Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 190: The Fundamental Mystery of the Mind, Annaka Harris

Episode Date: June 5, 2019

As a child Annaka Harris suffered from migraines. Searching for ways to cope with that pain, she became curious - wondering "what is this pain" and "where is it coming from?" The line of questioning shifted her perspective and propelled her into a quest of understanding the mystery of consciousness. Harris takes us with her on this quest in our interview and in her book Conscious, which looks at the many definitions of consciousness and challenges long-held assumptions about this complicated concept. The Plug Zone Website: https://annakaharris.com/about/ Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind: https://annakaharris.com/conscious/ I Wonder: https://annakaharris.com/i-wonder/ Twitter: @annakaharris Meditation From Joseph Goldstein on Ten Percent Happier "Turbo-Charge Your Meditation" aka, Busy Life Meditation: https://10percenthappier.app.link/o431sZ4XWW ***VOICEMAILS*** Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail: 646-883-8326 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, when we think about the fundamental mysteries of the universe, like why are we here, is there a creator, what's the deal with the big bang, is their life on other planets. When we're pondering this stuff, we often overlook a huge one,

which is the mystery of consciousness. Now, consciousness, I'm well aware of this, is one of those funny words that can sound off, putting the highfalutin like the mind or the cosmos, but it's actually endlessly fascinating. Put extremely simply, here's the deal with the mystery of consciousness. How did we on this planet and maybe on other planets that we haven't discovered yet? How do we go from piles of rocks and swirling bodies of gas

to being able to sing opera and design iPhones? In other words, how do we go from non-conscious matter to taking this unfathomable leap to becoming conscious to having the lights turned on? This is not, I hastened to add, a academic exercise. Probing this mystery of consciousness does two things that really can boost your well-being and happiness.

First, it can provoke a sense of awe. Studies show that provoking awe can have all sorts of psychological benefits, including giving us a huge dose of perspective about our tiny place in the universe. And second, using simple meditation techniques, we can actually bump directly up against the mystery of consciousness in ways that as you're about to hear from our guests this week are both exhilarating and deeply meaningful. So our guest is Anika Harris. We're not related by the way, but we are a long time friends. And Anika has written an excellent new book about this subject is a is a slim, crisp, compelling volume called conscious, a brief guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind.

And I promise you, if you read just the first three pages, you will, I strongly suspect, see that she has this uncanny ability to succinctly produce awe and wonder for the reader. This is not her first book, by the way. She's also the author of a children's book called I Wonder, which my wife and I read to our son. She was a collaborator on the mindful games, activity cards, which were put out by Susan Kaiser Greenland, those are designed to teach mindfulness and meditation to children. Susan and Anika actually were on this show back in episode 121, so if you want to hear more about meditation for kids, you can go back in episode 121. So if you want to hear more about meditation for kids, you can go back and check that out.

I should take one other thing about Anika while I'm talking about her CV. She's also a highly regarded editor and consultant to science writers, not for nothing. She's a longtime meditator as well. One very quick related and very much related item of business before we dive in. During this episode, Anika and I talk about a specific meditation practice

by our mutual friend Joseph Goldstein. That practice is designed to get at the mystery of consciousness. And the practice is actually available in the 10% happier app. And it is titled Turbo Charge Your Meditation. And it can be found in the Advanced and Unguided section of the singles tab, or you can click directly on the link in the show notes of this podcast and you'll go right there. Okay, enough for me. Here is Anika Harris. Nice to see you. Nice to see you too. I always ask the same question. How did you get interested in meditation?

There are kind of many answers I could give actually. Give them all. Okay. I've always been very interested and curious about consciousness, which is obviously what my book is about. Let's see. I originally, like formally, was introduced to meditation. I think we spoke about this actually in our last interview.

In a yoga class, I was a professional dancer, a couple of careers ago, 20-something years ago now. And I had an injury and part of my physical therapy was to go to yoga. And this was where I actually, you know, someone was teaching me how to meditate. And it was the first time I actually got instruction. But as a child, I had very severe migraines that started when I was eight years old, and they didn't have the kinds of medications they have now. So there were times when I would be completely incapacitated, like every time I moved even an inch,

it was incredibly painful. So I'd just be, you know, for hours at a time, just lying in one position, just trying to get through it. And I realized, I just, I tried different tricks of things to think about, and you know, you just try to come up with coping mechanisms when you're in a situation like that and

I Suddenly just I actually don't know why exactly but I got interested in What was so horrible about what I was experiencing and I just that was like the first moment in my life where I realized that curiosity can be an antidote to a lot of suffering and can be an antidote to a lot of suffering. And I really just, I think it's like the classic feeling that you understand as an adult when you study meditation, or you study these things that resisting the negative feeling

or the negative emotion just contributes to the pain you're experiencing. And I think I was getting that just at a fundamental level with this migraine pain, that it was worse to have my internal experience be, I can't do this, I can't take this, this is what, you know, to just have this. I mean, and I don't know that it was in those words, but just to be feeling like, I need this to go away, I can't do this, you know, It's kind of the best words I could give to it.

