully would get you to meditate. But then I realized after the book came out, and especially after I started the app, that I really got a sense that people have trouble even if they want to meditate, adopting

the habit in an abiding fashion. So I wanted to write a book that would help people actually do the practice, but I'm not a meditation teacher. So I wanted to recruit a true meditation teacher. So I got Jeff Warren, who's based in Toronto. He runs an amazing meditation group up there called the Consciousness Explorers Club. And I've been a fan of his for a long time. He's really funny and really cool. So he's the full package. He's really charming. I often call him my man

crush. So Jeff and I decided to do this book together. The first thing we did was we took this cross-country road trip where we met all sorts of people's celebrities, cops, military cadets, all sorts of people who want to meditate but aren't and we help them get over the hump. But then when we got home, the trouble started because we had to write the book on a really tight deadline and in the process kind of nearly killed each other. So we did this podcast together. This is the second of four podcasts that we're doing during the month of December, special podcasts all kind of around leading up to the release of the book on December 26th.

But this is kind of the behind the scenes, the behind the music version of meditation for fidgety sketchics. We're going to hear like how crazy and neurotic we were about making it and how it kind of brought out some of our deepest idiosyncrasies, flaws, and foibles and at times created some conflict. But this conversation really kind of tied a ribbon around it for me because you know sometimes when you have an intense and difficult experience with a friend it ends the friendship or it cements the friendship and in this case as I think you're about to hear it,

the latter is true and I'm very grateful for that. So here he is, one of my all-time favorites, Jeff Warren. All right, man. So you just got the physical copy of the book. How did that feel? Yeah, it felt good. And it was amazing. I mean, I'm just amazed at how fast the turnaround was.

I mean, it was this epic adventure, epic writing adventure. The production happened so fast and now it's a reality. And I think about the first book I wrote, which was like this, you know, it dragged out over multiple years with long edits and torturous back and forth with editors. And this was very painless. So, I mean, but quick and intense, but it felt great. I mean, we did it. It's unbelievable. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

I mean, I've only written one other book and it was what you described, like many years and all this angst. And this one was an enormous amount of angst and pain and sleeplessness, but it was concentrated. So we did the road trip in January of 2017 and the book is coming out in December of 2017. That is a very fast book.

I hope that the consequence, it doesn't suck. No, no, I don't think it though. But it's a, yeah, a very intense turnaround. I mean, it's basically unheard of to the to be to do something that come out that quickly And that's what I was amazed by so I don't have much of an agenda for this conversation other than like just giving people I guess I kind of behind the scenes look at how it came about and how we did it and you know pulling back the The curtain a little bit so I guess look let me ask you from your perspective, how did you get involved in this project? Well, I mean, I guess it starts with our relationship, which was, I wrote that

piece in 2012 in the New York Times. Yeah, and then you got hold of me, and I didn't even know who you were, because I don't even know the freaking TV. You're like, hey, I'm, you know, I've worked at ABC. I'm interested in meditation. I'm like, okay, who's this guy? And I, because I get all kinds of weird emails from random people asking me about consciousness. I mean, that's like kind of part of the, part of the lifestyle at this point.

And so I was like, yeah, this guy seems nice and we had a bit of a back and forth, but then I just, just kept up. You know, you'd send me a note once in a while. I guess you saw you'd see something. Oh, you subscribed to CEC newsletter. And then you'd see CEC's your group, the Consciousness Explorer's Club in Toronto, the you co-founded a meditation and other stuff group, which is awesome.

And the newsletter is just so well written that as I joked in the book, it's like the only time my life I've ever wanted to move to Canada. Although, yeah. Um, the, uh, uh, in those with a early, early days of the conscious explorers club when we were really experimenting with all kinds of stuff and writing these ecstatic emails. And so you would send me these notes saying, oh, I really like that. I like that. And then you started telling me that you had this idea for a book, uh, that you had this

idea you wanted to do and you weren't sure what was going to work and you were very humble and modest about it. Meanwhile, it came out and ended up being this mega best seller, 10% happier. And then we just kept up, you know, back and forth. And at some point, we hung out in New York, I think, it was, came down and we had dinner. Actually, we spent, there was, so you came down, we had lunch way before 10% of happier came out and then you came down another time with your then girlfriend, now wife, uh, Sarah and had dinner with you and a bunch of people.

And then I saw you and I was up in Toronto and had, so we had, we had spent, it wasn't just like we're a pen pals. We were actually like hanging out. Oh, yeah, totally. And it was fascinating. I mean, for me, it's really interesting to see, like when you get into this stuff, you really get into this stuff. And to have another, you know, kind of compadre that you can totally nerd out about and talk about the deep end stuff, but talk about the accessible stuff. And I could just see you getting psyched about all the things that I was psyched about. So, you know, it's exciting to have that kind of a relationship.

And especially when it feels like the thing you're figuring out together is like, you know, the mind or reality or how to be in the world. You know, it's like such a fundamental thing that you're excited about. It's like, you could be psyched about sports, you could be psyched about elephants, you can be psyched about all these different subjects, but when your subject matter is how to exist as a human being, there's definitely something highly motivating about those kinds of friendships and relationships, and I think that was a big part of what happened for us, the star was this really just being psyched to kind of talk about this, what are the limits of this, you this? And also particularly because it's not talked about in sort of the intellectual mainstream or the mainstream itself, the dimensions of change that can happen through these kinds of practices. It's sort of talked about in this generalized way, this sort of soft, Dharma way, but nobody really is publicly explores the specifics of that.

It seems like, although that's starting to change. So it also felt like this subject matter that was very fresh, that was mysterious, you know, that was, and yet hugely relevant. And so having a friend of Bount's stuff off was just, you know, for me, I loved it. Yeah, so well said that. It still did. Perfectly articulated. That's exactly the way I feel. And which is why I thought of you when I decided to write a follow-up. I don't know if it's a follow-up or a companion piece. I don't know what I would describe this next book as, but basically the animating insight for me in terms of this new book, the meditation for fidgety skeptics, was that on my first book, 10% happier, I had

this naive assumption that people who read it, you know, would start meditating because I thought I made a reasonably good case. But that is so, that is to completely miss the complexity of what it takes for people to form a good habit and the difficulty that people face when they want to change aspects of their behavior. And I learned that very powerfully after the book came out and I started the 10% happier app where you, Jeff, you've done some amazing work for us. You've done a great course on there with us and audio meditations. But in the course of working for that company, I mean, it became very obvious to me that

there are all these obstacles that people face to actually doing the thing. So even if you read a book or meet a friend and get inspired and think, okay, I should start meditating, then there are time issues, there are misconceptions around, can I clear my mind? Or do I have to clear my mind or is this gonna somehow lose my edge? Is this self-indulgent? And so that's why I wanted to write the follow-up book to actually help people do the thing.

