Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 172: Mark Epstein, Combining Buddhism and Western Psychotherapy

Episode Date: January 30, 2019

If it were not for this week's guest, Dan Harris may never have found meditation. Mark Epstein, M.D. is a psychiatrist and the author of a number of books about the interface of Buddhism and psychotherapy. Dr. Epstein discovered Buddhism at a young age and says he saw therapy as very Buddhist, making it a natural transition. He explains how the traditions, when used together, can lead to spiritual and psychological growth. Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail at 646-883-8326. The Plug Zone Website: http://markepsteinmd.com/ Books: http://markepsteinmd.com/?cat=2 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

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

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

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUT I'm Dan Harris. I was having a chat the other day with my longtime colleague and friend, our chief anchor here at ABC News George Stephanopoulos, who had just come back from his holiday break. And one of the books he read and really enjoyed on that break was called Advice Not Given

by Dr. Mark Epstein. I was really excited to hear that because I love that book and I love the guy who wrote it even more. Dr. Mark is a repeat guest on this podcast. We don't do that often, but he absolutely warrants it. If you read 10% happier, you know a little bit about Mark. I read about him quite a bit in that book. wrote a what was I think the first book I ever read on meditation and on Buddhism called Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, which was a gift for my wife and this is an overused phrase but I'm going to use it anyway because it happens to be apt in this case changed my life and I called them up and essentially asked them if he would be my friend. And that began a years long set of conversations that really had a big effect on my mind and on my life.

And I wrote about them extensively in 10% happier. And so he's out with a new book, which is just out in paperback. It's called Advice Not Given. And like all of his books it this one's fantastic it's a little bit more personal he talks a lot he takes you into the room as he does therapy he is a dr. mark is a psychiatrist who has a private practice here in New York city and is also a long time practicing Buddhist in fact he got into Buddhism before he got went to med school and became a shrink

but he really in this book advice not given takes you into the room as he as he's doing therapy talks a lot about why he held back from talking about Buddhism and meditation with his patients for a long time talks about mistakes he's made in therapy talks about the death of his father the nature of his own inner critic, ways for all of us to manage our egos, the voices, the voice in our heads, talks a lot about the role that Buddhism has played personally in his life, and he's got some criticisms of the modern mindfulness movement, which I happen to share. So a lot there with Mark, and I, you know, I just, I think this will come through in the interview,

but I give him and his work the heartiest of endorsements. If you like this podcast and maybe if you like the 10% happier app or any of the books that I've written, he is in many ways the Senate, one of, if not the sort of most important causes and conditions for all of this to come about, because I had I not met him, I don't think I would have gotten as deeply into meditation and Buddhism as I've subsequently become. In fact, I ran into Mark recently at the end of, I was in the last day of a meditation retreat up in central Massachusetts at the Insight Meditation Society, and Mark was on like the first or second day of his, and I ran into him. I was taking a walk, and he was taking a walk, and we sort of broke the rules, and I got a hug, and we were chatting for just a quick second, and I mentioned to him, you know, I

wouldn't be here. I can't imagine a situation in which I would have ended up on a meditation retreat, me, given my history and proclivities, were it not for his books and his friendship. So, yeah, he's a big figure in my life and I think you're gonna get a lot out of this interview. So that's coming up first a few items of business. One is just a reminder, the voice mail's are now at the end of the show. We started that last week.

This is gonna be the way we're going to do it going forward. And also as I know, I've been promising this for a while, but we'll get to it pretty soon. In the future, it won't just be me entering the questions, but this week you're stuck with me. Also, a couple of new things in the 10% happier app. Two new meditations up there, one from Orrin Sofer, which is about falling asleep, Orrin, one of our most popular teachers.

Also from the one of the newer additions to the app, Jessica Mori, who is phenomenal. She's got a new one on there called Waking Up. And I do want to give a big shout out to a woman who plays a big role in producing this show, Tiffany O'Mahundro. She does a lot of work editing this show and getting it into shape. And so all

of us here in the New York office deeply appreciate her work. And she had a baby last week. So I want to give a big shout out to her and a congratulations to her and her family. A couple of notes on Mark before we get into this. So he is, as I said before, he's a psychiatrist in private practice here in New York City. He's written a number of books, including Thoughts Without A Thinker. The aforementioned going to pieces without falling apart, going on being open to desire. These are really beautiful books. And the latest, which is, as I said, just out in paperback is called Advice Not Given. I do want to mention that this was recorded a while ago.

We held it for a minute. So you will hear a reference in the present tense to Arizona Senator John McCain, who has, of course, unfortunately passed since then, but so don't let that be too jarring. That's just a reflection of the fact that this was taped a little while ago. All right, enough of my raving on and on about Mark, you can fall in love with him for

yourself here. And we do not go too much into his personal biography the way I often do with people sort of walking through their lives. If you're interested in that, go back and check out his first interview with us, but there's a lot here, a lot here. So here we go, here's Mark Epstein. Nice to see you. Wonderful.

You've got your summer haircut. Yep. That's got it. You just got it. It looks good. Yeah, last week. Yeah. So in the new book, it felt I was saying to you

before we started rowing. I actually think it, I'm hesitant to say it's my favorite of your books because I love all of the books. I want you to love this one more, but I kind of do love this one more. It feels more personal to me. Am I right about that? I tried to write it in a spoken voice, and I wanted it to be coming really from me, not from my mind, if that makes sense.

