Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 142: Jeremy Richman, 'There Is Hope in Helping'

Episode Date: July 4, 2018

Jeremy Richman remembers his daughter Avielle as a fun spirit with "this unbelievable smile that she would just give out to anybody," who was as happy playing dress-up as a fairy at a ball as she was practicing Kung Fu and shooting a bow and arrow outside. Avielle was killed with 19 of her classmates and six educators in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, and in her memory, the Richmans started The Avielle Foundation, which funds research on brain health and causations for violent behaviors. 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 did memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Skiggy Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Fair warning guys, this is an emotional episode. Gary Meigh Richmond is my guest. He lost guest he lost his daughter in the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012, the massacre there. I am recording this. We record the introductions to each podcast a couple days before we post them usually and recording this on a day after get another mass shooting in America this time at a newspaper in Maryland at this point five journalists killed. And it's easy to kind of get numbed to these headlines, but there is a real human cost and you're going to hear from a dad today.

And a meditator who had a pre-existing meditation habit that he's resuscitated during the course of his recovery. And I just want to tell you that this is an incredible story. And they're moving and uplifting parts of it and also very practical takeaways. So a great episode. Much more from Jeremy coming up. But first, let's lighten things for just a minute and take some phone calls, and then we'll get back to Jeremy.

So my usual caveat, I am not a meditation teacher, not a mental health expert, just a reporter and a meditator. So I haven't heard these questions in advance, so I just do my best to answer them on the fly. So here we go, call number one. Hey Dan, I just wanted to say thank you my partner and I have a Mindful Muslim Resiliency and Boping Cractive and what we really appreciate is the time you take

to both understand and teach people about the differences of the different types of meditation and I think that those nuances sometimes are cast over understand and teach people about the differences of the different types of meditation. And I think that those nuances sometimes are cast over and I know you say that you're not a teacher, but we just want to tell you that you've been teaching us and that we really appreciate everything we've learned from you.

Thank you so very much. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I don't hear a question there per se, but I'll just say on the issue of being a teacher, Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I don't I don't hear a question there per se, but you know, I'll just say on the issue of of being a teacher, you know, I think it's possible to go get a teacher training in a, you know, reasonably short order as a meditation teacher. And and I think that's a legit thing. That being said, the in the meditation school in which I've been reared, which is terivata

Buddhism, old school Buddhism, those folks, they do a lot of training. I mean, years and years and years of silent meditation retreat. And that's just a different level of authority. You can bring to the table. Authority, understanding may be a better word that you can bring to the table as a teacher. And that is what I don't have. So I do a reasonable amount of daily meditation and I go on silent meditation retreats

and I can teach somebody basic meditation. But when I say I'm not a teacher, that's what I'm referring to. I'm married to a physician who has this incredible amount of training and many of the meditation teachers, I know have comparable levels of time served in training before they go and teach. So I'm just trying to respect that when I say,

I'm not a teacher. But anyway, I really appreciate your message. Thank you. Let's go to call number two. Hey, Dan. This is Gus. I really appreciate your work here. And I've been using the app and reading the new book as well as your old book. And one thing I noticed when I sit down

to practice, I tend to get this sort of anxiety-like feeling in the pit of my stomach, almost like butterflies, but a little worse. And it's very similar to what I've used to call anxiety. I stopped drinking two years ago, started therapy, started some support groups, and I've no longer have anxiety. Except at the moment when I sit down and meditate close my eyes, I tend to get a little ball of something in my stomach. So I was wondering if you have any advice about that. I sometimes make that the focus of my meditation and it often does go away but almost inevitably as soon as I sit down close my eyes I start to feel a little bit

anxious. So I wonder if you have any tips on that. Thanks again. Bye. Thank you. I appreciate that. First of all, that is a towering achievement, stopping drinking two years ago. So I don't want to let that just fly by. That's a big deal. And congratulations to you for doing that and best of luck, as I know it's, you know, you're always, as they say, in recovery. As with so many of the questions that you guys call with, the answer is always embedded right in the question. I think you're doing what you should do. The move in mindfulness meditation when anything arises is to,

and it will get annoying to always hear this, but it is always the thing to do, be mindful of it. Investigate, take a look at it. And so you will see that you will learn a fundamental lesson that we need to learn all the time, which is that it's going to change. It may get worse, it may get better. I use quotes around that word. It may get more intense, it may get less intense, it may go away, it may come back. But everything changes all the time and that is the thing to learn by looking By looking at the these physical sensations that are arising and then how it what kind of thoughts are arising in relationship to the physical sensations

you can watch that whole feedback loop and See that everything changes and also learn something about your mental habits So mindfulness is the move every time. The one thing that came to mind for me as you were speaking is you said sometimes it goes away and I don't know if you are falling into this trap, but sometimes we have this trap when when we're meditating meditating, we try to bring mindfulness to whatever arises often something difficult, like a pain in the knee or some sort of set of physical sensations that are reminiscent of an

emotion or an actual difficult emotion, and our goal is to make it go away. And actually that can have the, in my experience, can have the paradoxical effect of making it worse because you have this desire to make it go away. So to the best of your ability, you might want to not have to drop the agenda or to even better to notice that you have an agenda of making it go away and just be mindful of that. Because what we're trying to do is just say welcome to the party to whatever arises. We're not trying to get rid of it. And if you notice, it's natural to want to get rid of it. And just notice when that arises too, Joseph Goldstein, the great Joseph Goldstein, my meditation teacher who yes,

has never come on this podcast and we'll get him someday. If you want to hear more from Joseph, like he's all over the 10% happier app, so he's jamming, he's all over the app. Anyway, he's never come on the podcast, but I'll forgive him for that. He will at some point. Joseph has this great little phrase that he invented. He calls it in order to mind.