And I reached out to you because like you're one of the most awesome guys I know. So I thought it would work well and it did. Yeah. It's interesting. I realize how much I, in a way, didn't understand about what it takes to make a meditation practice work before writing this book. I've always been really focused on the inner game.

So what are the mental skills that we're building in practice, like really trying to understand those from the inside. And I've had a great teacher in Shins and Young really help me with that. And so that's been the real focus of my teaching. And it was only through writing this book with you that I realized there's an external game as well. And actually that external game is every bit as important for a practice. And that has to do with how you create the structure, the container that's going to hold you for a practice. And that has to do with how you create the structure,

you know, the container that's going to hold you in a practice, how you create the support system, you know, with the community or friends or teacher, how you create, how you structure the practice itself, how you, how you fit it into your schedule, what it takes to create a routine, you know, that stuff was all in a way fresh learning for me. Like, I, you know, I kind of knew vaguely about it and based on what was working for me and my friends, but I think a lot of people who don't make it in a practice, it's for those external reasons. And it made me realize that actually that is part of the practice.

It's not just what you do in the cushion, it's just getting you there, that is half the work, if not even three quarters of the work. Yeah, I think that's that was what I learned that I didn't know before we started writing and researching this book that That there is so much to learn and to know about About what it takes to get somebody on the question or what it gets to take anybody to do anything that makes them healthy You know one of the things I learned in in researching the science around behavior change or habit formation is we didn't evolve as a species for long-term health planning. We evolved for immediate gratification in the form of food and sexual partners or threat

detection in the form of running away from saber tooth tigers. And so evolution doesn't care about your long-term health. Evolution cares that you survive long enough to get your DNA into the next generation. And so therefore, we are not naturally inclined to do things like exercise and eat healthy and get enough sleep. All the stuff that we know from the science is good for us because it's just like not the mind and the brain that was bequeathed to us by millennia of evolution. So it was just so fascinating to learn about that and to see how to apply it in real time. And I want to talk about some of the applications we came up with, but just to stay with the kind of

the chronology of the story. So I came to you, I believe, at the end of 2016, and I said, hey, Jeff, I'm writing this little book. We're gonna rent a rock star tour bus and go across the country and meet a bunch of people who want to meditate and aren't and figure out how to help and get over the hump. And it's gonna be, we're just gonna take 11 days, you're gonna have to be away from your home

and probably eat bad food. And I have no idea 11 days, you're gonna have to be away from your home and probably eat bad food and I have no idea. And then we're gonna have to crash a book on very short time frame. Why did you say yes to that? I mean, who wouldn't say yes? Ha ha ha ha ha. To that. And first of all, there's the adventure.

So just the idea of going across the states and meeting, I mean, what I liked about the project was that it was sort of applied mindfulness, the journalistic side of it, like actually meeting real people who are trying to apply it, who are stuck in different ways and what they were doing.

And I mean, that was, I mean, that's an incredible opportunity. You're not, you're taking out of most of the Dharma books I'd read or most Buddhist books or meditation books, it's like, oh, this is what you gotta do. But it wasn't, in an occasion, there's quotes from people having different challenges, but this was actually meeting real people with real, entire worlds, you know, the world of the, like, military, the world of, like, politics, the world of celebrity-ness, and looking at their actual jobs, and then saying, well, how could this help or what were they finding with the challenges? I mean, so that was really the big draw for me was that

there was going to be this adventure then to actually meet with the real people, which really kind of ground it in the world. So that was, I mean, that was it. And then also, of course, it's, you know, it's just fun. It's fun to hang out with you. You know, you're always making jokes. We have a good time together and having my buddy Eddie on board was like a huge motivator

too. Eddie, Eddie Boyce, the amazing Eddie Boyce, who is our creative director, who oversaw all the video production and there's a ton of it, which you can, which will be posting all over the place. And also you can see on the app it, yeah, Eddie Boyce is the man. He's the man. And then there's just the randomness of like life drops these opportunities. And then it's like, okay, well, why not? I never would have thought about this in a million years that I would have done something like that. In fact, I was, you know, my, as I'm sure we'll talk in

down the line in this talk, my propensity is to go to the deep end and think about the more complex stuff and often at the detriment of understanding the kind of wide end or the ways of making it accessible. I often don't think in that mode and so you kind of forced me into that. I realized there was a huge growth opportunity for me as a teacher and as a thinker to kind of expand my repertoire too. So that was also part of it. Although I wanna say in your defense,

so we will talk about this and it gets talked about a lot in the book how we basically wanted to kill each other because my propensity for being just kind of mean and your propensity for spinning off into these like esoteric theories that when I'm trying to to get us to write a book about basic meditation. But, in the moment, we're out on the tour, on the bus,

you know, and it was hectic and hard. We had this incredible schedule where every day was, we were meeting these people and shooting all this footage and then getting back on the bus and driving hundreds and hundreds of miles. It was really intense. But you were, to take a meditation teacher who most of whom are,

nobody ever like criticizes or gives notes to a meditation teacher, hey, I don't think you did that meditation right. Like they're treated like they're made out of porcelain mostly and to take a meditation teacher, throw them on a bus full of, you know, random people and awesome people from the 10% happier world,

but still you didn't know most of them. And throw you into these crazy situations where, you know, we would, one day we'd be sitting with the singer Josh Groban, the next we'd be hanging out with cops in Tempe, Arizona or social workers in New Mexico or formerly incarcerated youth. And we programmed this thing to be incredibly diverse. You would display an incredible ability to wait into whatever environment we

concocted and just totally lock in on what the needs were at that moment and help people get excited about meditation in a way that I think made them more likely to actually adopt it as an abiding habit. So I want to say that in your defense before we later on pick on you. I appreciate that. That's very nice you to say. Although, you know, I think part of it is actually part of it probably has to do with being pretty ADD.

When you're ADD, you're just able to reset. That's one of the qualities of being ADD. It doesn't last long in whatever microclimate of mood that you're in. You just book your reset in a new moment. That part of my pathology, if you want to call it that, is actually quite helpful for showing up in the moment and being in a particular, it's a kind of adventurous situation. So I just think it's ironic that, you know, my biggest mental challenge is also part

of what can help me, it can actually help me out sometime as a teacher. So, so it's say more about ADD because, you know, you had mentioned to me many times that you had ADD, but especially on the road trip, you mentioned it came out a lot. But I'll be honest, I never really took it seriously. I mean, I'm not that I was being disrespectful. I just didn't, you didn't seem like you had you know really elite college and had written uh... very successful book and had a really successful meditation career and so i i didn't

think i i don't know i people often say these days oh i'm super a dd so i just never i didn't take it that seriously and it wasn't until we got into the writing process where it became very obvious that actually this is a huge thing for you uh... and it became very difficult between the two of us. But just take us back a little bit.