Well, we would unpack that though. not from my mind if that makes sense. Well, we would unpack that though. It's not written in a dense or semi-dense conceptual way where I'm trying to figure out concepts. It's written from an experiential place that I'm just trying to communicate the way I would if I was talking out loud. It has always felt to me a little bit knowing you personally and then being an avid reader of your books that as your authorial voice has held something back.

And I think in this book I didn't feel that way. Good. Well, even knowing me personally you might feel like my personal voice is holding something back, but... At times, at times, sometimes it all comes up. That's why I'm a shrew. It works. But so, you... was that a decision in your part? Like, okay, look, I'm gonna kind of let it go on this one.

Well, I didn't know what the book was gonna be when I started writing it. I started writing it a couple of years before it took shape and I started writing it by, you know, I only write one day a week and I didn't know what my subject material was gonna be. So I would just come to my desk on that one day and try to write something real about what it happened in the office or about what had happened in my life or what had happened on retreat or what I was thinking about or what I was feeling. I tried to write a page and I accumulated a lot of material, some of which went into the book. I have a lot of other bits and pieces that didn't make it into the book, but somewhere down the line, I got the idea for the title,

advice not given. I was on a meditation retreat and I was thinking about my father who had passed away a couple of years before. And then I was thinking about my patients who I was not always so forthcoming with as you have already indicated about my Buddhist leanings. And then the phrase advice not given sort of came down into my mind. And I thought, oh, that's a good title for the book. And I had a different subtitle for a while. But and then some time later, I thought, oh, the eightfold path that could work as a structuring device. You know you have to explain what the eightfold path is.

The eightfold path is a structuring device that the booty used in his fourth noble truth to explain the both the path into Nirvana, Enlightenment Awakening, and the path out of Nirvana, Enlightenment Awakening, because his four noble truths, not to get lost in this, but the first truth is like the problem, or the disease, the illness, which is unsatisfactory ness, or duke or suffering. The second truth is the cause of the disease, which is clinging or craving, or thirst, or ego, or attachment, or various words have been put on it. The third truth is there is a cure, which is enlightenment or nirvana or blowing out the craving or awakening. And the fourth truth is the eightfold path. So why does the fourth truth come after the third truth? The way to the release, why is it given afterwards? Because just getting a glimmer of awakening, I think, doesn't necessarily cure you of everything. You have to use that to get a handle on yourself in a continuous way. So the eightfold path is not just about meditation,

only three-eighths of it is about meditation. The other five-eighths are about your conceptual understanding of what's real and what's important in life. Those are the first two. And the next three are ethical, behavioral kinds of things, right speech, right action, right livelihood. So I go into a whole thing about why right does right imply wrong. I don't think so.

The Buddha, the word the Buddha used, wasn't right. Like we say right and wrong was more, right, like if something's crooked, I'm going to write it, you know, balanced. And some people use realistic, or now I'm even thinking real, you know, like the point of all this is to be more real. So anyway, we could go on about that. But it came to me that I could structure the book using the eight-fold path as eight chapters. And then I had to fit all the little bits that I'd been writing. You know, which ones would go well with right speech? And which ones would go well with right motivation? And which ones would go well with right mindfulness? And then I had to

write, you know, things that made more sense, that explained a little bit about. I was trying to reinterpret those, those, uh, different aspects of the Eightfold Path, instead of the classical one of right speech, meaning don't gossip and don't say nasty things about someone to think about it more as, uh, right speech could be how we talk to ourselves. So what you sometimes call the inner critic, you know, right speeches like not putting yourself down all the time or not putting down your parents all the time in your mind or your wife or your husband or your children or, you know, how you talk to yourself really matters.

So that kind of reinterpretation of things. Why do you think you held back your buddhistic leanings from your patients? Well, I didn't want to be a, you know, like a Christian therapist or a Jewish therapist. I mean, imagine if it was like if you went to a therapist and they were laying a, a, a, a, a, a, a, you know, telling you to pray or whatever.

I think it's very different. I know you think it's very different, but, but you didn't always think it was very different. That's right. There would have been a time when you would have been the last thing you would have. Right. You would have let yourself do, you know. Um, had I, I just, I should have met you earlier. You did meet me earlier. No, I mean much earlier. Yeah. Well, you, you might have seen me and not recognized.

Well, that's right. You know, that's right. Um, but anyway, I would have been in hiding. So, um, uh, so I really wanted to be a therapist. You know, I was deep into Buddhism before turning towards a career as a psychiatrist. So I had that in me. You found Buddhism really in college.

In college, 18, 19, 20 years old. So I had a good seven years or so of that was really my primary thing. And then I took the pre-med courses that I didn't take in college and went to medical school with the idea of becoming a psychiatrist. I think there were two people in my medical school class out of 100 and however many who wanted to be a psychiatrist. But I had that agenda and I really wanted to learn how to do that right therapy in a way

that was right for me. And a lot of that is not giving advice. Advice not given. It's not leading with what the therapist thinks the person should do. Because often the person who's in therapy doesn't even quite understand for a long time why they're in therapy, what's really causing the anxiety that brought them or what the real issue is, or sometimes people who were sexually molested when they were young, I don't want to talk about it, don't even really remember it for a while.

