Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 139: Diana Butler Bass, 100 Days of Gratitude

Episode Date: June 13, 2018

Author and religion scholar Diana Butler Bass has tried on many forms of Christianity, from growing up Methodist to becoming an Evangelical Christian for years and then joining the Episcopal Church, where she started exploring Centering Prayer and eventually meditation. Though her 10 books span a range of facets on Christianity, Bass says writing her most recent book, "Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks," saved her life. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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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. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUT OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ OUTRO MUSIC I'm Dan Harris. We're attacking a big issue this week with somebody who I think comes at it from a really interesting perspective. The issue is gratitude, something a lot of us lack, and I'm interested in the notion

that you can train it as a skill. So Diana Butler-Bass who approaches it from a Christian contemplative standpoint is a really interesting person to talk to about this, and she got a new book conveniently entitled Grateful. We're going to talk to her in a second though. First, your voice mails. And here's number one. My question is, should I and how do I let positive thoughts pass during my meditation? Might sound weird, but it seems a little easier when I was a little depressed to meditate.

It's actually a little bit more challenging when I have positive thoughts to stay with the breath or stay on task. Okay. Well, I should have issued my caveat. I'm sorry if this is annoying to regular listeners, but I'm going to do it every time. I'm not a meditation teacher, not a mental health expert, and I have not heard these questions in advance, So I'm just doing my best as a rank and file meditator to answer them. That being said, thoughts,

our thoughts, all thoughts in meditation should be treated the same way, which is you give a respectful salute and gently escort your attention back to the breath. I can understand, I'm not picking on you because I can understand why positive thoughts would be sticky and especially if you've been, you have a history of depression and positive thoughts, therefore are sticky or because they're more novel. So again, no, no shame in that game. I'm just saying the, the move from a meditative standpoint is the same, which again is to notice you could even make a soft mental note of thinking. Okay, that's thinking. And if it's not attended by an emotion, maybe the emotion is elation,

joy, restlessness, because you can't wait to go do whatever. You can maybe make a little mental note of that, you know, joy or excitement or whatever. And then if you want to get, you know, if you want extra credit, you might even explore how that's showing up in your body. You know, is it tinkling somewhere? Is it you feel sort of the urge to get up, pump your fist, whatever, take a look at all those things mindfully, and then when it's passed, which it will, then you can go back to the breath. And by the way, it might be worth even noting that it does pass as everything does, because that's a really important window into one of the big insights, which is nothing less, including you.

And that's one of the things we're getting in touch with in meditation. And so why, again, from our super practical standpoint, what's the point of treating all of the content, coughed up by your ego or whatever, mindfully, the point is that when you're overtaken by any kind of thought or emotion positive or negative, that you aren't owned by it, that you can respond wisely to it rather than reacting blindly. So you might be, you might find you have positive emotions and you want to do something, but you probably don't want to do something annoying and overly abulliant as a consequence.

Maybe you want to let the thing pass, examine it for a second, and then take positive construction, constructive action. Just the same way, it's the same technique that we have with, say, dealing with anger. When anger comes up, rather than just snapping or doing something that you'll later regret, maybe letting it pass and then responding wisely

to the emotion or to the situation rather than reacting blindly. And on the impermanence thing, why is that important to see? Because it is a fundamental fact of the universe. And it's not something we cut into easily. So it makes sense to, in a universe where we're not in control, that things are gonna come and go.

Other people in our lives, our hair, our health. All sorts of things will come and go. We wanna develop a healthier relationship to this law of the universe. All right, question number two. Hi, very excited to be calling in. I think I've had a question in a round of that way. I have a teenager who I tried to do meditation with

to help us in anxiety that was really becoming overwhelming. And I never did the consensus or to do it. I read your book. It's kind of the same type of thing. Society was for edge. And even with all the in-local sides to the preparation, I couldn't get it there. But I did start meditation as a way to hopefully get her to do it with me. And I found a lot of great results that I translated really well into parenting for me

in being more present. I was able to say things that called her to be more present with really great results. And I guess kind of my question is, you know, how do we, I think it's a great parenting tool. How do we encourage people to help their loved ones to have anxiety and meditation would benefit? But you can't get them there because I found by I'm supposed to

that I was able to transfer to a lot of the mindfulness that I was getting from meditation over to her. And it's been very effective and I see my practice for flapping back at me through both of my kids actually. So thank you for letting me appreciate it. Not around about a pleasure to listen, and you answer your own question for me beautifully. The answer is, you can't force somebody to meditate, and even attempting is incredibly annoying and likely to backfire. I mean, I think you can, the most you can do is, you know, kind of gently recommend it, but pushing it too hard is just,

as I said, likely to backfire because you're basically recommending somebody take on one more task that they may or may not want to add to their lives. Also, you're kind of telling them, I don't think you're doing this as a parent in your specific situation, but often when you remember and then people meditate, it's like a kind of a way of saying you're messed up, broken, whatever you need to, you need some deep work, dude. So I would be very careful about pushing meditation on anyone. And it's really tricky when you're a parent, but especially if your kid is, you know, in his or her teens,

or they're likely to reject reflexively anything you suggest. So you did what I would have recommended and you sounds like you did it beautifully, which is, you know, I often tell parents, if you've got a kid with anxiety and anxiety among children is an epidemic right now, the best way to get a mindful kid is to be a mindful parent. And that's a pain in the butt to hear, because it means you have to do the work, but I really think you do have to do the work. Your kid, in my view, is most likely to model what you do, not what you say.