Like when did you know that you had ADD and what kind of problems did it cause? Yeah, well, it's a good question. And I'm kind of just learning to talk about it. Publicly, it's something I struggle with my whole life, but part of being ADD is that sometimes it's hard to see the big picture of what's going on. So it started when I was a kid, just being like a lot of kids having, like, I had really more the ADHD than like superhyperactive attention all over the place. They've been thinking about renaming ADD executive function disorder. So

it means all the kind of normal things that come with a healthy functioning frontal lobe, like impulse control, planning, organizational, prioritizing, those kinds of things, they're just not as well developed. And that's normal for a kid. So, lots of kids have ADD. But, once at a certain point, you start to grow out of it and you start to develop more of those frontal cognitive

capacities, although you can make an argument that with the technology these days, everyone is getting a little bit more ADD that those, some of those inhibitory mechanisms don't aren't coming online as fully. So for me, it was just being very dysregulated and all over the map and super hyperactive. As a kid, especially.

As a kid, like a disaster nightmare. I mean, my parents literally had me in a leash. Like, there's like apparently some picture of me at the zoo with like a full body harness on, you know, running full speed towards the, you know, chimpanzee tanks or whatever they were. And yeah, getting de-enced back. So that was me.

I don't mean to have any distress, I don't not laughing out of any disrespect for parents who have to get the least. That's nice. Now, no, no, I'm laughing out of disrespect for you, but not for other kids who, you know, this is a serious issue. And I know you had a serious issue

and so I'm not really disrespect for you, but I'm laughing because basically I felt like there are many times what I wanted to put a leash on you. And so now knowing that your parents had a leash on you just fills me with all sorts of satisfaction. Yeah, my friends love that story. They never fail to remind me about it. To give you a bit of the history in terms of how ADD develops. For a lot of people, like young boys especially, but young girls too.

And now the people begin to realize there's different types of ADD, but a lot of it you kind of grow out as you get through your teenage years and you kind of consolidate things and you kind of come online more in that way. And I actually think that that has started to happen for me, but then I had this huge head injury where I, at 21 or 20 or I fell out of a tree I was high and I just was with my friends we were playing like football in the road and I climbed up to the tree and anyway it was a bit of a ridiculous situation I fell I broke my neck I I had I dislocated my spine and and fracture the vertebrae and C67 and I had a pretty big head injury where my head just got really,

I hit a parked car on the way down. It was a pretty big fall. And after that, I was, you know, I was in traction for a month. I was in the halos and it was sort of six months to recover. But I really, it knocked me back into a super ADD space and that I didn't understand really at the time. I just knew that I wasn't processing stuff

in quite the same way. And that's actually when my real interest in consciousness and the mind started because I was like, well, what's going on here? Am I more like, I thought I was better from this ADD stuff, but now I was really ADD. And this is where it's important to make a distinction for people who think, oh yeah, I'm I was really ADD and, and this is where it's important to make a distinction for people who think, oh yeah, I'm a little bit ADD. I know what that's like, or people

who underplay it, like real ADD is really a serious problem. It causes a ton of suffering in people and because the experience is that you can't ever get your sh** together. You're, you know, you start on a track thinking about something and you're bouncing off five tracks laterally. You can't complete anything. So there's this sense of guilt or a sense of like your own incompetence and you don't know what's going on

because the thing, like you're in a car that can't stay on the road. And you think it's your fault. Like, well, what's wrong? It's a failure of character somehow that I can't just see through on these projects. And I'd go from one project to another or one city to another or one partner to another, like romantically, I couldn't stay with anything.

So, there was no lasting satisfaction. Like, even though I was a very fun, loving, happy person on one level, and I loved partying and of course, that would just feed into the ADD thing. I wasn't ever able to follow through on things and it was very frustrating and actually more than frustrating, it was like, you know, after a while you're like, why am I even here? Because you can't, even relationships don't feel like there is deep as they could be because you're just not present for them, you know, or all the normal satisfaction of being meaningfully connected to work of seeing things through, the feeling of like beginning something and finishing something. And that, you know, for all through my 20s, that really wasn't there.

And then I, and even into my 30s, and then there's a period of my mid 30s where suddenly I kind of got my sh** together. Like I got a good job at CBC. I managed to write this book about consciousness. CBC, which is the Canadian broadcasting company where you were a radio journalist. Which is, and it would fed into my ADD because you're just jumping around from the idea to idea. So that was cool. But, and they had, I had wonderful bosses

who really cared about me. And they, they could see that I had, because the benefit of ADD, of course, what everyone says is that you do have a lot of creativity because you're just skipping tracks all the time. So you're, you get to access this very wide pool of data and that's so it's great for journalism, it's great for ideas, for a certain kind of creativity.

And that kind of got me through that and then even running head trip, like I, you know, that book is, I mean, it's sort of a cult thing, people really like it, it's got a ton of cool stuff in it, but it's a lot of information, you know, it's like a 500 page book with like sort of a cult thing. People really like it. It's got a ton of cool stuff in it, but it's a lot of information. It's like a 500 page book with tons of footnotes.

I look at it now and I'm like, I'm like, I wonder how my editor is even let that out in the world. It's very much an ADD thing. So it was so, you know, can I just address you? Because I think a lot of people, and I'm not interacting to change the subject. I can't interact to just amplify your point, which is I think a lot of people think that ADD means you can't pay attention,

you have no ability to pay attention to anything, but in fact, what I learned about you, well, first of all, one thing I learned is that there are many flavors of ADD, and the other thing I learned is that your specific flavor is that actually you get like manic about style, you get, I think as you described it, you get so entranced and entangled by an idea that you like build this tree house in your mind and then you climb up and live in that tree house. That actually is one of my favorite quotes that comes from Saul Bello, who talks,

who is a master of talking about the human mind and how we kind of make these traps for ourselves. But that's exactly it. I mean, there's a hyper-focus aspect to a lot of people with ADD where you're either in a skipping track mode or then when you lock in on something you're interested in, it's like you're hyper-focused. And the part of the reason you're hyper-focused

is because you're worried about losing the focus. So you have to hold onto it so tight because you're always losing the focus in your life. And so people are trying to pull you out of that, but you're like, you don't want to leave because this is the, you're finally, you finally got it locked down, you know. So, you know, it's really, and that was a huge learning in this book because I, I've always known I've had that capacity, but I never really thought about it in the, in the terms of ideas and thinking and writing itself.

You know, I always, I kind of, yeah, it was just a illuminating process to write this book with a partner who would be like, you know, sort of delicately, you know, dude, and sometimes not so delicately, you're really off on this tangent here and it's not connecting to the immediate needs of the moment. And I would have to like pull myself out of that.