So a therapist has to be patient, and a therapist has to wait, and a therapist has to make space. And that all seemed very Buddhist to me. I learned how to do that for myself through meditation. And that seemed very natural as a therapist. So instructing my patients in the four noble truths or the eightfold path or how to be mindful, that seemed unnecessary. I was more interested in creating an environment for them in which they could say whatever they were experiencing without feeling shame or without being embarrassed.

So that's a lot, you know, that's a beautiful thing if one can make that happen for somebody. So that was primarily my focus. And then after I started writing books and someone people would come specifically because they thought, oh, maybe I had some other expertise, being a Buddhist therapist gave me a leg up in some way. And some people asked specifically about where to go on retreat, who the good teachers were, how to learn to meditate. And I would often help guide them,

and maybe talk a little bit about it, but mostly introduce them to people who could be that for them. Then other people started coming who'd had a lot of meditative experience, but still really needed therapy help. With those people I could engage more in like Dharma conversations to try to get it where they were misunderstanding, in my view, various aspects of the Buddhist path and using it defensively to hide from, you know, more areas in themselves that made them uncomfortable. Sometimes that's referred to as spiritual bypass. I think that's one phrase that's been put on it. Yeah, spiritual bypass, spiritual materialism

would be another one, or the whole thing in Buddhism about the cause of duke, the cause of suffering is desire, you know, so a lot of people who had not been able to stamp out their desire, but felt like that was the point, you know, would end up in therapy and need some encouragement to, you know, like it's okay to reach out to other people sometimes, you know, would end up in therapy and need some encouragement to, you know, like it's okay to reach out to other people sometimes, you know. Do you feel looking back now that you should have shared more of your, what you know about Buddhism and meditation? I sort of think like, you know, this is more the right time. Like I'm more, I'm more steady in my work and more confident about what I can do for someone in therapy and that I can also talk about Buddhism and not interfere with the therapy

and that the two can work together in a way that I've always written about that they could work together. But now, I think I'm a little more interested in actualizing that for people. So you do now, you will bring it up in a way that you wouldn't have? Sometimes, sometimes I will now, yeah. What's the variable? Where the person is at. I mean, I think I'm still taking my major cues from the person, what they might need.

But I'll float it for people, you know, if they're waking up at night, because they're anxious, you know, like that's a good time, actually, the middle of the night to sit yourself up and do a little meditation. Or if they're, I mean the more interesting thing is we're to really see where people are holding on in a clinging kind of way, you know, to be able to, as a therapist, point that out to them kind of as it's happening in the office, that feels like really putting the Buddhist

psychology into practice, because clinging when you see it clearly liberates itself. You know, that's the whole theory and meditation that once you see it clearly said there's something in the person that wants to be free of it even while instinctively we're all doing it. Well, I think that's worth exploring because I think that'll be,

that'll sound like it's in the neighborhood of truth to people, but People may need some help figuring out exactly how that works. Yeah, I'll throw some personal example out You'll tell me if I'm okay saying what describing what you're describing But for me, one of the big things that I deal with in meditation is Am I doing this right? You know, am I a terrible meditator? I think it's a pretty common issue for meditators. And there's one really powerful way to deal with it, which is to make a nice little mental note of doubt.

Not doubt in the positive sense, like I'm a journalist, so it's nice to be skeptical. I mean doubt in the negative, in the majority of like the quicksand completely stifling force of self questioning and self-reservation. And when I see, oh yeah, no, I'm just getting wrapped up in this story, this endless, for somebody recently used the term that I like, a term that I like, think whole, think whole of doubt, if I just say to myself, oh, this is just doubt. Sometimes it's just, I'm liberated from the doubt just in the seeing of it. So is that come close to describing what you're describing?

Well, that approaches it, I think. You and I have both been trained by Joseph Goldstein, who's one of the great American teachers of Vapassana in-site meditation. And the traditional Buddhist psychology that comes along with the way Joseph teaches says, there are five hindrances that arise when you try to concentrate the mind, you know, greed, hatred, worry and agitation, sloth and torpor and doubt. So he's taught you, you know, when that kind of loop of I'm not doing this right, he's taught you to say that's doubt, you know, and to He's taught you to say that's doubt, you know, and to insane that, to back off of the

involvement with the story that you're telling yourself. So, so that's one way to work with it, and it does work just like you're saying when you when you back off from it, it, you know, dissolves often, except it comes back in the next you know, dissolves often, except it comes back in the next five minutes, you know, but that so what I'm I'm saying something quite similar, but I'm trying to look at the the way that you're criticizing yourself, you know, because that's because I bet you're doing something similar, not just in meditation. You know, that's bring meditation is bringing out some kind of chronic ego thing in you. You know, that is a kind of clinging. You

know, you're clinging. What is it that you're clinging to there? It's a notion of yourself as imperfect, or as you're a slacker in some way, or you just can't quite get it right. Is it like from toilet training, it's time, you know, where? You were like the toilet. It doesn't always, no, but you know, you're not doing it right,

you're messing up, you know, it could be a, it could go back to something more edible, meaning more genital, meaning, you know, like you can't do it right, you know. But there's some element of clinging there that if you focus your mindfulness, if you focus your attention on whatever the feeling tone is that's going into, I'm not It might give you another way to let the clinging dissolve. It's just like changing the focus a little bit where the ego's machinations, the ego's instinctive habits themselves become the object of mindfulness. And that I think is leading towards the insight practices, you know, where we start to make the self, whatever the self might be, but we start looking for how we actually experience the self in our own experience.