I said this before in the podcast, my parents lectured me on all sorts of things. None of which I do. I mean, I have Ife and joke that they told me I couldn't watch TV. And now I work in the box. But they modeled a bunch of things they did that are all of which I now do.

Importance of meaningful work, importance of having a healthy marriage, importance of daily exercise, importance of a healthy diet. All of these things which they didn't actually lecture me much about, but I just saw them do. I just pounded into my neurons as a consequence. And so that's obviously an end of one, a small data set. But I think as a, from my understanding, I'm not exhaustively familiar with the parental literature, but I think I'm on a reasonably solid ground there. When I say that you should model mindfulness

and let it seep into her own time, or as you said, by osmosis. And then there's this thing where you can, your answers to some of your questions, can include meditative concepts that can be useful even if she's not meditating. You can reframe some of these issues and refract it through your understanding of meditative concepts such as responding rather than reacting or decoupling yourself from habitual thought processes. And that can be really useful, again, even if she's not practicing. I just spent, I had the privilege of spending about 24 hours just a day or so ago with my good friend and co-author of the last book. I wrote Jeff

Warren. We wrote meditation for Figuity Skeptics together. He's an incredible meditation teacher from Toronto. And we were given a talk together. And he was telling me about a project he's working on where he really thinks of meditation as like a first aid kit for sanity, you know, a first aid kit for the human condition. Where if you, if the more people learn how to meditate, even if they're not teaching others to meditate, well, they may be, but at the very least, they're also just kind of modeling sanity. And that can sp, you're like little nodes, little ambassadors

of sanity and that- that really can spread through the human network. So good on you. If- oh, so two other things to say before we get to our guest. Last week, somebody asked me about CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy and I- I made my best guess in my answer. You can go listen to it if you want. And I was a little, I was openly unsure that I was answering it correctly, but I want to send a thank you to Richard Bloom, who is a psychologist in Connecticut who called and assured me that I did answer the question correctly. So Richard, thank you for that.

I really do appreciate that. And anybody who wants to go here, my apparently correct answer, you can go back to the last week's episode. Okay, Diana Butler Bass. What a great guest. She was recommended to me, and I'm grateful to use a loaded term

for the recommendation. Diana has just written a book called, grateful, all about her coming to terms with the fact that she wasn't something of an ingrate in her own life and she talks about how she went about cultivating what is sort of a life scale par excellence. And I'm really, you know, the regular listeners will have heard me say before that my, the animating insight for me in my

whole side hustle and the meditative world is that the mind is trainable and there are all these skills, you know, gratitude, generosity, compassion, happiness, calm that we want. And as it turns out, these are trainable skills. They're not factory settings that can't be tickered with. And gratitude is one of them. And I'm actually working on a book about kindness. I don't even love that word so much, just because people find it trickle-y, but I'm going to do my own sort of spin on kindness. And gratitude is one of the skills I want to look at, which is why I wanted to have Diana. Also, I'm interested, I was interested in, and that interest has now been somewhat stated, because as you'll hear, she also talks about meditation as it's practice within the Christian

community. So, a lot to recommend Diana Butler Bass, but she's better at making the case for herself than I am. So, here she is, Diana Butler bass. Thank you for coming on. Really appreciate it. I'm glad to be here. I'm glad Anna Marie talks recommended to you. I should say who that is just in case people don't know, but she's the host of with friends like these on the Crooked Media Network and she was kind enough to have me on her show. And she strongly urged me to talk to you, and I'm glad, for a number of reasons that I will get to shortly. And I want to talk about gratitude and your new book, Grateful,

but first let's just start with meditation. How did you get into it in the first place? How we into it, are you? Meditation is not something I knew growing up. I grew up as a Methodist kid and took church very seriously. And then I wound up for several years within Evangelical churches. As an adult, I became an Episcopalian.

Where would tell me that I started to interrupt you? This is something I'd do. The Evangelical experience, where was that happening? Mostly happened in Arizona and California, when I was in high school and then in college. And so I wound up in a very large Bible church in Scottsdale, Arizona as a teenager. And then I went on to an evangelical college

in Southern California. So I have some pretty wide experience within American Protestantism. But from mainline to evangelical. Correct. And neither one of those traditions or traditions that do meditation. It wasn't until... No, in fact some evangelical pastors will tell you it's...

It's the devil. Yes. Yeah. You're opening yourself up to demons coming in. They think that it's dangerous. And so later on, when I was a young adult, I wound up going to an Episcopal Church, which is its own thing, its mainline Protestant, but it's also kind of Catholic,

and it's just a different part of American religion. And Episcopalians have been over the last 20 years, exploring the territory of what they call centering prayer. And so that practice of centering prayer, which is literally prayer where you sit quietly, where you discover the presence of God inside in yourself. And oftentimes in centering prayer, you will meditate around a particular scripture or an incident maybe in the life of Christ,

but it's a different approach to prayer. It's not the kind of prayer where you're asking for something. Instead, it's a prayer where you're being with the Holy Spirit. And so it was there where I first began to encounter what is really a classic form of meditation within the Christian tradition. And after exploring that, which I still do centering prayer retreats on occasion, I- So you'll go off for several days and just do that. Yeah. Uh-huh. I keep derailing you, but can I just ask you about centering prayer because the folks who