And I have to say meditation has been enormously helpful for that. And the thing that I struggle with in this respect is the thing that everyone struggles with, which is that we get our fixations up. We get in our entranced with our ideas, our notions of how things need to be. And the way Saul Bellow put it was that,

it's like we build these tree houses and we go up and live in them. And then we imagine the tree house is the world, but all around is the forest. And it's humming with possibility and mystery, but we only see our own, it's not only do we build these tree houses, but we like pave them with these,

we put like mirrors on the inside. And we're just looking at our own ideas reflected back to us. And what's fundamentally transformational about it, insight practice, is it allows us to pop out of those kinds of situations, pop out of that trance, and say, oh my God, you know, I was inside this mood, I was inside this idea, I was inside this conviction,

believing that this was how things needed to be. But if I am able to just notice this as this smaller part of this one part of my experience, you know, as I would say, the figure inside the ground, you know, just like the tree in front of a background of mountains, realize that I'm, oh, I'm in the tree and you pop out of the tree and now suddenly you can see the forest, you can see the mountains, and you realize that you have options that you can move into a different place when you need to. And that is absolutely, that's what we talk all about in the book again and again. That is the liberating, absolutely liberating dimension of an insight or a mindfulness practice

and it can be repeated again and again. And it will be repeated again and again and it will be repeated again and again because it doesn't matter how many times you hear it, you will be once again stuck in your trance, you'll be stuck in your tree house. Imagine that this is how things need to be. So, you know, I have so much gratitude for my teachers who, you know, took, with great patients, would show me this again and again, again and again, this ADD kid who was just a dysregulated partier, who just did not have it together. But again and again, Jeff, can you come back right now?

What is happening? Can you feel this sensation, this sense of being fixated on this idea? Can you notice, you know, the thought pattern itself in the act of noticing, in the act of feeling? Can you notice that you're not in and anymore? in the act of noticing, in the act of feeling, can you notice that you're not in it anymore? How does that feel? It's like, oh my God, are you really, why didn't they teach me this in school? And, you know, I know you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, well, I know what you're talking about at several levels. One, because obviously I like every human being that's who has ever existed. I get stuck in my own trances and lose sight of the greater picture.

But I also know what you're talking about when you say when you talk about your teachers having to pop you out of an obsession or fixation. And I'm realizing like the way you talk about your teachers doing that, like I, the way the writing process got set up, in other words, we got back from the road trip and we had like two minutes to write a book. And, you know, I think the pace that we were on was that, because I was doing the first draft.

So I had to do a chapter a week in order to, for us to be on deadline long time, which is insane. It was insane and almost killed me. And, but in the process, like you, you were writing the meditation instructions, which by the way are beautiful and brilliant. But in some of the early iterations were also beautiful and brilliant, but incredibly long and often, you know, mired in esoterica. And so I had to do what your teachers, you just described your teachers doing, say, hey,

Jeff, you know, like notice, you know, can you pop out of your obsession and be with whatever is happening right now, except for I didn't do it in a nice way. Like the way you described your teacher's doing it, it's filled with compassion. But I was pissed and I was tired and I was stressed and I had a day job and a family that I was dealing with and then trying to write this book on a, you know, like on with a gun to my head.

And so it got a little tense there. So can you describe that from your point of view? Yeah, I just think it's so funny that I'm supposed to be the meditation teacher. And I'm like, I'm totally, hopefully, lost in my thing and you're the one who's popping me out. But yeah, from my point of view, well, I mean, things started good well enough. When we got into it, we knew we had a loose structure in terms of what we had these main, we had these experiences, first had these experiences first all the road trip. And then we had these ideas of, we knew these different

ways in which people got confused in their practice. And so Carly did a phenomenal job of helping us, you know, helping you create outlines first and ultimately write each of those chapters, that fusing both the story of what was happening on the road. So we should say that Carly is the third author on the book. So it's Dan Jeff Carly. So sorry, go ahead. Yeah, so, and that was, so that was already, that's just an huge amount of work to figure out.

Okay, what are these different challenges that people are having? How can we fit that into the actual course of the narrative that we had? And then the third piece is, and how can we fit that into the actual course of the narrative that we had? And then the third piece is, and how can we build a curriculum that's gonna teach people meditation in a way that makes sense along the same trajectory? So those are three different tangents that we were trying to weave together,

like three sort of threads. So, so- Yeah, just to emphasize that, sorry, sorry. So just to emphasize that, we were trying to build, it was super-rubed Goldberg. We wanted to have a chronological narrative built into the road trip.

But we also wanted every chapter in the book to address a specific obstacle to meditation. So we had to line up, we had to make sure that the road trip in some way progressed not only through time and space, but also through these ideas in an orderly way. So the, so we, the first one is about people fearing that they can't clear their mind. The second one is about not having enough time.

The third one is fearing that somehow meditation is going to make you look weird. But we had to, we had to superimpose the, I don't know what was being superimposed on what, but we were imposing, superimposing the narrative on top of the sort of order of pedagogical ideas about like attacking these various obstacles, or we're doing it the other way around. I can't figure out. And then on top of all that, we wanted to teach you basic meditation and many, many permutations. So it was really hard to do. And you're right.

The Carly Adler, the third co-author on the book was incredibly helpful in helping us figure that out. Oh my god, yeah. She's brilliant. And a saint and very patient with both of us in all the different neurotic ways that we are. She seemed to be the most like just this amazing nurturing force that kind of kept the whole thing going. Amen. But just to, well, sort to come back to the story. So you're there doing the chapters and you're building the narrative and you're working and you're elaborating all the behavioral science stuff, which is so interesting. And my job was to figure out, okay, well, how can we create a teaching progression? So at first I felt like it was hard for me to get

into it because I was sort of waiting for to see what the outline, what is the structure that we're building here in terms of those other two strands. And then when I started thinking about it, I thought, okay, I got this great idea that I wanna do, I think this should be an exploration of the entirety of insight practice, the depth, from the surface of the mind to the depths. This is gonna be a progression

from like how we first start noticing that we can get stuck in thoughts to what those thoughts are made of, to the feelings and the images, and then to the fact that larger idea of the patterns and then the deeper idea of disembeding from sensory experience, and then going into the profound nature of mind, and I had this whole like, and I have sent you this long 14 page document I think that had all of this, and I thought it was, I know, it was like, I'm like, yes, this is gonna be it, this is gonna take people not only from introductory

meditations, they're gonna start to understand the deep end of the pool, and I sent this document very proudly thinking that this was really gonna solve all of our problems, and I think you looked at and you were like, oh my God, I don't even understand what this guy's writing here. I mean, you know, from your experience. It threw me off the deep writing here. I mean, you know, from your experience. It's Ruby of the deep end.

Like, I was, because I was at this point so afraid and frazzled from trying to balance my day job as a journalist with, you know, the family and having a young child. And then this massive responsibility that got ladled on top that I had completely underestimated how bad it was this process was going to be. I had just walked into this like, Elmer Fud. Hey, I'm Aresha and I'm Brooke. And where the hosts of Wunderys podcast, even the rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one.

Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Ru off course. In our series RuPaul, Born Naked, we'll show you how RuPaul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon music or the Wondery app. And so I was just hanging on the by thread and I needed like help and support to make sure I got from chapter

to chapter and I just wanted you to write simple practical meditations that plugged in that I didn't have to worry about. And then you sent me this 14 page memo that was so, it was actually, you know, having looked at it after I calmed down, it was really great. I mean, totally great. But for, like, it was a book in and of itself And it's for like hardcore deep-end meditation practitioners. So I was like, what am I supposed to do this? Like I'm I was just I don't I got mad, which we'll talk about my anger issue, which really came out not only in the process of dealing with you

But just also came out in my process It came out through the course of the book in terms of my learning how, how angry I get with myself and how mean I am to myself. And you really helped me deal with that. So we should get to that. But, but yeah, so that the memo, just to get back to the story, the memo completely, I lost my mind when I read it. Yeah. And, and, you know, I, I think, you know, you were, I mean, this is the thing about stress. It's like you're under a huge amount of stress. You're wreaking barely sleeping.

You're doing two jobs. So you're reactive. You know, that's why we do this practice. You know, and so I think it's funny that everything we were writing about in the book, everything we're trying to communicate in the book, we are ourselves fighting with and wrestling with and dealing with in this intense deadline. You've got your reactivity, your toe, your burned out and you're starting to get become basically a and then I've got my total distractability and I'm like off in the clouds doing my thing and

and also and it's more than you know I realized you know so when you go off in that into your own idea space, you're not connecting to what's really going on on the ground with other people. And so in a way, I actually wasn't empathizing fully with what you were dealing with. I didn't really realize the, I mean, I could see that you were stressed, but I was, that was my own fixation. I'm thinking, oh, this is the right way to do thing was actually preventing me from seeing what was going on with you. And so when I started to see that was happening, I tried to sort of disembod, but it took a few,

took a couple times to, we'd had a few trial runs, and then eventually we got back into a good flow, and then it was just sailed from there. Yeah, it did. I mean, I'm extremely pleased with where it ended up, and that, you know, these are, I'm just gonna sing your praises. It's just gonna embarrass you, but so sorry. But like, you know, there are many, many, many great meditation books out there, but very few of them get read very frequently. the parts of the book that are yours where you just teach people how to meditate. I've never seen such funny and fresh writing about how to do the practice that will actually

make you laugh as you're reading it, but also give you practical advice and also just peak your curiosity and get you excited to do the thing. So where we ended up was a great place, but it was tough to get there. Yeah, and there was that one month. But overall, I mean, I guess, you know, I just loved the experience. And what really came down in the end was that I got to actually finally talk about who I was, like in terms of the challenges that I have. And I had that never would have happened if it wasn't for you. Like you kept encouraging me.

Once you realized that anything was going on, you got really interested in it. And you started asking me, you know, what, what is that like? And when did that start? And you tried to draw, you kept, and you slowly started drawing me out more. And I never talk about this stuff. Like, I, and this is why I, I, I, I've always had a lot of ambivalence about, you know, who, me being a teacher.

Like, I didn't even want to be a teacher. Like, I never thought about it. It was nothing that occurred to me. I was a writer and a neurotic writer at that, like many writers. And it was only Shenzhen constantly encouraging me saying, look, you really, you have a gift for talking with a mind or thinking about this stuff,

you should be out there. And I would be like, well, I don't want to be out there. I mean, who am I? I'm not some model of mental health, I'm so flawed and screwed up, like, but he kept encouraging me. And so I did my thing in Toronto with that encouragement and just, and people would come around more

because I was a writer and we had just a fun big group of friends and it just was this fun informal thing. And I guess teacherliness or whatever you want to call it, kind of developed through that, but there was always this feeling in my mind that I was like an imposter. Like, because I didn't have, I didn't seem, I wasn't naturally calm and placid.

I wasn't like Joseph Goldstein or Sharon Salzburg or all these amazing people whooster, like, because I didn't have, I didn't seem, I wasn't naturally calm and placid. I wasn't like Joseph Goldstein or Sharon Salzburg or all these amazing people who are just like, who of course deal with their own stuff and are totally honest with it, but are so obviously, are so obviously the beneficiaries of this practice. And I was a beneficiary of the practice,

but it was, it's like you say 10%, 20%, you, it can help in huge ways, but there's still these fundamental ways in which you're challenged. And just having you encouraging me to talk about that, it felt like I have so much gratitude. And like I almost want to, I feel emotional talking about it because I, I felt like I don't have to lie anymore. I could just say, yeah, this is me. And I'm not, I'm pretty f*** up, up, but I still meditate, and it's helpful to me in a lot of different ways. And I can talk about how it's helpful and I can talk about how it's not.

And there needs to be more of this in our culture of people saying, yeah, I am having these troubles when it comes to my mind. And it's not just external conditions that are causing challenges like, oh, I'm having trouble with this job or I'm having trouble with this thing over here. We bring these conditions to the table and we don't talk about them.

And there's, it's so profound that these internal struggles and the more we can just admit to them, then it's like, that is the insight process. We see them, we admit to them, we're no longer as stuck in them as opposed to ruminating on our own or thinking that we're uniquely doomed. And and so this was a very healing project for me and it wouldn't have happened if we hadn't had those challenges in the writing and you hadn't encouraged me to kind of be more out that way. And so I have, you know, so it's I've had the fact that you're an amazing writer and an awesome guy like I have a lot of gratitude for you for So it's having the fact that you're an amazing writer and an awesome guy like I have a lot of gratitude for you for

For just you know trusting in me and and allowing me to have this kind of This kind of a change this kind of a awakening I guess you could say there's a there's an expression that my Yiddish grandmother or Jewish grandmother, but it's a Yiddish expression that she used to use which is Naxis like it's a giddish expression that she used to use, which is nachos. Like, it's when a grandmother or anybody sees somebody, they love and they're just so proud of them. That's the feeling I get when I listen to you talk or when I read your parts of the book that, that, and I don't mean that in any way like from a paternalistic standpoint, we're the same age and I look at you as my teacher. So if anything, the authority runs the other way,

but I mean it more as a friend, you know, the, the, you know, to realize, and the, so, basically, sorry, just a step back for one second, say, you know, once, once we realized that you and I were, that we were having a problem, and that the root of it was the ADD, what I ended up doing was just co-opting that and turning it into

a plot line in the book. And which meant that you reluctantly, I had to get you to talk about it candidly so that I could write about it. So, I ended up really injecting this into the book, which you did not go into the book process thinking you were going to be revealing to the world. But what was so beautiful for me to watch was, first to understand that this was something you were really insecure about, that you were basically an amazing meditation teacher who had imposter syndrome, who felt like you didn't deserve to be a teacher. And that this was an

like you didn't deserve to be a teacher and that this was a albatross for you. And I got, I had the privilege of being able to watch you realize that what you thought was a liability is actually a strength that because you have these challenges and are willing to speak openly about them, you connect better to people. And by the way, that in the end is the whole damn point, which is to connect better to people and teach them how to do this thing and lead happier, more productive lives. And so to watch you kind of a guy who I had deeply admired for many, many years ever since that article in 2012 and the New York Times feel as confident and as awesome as everybody around you who knows you, knows you to be. That was an amazing thing to watch.