That we're often mindful of something like a physical, an unpleasant physical sensation in order to mind, that we're often mindful of something like a physical, an unpleasant physical sensation in order to make it go away. So the thing to do there is just to notice that, oh yeah, this is in order to mind. Because again, the game is to be, you know, non-judgmentally aware of whatever arises and why does that matter? You've heard me say this a million times and I I'm gonna say it again, because when things arise in the rest of your life, a difficult emotion,

an urge that may be unconstructive, a difficult physical sensation, you don't have to be so reflexively yanked around by it. That's my stick. Those are your calls, always appreciate your calls. The number for leaving a voicemail is right there in the show notes. So go ahead and call. We really, we really love him. So back to Jeremy Richmond. Just to say a little bit more about him, he is actually a neuro pharmacologist by training more than 20 years of research

and drug discovery experience per his bio. He is now, though, out of that business, although he does do some lecturing at Yale, whereas the faculty lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry at the School of Medicine there. But really, most of his energy is directed towards something called the Avi L Foundation, Avi L or Avi,

is the name of his daughter who was murdered at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in December of 2012. And the Aviel Foundation, as you will hear, does a lot of very interesting work in the area of brain health and mental health. And so he's the co-founder and CEO. But I should stop talking and let you hear his story because it's remarkable. And I just remind you, if you have any part of you that's a little reluctant to go there,

there's some amazing and upbeat twists here in this story that I think you'll want to listen for. So here he is, Jeremy Richmond. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. So how did you get into meditation with the start? Well, so it started out way back when I was really young. I was taking, you know, as like a karate kid story. I was taking martial art classes at the YMCA in Arizona and my instructor was kind of a really traditional old school Marshal artist and he practiced Zazen.

So, Zazen is the Zen term for sitting in mediation. He did mediation, yeah. Exactly. And he didn't introduce it that way, but it became part of my instruction and he instructed me. At that time, I had no idea why, but he instructed me, we're going to sit and we're going to count our breaths, and I want you just to not move and see if you can get as high as you can count before you're distracted, and just take note of that. We're going to come back and after our lesson, we're gonna do it again

and you see how high you can get. And we did this very regularly. And then eventually he changed it up. And he said, now we're gonna count on our exhales. And I didn't have any idea why that would make a difference, but it was an experience. And then he said, now I want you to think about the things that distract you,

that when you realize that you're distracted and what those are and kind of look at them and examine them. Eventually we got up to where he was having me kind of like, want you to examine the space in between your breaths and kind of live there for a little while. And at the time they kind of all seemed really esoteric and a little mumbo jumbo, but as I got older, I still practiced it a lot and started studying kind of Zen Buddhism and Buddhism and the different claims that people would get from what you could get from meditation.

And this is in the days of, especially before neuroscience got involved in kind of legitimized any of this. It was, you know, hokey and hippie trippy, but I was raised by, I'm half hippie. So wait, one parent was a hippie? My mom was from the land of crystals and karma quite the hippie and really interested in this. And your dad was not into that? My dad is born in the Bronx, very serious, straight-laced, scientific. How did these two get together, though? I don't know.

I mean, they're both fun. And they both enjoy life in all of its ways. But my dad's very analytical and objective and meditation kind of lived in the other arena of the universe that he wasn't interested in. It was hokey. My mom was the spiritual. My dad was the sort of the scientific. And now I think that it was a perfect marriage because the blending of the two is a great and powerful thing. Later on in life, I kept pursuing it and realized that it had all kinds of benefits that you

write a lot about in Tempers at Hamburg, the idea of being able to find a calm place so that you can respond instead of react to situations. And I think that that's the biggest boon that I've gotten from practicing over most of my life, the mature yet you say you started with what you now know to be Zezen and then you started to study more about Buddhism later. Did you ultimately fall into a kind of practice that you adopted or a formal no they all ended up you know They all ended up being kind of the same thing, just seen through different lights. They would call that the idea of paying attention to sensations and sounds and input from the world as being mindful or being present, or, you know, in whether you were studying

your breaths or a spot on the wall or a coon or anything like it was a way to train the brain to focus on something until that monkey mind steps in and says something you tap to your shoulder or gives you an itch that you can't seem to ignore or that that perseverating thought that you regret that you didn't say something until those things pop in your head and then that's where the work comes in and they're all kind of the same is, is that how do you look at it and kind of let it go and move on to back to your focus again?

Did you find yourself practicing every day? Oh yeah, for years and years of my life, I practiced every day, particularly through college and everything from, you know, people I think helps them to know that to practice, I mean, you could sit for two minutes and still have benefits, you know, but it would be anywhere from two minutes to ten minutes to that ten minutes, which was probably typical to maybe if I had the luxury of a lot of time on my hands, I would spend a fair amount of time. And you got into meditation way before it was cool.