listen to this podcast, I suspect most of them are doing the kind of meditation which is you pay attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. And then when you get distracted, you start again. Or you're doing the kind of meditation where you work with a mantra, you know, a word silently repeated to yourself. And then when you get distracted, start again. I'm sure there are folks listening to the podcast who do other kinds of meditation entirely or none at all, but I think the broad swath probably one of those two buckets that I initially described. What are the differences or similarities that centering prayer would have

with what I just described? Now I've had experience in silent prayer and forms of meditation that are much more out of Buddhist and completely non-secular kinds of traditions. So I can actually speak to that with some sense of authority and experience. And what's fascinating to me is the similarities are intriguing. And I think that a lot of people who don't do Christian forms of meditation don't know

this. That Christian meditation does have mantras, and usually they're the name of Jesus, perhaps, or saying the word over and over again, love love or some aspect of how Christians understand God's being. So there is that kind of mantra meditation. There's a very traditional form of Christian centering prayer that has a longer mantra and it is to say over and over again. Lord Jesus Christ have have mercy on me, a sinner. And so you just say that over and over again. And a lot of people actually say it,

and each time they say it, they drop a word off. And so you begin the meditation process with the whole mantra, and then you drop back a word at a time. And so you have more and more space and fewer and fewer words until the final word is Lord and then the last act and the meditation, the last moment of the meditation is just silence and you're sitting there and you've had this experience of praying through, you know, it's not really praying through words, but it's letting these words come into you and experiencing them with great depth with your

breathing and, you know, sitting usually straight or on a pillow in some way. And so it's very similar to kinds of meditations that my friends who are Buddhist experience. So that mantra meditation is present in Christianity and something that a lot of Christians don't even know. And then there's also just the classic silent breath meditation, which some people do with rosary beads. And I know I actually have a wonderful set of beads that I got from a Buddhist friend that I use sometimes in meditation, the 108. Is it a mala?

Yeah, yeah, the 108 beads. And so I have this beautiful, these beautiful meditation beads that I carry around with me. I have them here in New York with me as my effect. So would the, the, the you of high school and college, how would you, and the family you came from from which I'd like to hear some more about. How would they hold you and the family of origin feel about your current server more. Eclactic religious contemplative style. My my parents have sadly passed away so I can't ask.

My parents have sadly passed away, so I can't ask. My dad and mom were really amazingly interesting, open people, and they were the kind of Christians that wherever there was love and wherever there was goodness and acts of generosity, they could praise those things. And so they were not the sort of Christian parents who raised us to think that, you know, Jesus Christ is the only way and that everybody else is going to hell. That was not my parents' worldview. And so I credit a lot of my openness to the fact that I was raised in this really very gentle form of Methodism that cared a lot about the world and cared a lot about

our neighbors. And so my parents would have been happy for anything that I would discover in my my life that made my spiritual journey better that would make me a better person and that would contribute to love in the world. So that would be my parents. There need to be more Christians like that on the planet. I'm afraid that right now Christianity has a, in some ways, deservedly bad rap because the noisiest voices of the Christian tradition right now are ones of exclusion and condemnation. condemnation and that really disturbs me. But they, of course, do not appreciate borrowed practices or practices that multiple religions share. They think that that's dangerous. Would you have thought that when you were young evangelical?

I might have. I think probably when I was moving into the tradition in my teens, I think probably when I was moving into the tradition in my teens, and you're just, you know, kind of at an age where you're exploring the theology for yourself. And there's a lot of voices, especially for young women. There's a lot of voices that are around you telling you how you're supposed to believe. And I think that young women have a tendency always to want to please those people, you know, mostly male pastors who are in authority in those communities. So I think that, yes, there would have been a time when I would have found myself on the judgmental side of that. And my parents who were alive then were actually a little worried about me. My mother in particular said, oh my gosh, I can't believe that you're going to this kind of Bible

thumping church. And later on when I became an Episcopalian, I came home and I told her that I'd made another sort of move in my spiritual journey. And my mom looked at me and said, a Piscable, and my mom looked at me and said, a piscable, that's something I can understand. Thank goodness. So my Methodist mother approved of me becoming an Episcopalian because she knew that it was a more open and more less judgmental, I'd say, form of Christianity.

So not there are good evangelicals, but they certainly do not necessarily bring as a tradition any kind of openness to the practices of things like meditation and gratitude. That's not their strong point. Although I will say just amplify the point you were making to the end, I mean, I have a lot of evangelical friends who are really interested in meditation. And so, I don't think they're representative. I think there is, maybe they're representative in some way. I don't know, actually, I don't have the data.

So I shouldn't speak too much authority. But I do know that there are many in the evangelical world who are kind of anti-meditation. But for sure, the evangelicals, and I know, for example, Mike Cohenker on weekend, good morning America, Paul Affaris, who was a very it was quite devout. She is a very active meditator and not actually in a more in this sort of secular mindfulness tradition interestingly so so there's a there's a diversity there and I've learned as somebody who grew up and the people's Republican Massachusetts and had no exposure growing up to the evangelical community, that there's this infamous Washington Post editorial that referred to the evangelical community as sort of like, dumb and easily led, you know,

from decades ago. That was not my experience. That I actually really had a in meeting this sort of evangelical intelligentsia and also to sort of rank and file folks in the pews, not at all similar to the caricatures that I encounter. In some cases, yes, but not, in many cases, not similar to the characters, to the caricatures, one encounters in liberal dominated media. That being said, I wish that there was more of an openness to meditation.