Well, thanks, man. I mean, wouldn't have happened without you, so I feel like I said, I feel a lot of gratitude. And, yeah. So I would say I said, I feel a lot of gratitude. And yeah. So I would say it's like emotional. Yeah, and I don't want to make you feel too uncomfortable because I know unlike me, you don't have narcissistic tendencies. So as somebody with narcissistic tendencies,

I will now steer the conversation back to me. Well, but with a big dose of you because I want to talk about a way in which you really help me. It really starts because, and this theme is big, we tell the story in the book, but it's worth talking about now too, I think. You, as we were on the road trip

and living in this tin can together, driving across the country, often under great stress and with a lot of fatigue because the schedule was so crazy and eating junk on the road. So not somewhat suboptimal circumstances, although it was also a blast and we should get to that too. But you started to notice something about me that I had been insecure about but hadn't

really let myself see, which is that I am very committed to the practice of meditation. And yes, there are times when I have very satisfying experiences on the cushion, but much of my practice was shot through with this. Each of your vegetables, gulag, forced march type of atmosphere.

And I think rooted in part, so your initial insight was, Dan, I'm not sure you like meditation that much. Like you have this kind of aggressive attitude towards your own mind in some ways and the practice feels sort of stern and severe with the way you do it, but that grew into a realization that that it kind of all of that came out of the fact that I'm I struggle with a lot of anger and I tie it back to my grandfather Robert Johnson. It was a really angry guy and not very nice and

back to my grandfather, Robert Johnson, who was a really angry guy and not very nice. You helped me see that I had this inner Robert Johnson that was very mean to myself and I think that made meditation kind of unpleasant because every time I got distracted, I would just holler at myself. That whole process wasn't so supple or seamless. Then that also obviously had its external manifestation, which we saw in full, in its full glory during the aforementioned, you know, month of discontent when we were struggling over the writing of this book. And really seeing that and teaching me ways to work with it was hugely valuable. And I would say the one, the two things you taught me,

and I want you to hold forth on them, or anything else you want to hold forth on once I shut up, is the two things were one, learning how to see the tendency toward anger and to give it a name, you know? And every time the Robert Johnson rears his head within my mind, I'm like better now at seeing, oh yeah, that's Robert Johnson. and that kind of defangs the the the the the monster and then the other thing is tic to

is you taught me this little thing called welcome to the party which is a little sort of mantra a little thing i can say to myself when i'm getting pissed at myself during meditation for getting distracted so i just said a lot and there are a lot of things in there for you to react to or not, but I'll shut up and let you go. Yeah, well, I mean, I think the first thing to say is, you're not as much of an ass as you think you are.

I mean, you can be a dick, and it was more like coming out as sort of snarky comments, but I never really felt like, I think you still do hold it together in a lot of ways. I never really felt the full brunt of that. I think you are hard on yourself in that way. But there is definitely a severe quality, there had been a severe quality to your practice where just this you know really really hard on yourself for certain expectation that this meditation has always

got to go this way. It's got to go well and hard on yourself when it wasn that this meditation's always got to go this way, it's got to go well and hard on yourself when it wasn't. We began to see that this was part of this program, this anger program, and we gave it a name, the Robert Johnson. So after your granddad, and so this is something I can definitely talk a lot about. It's a revelation. I think it was probably my first big revelation in meditating, actually. And that was when I started to get still, I would realize that there were these, in a

sense, these different programs that were running for me and that running, that run for all of us. And what I mean by that is there'd be a certain pattern of thinking that I would get into. Often, I'm related with mood. So I'm just using myself an example, and I'll use you as well, just because we're the two experimental guinea pigs,

but everyone listening can apply it to their own lives. So for example, you're in a bad mood, and you're feeling kind of angry. There's often an inner voice, kind of narrating your anger, or itemizing your lists of your slights, and your injuries, or whatever it is. There's a particular feeling in the body, like a tension, a contraction, or maybe your jaw hurts,

or things are bearing down. And from the inside that program, or what do you call it, inside that mood, that personality, everything, you see everything through that filter of being that anger. Your life is, everything's, you're pissed about this. Everyone who's coming up to you, you're interpreting in a slightly angry way. That becomes the filter of how you experience things. And I just use anger as one, but it's the same if you're feeling kind of lost or doomed

or you're feeling depressed. It suddenly becomes the new world and everything is interpreted through that. You're, everything you've ever done that was any good now seems like reinterpreted in that light. Or something I struggle with is the over excitement, like hypomania. I get so totally psyched about something

that I'm then lost in that piece. So we get these, these are patterns of acting and relating that there are habits that we've created. You know, they're related to our moods, but the more we repeat them, the deeper they get. What I started to see is that you are really deep in this habit, this Robert Johnson program of holding yourself this really high standard, kind of angry at yourself for not meditating the way you imagine them to, angry at other people.

Very friendly and affable on the outside, but you have this opinion track running around where people are failing in the ways that you, they shouldn't be failing. And I mean, just like every other human being, you've got these programs. And so we started to get curious, well, what is this thing that comes up for you? And when it happens, because it happens, of course, sitting as much as it does during the day, can we begin to notice what it's made of? And that's what's the big insight with mindfulness or when you start to get into really noticing patterns, this is where shinsen is a genius, is that often our patterns, they're made of like,

you know, they're made of a little bit of images, they're made of a talk, a pattern of self-talk, they're made of particular body sensations and feelings. And if you can actually begin to notice, talk, a pattern of self-talk. They're made of particular body sensations and feelings. And if you can actually begin to notice, okay, yeah, I'm having this bit of talk in my head, I'm having this, these feelings in my body, then you can pop out of it. And one of the ways to do it is to give it a name. So like, I have, in my practice, I literally name, I have like a dozen different programs or personalities. What do we want to call

them that I've noticed that I can get into. And now in life, when I start to go to that place, to one of those places, I can go, oh yeah, I recognize this, this is El Grandioso or this is the Catastrophist or this is Lost Jeff or Angry Jeff or whatever it is. I can kind of see that that program has taken over because I've learned and noticed the body feelings of it.

I've learned to notice the refrains. And, and literally, this is the magic of the practice. You notice it, you give it a name, you can pop out of it. And it's amazing how quickly that can happen. And that was, so that was one of the things we definitely worked with. And I mean, I'll let you talk about how well it worked or didn't work for you.

But as a you were really resistant first, you didn't like the idea of giving it a name in town to do cutesy or something, but it can be really valuable. Yeah, I know. I thought it was, you told me one night on the bus, we would have hours and hours. We would shoot during the day for a couple of hours, but then we would have these long bus rides, which actually were magnificent in my opinion. They were, we would use hours and hours of just chatting, which I loved it. Just talking to you and talking to the other people in the team, I just loved it.