You know, I'm using experience twice, but how we actually know or don't know the self from the inside. And that becomes really interesting, more interesting than just looking at the hindrances. Yeah, but I, to me, that the two are totally linked. Yes, absolutely. They're totally linked. Yeah, so it's in the moment you're seeing doubt, but you can broaden the focus to look at the habitual storylines that are these programs

that are tapes that are running all the time. Well, you can look at yourself. Like, that's what I'm saying. Yes, no, no, that's the next level. Is then you're just looking at the whole system of like, who is this, who's telling the story, who's receiving the story? But without questioning it right away, like, who is it, who is it? Like, who's receiving story? But without questioning it right away,

like, who is it, who is it? Like, you have to find, like, it's you. Yeah. You know, you're, you're in there doing that. Yes. So where are you, you know, like, really find it, really, really, like, really try to find it. The issue of like finding the self, the self at all.

Yeah. It could sound, I would imagine to some people as a little, I don't know, loony, or upstroos as a taric, you know. Why is it important to examine the self? I don't know because some people, many people, many of them may not have any idea what you even are talking about

when you talk about the self. Well, some things running us, and it's not always the healthiest version of who we could be. But we can't make it if we don't see it clearly. Unmake it. Unmake it. Is it possible to make the self? I don't know. It's possible to doubt oneself a little more, to use doubt in a good way. It's possible to become less sure that you have to be the person who's always questioning, are you doing it right? You know? So how would one even begin to look at the self?

Come to therapy. This is not something I can be done just in meditation. I think it, of course, it can be done just in meditation. But I think it's very easy not to do it in meditation. It's very easy to just spend your whole life in meditation doing something else. What would that be? Getting concentrated on your breath. Yeah, being mindful, you know, lifting, moving, placing.

As you walk. As you walk, eating the raisins. Right, so all the traditional mindfulness stuff, but you're not necessarily looking at the operating system. Exactly. Or whatever the I don't even mean the operate. You're not necessarily getting down to something more real in yourself. real in yourself. One of your arguments is that meditation isn't going to fix all of your problems that other things, namely psychotherapy, are also really important. Psychotherapy might not fix all of your problems either, but... Well, you also argued that in previous books. You had a quote in one of your earlier books, and I don't know if it's from you or somebody

else, that psychotherapy can bring you understanding without relief. Yeah, that's unfamiliar. Yeah, I know, I know. We're poor indeed if we are only sane, that's from Winnicott, that's when I remember. So, but you have a little bit of a contrarian streaking you about the current mindfulness revolution that it's not the only thing, the only modality we should be reaching for. Can you just say more about that? Because I feel like it will build upon the discussion we've been having. Well, in the Buddhist way of thinking, according to Buddhist psychology and so on, mindfulness

is an introductory practice. You know, it's like the way into examining the self. So to take mindfulness away from that context and present it here in the West as a complete thing in and of itself, it seems to me clearly like we're short-changing people. So, I'm all for it, like I've been involved in this from, you know, the beginning of mindfulness coming into a Western psychology. I'm all for it. It's been, it's enormously helpful for lots

and lots of people. But the tendency is to, you know, like with Prozac, when Prozac came, everyone wanted to take Prozac because they thought, oh, this is the thing, this is the magic thing that's going to make me feel better. And some people, Prozac, really worked for them, you know, like nothing else ever, ever had before. And then for lots of people, Prozac did nothing, just gave them side effects, or did nothing at all. So the hunger for like the one thing that's going to, you know, fix everything, leads a lot of people to mindfulness because it's new, and there's a lot of, it has a lot of charisma for the moment. And inevitably, people are going to be disappointed,

because it can't do, you know, to try to overwork it is just going to, you know, be frustrating for lots of people. So I'm for seeing that coming, which is why I'm, you know, cautious about there's a real tendency in my field, the field of psychotherapy for a young therapist in training to want to learn to be a mindfulness-based therapist. And that, they come into it wanting to do that. They spend their graduate school learning to do that. And they never learn anything from the whole tradition of psychodynamic psychotherapy, like

that's just like over with. So then they're going to be dealing with people in intense interpersonal situations, and they're not going to have the wisdom of psychotherapy to turn to, to help deal with these more intense kinds of disturbances that healthy people have. I can really see, as you're here as you're speaking, that what a big influence you've had on me, because I knew you were right at the beginning of my meditation career. And I think that's inevitably what led me to take the sort of 10% happier root. And also, you know, when people ask me, you know, I try to be very careful to say, like, I don't think I'm not a meditation supremacist, you know, that I don't think it's the king

of all modalities. I think you we know there are a bunch of things that work when it comes to mental well-being They include medication psychotherapy getting enough sleep exercise positive relationships meaningful work diet And so we should be reaching for all these things It seems to me That's what you're saying, but it might is is there more to it than that? Well probably there's more to it than that, but I'm definitely saying that. I mean, I spent a little bit of time in India around the Dalai Lama and around the Tibetan community in exile and worked with the physician who was the Dalai Lama's physician and asked a lot of questions

about, you know, like, was there the same kind of emotional suffering in their community as there is in hours. And there is. But they don't have psychotherapy. They don't have psychotherapy. They didn't have much medication. They're like, you know, people high up in the community who are bipolar, they have manic depressive illness, just like we have manic depressive illness, that's out of control.