Yeah, it's an interesting question about how people see evangelicals. You know, because I do, I have a huge part of my life spent in that subculture and the college that I went to in California was an evangelical college. And it was not a place that was and it was not a place that was intellectually closed in any way. We read pretty much anything you can imagine. And the idea there was that you could encounter any idea, any thinker, and you could gain from that. And it wasn't just an issue of reading people in order to argue with them, but it was really an issue to read people like

Nietzsche and understand Nietzsche on the terms that Nietzsche presents. And so part of my movement eventually towards the Episcopal Church came because my college was so open-minded as an evangelical school. I think that the the difficulty comes like as I saying, I was part of a congregation in Arizona. And there's a kind of on the ground, almost kind of folk religion aspect to many parts of evangelicalism, particularly in the Southwest or the American South, parts of the Midwest, where those kinds of ideas, like, you know, that a demon will occupy you if you meditate, are kind of common ideas among people who are impuse. And then there's this other aspect of evangelicalism. And we're seeing that right now, too, because evangelicalism itself is so divided. And it's become very divided around, of course, Donald Trump.

And what you often are witnessing, if you follow religion, in the news, is that a lot of the more elite, more intellectual evangelicals, are beside themselves, that there's still such a high level of evangelical support for Donald Trump. And so that division right there reveals within itself a sort of a fault line

within the evangelical community, between evangelicals who are more open and more engaged, frankly. And things that are happening in the world, whether they're politically attuned or whether they're attuned to trans-around spiritual practices, and that they're willing to engage and willing to listen and sometimes find great benefit in ideas outside of that, they have angelic world in their own spiritual lives. But then there's this other part of evangelicalism that is really, really, really strong on the ground. And that's a part that I know too from my own life experience.

I don't want to get bogged down this because I do want to get your book, but it's, I'll just say by way of a buttoning up comment here that, so interesting this debate about how Trump plays in the evangelical community in the United States, because you will often hear those, some evangelical pastors sort of bemoaning the, how, how much loyalty there is to Trump in evangelical circles. And then on the other hand, you'll hear folks say, look, I didn't elect a pastor. I elected somebody who's going to defend my faith. And he put Corsuch on the Neal Corsuch on the Supreme Court. And he's doing all the things I want him to do on from a policy level. So let's call it good. Anyway, fascinating debate.

One, actually, if I had the time that I would want to delve in quite deeply with you, but I don't want to rob you of talking about the things that are probably more relevant to this podcast. So I had derailed you before when you were talking about your meditation career. You were talking about centering prayer that you had done for a couple of decades.

Let me get you back on the rails. So you had done that for a little bit and then you started just moving into other forms of meditation. How did that come about? Some of it came about through personal experience, which I think you'll probably relate to. I have always struggled with anxiety and depression and those things, they just sort of entered in my life in ways that I did not expect. The first time I ever had an anxiety attack, I was in a Kroger supermarket in Durham, North Carolina. It was right before I started working on my PhD. And I literally did not know what was happening to me.

It was so terrifying that the room, you know, the grocery store was spinning and I dropped whatever I was buying, I don't even remember and ran out of the grocery store and sat down in my car in this intense North Carolina summer heat and sweat just pouring from every every part of my body and crying. And that was the first time that that had ever occurred to me. And I didn't, at first I thought something terrible was wrong with me, you know, physically. So I went to the doctor, went to the hospital, and discovered that this was something called an anxiety attack. And for me, it was twind with depression as well. It was very hard. I mean, it actually ties in with our conversation.

It was very hard to be an evangelical woman in the mid-1980s who was working on a doctorate and religious studies. It was not done. And so I was very alone. And I was breaking new ground in you know, in my own community. So it caused an incredible amount of stress personally and in my first marriage first.

And so anyway, that whole episode opened my life up to different kinds of tools that would just help. And somewhere along the line, those early years when I was dealing with stress of graduate school, someone introduced me to, I believe it, it could have even been a therapist who introduced me to the idea of meditation, guided meditation in particular, and gave me some CDs by a woman by the name of and gave me some CDs by a woman by the name of Belworth Nappersec, who has done CDs for Cleveland Clinic and other places. And those are meditations that literally do guide you through processes to reduce stress or to take away fear, those kinds of things and so so those guided meditations were in opening and I realized that they were sort of like the centering prayer Experiences that I'd had so both of those things were

tools and Practices that I began to pursue and eventually that just I realized there was something else to the silent meditation and I had experienced that mostly in Quaker churches, where they have some Quaker communities have hour-long Sunday worship services that are completely silent. And the similarities between what happens in a Sunday morning silent Quaker meeting, and what happens at a health and wellness retreat

led by Buddhists is remarkable. And so I've been to both and it's for me at least a very similar experience. And now I I prefer silent meditation above the forms of the mantra, meditations and centering prayer and guided meditation. I really appreciate whatever it is that happens within my my being When I can be in that kind of silence for half an hour to an hour What What do you think is done for you? I mean has your I anxiety and depression these days, and if it's gone down, would you credit

meditation at all with the diminution? Yes. I don't struggle nearly as much as I used to with anxiety and depression. I think that part of it for me, I hope this isn't too embarrassing, but you know, women have interesting phases in their lives related to hormones. And so when I went past, when I went to menopause in my early mid fifties, and I'm not that far past it now, I'm not sure. Is that what you think might be embarrassing? Definitely not.