Did you tell people? No, we didn't talk about this. I mean, my friends, all my roommates and my friends all knew that I did it. But it was, you know, hippie trippy still and kind of goofy. And yeah, I was, I was I was the I was the shortest kid all through school all the way into college so I was used to taking people kind of picking on me and stuff so I think I grew out of caring how tall you I'm five six now I'm not a good day but you're not much shorter than me yeah well, I was, I was a little guy for a long time.

I know the feeling. So, so I, you know, I, I gave up really caring what other people thought. I was the kid that, that in school was like, I must have been gone on the day they handed out the how to be cool books because I always seem to be like, how do you guys know that you're not supposed to wear your back back on Bush older? How do you know that this is cool and that's not? And so eventually I just gave up and suddenly I was cool. Just by owning the... This is by not caring.

Yeah, I think that's right. There's actually a meditative lesson in that for sure. Absolutely. Letting go. So did you keep practicing when you had kids? Well, up into my adulthood, it started to wane. As you start to get busier, you realize you've kind of gone a little bit of time, maybe without it. But all the way up until through Aviale's life, we did.

You and your wife? Or? I did. I practiced it all the way up until Apia was killed and then you know, it got pretty rocked and I wasn't really doing much of anything for a while other than trying to create our foundation and just wander through the way that through the cards that we are being dealt with. And then I realized quickly that, you know, of all the times that I probably could really use that effort, I started back up again maybe a year after, and it still has been waxing

and waning, but still valuable. Well, I want to talk about the utility of meditation in these past few years for you specifically, but first you just tell me about just walk me through what Evie L was like. Yeah, you know, every parent's going to brag about their kids. I'm sure that you know that now. But she was just the brightest light. She had this unbelievable smile that she would just give out to a disliked to anybody. It was really infectious because it was just kind of a

first child. She was our first and only kid. And she could light up a room with her smile and her giggle. And she just had a really fun spirit. She wanted to enjoy things, wanted to meet people very gregarious, had a real mature and infinite sense of justice. She could not stand if something wasn't fair or somebody was being mistreated.

She would jump in. I loved the fact that Jen and I really try to dismiss gender prescribed ideologies, you know, stereotypes of the man does this, the woman does this, and you know, so as a result, I think that Avia was just as happy playing Barbies as she would be super heroes or practicing kung fu outside or shooting a bow and she could do more pushups than anybody in her classroom and get hold of her stance for two minutes. And she was really active and then she'd throw on a dress and dance around and pretend she was at a very at a ball. And it was just a free spirit.

She liked to, she would sing everything. She would narrate her whole morning, like in a, like this ongoing song of, I'm coming down the stairs. And she would dance around. And I really miss that. Mad, I bet. I bet. So, talk me about, talk me through the event, it was December 14, 2012. Yeah, on a Friday, December 14 in the San Diego Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. She and 19 of her friends and classmates and six of her educators were killed in the morning at school.

And how did you find out? Well, it was kind of everything drawing up to a close of the school year, and so they had all the little holiday parties and things that you would do in the classroom, and you were planning your Christmas holiday vacation. And we had had plans to come down here to the city to see the Christmas spectacular at the Radio City Music Hall. And so we weren't going to bring her to school that day, but she's no, no, we have to go. It's a dad you have to come in and we're going to build gingerbread houses. And so, you know, we it was a special day because I was home for, I was just going

to work that morning and then head into the school. So I got to put her on the bus instead of, instead of Jennifer, her mom and we were outside. As typical, I didn't have a warm enough jacket on her. So Jen came outside, which is just so fortunate. You came outside and yelled at me. What do you think in get a jacket on our so we put a jacket on our and that's when the bus came and so both of us got to say goodbye that morning and um, she got on the bus went to school and I went back into the house to sit at the computer and work for a little bit and I was uh, I was talking to the group my the group that I worked with. And the other line rang, and I answered it real quick.

And it was a robo call saying that there's a lockdown because of a shooting taking place in Newtown. And right away, I forgot to go to the other line and say goodbye, but I hung up the phone and went down and talked to Jen and said, hey, I forgot to go to the other line and say goodbye, but I hung up the phone and went down and talk to Jen and said, hey, I just got a really crazy call. But really in the back of my head, assuming it must be a high school or a mistake. Did they say it was at a school? It's just new town public schools are in lockdown because the schools are in lockdown.

Yeah. But then the phones kept ringing and now we're hearing sirens and we live pretty close to San Diego Elementary. So we're hearing, I mean, police cars are racing by our house. And Jen called a friend of ours that we know is she's often at the school and does a lot of things in the classrooms and we called her and she was there and said it's our school, it's our classrooms.

Get here right away and so we jumped in the car and it seemed like it took us days to get there, but with tons of police racing by us. And we pulled up and we couldn't get to the school because it was all blocked off with the full SWAT team by that point. And so we went into what there's a firehouse right on the corner. And so we all went into the firehouse. And as parents met up with their kids, we realized that there was a small group of us that were missing our kids. And

Jen and I made a list and started getting people to sign it who hadn't found their kids yet. And that became the 26. At some point did they formally notify you? Yeah, there was some, unfortunately I had run into some of OVL's friends that were in the classroom and was sparing some details. I could tell things were pretty grim. And so I kind of knew, in one part of my brain, I kind of knew it was not gonna be good. And the odds were really bad for Avi.