I've had, because I'm a psychiatrist and the people within the various Buddhist communities trust me, I've had Zen teachers, meditation teachers of all stripes who very accomplished, but are still suffering from depression, anxiety, addiction, interpersonal issues, sexual issues, all. I mean, every, people just are who they are. And that's sort of the beautiful thing about Buddhism, is it says just work with yourself just as you are. You know, like the more real you can be about what your struggles are, the more useful this is all going to be. Stay tuned more of our conversation is on the way after this. Hey, I'm Ericia, and I'm Brooke.

And we're the hosts of Wunderys Podcast, even the rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Ru off course. In our series RuPaul Born Naked, we'll show you how RuPaul overcame his demons and carved

out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. One of the many things that I liked about your book is really the feeling of being brought into the room. You've done that in other books, but I got in this book a sense of the rapidity of the back and forth, the complexity, the sort of multi-dimensional chess game you are playing while treating patients.

Can you just say some more about that? Yeah, well, there's a thing that happened that I didn't put into this book, but that was sort of like the prelude to this book that I think would help to answer your question, which was my father, who, like your father, was a physician in Boston, a scientist, a researcher, and a clinician. My father got brain cancer at the age of 84 on the silent part of his brain. So, on the non-dominant part of his brain.

So, he was working, seeing patients, doing research, until he got lost one day driving home from the Beth Israel hospital to my parents have some Brookline You know a 10-minute drive that he'd taken for 30 years got lost. That's how they found the tumor And by the time they found it it had extended So they couldn't really do anything about it and it was the same kind of malignant tumor that John McCain has and that Ted Kennedy died from, you know. And my father being a, the physician that he was knew the prognosis, knew he only had

a short time to live, as did I. And I had never talked to him. He's in, like, my patients, but more so. I knew he wasn't interested in any of the spiritual stuff. Another way in which he's like my father. Another way in which he is, yes. And I understood. He was very proud of my writing and he had all my books on a special shelf in his office. On the right. I think he read some of them.

But we never talked about the meat of it. It's funny this is exactly what's going on. I think it's not unusual. But I didn't want to make him uncomfortable. And yeah, I had gone my way and we had worked our stuff out. And you know, that was all fine. But I remember sitting in my office, which is here in New York, realizing my father was going to die soon, and that we had never talked about what maybe I understood from the Buddhist world about what could help in the process of dying. So this is coming into the complexity of the kinds of conversations that one can have

as a therapist or as a son or as a friend or you know it's not that different. So I decided I would call my father on the phone and try to talk to him, which I did. And he picked up, he was at home and he was very receptive. And I said, you know, we've never talked about any of this, but maybe it would be helpful, you know, as you go into this maybe it would be helpful, you know, as you go into this new thing for you to know what they say and what I sort of believe. And I wanted to talk to him in, like, sort of in the non-spiritual language, just in day-to-day language. So I said something like, you know the feeling that you've always had deep inside about who you are, that when you were 20 or 40 or 60 or 80, it doesn't seem to have changed very much.

Like if you close your eyes, you're still you. But if you try to find that feeling, if you try to put your finger on it, it's sort of invisible. It's kind of transparent. But yet you know it's there. You know you're not like another person when you, you know, I said what the Buddha seemed to say is that if you learn how to relax your mind into that feeling of who you've always been, that you can ride that feeling out

when you die, when the body starts to fall away and everything, you know, who you think you are is no longer operative and so on. That's still there. And my father listened and he was very nice and he was like, okay, darling, I'll try. But that, I've faced that. I've had those kinds of conversations, you know, different with everybody, but in my office because sooner or later, everybody goes through, you know, really intense things like this. You know, someone comes in at the age of 31, newly discovered that they have the breast cancer gene, you know,

newly discovered that they have the breast cancer gene, you know, and they have to go in three weeks for a double mastectomy, you know, or if someone comes whose child has been run over, you know, crossing the street, you know, like random things that in the midst of people coming just because they're, you know, trying to make their marriage work better. But so trying to figure out what kind of language to use to give people another perspective on what they're going through is, I think, the deeper challenge of bringing these two worlds together. Is this work exhausting or invigorating or both? It's not that exhausting. It's often invigorating. The only time that it's really tiring is if I'm with someone and they're not really talking to me about why they're there. If they're not being real enough in some way. It's a little bustery. Just or so defensive around, they just really can't yet.

So that's the most challenging. Do you find it? You've made big mistakes. I've certainly made some mistakes. I talk about one of them in the at the beginning of the book of being too aggressive with a young man who came to see me coming off of a meditation retreat where his mind started to unwind. And he was a little crazy, I thought. That's right, I remember. And I, but I was meeting him for the first time and I wanted to help him and I felt like

how something wasn't quite right. But I laid into him too quickly about what might be wrong. You might be bipolar, maybe we need to give you medicine and I scared him. His mother called me the next day, criticizing me for scaring know, I only met him once, what was I, what was I thinking? And she was totally right. And I used that example in the book to talk about why a therapist has to be careful with his or her expertise or his or her knowledge, because often you can use that knowledge in a insensitive way, if not a hurtful way.

You open the book with a really effective piece of writing about the ego. Can you talk about that a little bit? Ego is the one affliction we all share. And in our struggle to be bigger, better, stronger, more, this and that, we undermine ourselves relentlessly, so that we're left with a feeling of being, you know, unworthy, not good enough, insufficient. So the ego has us under its sway. And we can't just get rid of the ego because to do that would leave us psychotic or helpless. We need our egos.