Okay. It's not embarrassing to me, but I don't know what my old-fashioned Methodist mother sometimes stands behind me and says, can you say that on the radio? You're in a safe place. So anyway, when I got to that part of my life when everything was changing biologically for me, a lot of my stress and depression literally just abd away. And so some sort of hormonal change helped me a great deal. But I also had had years of walking through these periods of intense

fear or intense grief and had learned from meditation and learned from, ways of availing myself to practices, I think, that cause us to be grounded. Things like walking a labyrinth or being out in nature, these are things I try to balance with a very busy life and also with a life of being a writer, which is a very stressful, surprisingly stressful career to have. I hear you. Yeah, I hear you writing sucks. I hate it.

People always say they want to be a writer and I always kind of look and say, well, that's nice. Don't do it. Yeah, it's hard. Well, let's talk about your writing. One of the many reasons, aside from the resounding recommendation from Annamarie Cox that I wanted to have you on, was the subject of this book, which is called Grateful. I selfishly wanted to have you on because not only am I interested in the subject generally, but I'm going to write a new book about, well, I can't even say the title on my own podcast

because it has a bad word in it. I'm not allowed to say bad words, but let me just say. Oh, so menopause is okay, but bad words are wrong. Well, you can say bad words, but I'm a Disney employee, so I'm not allowed to. But the title of the book is the self interestedinterested case for not being a and then the final word starts with an A and ends with an E and you can fill in the vowels and consonants. As you please, as let's just say, jerk would be another word. And one of the things I want to write about is how gratitude is actually very useful in

this. So having said all of that, talk about the thesis of your book and we'll go from there. This book was not a book that I wrote out of a sense of expertise. It's the tenth book that I have written, which means there's been a lot of stress along the way. And many of my early books were about liberal Christianity and congregational life and how all that was changing in America, different kinds of religious and spiritual trends. In those things, because I do, I have a doctorate in that, and I also have a lot of life experience

in those kinds of congregations. And so when I went to write those books, I was an authority. I'm an expert. And all of my degrees say that. So I was writing my former books out of that sense. This book I went to and I said I'm 56 years old and I don't really think I understand gratitude. What why did you think it was something that would be important to understand?

Well, in part there was a year, it was about three years ago, when two of my good friends passed away. One was 72 and the other one was 82. And these are people who mentored me and that I really cared about and I worked with quite frequently, a New Testament writer by the name of Marcus Borg,

and then a woman who wrote about religion in the media for many years by the name of Marcus Borg, and then a woman who wrote about religion in the media for many years by the name of Philistical. And these two meant, you know, they were just great teachers. They really, in a sense, if Christians have gurus, they were mine. And when they passed away, I got me to thinking quite a bit about the fact that I was in my mid late fifties. And what kind of person did I want to be for the next 20 to 25, 30 years of my life? And how, what kind of legacy would I leave behind?

And I realized I have had friends through the years who are older than myself, who's, who get into their 60, 70s and 80s, and their lives are full of regret. And they've just let regret eat them alive. And then there are other friends like Marcus and Phyllis, who are people who carried around this incredible sense of Thanksgiving, that their lives had not necessarily been easy, had not necessarily been always

what they expected. But through everything that had happened to them, they were able to find the presence of goodness. They were able to appreciate the abundance that surrounded them. They were able to see the good and other people. And as I thought about their lives and what they had taught me through the years after they died within like three or four months of each other, I realized I wanted to be like that. And when you're in your mid fifties, there's still plenty of time to grow and to become the person you want to be as a wise person, a wise elder in society.

And so that was the first thing that prompted me. So is this something that's trainable? Yes. I actually learned it while writing the book, which was fascinating. So I walk into this project and I said to my my longtime editor, I'm thinking about this idea, and he said, I'm so glad because you really need to learn this. Oh, I thought to myself, oh my gosh, that's one honest editor. Why did he, what, he or she say this? He was a he. Yeah, it's a he. And it relates to writing, which is, it's hard to admit, and it's, I feel sad saying it.

But you know, writers have expectations of their, their vocational life in the same way, a lawyer or a doctor or a college professor, or anybody really does. And there are certain kinds of milestones that you really want to achieve as an author. And I got into my mid-50s and while my writing was successful, I have a very solid and lovely and an audience I care

for deeply. I had never really sort of my work had never really gotten to the place where I wanted it to, either in terms of its literary quality, which I really keep striving to improve with every book, but also in terms of simple things like sales, which really matter, especially when like myself, I'm a freelancer, I don't have a day job other than writing and then doing consulting and speaking about the topics I'm writing about. So I felt really bad about that, and I was beginning to get kind of bitter about it. And- But just by the way, you're a good company.

I mean, you should see how often I check my Amazon record minutes to embarrassing. So I get it. Yeah. And it's, you know, like I said, it's a little hard to admit that, but I'm glad that you could say that too. Because it's something I think people don't consider often.