And then the other part is like, oh, maybe he's mistaken. But then eventually, your governor Maloy was there and the chief of police was there. And they eventually said, you know, there's 26 bodies and there's 26 names on this list and things are pretty grim. And at some point did they read off the names on the list or had you come over to you and say your daughters on the list or hand you come over to you and say your daughter's on this list? They couldn't, I mean obviously at that point they can't identify, they have no idea who the kids are.

Oh okay. You know, there's just 26 bodies, 26 names of missing people. So obviously those were who were. Sorry, I thought when you referred to a list, I thought they came out with a list of names. You're talking about the list you create. We had sort of collected it. We just said everybody who's missing, I loved one, write your name here.

And so how does it go or how did it go for you? Where do you, because I project myself into your situation as the father of a young child, myself. I assume I would collapse right away and then never recover. So how did it go in that moment for you? Did it take a while for the weight of it to fully hit you or did you hit you right away? It's really surreal. It's hard to describe it. The weight of it hits you right away, but it just sits there.

And so there's never a time that you feel like it went away. I mean, you know, it's like getting a bad cut or, you know, I don't know if you ever broken a bone or anything. And at some point saying, oh, it's 100% healed. You'll never, you would never say that. It's just, finally, one day you realize it's, it's better. But in this case, obviously, it's a pretty infinite heartbreak. It's, but clearly in the first 48 hours is just a blur. I remember specific things about it and other. So I have no recollection other than literally lying on the floor just apoplectic.

Just not thinking just... Yeah, I mean, you go through all these random thoughts just popping your head What if I hadn't put her in school that what yeah, what ifs? I mean if I could delete those two synapses from my brain. What if but You know you go through what ifs and you go through a lot of anger and a lot of why why and Then you go through random weird other things. Like how should I be feeling? How do I feel? I can't even figure that.

Like it's so out of control and so disproportionately unreal that it's hard to even really put your finger on what you're feeling and if you're feeling appropriately and how you should be responding. It's just, it was all surreal. For Jen and I, we immediately needed to focus on something. And really early, I was so lucky. Jen said, we need to get out of bed. We need to keep moving literally, just physically moving a little bit. So let's just try to find something of beauty to look for and that's going to be like an active exercise. Find something of beauty, you know, a bird or the way the sun is shining or somebody doing a kind gesture or, and we

did that for a day and realized like right away that that's actually super easy and it's really rewarding but you can find stuff beauty you can find things of beauty everywhere and how many days after two days maybe oh really so this kick this kind of survival mechanism kicked in for you early pretty early and and then then we said all right let's up the game and see if we can do something of beauty every day for each other, for ourselves, for somebody else. And that's really hard, actually, to purposefully do something, to give to the world. That's tricky.

But also, in the meantime, we knew that we had to do something in response to this in the sense of finding a new purpose. There's a great quote that attributed to Victor Frankle, but he was actually quoting Nietzsche when he said, those who have the why can endure anyhow. And we had a strong why. So now there was no obstacles. We can endure anything really. And so, Jen and I are both scientists and so we decided to play to our strengths and create

the AVL foundation to study the neuroscience, the underpinnings of violence and the risk factors that lead there and the protective factors that lead away from it towards compassion, kindness, connection, resilience. And that became our endeavor. And how, and well, that's how we met because I spoke at a fundraiser for the Appale Foundation. So, so how long has the foundation been in existence? Well, so it was, you know, basically by January of 2013, we had incorporated and filled out applications to become a nonprofit and got that expedited and approved and we've been going since then. So you just knew somehow, maybe it wasn't cognitive, maybe it was more visceral, but you just knew, I'm guessing here, that either you let this

crush you permanently and irrevocably and make you completely useless to the world always, or you lean into it and find a way through that honors your daughter in the best way possible. Am I saying that correctly? Absolutely, that's exactly it. And the next step that I think is really important and why somebody hasn't perhaps created a foundation that's committed to this endeavor is that we wanted to prevent others from suffering the way that we were suffering and continue to suffer to this day. So if there's a hope that we can get somebody help before it's another tragedy, then that

would be everything right there. And so tell me about how the foundation is going, what's the work, what has what work has been done, give me everything. Well, so our mission is really two-sided. It's on the one side is we want to actually fund and foster research to studying violence as a disease that could be prevented intervening cured. And so we have very traditional neuroscience research that we're funding that ranges anything from neuroscience research that we're funding that ranges anything from studying the brain circuits that fire in psychopathic violent offenders versus non and see if we can write those changes of circuits from one from the psychopath to the normal individual. We funded a study at the University of Michigan looking at what's called a discordant twin study. These are really cool studies because they take monosigotic, so identical twins, they're

genetically the same, that are raised in the same household and environment, but that their behaviors are different, where one of the two of the twins has antisocial, aggressive antisocial violence, and the other does not. And so now you can really shed a light saying differences that you see in the modification of their DNA, what we call epigenetics, differences in brain structure and biochemistry, blood chemistry, must be likely part of the violent behavior. And so those are really valuable because the system is fairly well-controlled. And in this case, it was a pilot study. I mean, at this point, we're not funding huge