And by ego you mean thinking mind. Well the ego comes out of the intellect. So it's a product of the thinking mind. My latest thought on it is it sort of starts to come when we're two or three years old and there's enough self-consciousness for the young person to realize that they're kind of alone in here. You know, they're like a little person and they're really like sort of alone and who's going to protect me, you know. And so the thinking mind, the intellect develops

necessarily what we call the ego, which helps us regulate ourselves. It helps mediate the outer demands, you know, of the parents and the schools and the older brother and so on with the inner need for food and holding and affection. And so the ego, it's sort of like the executive function the way we talk about it now. It helps to regulate or mediate experience. It helps to regulate or mediate experience. But we start to think we are it. We shouldn't get rid of it. We need all that the ego can do for us.

But we tend to cleave to it exclusively. I think that first book of mine that you read going to pieces with that falling apart, that was another way of talking about the same thing that there are very important experiences in life that Winnecott, the person I always turn to when I'm looking for inspiration, a British psychoanalyst, he gave

it the name of unintegration, different from disintegration. But there are times of going to sleep, having sex, listening to music, watching a movie, riding a bicycle, it's soul cycle. There are times when you don't need your ego to be in charge. And instead you are letting go in a certain way and expanding, you know, letting the boundaries down. When a cot talked about play, that little children in their play are in a kind of state of unintegration. If they feel safe enough, if the parents are there, but not too much there.

If they're in the next room and you know they're there, then you can play with the little men on the carpet or whatever. And that sense of play in some way, I I think is what we're returning to in meditation. We're giving ourselves that unstructured time to just let the mind unfurl. And out of that we're reducing the clinging to the ego. We still need it when we have to go to school the next day or go to work or take out the garbage or drive the car. We still need it and we can find it again, but we don't need it all the time. It sounds like we just need, we don't need to get rid of the ego, we need to have little vacations. Or we need to turn it from master to servant.

You know, there's different ways to talk about it. So little vacations, but also an abiding, and to create a relationship that's a little different in on an abiding basis. On an abiding basis. That's the the internal shift. That's what I was trying to get to before when I was talking to about making the the sense of self, the object of meditation. Another way to say that would be like changing your relationship to the ego. So instead of letting it, it's driving you when you're saying, I'm not doing it right,

that's really your ego talking. So if I can get you, or if Joseph Goldstein can get you to look at that ego at the same way you're looking at the doubt, then, oh, then where are you? Then you're taking a little vacation from your ego right then in that moment. Let me kind of throw something at you out of left field. Sure. We're approaching the end of our time. And I think I'm just putting myself in the position of the listener who will have been, as I have been really interested in everything you're saying, but may want us, like,

some practical, something practical to do. What if we close, would you be willing to do a five minute guided meditation where you put some of this into, like show us how to do what you've been talking about. I could show you how to do something. Fine. Yeah. You can do no wrong in my eyes.

I'll show you how to do that. Okay. And I mean that, actually. But you're game for that? Because we can edit this out if you're no one. Yeah, sure. I would try. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, shall I start? Yeah. You've got a clock right there. You can do as it goes along as you want. Okay. Well, I would say first, first pay attention to your physical posture. So let yourself settle into some kind of comfortable sitting position where you're feeling your back relatively straight, your feet on the

ground or folded beneath you, but feeling all the places where your body is being supported, either by the floor or a cushion or the couch or the chair or the car if you're listening, you know, so feeling the touch points of your body. And then there's a parallel mental posture that you want to give yourself. So you want to rest your mind in the body, the way the body is resting in the chair. So just let your thinking mind, your aware mind, let it settle into itself as best you can, just relax, relax the frown lines in your forehead, relax the muscles in your shoulder, and let your listening awareness, particularly at your ear doors, what we call in Buddhist psychology, the ear door, the portal where sound enters your mind. So open the ear doors. So you're just listening, not only to my voice, but to all the ambient sounds that are coming around it through it

to the side of it, along side of it. So just make the meditation one where you're open, listening, hearing the sounds as they strike your eardrum. your ear drum, noticing both the silences and the sounds, but not making a big distinction between them. letting it just all pass through your awareness. And then in the midst of that where you're just, you're just, you know, the body held by the, by the chair, by the floor, the mind relaxed into the body, the sounds swirling about you or not in 360 degrees, the sense of your mind opening, your ears opening, your attention opening. If you start to hear yourself thinking, pay attention to that too.

Just notice the kinds of thoughts if you are having them. You don't have to go looking for them, but if thoughts come, just be curious about them. The same way you might with the sounds that you were already letting yourself hear, like, oh, there's a dog barking or there's a car horn or there's the static from the radio. radio, have the same kind of posture, the same kind of mental posture towards your own thoughts. Don't push them away, but don't cling to them. And if they're, you know, random day to day, or what am I going to do next, when is this going to be over, those kinds of thoughts, those are easy to just let pass through you. But if the thoughts have a little more something attached to them, a little more ego, we might say, if you can feel yourself gripping somewhere with the thought like Dan was talking earlier,

I'm not doing this right or if some memory comes of somebody you're upset with. Some kind of thought where you really know you're you thinking it, or it really matters to you. Pay particular attention to that feeling of it really mattering. Try to zero in on the really bothers you. And just try to hold the sense of that feeling without indulging it. You don't have to do anything about it. You know, the way your mother talked to you, the way your partner didn't say goodbye. If any thoughts like that come just observe them like anything else.