They see your name on the front of a book and they think you're a success. And yes, that is true. And I've learned to be much more grateful about that. But there's also things that we hold inside where we feel our own failures more deeply. And so my friends and my family, my husband and then my editor, you're not the first husband. No, no, this is my second husband who's who we've been married for 21 years now and it's been a resounding, beautiful, amazing success. We have a wonderful 20-year-old daughter. But then my editor, Roger, who has worked with me

on every one of my projects. He's like my brother. And he knows me so well. When he said that to me, I thought, oh my gosh, well, my husband Richard knows this, but that Roger knows it. Now this really is getting me a little concerned. And so the mirror was the death of my friend's Marcus and Phyllis, but then when my editor Roger said to me what he said, I went, okay, it's time to take this very seriously. So I start the book with

what was originally a chapter entitled Confessions of an In Great, I think the chapter title now is just a confession, no thanks, a confession. But I talk about a very common thing and that is my struggle as a young teenager with writing thank-you notes to my grandparents. And about how this struggle caused such anxiety and such a brawl between myself and my mother that I almost just gave up on the idea of gratitude. I thought I was born as sort of a gratitude clots. So that is the frame of the book that I'm not an expert, that I'm a strugglinger. And yet in that struggle, there was something about gratefulness

that was calling me to be a different kind of person and a better person as I look forward to the years that lay ahead. And so that gets laid out in the beginning of the book and then the book arcs through that deeply personal experience that share I think that so many people share that experience of our mothers, you know, standing over us. Saying, right, these thank you notes. I was so bad at it that my mom, one Christmas, I think it was one of 14 or 15. I think it was when I was 14 or 15. Every year, we used to get one hardback book among our other Christmas presents under the tree. And so every year, there was that one book.

And I loved opening it and seeing what it would be. So I race up to the Christmas tree this one morning in my early mid teens. And I pull the wrapping paper off. And the book is, I'm not kidding, mismanners. And my mother had put a bookmark in the section on how to write thank-you notes. It was the most passive, aggressive, Christmas present I have ever. I'm not sure that's even passive, aggressive. Just aggressive. And so my

mom was just like, you know, I want you to learn how to do this because I want you to be a civilized person. And I just never, I was bad at it. And so I've learned since then, lots of people are bad at that. And I didn't understand gratitude because of those experiences. And so this book says, okay,

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You can listen ad free on the Amazon music or Wondery app. I think of gratitude to something much deeper, which is not taking everything for granted. Yes, and eventually for us, I figured out that I was not really an in-great, that there were things that I felt very grateful for, but because I'd had these early experiences where my mom had taught me that gratitude had a particular shape and form, that was about, you know, writing notes or giving gifts or giving an apple to a teacher at the end of the school year, making sure that the people who had given me something got something in return, it was an exchange. A kind of quid pro quo transactional approach to gratitude that I didn't really appreciate

other forms of gratitude. And so in the book, I talk about how gratitude is much more complex than what we often think, and that it involves our feelings and our actions, and that those feelings and actions are expressed in two levels of human experience for us as individuals and also for us in community. And so that there's really four large spheres in which gratefulness plays a major role. And that is, I identify them in the book as me and my emotions, me and my ethics.

And that becomes like the practices of writing thank you notes or the making sure you return a favor if someone does you a good favor. So, so the feelings, ethics, on a personal level, and then the next two sections of the book are about we and our feelings and how gratitude is some, a part of communal life that we sometimes don't pay attention to. And yet it's always present. So you get these sort of unexpected moments

in our public and social lives, where say, for example, the Cubs, when the World Series. And everybody, literally millions of people in Chicago poured out into the streets. And as reporters wrote about that, it became very clear that it was about joy, which is also about gratitude. And times people were interviewed around the time the Cubs won the World Series, and they all said things, oh, I'm so thankful that I'm alive now now that I could see this thing that my grandparents only dreamed about. And so gratitude shows up as a public emotional practice, or a public emotional response often.

And then I argue at the end of the book that if we can feel grateful as a people in unexpected and serendipitous sort of ways, what would it look like if we attended to gratitude more deeply in our political and social lives? Could we have a politics of gratitude that was based around a vision of abundance, a vision of connection and care for one another, and a real deep and profound social humility instead of hubris. And so what starts out as aures with gratitude into a vision of a politics of gratitude that could save us as a people. I want to touch on that for a second. Let me just talk about you.

Do you feel like you're better at gratitude now after having done this book and what made you better? Well, it's a funny story because the book contract was signed in the spring of 2016. So I had been through all of this stuff with my editor and my husband and thinking through the idea in late 2015. We talked with them. I published her which is Harper through the early months of 2016. We all agreed on it. Okay, yes. I'm going to write a book about gratitude. Contract signed. And then 2016

happened. And, you know, watching the news that year, it was a really unexpected and awful year. And I can remember being transfixed by what I was seeing on television, that, you know, here was this political candidate, you know, yelling at us, and encouraging violence at rallies, and people saying things that I just never would have dreamed that I would see people say in public, And these upsetting sort of episodes in the news. And it was so distracting and so distressing to me that I couldn't write. So I did my research and I structured my book, but I could not literally sit at my desk and feel grateful in such

a way that I could write a book about gratitude. So I said, okay, I'm just going to sit this aside. I'll do what I can. And after November 8th, when everything goes back to normal, then I'll be able to write a book on gratitude. And of course, November 8th happened. And while I know that there were some people who were thankful for the feelings they had on the morning of November 9th, I was not one of those people. I literally was

in bed. And my husband came in with a cup of coffee and I said to him, tell me I dreamed what happened last night. Tell me that was a nightmare. And he said, no. And I said Donald Trump is President of the United States. And he said, yes. And I think I cried for six weeks. And I did not feel grateful.