studies that need to be done. We're waiting for more funding to do that. But the pilot study was so successful that they were then able to get real meaningful dollars that resulted in $7.5 million in funding as a result of the pilot data, which is really rewarding. So studies like that, we also have some clinical studies that are ongoing and some public health programs and studies looking at the consequences of adverse childhood experiences and what

changes that those can lead to and how can we potentially prevent them and write those adult behaviors. And then we also have a whole army of interns and older fellows that we help to fund and encourage them to move into the brain health space, whether it's studying neuroscience or going into medical school eventually to study behavior or the brain or psychology or therapy or even engineering to study the next machine that can make imaging the brain affordable, accurate, approachable, and reproducible, or even moving into business world to get people to be more socially, viscally, responsible. But we also realize that science and a vacuum is really of no value if you can't give it to the everyday person in a way that's completely approachable, digestible, so that when they go home, they can reach into a toolbox

and find something meaningful to them personally. And generally speaking most sciences done in this very privileged tower, they speak their own language, they, we speak our own language, we have this kind of high brow thought process, and that's not of any value if the everyday person can't access it. And so the other half of our mission is community engagement and education,

and that's where we were so fortunate to have you come up to one of our brainstorm experiences to talk about your experience with meditation and your crisis moment and things like that. Much more of our conversation right after this quick break. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai.

And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the build-up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans form the free Brittany movement dedicated to fring her from the infamous conservatorship,

Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone

who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon music or the Wondery app. It strikes me here. You're talking about the breadth of your work that Bobby who as you described her had this fear sense of justice would very much approve because this is justice in the most holistic sense, which is like, yeah, let's try to figure out what's causing this and stop other people from having to go through this pain and also let's find out if there are ways to treat people who are likely to commit

violence so that they don't harm others and themselves in the process. Exactly. I hope that she would be very proud of this. If I recall, you are a neuroscientist, right? Right. When I was younger, I wanted to study the brain and neuroscience. As far as I could find, there was no undergraduate neuroscience programs. There probably were, but I didn't look very far.

I was in Arizona at the time, and they didn't have an undergraduate neuroscience program at the University of Arizona. So I studied philosophy for most of my time there, which really was great. And in the meantime, I volunteered and worked eventually in a number of neuroscience research labs. And then when I graduated, I started a graduate program and I got my PhD in neuropharmacology. So I studied how chemicals affect behavior,

whether you make the chemicals in your body, or you take them in nutritionally, therapeutically or recreationally, how they affect your behavior is what I studied and what was exciting to me. And then I moved that into, for my postgraduate work, I moved that into much smaller spaces looking in neurons at how you form little neighborhoods of aggregated proteins. So the complex is that come together to help signal and transfer information from one part of the brain to the other.

How those change in response to activity is a model that we would pose is how we learn. We call it long term potentialation at LTP. And that's a study how you could recruit different components of a signaling system together with activity. And then I went into drug discovery at a small biotech pharmaceutical company, studying Parkinson's Alzheimer's schizophrenia and obesity. And then that somehow grew into cardiovascular research interestingly. And at the time I had really been fortunate in that environment to have

exposure to the drug discovery pipeline from the bench all the way to the bedside, which is really fun, but it's also really rare that you get to be on a project from one end all the way to the other end. And so then I was fortunate to get recruited by a big large pharmaceutical company, Beringer Engelheim, which is here among other places in the world, but there's this place in Danberry, Connecticut, and that's how we moved the family across the country. And then unfortunately a year and a half later, the tragedy occurred and we right away created

the foundation and that's where I am now. Another what if? Yeah. So you're not doing that work anymore. You're full time at the foundation. That's right, you know. How important for you in your recovery has been, has the process of taking constructive action through this foundation bin?

I mean, I don't know. I don't know if it covers the right word. Maybe it is. I don't know either, to be honest. It's always funny when you've only taken one road. You don't know what the other road traveled would have been. I guess Aegis Hens will be sighing that we could have taken the other. But I don't think so.

But that's all I know. And I think it's been, it would be, it would be, I suspect I would be bitter and frustrated and lacking a lot of purpose if I didn't, if I didn't do this. What are your marriage? Because a lot of marriages don't survive the death of a child, never mind a murdered child. Yeah, that's a good point. And, you know, no marriage is perfect. I don't think, I think everybody has some struggles.

And when you add a child into it, it really tests the bonds because if you disagree on how you're going to affect one way of raising the kid versus another, those are difficult. And we had our troubles, no question about it, but I think we were doing a good job and that it was, we both, at the end of the day, it was fun and rewarding and we liked it a lot. And when we lost Aviel, you could see how, if we had a disagreement religiously or politically or if we weren't on the same page on how to or what how to respond what we should do Then that would be just a profound divide because of that passion that you can you know You can see that we we both luckily were on that same page. So if anything early it drew us

closer You know, you made an interesting and really emotional decision, which is another kid. Yeah. Well, really early in that in 2013, we knew that we we weren't done parenting. I'll tell you, other than the day, Friday, 12, 14 itself, which is clearly the worst day of my life, the next to that would be Father's Day than the following, because I didn't have any other children, and I wasn't a father anymore. And that was just brutal. And we so badly wanted to be parents. That was our identity.