But look for the mental tone, the feeling tone associated with it. And just let that percolate there in your awareness. And then after a bit, you can come away from that and dwell once more just in the sounds around you or in the physical sense of your body and the chair on the floor, on the couch, in the seat. And if your eyes have been closed, you can open your eyes. If you're driving, hopefully you've had them open. And you know, forget about where we just were and come back to your regular life. That was great. And so in many ways you are pointing in that meditation toward what you've been discussing throughout this podcast, which is this feeling we've always had or since we kind of woke up into ourselves of us of the self. Yeah, well, I think it's confusing.

It's confusing even to me, because I think there's two different feelings there. The one that I was trying to show my father, which is the feeling of who you've always been and who you might still be, even when you're totally enlightened or into your next incarnation or whatever, that might be your Buddha nature, your consciousness.

And then there's the feeling of like, oh, what's the matter with me? Or how could she do that to me? Or, you know, I'm embarrassed to show this thing about me or I feel ashamed to be myself. And that's much more the ego feeling that I think we don't need. So I'm actually trying to show both until it's clear which is which.

I unreservedly recommend your book, and I do that with all of your books, but equally with this one. So it's always a pleasure to see you. Thanks, Dan. You're the best Really nice to be with I owe you an enormous amount. So you've paid it back a long time ago. No I appreciate it. Thank you. All right big thanks to Mark Epstein It's such a pleasure to see him every time I see him and Yeah, really appreciate it. Check out his book. All right, let's do some voicemails. Here's number one.

Hi, Dan. This is Rob from Minnesota. Recently in a podcast, you said that you cut your meditation time daily from two hours to one hour. Just wondering if you noticed any change in the beneficial effects. Basically, I was wondering if there's any diminishing returns when it comes to meditation after a certain point. Thanks a lot. So I did. For a long time, I did two hours a day of meditation, and I cut back to one for some reasons I've

talked about on the show before having to do with the fact that I had a 360 review. That's when you, it's really an unpleasant thing, but you recruit people from all areas of your life, personal, professional, and people who you work for, who work for you, who are your peers, and they give anonymous feedback to a reviewer and then the reviewer writes up a report. Anyway, that report was pretty deeply humbling and one of the things that people say was that I was just pulled into many directions and disengaged and cranky and I made a bunch of both short term, medium term and also increasingly now working on some long term, changes as a consequence of that report.

And one of the things I did pretty quickly is to cut back to one hour because it frankly just made me more available at the office and at home, and a little less crazy and stressed about getting everything in every day that I needed to do. So in a sense, that's been a real positive. And one of the things I did, because I still am really committed to a deep practice, and I think it's important to me personally, but it's also important, I think, in the work I'm trying to do, that I know what I'm talking about when I go out and talk to people about meditation, not only on this podcast, but in my speeches and in the app and all this other stuff that

I'm doing. So what I've done in cutting back to an hour is really committed to doing a long meditation, a long meditation retreat every year. And I, a close listeners may remember a conversation we had within the last 18 months with Danny Goldman and Richie Davidson who wrote a book called Altered Traits and it's all about the science, the neuroscience around meditation. One of the things they said was that there appears to be evidence that it's retreat time that is the most effective in terms of advancing your practice. So I think I feel pretty good about this trade off for a lot of reasons.

And I think the science suggests that retreat time is really important, and it's also something you hear from teachers anyway. In terms of the effect on my daily practice going from two hours to one, I do notice that now that I'm at one, the meditation, the beneficial effect on the meditation is that I'm not, I think there was a lot of not so subtle or seen and then to a large extent also unseen concern in my head about getting it all

in every day and I think that had an effect on the quality of the practice. That being said, the detrimental part of this is that doing two hours a day really does up your ability to concentrate. And so I can feel that going down a little bit, but not in a way that's freaking me out. So it's not some huge, crazy, horrible effects on the quality of my practice. So your question was, are there diminishing returns? I'll tell you just tell you from going on retreat, when you're doing intensive all day long practice, especially also sort of turning all the interstitial moments on retreat, you know, walking around, eating, going to sleep, brushing your teeth,

turning all of those into a mindfulness exercise as well. I have found that to be incredibly powerful. So in my experience, there doesn't, there does not appear to be diminishing returns in terms of, you know, packing in a ton of meditation into a single day. But in terms of your daily life practice, I don't know, I think that's probably, here's my guess.

I think it's probably quite, that probably has to do with your specific mind. So I suspect this is kind of an individual idiosyncratic thing. And so what I would say is if you're thinking about doing more or less meditation, just experiment. Really that's what this is and what I've learned a lot about the thorny practice of forming and breaking habits for humans. Experimentation is incredibly important. So I experimented for three years with two hours a day. It wasn't working for a variety of reasons and I come back to one, but my life situation may change and I go back to two. I know people who do three or maybe I'll go to a half hour. It really depends.