Nor did anybody on my street, I live on a suburb outside of Washington, D.C. I have friends that work for the Smithsonian and our school teachers, the work for the Ag department and other things, and they were stunned. And so the first six weeks or so, after the election,

were mostly spent with my neighbors going through the motions of Passover and then Christmas and talking about how our world and our little neighborhood street. Passive Thanksgiving, I mean. Oh, thanksgiving and then, excuse me, I mean, it's not Passover, on Hanukkah. Yes, I'm thinking Eastern Passover.

But Thanksgiving and then Hanukkah and and then Christmas all happened right after that. So I was in the neighborhood and we were thinking about what was going to happen to our little street with this huge change. We knew it was going to be a huge change. So I started sort of pulling myself a little bit together and I went back in my office and the contract was laying there I called up my my publisher and I tried to change course I said can I write a book about something else and they said no This is what you're contracted to do and I thought oh my gosh, okay, well

What am I gonna do now and? Because I'm the person that I am is that I can't write on spec. I can't write something because somebody just tells me that I'm supposed to write about a subject, is that I have to write about it because I have some connection to it. And I said, all right, well, I'm going to do what some of the literature has actually said that I should do. And that is I'm going to get up and I'm going to do what some of the literature has actually said that I should do. And that is I'm going to get up and I'm going to try to be grateful for one thing.

And so I got up about three days or so before the inauguration and I said, okay, today I'm grateful that Barack Obama is president for three more days. And I walked down to my office and I spent five hours writing about gratitude. And the next day I got up and I was thankful for the fact that my daughter was getting ready to go back to school for her second semester in college and went down and I wrote. And that became the next 100 days of my life. The first draft was finished on the 100th day of Donald Trump's presidency. And I couldn't forget that because of course the news and the post and the TV were

awful of the 100th day. And I sent the book in that morning. So I didn't realize that that's what I'd done, but I had spent 100 days of getting up, seeing that there was just this huge uproar on the front page of the Washington Post or on the New York Times or flipping on the TV and hearing the morning shows talk about some tragedy of the day. And then I would literally walk into my office, and I would say, what am I grateful for? And what I learned in that process was that when you're grateful

for one thing, it becomes easier to be grateful for two things, and then it becomes easier to be grateful for three. And that gratitude functions almost like a spiritual multiplication after a little while. And so I got to the end of the of the first draft of the book and I literally saw the world differently than when I had began to be gone. And my husband looked at me and he said, you know, writing this book has saved you. And I didn't realize that that's what it had done. But I've written books I love and I'm proud of and I've written a lot of words. But there were never there's never been you know 200 pages of words that I've written that saved my life. And this book did. So let's get practical in terms of what people, what practices or maybe just one big practice that that our

my listeners could embrace. And then we also just twin that with a question, which is, you know, how are you feeling now? Because Donald Trump is still present. A lot of people are delighted about that fact, you're not how you feeling now. And how are you feeling about the book coming out and are you gonna be checking your Amazon rank as much as I do? So that's a lot of questions in one.

It is a lot of questions in one. What was the first one again? What's the practice that you do and that you would recommend for the rest of us who struggle with issues of gratitude, whether it be around politics or not. The practice itself is the practice of having a disposition which sees through whatever the circumstances are in life to recognize that we live in a gifted universe.

And that those gifts are constantly coming at us, and that our lives are not bereft of those gifts, whether it's the air we breathe, someone just simply being gracious to us on a subway in the morning, having food to eat, whatever those things are, no matter how rich or how poor you are, if you have life, and if you feel the abundance of that first gift, we have everything we need.

The poet Wendelberry, that's one of my very favorite lines in poetry, he says, everything we need is here. And that's a line about the practice of gratitude. When we recognize that, everything we need is here, abundance. And then that thank you comes and we move on out of that abundance, rather than a vision of scarcity and fear. So that's what the practice is. The practice is recognizing life in a gifted... Is that something you do first thing in the morning? Yeah. To recognize that we live in a gifted... Is that something you do first thing in the morning? Yeah. To recognize that we live in a gifted universe is what we want to get to.

But because we're human beings, we need to have tools to help us get there. And so in the book, I talk about several different kinds of practices, most of which have been recommended by therapists and spiritual guides and medical doctors for years, and they're things like keeping a gratitude journal. Or another really popular one is writing thank you notes to people. Not thank you notes necessarily for gifts, but to people who do nice things for you. So go back and think about your teachers or go back and think about a relative or a friend who's been particularly kind and take a moment and send them a card and just let them know. And so to incorporate those kinds of practices of recognizing the gifts that you've been given and by writing them down.

I have done journaling to some success in my life, but that was not how it worked for me and while I was doing this book. Instead, it was literally a morning prompt me and for me, in the first 100 days of Trump, it became kind of a negative prompt and that was picking up the Washington Post off my porch. It was so depressing to read those headlines that it literally prompted me, oh yes, what are we grateful for today, Diana?