You sure we were scientists and we had hobbies and things that we really love to do. But underlying all of that, we wanted to be parents. We looked into adoption and we had some help from some very kind of people that could scientifically help us out a little bit. And so we have now two... Meaning IVF. Yeah. A whole lot of our child too is the product of IVF.

Okay, right on. Yeah, so the funny questions can be, where do kids come from? Well dad goes to the hospital, yeah. Okay, right on. Yeah, so the funny questions can be where do kids come from in? The hospital. Yeah Mom goes to another doctor, but I referred to our kid as the most expensive child Well, so now we have a three and a half year old little girl imaging and I want in half your old boy Owen Two Two. Yep. Yep. I knew I knew of one. Yeah. Is it, I would imagine there's an enormous amount of joy

in being able to be parents again, but also I'm guessing not uncomplicated in some ways. Yeah. Boy, and every day we hear different ones. I mean, some that are just so suddenly beautiful and heartbreaking, heartbreakingly tragic at the same time. I look at Imogen and she is the spinning image, like a twin of Aviel. And that's beautiful and it's just brutal.

Sometimes I look at pictures that come through like on the computer slideshow and I'll just wait which one is that and that breaks my heart and it's also beautiful at the same time. They have definitely a little bit different personalities for better, you know, like it's great that they're both different. And then, but at the same time, yeah, there's nothing better than having that pleasure of parenting. But in terms of challenges, the other day, Imogen was blowing a dandelion and I said, you know what you're supposed to do? And she said, oh, I need to make a wish. And I said, what do you wish? And she said, I wish my sister was still alive. And that took me up. That's brutal. And she's definitely, you know, she's old enough. We, of course,

she's going to be raised knowing that she, she had a sister, both of them, Owen and Imogen. them, oh, and, and, and imagine. But they're, you know, they're too young to know that she was murdered and certainly not in their school when we want them to look forward to going to school. So that's going to be really tricky. And, and we can already just at three and a half, we can already see her trying to guess, you know, like, what exactly happened? And she's making assumptions. And we don't want to lie. We don't want to, but you know, she's too young for that. The Sandy Hook elementary school still exists. That's a real controversy. I probably wouldn't want to get into, but yeah, they, they, for some reason demolished it and then rebuilt another school very expensively on the same site, which is just kind of silly.

Is that where these kids will go? Imaging in there? Absolutely not. No. No, they'll have to go somewhere else. That would be too. I can not stomach taking them to that same place. Even if it's a new building.

What's the point with so what if it's a new building? I mean, that's where we would be taking them anyway The I said I question myself before when I said I use the word recovery because I just don't I don't know if you if If you ever recover or if you're just constantly in a process of recovery and it brings to mind a beautiful article I read years ago in the New Yorker by a pair of father, I believe, who had lost the child to illness. And he said, losing a child, you get a new organ who's only job is to secrete sadness. And that really stayed with me years ago. I don't remember much about the details of the article

other than that line. Does that bring true to you? That's, yeah, that definitely brings true. I try to express even to very close friends, but I try to express to people the fully understanding forever. Like you will never see her again, you will never hold her, you know, feel that weight in your arms, never snuggle, never get that hug and kiss on the cheek. That's like you will never have that again. That's that's in the fact that that's with me in my mind always sleeping, waking any time of day and still to this day. But the the weight that feeling of sadness is definitely

waned. It's waned. Oh yeah. What role if any has meditation played? Well, I can only speculate. You know, I haven't gone off to retreats. I haven't done any really like incredibly formal training. But the way I see it for me, what it's really afforded me in my life is, when I've done in the past very physical things, running long distances or martial art fights or different activities that are hard physically,

meditation has given me the ability to examine, wow, my legs are absolutely burning. I, in my brain is telling me to stop running, isn't that fascinating? Like, you could pick it out, you could look at it and say, that's, that's, that's so fascinating how it's trying to protect me. Okay, but keep running, you got another eight miles

or whatever, you know, keep your guards up or whatever the, whatever it is that you're doing, that you can separate it. And I'm not saying that I could separate myself from the, I was clearly feeling heartbroken, feeling saddened as I still feel those things, but I can look at it and say, that makes sense, that is a horrible thing.

What a terrible, handier don't. Keep moving forward, keep trying to make good out of it, keep trying to, and so to make good out of it, keep trying to. And so the process of meditation finds those, the ability, again, I think you said it so well and it really resonated with me, the ability to respond instead of react. And being able to do that is hugely liberating because it allows you to move forward despite discomfort, despite being incredibly overwhelmingly outside your comfort zone.

Just to be clear, respond not reactive, not mine. I use it a lot, but it's not going to find me. It's a venerable meditation cliche. But I'm curious about the utility of meditation in extreme circumstances. You had, by the time, December 14, 2012, rolled around, you had a lot of meditation under your belt. Was it, do you have any sense of whether having a mindfulness practice in your life was of any use in what I would imagine are the worst circumstances imaginable without question. I mean being able to

still move to being able to act being able to think rationally with all the walls crashing down with all of the whaling and sadness and horror coming out of me and everybody around me. Still being able to think, I need to do this. I need to, I need to move here. I need to help this person. I need to make sure Jen is okay. I need to eat. I need to keep moving forward. That, that, it without question afforded me to do that. But it goes back to the same. That's all I've done.