Some really happy memories. One night you mentioned that you had this inner program called L. Grandioso, who was sort of the, I think you described as a cheerleader in your corner who was, you know, Agony Wan telling you how great you were and obviously it was a result of some insecurity that you had as being a kid who had to wear a leash essentially. And so L. Grandioso came about and you know what? He was here, L. Grandioso El Grandillo so what I just had to mention is fantastic hair.

Oh, I'm sure he does. Yeah. Uh, uh, where walls of London and so you, you then recommended that, you know, you've got this Robert Johnson and I'm sure others, you know, you should name them. And I was like, I don't know, it seemed kind of corny. But as time progressed, especially I think, when I was struggling in the aftermath of the road trip in the writing of the book, I did start to do it.

And I now have like five or six people of programs, inner programs that I notice come back really frequently. And as cheesy as it may sound, just the simple act of giving it a name, it doesn't mean you, I mean, I'm not like totally personifying it and having some imagery of, you know, Robert Johnson and a little Bo Peabout fit or anything like that. It's more just like, I noticed the pattern arising, all the body sensations and images and thought flavors. And I'm like, yeah, that's Robert Johnson.

And it kind of just like, it's like the Wizard of Oz. It's like you see it's just like a little little guy behind a curtain and you can let it pass. And what you did for me turned out to be the truly brilliant add-on that has as well, the combination of naming and seeing these programs with another thing that you introduced that has utterly transformed my practice is to not only to see them, but because in the seeing there can be some hostility. There can be like, oh, you know, there's a way in which you see El Grandioso

or you see Robert Johnson and you're mad that they're there. But there was something else you did, which is you said add this little mantra of when you see any distraction, and particularly distractions that you really don't want to be seeing, force yourself to say, welcome to the party. And that, for me, as a guy who had so much inner hostility,

self-directed hostility, you know, anger at my own mind for not doing what I wanted it to do, forcing myself to say, welcome to the party, whenever I get distracted, even if I don't mean it. I mean, I almost never mean it, but just that fake it till you make it spirit of using this little mantra has, again, utterly transform my practice. So as much gratitude as you may feel toward me, it is, I promise you fully,

fully required it. Well, I appreciate it. I mean, that is the, I think that is the, that is really the deep part of this practice that, and that welcoming attitude is one that every teacher will talk about. It's there all over the traditions. And the idea is that we have all these subtle antagonisms about how we're trying to, we like things, we like this, we don't like that,

how we want the world to be. But the world is how it is. And it, to a proper assessment of your life, means accepting what is actually happening in this moment as what is happening, and letting it be there. And it's only through letting it be there that you can really best address what's happening

and then you can move on to the next moment. And particularly when you realize with these programs internally, these things, these are all strategies that you have developed that have to try to help you, that your body mind is developed to try to help you, rain is developed. And in a way, they came from this place, this caring place within the organism. And if you can start to see everything as, it's just, they're just patterns that went wrong. Like any pattern after a while starts to get grotesque, the more it gets repeated, you know, I mean, in terms of our negative habits, because you are what you repeatedly do.

You just keep repeating these things again and again, and they can start to, so what once work starts to become now a problem. All of a sudden, you are, you yell when you merely needed to be emphatic, or you hit when you merely needed to yell, or you kill when you merely needed to hit. Like, the way things get upscaled, upscaled, they way they build up and they get worse and worse. And so those programs that started out as being, trying to be adaptive, got,

could lead us in this place that's no longer working for us. But so the way to work with it is to say, okay, is to accept them, is to embrace them in this moment as being part of what's happening. And it's only through opening to them and embracing them that the energy of those patterns can start to drain out. And that is the magic of the practice that this is the good news. We are not uniquely doomed. It doesn't matter how deep you are in these tracks. As you start to

notice them and open to them and accept them, it's only in the accepting that they're going to, that they start to lose the momentum and you can start to reverse some of these habits and create better habits and good habits build in the same way. So that is, so that is, I mean, this is very deep. We're talking about the possibilities of human transformation. It all hinges on this piece right here, on this equanimity piece, this welcoming piece, and even more so if you can bring in a caring dimension to it, it just accelerates the changes that can happen. And every teacher talks about this.

They have their own ways of talking about it. Sharon talks about this all the time. Sharon talks about this all the time. Joseph talks about this all the time. You know, it's, it's, this is meditation 101, but when you live it, then it becomes real for you. You start to see, okay, that's what it actually means to be welcoming and all these subtle ways in which we're not that way.

You know, you're right. And I had studied meditation for many, many years before we, many, many years. I mean, less than a decade, but for me, it felt like a long time. Before we did this book, and I had heard teachers say a million times, that, you know, how you have to have a welcoming attitude

to your distractions and have what they call self-compassion. And so, as they say in teacherly circles, you know, hold your emotions with, you know, loving kindness and all this blah, blah, blah. And my, my, first of all, I don't like that kind of talk. I mean, I don't think it's wrong. It's just that for me as a skeptic and a guy, I guess. Like like it's that kind of talk just I find I just reflexively reject it, which is stupid and didn't were down to my benefit clearly. And also, I think there was this cocky assumption that, you know, I was going to win at meditation, you know, that the need to forgive yourself and begin again,

as it, which is the practice of meditation, really only applied that the need to forgive yourself and begin again, which is the practice of meditation, really only applied to other people because I was going to ace this thing. And which is again just toweringly stupid. And so yes, I had heard teachers say this to me, you know, everything you just said about equanimity and even the caring piece to sort of learn to care about yourself. But I just thought it was too sappy. But there was some, you were the right guy at the right time. And we had enough proximity, you know, like it does a huge privilege.

You know, for most meditators don't get to spend 11 or 12 days living on a bus with one of their favorite, all time favorite meditations. You're so, you were the right guy with with the right and with the right amount of proximity and standing to say, hey, Dan, I've really noticed this thing and to make points to me that were in arguable. So it really landed. Yeah. Well, thank you.

It was such a fun trip, but I mean, there's a point I want to make here that I think is really important to say and And it really trying to look at the big picture, you know meditation is a training in how to be Actually your life is a training in how to be because it's where the training happens. You're constantly being so however you are in life whatever attitude you have to your own life is a habit that is getting reinforced. So when you're sitting the attitude you have to practice is the thing you're training. So that's why it's so important to have this fundamentally welcoming attitude if If you have a fundamentally judgmental attitude or whatever it is, that is also gonna get more deeply trained. So you really need to look when you're sitting

at how you're approaching the whole practice in the first place. That's why we talk so much in the book about the specific training of skills. Like what are the, what skills are being trained here? And so there's the concentration. We know that, there's the clarity, we know that. But there's this equanimity piece

around being genuinely open to the experience. And then there's the enjoyment piece, which is another thing that we talked a lot about, which is deciding to be open to the possibility that this is something that you can enjoy, that you don't have to go into it with your, like, braced or with your backup, but that, but that, like, hey, even just sitting here doing nothing,

that is actually meditation, by the way. There are many practices that are all about that or many traditions, just sitting and doing nothing and enjoying your being, as I would say, enjoying the fact that you exist, the feeling of just breathing being here, just that alone is a deeply healing practice. It is a training and learning to accept yourself in this moment as you are.