And so then the bad thing reminded me to look for the good thing. And so that became my prompt. But eventually, the thing that I like the best right now, and it's the kind of a silly thing is that I literally carry around a little river rock with me when I travel and I have it at home on my bedstand when I'm at home and the river rock just says across it has carved across

gratitude, just a single word and so when I'm at home that little river rocks. It's next to my cell phone on my bedside table It's the last word I see before I fall asleep at night. And so it prompts me to say thank you for whatever has happened during the day or to God or to the universe. And then when I wake up in the morning, my cell phone rings, of course, I reach over and sometimes I don't hit the cell phone first, but sometimes my hand lands first on the rock. And I go, oh, it's my gratitude rock. I'm awake. Oh, thank you. And so that's the first thing I think when I wake up.

And that little goofy rock has become so important to me that I take it with me when I travel. And a couple of weeks ago, I was on an airplane and you know since you're you're right or two you probably do this as I carry books with me and papers to edit and all kinds of stuff when I'm traveling so my bag is often really heavy. And so my rock is in my bag and a couple books are in my bag and some things I have to edit are in my bag and a nice gentleman decides he wants to help me. He picks up my bag and he says what have to edit or in my bag. And a nice gentleman decides he wants to help me. He picks up my bag and he says, what you got in here rocks. I looked at him and I said, uh, yeah, it's a matter of fact. There is a rock in

there. And he looked at me. He said, are you a geologist? No, I'm just grateful. Can only imagine what kind of befuddlement that must have rolled over his face. Yeah, I think he was glad he was sitting a couple rows back for me on the flight, not next to me. Who is this crazy lady? So, has it helped you deal with the political situation and will it help you deal with the vagaries of publishing a book? Yes, it has helped me enormously deal with the political situation because what it reminds me in terms of the politics, that so much of American politics is built on really a myth

of scarcity. And that is the idea that the gifts of a good universe are in the hands of only a few and that those few control all of our lives. Now there is a corrupted structure of the universe that is trying to do exactly that thing, is trying to control the gifts of the universe and monetize them and make them only available for the few. But that's a corruption of the reality that is the deepest reality of creation. If you believe in God, it's a deep reality of the nature of God. If you're a humanist,

it's the deep, the abundance of the universe, the abundance of the gifts of, of the created order are present all the time and available to everyone in every way. And so that's the reality of things. And to be able to live into that reality and recognize the other story, the political story, as an injustice and a corruption of what is meant for good, for humankind and for the earth, gives me a sense of empowerment empowerment to be able to move out and participate in the political process, not out of hopelessness, but instead out of hopefulness. And it also just has given me a great deal of perspective. I do not appreciate the vision or the politics of President Trump, but I also recognize that so many of my

more liberal friends and my progressive friends have been allowed themselves to be colonized by him. It's all that they talk about. It's literally like they've given him complete power over their lives and being grateful, being queued to remember the gifts, being queued to remember the gifts, being queued to remember abundance reminds me of one of the greatest verses in the whole of the New Testament, and that is in everything give thanks.

And that verse doesn't say for everything give thanks. I don't give thanks for the fact that we're living in a great time of political division, not people of pain and fear for so many people. But we can be thankful in these times, in such a way that we can see more clearly the connections we have with one another and what should be our love for neighbor and how gifts are to be shared and not hoarded. And finally publishing.

Will it help with, well, I did look at my Amazon rankings today, but I'm less obsessive about it than I have been in the past. So I am very thankful for that part of it. There are a million things I would love to ask you about, sadly, though, we're out of time. But before we close, can you just lay on us the name of the book, the name of some of your other books, where can we find you in social media, anything else? This is what we often refer to as the plug zone. Can you just plug everything for us?

The new book is called Grateful, the transformative, you know, I can't remember the time. The transformative power of giving thanks. The transformative power of giving thanks. And it's just out. It was just a release on April 3rd by Harper One. The book that I wrote right before this, that I think that your listeners would really enjoy as well

as a book that I called Grounded. And that was called Finding God in the World. A spiritual revolution was also published by Harper One. And people can find me via my website, which is my name, Diana Butlerbass.com. I'm on Twitter. I mix it up a lot. So if you like a politics and spirituality and lots of comments about religion and theology. Follow me on Twitter. It gets a little rowdy there sometimes, which is good. I also have a presence on Facebook, just a Diana Butler bass. So people can find me on social media and I do respond. I can't promise I respond to everything on social media. I do block mean people who are just there to degrade others, but I will share answers to questions and try to give people helpful suggestions about their own spiritual lives if they

ask me. And if I happen to see the comment when it comes through. So I engage in that wonderful platform that we have now to connect one another. Thank you. Yeah, it's appropriate to say that. It's been great. Okay, that does it for another edition of the 10% happier podcast. If you liked it, please take a minute to subscribe, rate us. Also, if you want to suggest topics, you think we should cover or guests that we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at DanVHarris. Also, if you want to suggest topics, you think we should cover or guests that we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris.

Importantly, I want to thank the people who produced this podcast, Lauren Efron, Josh Cohen, and the rest of the folks here at ABC, who helped make this thing possible. We have tons of other podcasts. You can check them out at abcnewspodcasts.com. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with

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