So I have no idea what it would have been like without it. I don't want to get to do an end of two. No, you don't. You have an end of one that we all do. So, so my hunch is your, your response. And I say you collectively yours and Jen's response the way you describe it to this unbelievably bad situation was so to you the light a loaded term enlightened, you know, to want to find beauty and in particular finding beauty by being of use to other people.

I mean, I just wonder it seems to me that that I mean, I just wonder, it seems to me that that may well have been fed by what you learned about your own mind through the process of meditation. I've never practiced what they call loving kindness. Loving kindness meditation. I'm not till very later, before the murders, but really late in life. Do you want to describe for people who don't know what love and kind is medicine? So the idea that you sort of give compassion, you send out love to somebody that you know, somebody that you just a generic, somebody you don't know, then somebody perhaps that you

would not normally want to give out some, maybe some love too. And then to everybody, is that sum it up? Yes. So basically you close your eyes, you're in the meditative posture and you are act, you're envisioning specific people and repeating these phrases silently in your mind. May you be happy, may be healthy, maybe safe, may you live with ease, things like that. And you're doing it, you're, you're just kind of doing it systematically from yourself to a benefactor, a mentor, a dear friend, a neutral person,

somebody who you see, but don't have much relationship with, a difficult person, and then everybody. That's the classical progression. So you started doing that late in your meditation career. Yeah, yeah. That's the classical progression. So you started doing that late in your meditation career. Yeah. Yeah. And probably a little bit softer than just very methodically.

Like just the idea of think of somebody I care about a lot and think good things to them, good fortune, good life health. Then somebody that, you know, just a generic person on the street corner, then somebody that I'm having some strife with, perhaps. Um, and I thought that that, that last one in particular is very liberating, um, because you can see, uh, it frees you up to see why somebody might be motivated to behave in a particular way. And the compassion of being able to say, all right, you know, I'm not cool with their actions, but I can understand why that they would behave that way.

It's pretty liberating. And taking that specifically, so, I mean clearly in two ways meditation has helped me, just in the ability to kind of think, despite the sensations that I'm having and the feelings that I'm having, and still act, that was probably the most important, but also being able to accept people's kindness and also define the ways and the need to give out compassion and kindness, despite the kind of the, at that time, you know, it's all about me, me, me, and it's actually really hard until you're sort of on the other side of that curtain. It's hard to express to people how hard it is to accept, like, the overwhelming wave of compassion

and kindness that you have to receive that with the sort of composure is really hard. Same more about that, because I have a friend who lost is two little boys in a plane crash, and so he's a very close friend, and he's been on the receiving end of a giant wave of compassion, and it's just

interesting, you know, what, still very much in contact with him. And so it's interesting to watch how he receives it. I think he's received it with, you know, immaculate grace. But I had never thought about it the way you're discussing it. So can you say more? It's hard. It gets overwhelming and you realize you want to show your gratitude. But after a while you've just got, you've gotten on left, you're just tapped and you realize you want to show your gratitude, but after a while

you've gotten on left, you're just tapped and you still need to viscerally need to think people. And then you realize that you have the need to do something too. You need to be giving out. People are, oh no, no. I couldn't hear of you coming over and helping me move. Of course not. But you would have done that before the tragedy and you still need to, it's a selfish need

to be able to give. I don't think that's really countered. In fact, the thing, this idea is what I'm writing my next book about, a compassion, kindness, that it is, it's so counterintuitive, because we're all in this black hole of self-centeredness. In particular, I can imagine I would go there deeply

if something were to happen to my son, but actually the way out, or oh, way out, is to be of service. Absolutely. That's incredibly important to me. It's a fuel that's in you and if you don't burn it, I think you'd spiral in a horrible depression and you'd feel just completely hopeless and worthless. There's hope in helping. No question about it.

That's an incredible thing. And it's an incredible thing you've done. Can you just tell anybody who wants to know how to find your organization, learn more about it, perhaps support it, give it, we call this kind of, we call this the plug zone. Can you just give us everything social media websites? Absolutely. It's the Aviel Foundation, avi.ellefoundation.org. You can find us online. Please check it out.

You can donate there freely. Give everything you want and can give. And we'll put it to good use. And we're more than happy to tell you exactly how we're using it and what we're doing any donation that we give. And we'll put it to good use. And we're more than happy to tell you exactly how we're using it and what we're doing in any donation that we give. And we say every scent is change. And we mean it. So whatever you think you can afford,

if you don't think that's worthwhile, it is, I promise you. And you can find us on importantly, having these kind of conversations on podcasts, on social media, with your friends in your communities, having discussions about brain health, about talking about your feelings and your motivations for doing things. And recognizing that the brain is just another organ,

that's really important. If you're on a treadmill at the gym and you're running and you tell the guy next to you, man, I got to, I'm on the stat, my doctor has me on the statin' because my cholesterol's too high and I got to eat this crazy diet. He's just going to shake his head, oh yeah, that's a bummer, no problem. But if you said I'm on the anti-psychotic medication because I'm having these horrible hallucinations, you know, he's going to go to the machine next over because, uh, but the fact is the brain is just like the heart, the lung, the liver, the kidneys, it can be healthy and it can be unhealthy.