And I think having a sort of a lack of rigidity, but an overall commitment and order for the practice is from what I can tell seems to be the real important bottom line. Thank you for that question. Really appreciate it, Rob. Let's go to Belinda now from Chicago. My question is around any recommendations You have around how to identify a meditation coach

If that's something that you would like to do just to get a little bit more The deeper or a different angle on your meditation practice to find a coach are there sort of a patient issues look for Is it like an interview process, or are you kind of a steep, you click, or a five? Do you just recommend going off on just general reviews, or how to go about that? And also, how to approach the awkward conversation of payment, and how do you compensate them for their time

traditionally, and just like in an example, how to approach that, or throw that out there. Thanks very much. Love what you do. Bye. So I really appreciate that question and this is an issue. There isn't a great system for finding a meditation teacher and evaluating their credentials. This is a very young industry. That's obviously an ancient practice, but it's, they're really, we haven't set up, you know, all these different schools of meditation

and forms of meditation and different levels of, there is no good housekeeping seal of approval. And I don't know if there ever will be one. I know there's been a lot of talk in the meditation world of working in that direction and certain schools have pretty clear levels of teachers but overall for a beginner, it's kind of a murky situation. So let me say a few things that I hope will be helpful.

One of them is this is not a person to person face to face relationship, but if you are a subscriber to the 10% happier app, we do have these coaches. It is a, in my opinion, vastly underutilized feature of the app, but we find that the people who interact with our coaches, and you can do that right through the app, these coaches are long time experienced meditators. They really know how to answer questions. They love doing it, love doing it. They're really committed to this work.

They will engage with you as much as you would like and answer all the questions you have. And so I really do recommend that. That's not the same thing as having a face-to-face relationship with the teacher, but it's a really good step in the right direction. If you live in a city where there are meditation teachers, many major cities now have either Buddhist centers or secular drop-in places like in New York City, there's mindful MNDFL, which has has a they have three places in New York City where you can go learn meditation we also in New York City have the New York Insight Meditation Center and other places and this is true in a lot of major cities around the country. If you live in a city where you're privileged to have

teachers what I would recommend is going to a bunch of classes seeing who you click with asking questions in the group Q&A time at the end of a class, if they have it. And really getting a sense is this somebody who you think you can learn from. And do they seem like they really know what they're talking about? Do they talk about the practice in a way that resonates

with you? One yardstick for me is, do they take themselves seriously or not? I find that my favorite teachers really don they take themselves seriously or not? I find that that my favorite teachers really don't take themselves too seriously. They take the practice really seriously. They take you and your welfare really seriously, but they're not, they don't have a guru complex. The other thing is there have been, this is not happening, this is not an epidemic, but it is a real problem. There have been bad teachers. And so you do want to be careful. And the good news on that is episode 143 on this podcast.

If you go back and listen to that, Skydaddle seen talks a lot about, he wrote a book on this very problem and talks a lot about how to evaluate teachers through this light. On the issue of payment, some teachers have a set payment, so it's not complicated. But in the school in which I've been trained, they work on what's called the DANA system, D-A-N-A, which basically means generosity, you just sort of give what you can afford, give what you want, which can be very confusing. And so what I would recommend is a really direct conversation with the teacher and say, generally speaking, what do you get for an hour of your time?

If the teacher is uncomfortable answering that, then I would just go with your gut. Think about what you pay for a workout or if you see a shrink and use that as a benchmark and then also think about what can you afford. None of these teachers want you to spend more money than you can afford. The reason why they operate on this, one of the reasons why they operate on this Donna model is they're not out to make tons of money. They don't want to set a bar financially that's hard for people to vault over.

So it's going to require a little introspection on your part, and I recognize that it's awkward, but it's absolutely surmountable. So yeah, I apologize, Belinda, that there isn't some clear system out there. This is something that I've put some thought into. We at the company think a lot about certainly when we're evaluating teachers for the 10% happier app. We ask a lot of hard questions and think a lot about a lot of various factors. But for those of you out there who are newer to the practice and may not live in an error

or there's a teacher, I recognize this is complicated, which is why one of, and I know this is a self-serving point, but this is one of the reasons why I think apps are great and not just our app. There are lots of great apps out there, including Headspace and Sam Harris's waking up course. So apps are great, but having a one-on-one relationship with a teacher is also phenomenal. In my case, with Joseph Goldstein, it's made a huge difference. So best of luck to you. I wish I had an easier answer, but hopefully those are some useful tools.

I want to thank everybody for tuning in yet again. We really, the whole team, we really appreciate the fact that you come back every week. It means a lot to us. If you like what we do, and I know we say this all the time, but it is a reason why we say it, because it makes a big difference. Subscribe to the show, rate us, give us a rating, I like five stars, but you know, this

up to you. Tell your friends about it, post on social media, all of that stuff makes a huge difference because the more listeners we get, the stronger a case we can make to continue doing this. Also if you want to suggest topics you want us to cover or guess you want us to have on, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B Harris. We've gotten some good ideas through there. A lot of ideas that I haven't yet followed through on, but we have a long, long list of future guests. I also really want to thank the people who are involved in producing this podcast, Samuel Johns, Ryan Kessler, and the rest of the folks at ABC News who've done a lot to make this possible. I think it's worth,

of course, shouting out again, Tiffany, who does a lot of audio work on the show, who just had a baby huge congratulations again to her and her family. We have a ton of other podcasts here at ABC News, including a new one called The Dropout, which is utterly fascinating and it comes from Rebecca Jarvis, a colleague of mine here at ABC News, and it's about the Tera Notes scandal. I recommend you check that out. That's all we got for you this week. I'll talk to you next Wednesday.

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