And there is no more fundamental training than that. So that is, it's really important to kind of keep that in mind when we're practicing like as almost the baseline. And of course, we have to be easy with ourselves because we're not going to always be in that baseline and being able to just sit here and say, okay, yeah, I'm here and I'm okay with being here. We're going to have things we're worried about, we're going to be off lost, different stuff, we're going to have, and there's a place for training specific skills too about being more focused in these things too.

But if you surround your focus training with this severe, unhappy, I've got to get through this feeling, well you're just reinforcing that and then you're going counter to the to the grain of where meditation actually wants to take you. Yeah, and one of the last things you said there is truly what allowed me to do this because you're not saying all of a sudden on demand, you've got to be totally psyched about everything and everyone. What you're saying is you decide that you're gonna incline your mind in that direction and train yourself

to try to get better at that. And there's a huge fake order make component to that, which is, so for me, when I see Robert Johnson or I see any of my other annoying inner neurotic programs coming up in meditation. The practice of saying, welcome to the party, even when I don't mean it, over time actually can transform your attitude.

And I've noticed that when I see Robert Johnson now or any of these other things that like, actually I've sometimes I actually break out into a smile. And it's unaffected. It starts as an affected forced practice, but it turns into something else, and that's why it's a training. So yeah, it really, it's made a big difference for me. This has been a phenomenal conversation, but I don't want to end it without asking you,

is there something I should have asked that didn't any other points that you want to make that that that we should make before we would call it a day? No, I mean, that was that was a good conversation. I mean, there's a running joke through the book about mysticism about me, get also wanting to get all mystic. And I think that I'm feeling a little bit of a satisfaction right now because I secretly just got mystical there by bringing in the enjoy your beingness thing but there there is another dimension to this practice you know which I like to point to and I think is really important to to have as a motivation for people which is that there is something very beautiful and mysterious about this act of coming into the present moment, of welcoming what's there.

And it starts out, our focus is more on trying to work through the challenges that are preventing us from being there. So seeing these patterns that sometimes can hurt us, that are destructive, or that aren't really helping us, the people around us. And that's a big part of practice, but there's the flip side to that, which is this reorientation that starts to happen when you begin to feel what's below those patterns. When you begin to feel that there is this openness, there's a kind of presence in your life presence in your life that is really exquisite and it's not just feeling blissed out, it's the mystery and depth of this life that you start to feel and

the meaningfulness of it and you start to connect to it and it is there percolating up and it is waiting to be discovered in a sense at every moment. And this, as you start to taste this, that is when your practice really becomes the motivation changes. It's a privilege to now sit and experience your life in this way. And it's a privilege to be able to be with others in that way. And when you see people who are like that and we know them naturally, we know we have friends, we have colleagues who are just naturally more in that space, you want to be around them more. There's something that they're tapping into

that's very fundamental. And I just think it's important to talk about that too, that is, we don't just do this practice to wrestle with our tough stuff. We also do it to come more into the world in this very beautiful way and being more there for other people. And I just want to make sure that anyone who's listening knows that that dimension is real and you actually already know it because you go in there all the time.

Every moment to moment, we slip into those places where we're more available to our life and we, and when we're more open to what's going on and it is deeply fulfilling and people will know what I'm talking about, you know. Yeah, I mean, I, I, this, I think we'll find this satisfying. I mean, what you're talking about, I think of it kind of as just like the brute, yet beautiful raw fact of our existence, that we can, in meditation, you can, you can do the rudiments of the practice,

noticing the breath, and then when you get distracted, start again, but then you can also kind of drop all of that and just like be alive. And then you'll get distracted, but, but there's something in that first few nanoseconds of just kind of noticing the fact that you're here is incredibly powerful. And you're right, during the trip, you had a way of lapsing into this kind of mystical, shmistical talk. And in fact, in the third chapter of the book,

we're actually talking to Bethany Watson, who's one of the stars of the Elvis Durand in the morning show, who's she's a big radio star and we're interviewing her about the fact that she's having trouble setting up in meditation practice and she's saying something and you're like, oh yeah,

it's like just like kind of enjoying your beingness. And she looks at you and like she's just complete, like, oh yeah, it's like just like kind of enjoying your beingness. And you know, she looks at you and like she's just complete like, you know, are you joking? Like what is what I don't understand what you're saying. But enjoying your beingness, which I think now will make sense to people based on everything else. We've just all the paragraphs you and I have just uttered leading up to this is actually there, there is something to that. And the thing I wanted to say

that I thought you would find satisfying is that I find the phrase spontaneously arising in my own mind in meditation all the time. So that makes me feel satisfied. Well, you know, as a mystic, you do struggle to try to articulate this. That's the whole point. That's why they gave it a category called mysticism because you can't find language to describe it. But that thing of enjoying your being is it's not just like it just gets deeper and deeper and more mysterious and more fundamental. And that is what Buddhist insight practice points to. It's what the deep end of any contemplative practice points to it's telling us that there is a continuum here that is we can't use we can't words can't describe it but people know when they're in it and it and the practice helps point is there and if we are not talking about that then we're not really talking about meditation. You have got to honor that aspect of it. This practice, which has been here for all of human history, has been a practice to help put us in touch with that truth. And my friend, your life is better. The more you are inside that truth, the more you know it, the more you can share with others. There's just no if-and-s or

doubts about it. It's the thing I know most in my life. And I am someone with a hell of a lot of mental health challenges. And yet that's still true. So, you know, you know, just don't give up as well. I'd say to, you know, beginner meditators and because there's a lot there. Well said. Well, thank you for doing this. Thank you for sticking it out through a ridiculously

arduous writing process. Thank you for being my friend. You're the best. Thank you for sticking it out through a ridiculously arduous writing process. Thank you for being my friend You're the best. Thank you. Thank you, bro. You're the best two men's been such a wicked adventure. I'm psyched to see Where we'll go next No more year-long deadlines for sure No, all right Jeff. Thanks man. Appreciate it Okay, so that does it for another edition of the 10% Happier Podcast. Please take a minute to leave us a rating and a review.

And if you want to suggest topics or guests for the show, just hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. Special thanks to Lauren Efron, Josh Cohan, and the rest of the team here at ABC who helped make this thing possible. And remember, we're now on Tune-in. You can hear our new episodes there five days early on Fridays, through the end of this year. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next week. Hey, hey, prime members.

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