And we all need to talk about that and recognizing it and recognize it. It's not a character flaw if you feel depressed. It's not a broken child if they're hyperactive. It's not, it's not a broken child if they're hyperactive. It's not. It's just another organ But like the other organs, you're responsible for their health And so you don't get out of this just because it's biochemical or structural you need to take care of it So you are responsible for finding eliminating the risk factors that lead to violence

engendering protective factors in yourself and in your loved ones and in your communities. And we need to start in our communities and in the day and age, you can start that, looking us up on social media, at Aviel Foundation and on Twitter at AVI foundation, Avie Foundation and want Instagram and LinkedIn. So you can find us easily. I should have asked this earlier, maybe, I don't know how this is going to go, but we're

talking about sending compassion in particular to difficult people. Do you think you could, could you do that toward the person who took your daughter's life? Well, there's a, there's no short stories with me. Sorry, Dan. But let me say, this is a podcast. Well, we'll be say a couple of the first all this is a podcast. They're designed to be ranger, ram, ram, rambly at times, but in a good way.

Also, you're doing great. So this is an incredibly difficult thing to discuss. And so you're, so you should have no sheep. Okay. Well, there's, there's a great quote by a rabbi A.J. Heschel and he said, few are guilty, but all are responsible. And I really do believe that we're all responsible for our own health, for the health of our loved ones and our communities. So there's no question the Sandy Hook shooter was a profoundly

disturbed individual. And what led up to that, I can only speculate, but a lot of people in the community knew that there were very profoundly disturbing characteristics of the individual profoundly disturbing characteristics of the individual from really young, like five years old, all the way up his whole life. His family chose to pull him out of school, to keep him hidden in the house, to give him the rule of the roost there, to engage with them through a love of fire at Herms. That's a strange mix. And at the end of the day, why were they so closed off? Why it comes from this fear, the shame, this stigmatization and discrimination that you get with anything related to mental, mentalness, mental disturbances. And so instead of taking care of it they hit it and this is very common and we need people to recognize that you are responsible for taking care of this organ to brain that houses our memories our feelings and

our behaviors and and to not be afraid of it and to not to not be afraid of it. And to not be ashamed of it. And so, in terms of forgiveness, no, I'm really effing angry that nothing was done, that there was no intervention. But that's angered a lot of people. And at the end of the day, that doesn't bring Aviel back. What will be meaningful is that other people can help to break down this stigmatization, this barrier so that people will get help and will be armed with the knowledge that we need to get help to them, which we're not yet.

So we need to know more so that we can actually give meaningful diagnoses to brain illnesses instead of diagnosing symptoms and syndromes like answering yes to five out of nine questions on a questionnaire and we get diagnosed as depressed and you're like, well, duh, that's why I came in here in the first place, doc. I know I'm depressed, but being able to say, you know, little Johnny's got too much dopamine in his right, singular cortex, which is just a fancy pants way of saying, explains his impulse control problem, that's cool. Here's what we're going to do to work with it.

Now it's not a judgment on the parenting, it's not a judgment on a broken child, it's, this is a fact. Here's the, here's the health diagnosis and here's what we're going to do to try to remedy it. We need to move to that, to that arena. So in terms of forgiveness, I guess, no, I don't forgive them, the family or the shooter, but I understand how it could get to that. And I don't want it to happen again. Is it? Well, there's no question you're taking a lot of constructive action to take the conditions where this can happen and reduce the likelihood that those conditions arise again. This is an incredible thing you're doing. There's a difference. So I might at least between

forgiveness and compassion, you know, when you're doing or loving kindness, then you're doing a meta practice that we discussed before, loving kindness. Right. When you, you know, there's a role there for a difficult person, or an enemy is actually the way it's classified. Would it be too much to put anybody from his family or him in that slot for you? Would that, I would imagine just speaking personally, it would be too much for me. But I don't know if you could in a meditative posture work with that? I think I think had his mom survived.

I could answer that question, so I don't think I could truthfully answer it today because there really isn't anybody that was in his direct life that you could blame and say, okay, I'm going to send that person as an enemy, some loving kindness and compassion. You could do it for somebody who's not here anymore though. Yeah, I don't think I can. Yeah, I mean, I don't think I can. Yeah, I mean, I don't think I could either. I'm just curious. I don't know if it would help, but if it's not doable, there's no way to know.

But I do see a role in trying to look at the situation and say, how did it get there? Does that make any sense? And that is a form of compassion. It doesn't even have to be forgiveness, but it is an understanding. And that's actually quite liberating to know, all right, I can see how it got there. Yeah, I think that would be better than blind,

omnidirectional rage. It adds more nuance to the situation without pushing you to the point of sort of like what sometimes referred to as idiot compassion, you know, just like forgiving anybody for any trespass. Yeah. Is there anything I should ask that didn't, but I didn't, that I didn't ask? Those are always the things I think of like in the stairwell on the way now but not that I can think of right now. I really appreciate you doing this. I feel lucky to have met you and I'm glad we set this up. Likewise it's been a

real honor to him. Thanks. 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 Dan B. Harris. Importantly, I want to thank the people who produced this podcast, Lauren F. Ron, 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 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself

by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.