So there was one day I just flipped it, and I just wanted to see what is this feeling. Why is it so intolerable? But really more like, what is it and where is it? And I realized I couldn't even quite pinpoint it in my head. And I just spent a lot of time trying to figure out, and of course, this is getting into consciousness. Like it really just started to trip me out

that I was having an experience at all. And that it was hard to even, these things that I thought I knew so well, like headache and pain and thoughts that when you I knew so well, like headache and pain and thoughts that when you look at them closely, you get kind of a different perspective and they're mysterious. When you say that I was having an experience at all, that you're talking about consciousness there.

Yes. What I think consciousness is like one of those words like the mind with a cosmos where people throw it out. I remember walking down the back when I was in my brief flirtation with Deepak Chopra. I think there's this way way in the past before I started meditating. I remember I was interviewing him and or I was talking I think he and I were taking a walk or something like that before or after an interview and he kept talking about consciousness and other. What is it? Say that word. What do you mean? And he said a lot of stuff. I didn't understand anything. When I read your book, I do understand it. Well, yeah, so I give a definition really early on

and I think people do use the word in many ways and it's confusing and I actually like the word experience. I think it's a little bit cleaner. People use different words of awareness but I think awareness has a few different meanings also. But the way I describe it in my book, I basically use the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a famous essay called, What Is It Like to Be About Consciousness in the 70s? And he describes consciousness, I think very clearly, or at least what I'm talking about in the book, what I mean by consciousness, and what people mean by consciousness when they're talking about it being an absolute mystery.

And that is the way Nagel describes it as an organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism. And so if it's having an experience, if there's something it's like from the inside, then that is consciousness. And that is what I'm talking about in my book, and that's how I use the word. But I do think it is interchangeable with experience, and in some ways experience describes it better. I was gonna say something else.

That the lights are on at all. Mm-hmm. As you talk about it in the book, how did we go from rocks to singing opera? You know, how did we go from non-conscious matter to all of us having these very rich experiences at our level as homo sapiens but at varying levels throughout the animal world? Yeah, well, I think this mystery really fully came into view the moment that science advanced to the point where we realized we are all made of the same things, right?

There's not, you know, living systems and stars and, you know, we're all made of the same particles and we literally are star dust. And so once you realize, okay, all of these particles and atoms are, what we assume are non-conscious matter swirling around the universe, at some point the matter gets configured in such a way that the matter itself begins to entail an experience of being that matter. And so, yeah, that's really the mystery. And I was actually, I was going to point out because for some people, I'm not quite sure why, but for some people, that definition of naigles, that phrasing what it is like, there's

something that it is like. Some people get hung up on that and can't quite get their minds around it. Many people actually. And so I like to, I'll take someone through the following exercise to help them get what I mean by that and what I think he meant by that. And it's just with a couple of simple questions. So if I ask you, you know, is there something that it's like to be you right now? Are you having an experience right now? And I see you nodding your head already, yes, the answer, of course, is yes.

And then I say, you know, is there something that it's like to be your shoe? And of course, our answer is no. And even if in some crazy universe, the shoe is conscious, it actually doesn't matter. It's the point is the difference that you just noticed. I'm having an experience. There's something right here in this point in time and space that is an experience that I don't believe is happening in my, at the level of my shoe or in this table, that difference, just distinguishing between

whether there's an experience or not, that is consciousness. I just, a lot here blows my mind, and we'll go macro in a second, but micro, that you were a kid that was interested in this at all, but we're very different types of kids, but clearly, because I was interested in this at all, but we were very different types of kids, but clearly, because I was interested in stuff

that I can't even say, figure it in this context. So what was going on with you? It's not the only thing I was interested in. I figured out current dance with Barbies. Yeah. But this was in your wheelhouse somewhere. Yes, I mean, I think some children are definitely more inclined to think about these deep questions than others.

I think pain often pushes people, especially children, to think about these things. But many more children than I realized actually do naturally think about these things. And it's how I got interested in teaching meditation to children. Yeah, I think clearly something about those migraines is massively unpleasant as they appear to have been. There was something powerful in there, psychologically. Yeah, but I do think children, it's interesting, working, I teach meditation to children, you know, I guess you're listening, I know that.

They always blow me away. And even having had the experiences I had as a child, I'm always surprised at how many kids have already thought about this stuff or incredibly open to it. I do believe that it's much easier to teach children to meditate than adults overall. I was just realizing we both have kids this same age and they do ask these wild questions about. I'm sure as funny as Alexanderism, he also has his deep moments. Yes, we were talking before we started recording about some of the jokes my son tells or

like little insults he delivers very well. Yeah, he's really interested in death. Right. Yeah. I feel like kids can get very deep and they have very interesting ideas and thoughts about how the universe is structured and what we're experiencing and the whole range. Well, total non, well, I mean, it's, this is not a non-sequitur based on what we've just been discussing, but it's not, maybe not super relevant to the reason why you walked in this room to do

this recording, but this is where we are. You've written, you wrote this children's book called, I Wonder, which we read to our son. Oh yeah. And I read it as a sort of an agnostics guide to answering the big question for kids. And so I wonder, what do you say to your children when they ask, because you have two daughters, what do you say when they ask about death? For example, I'll tell you what I say, I want to run it by you. I say, I don't know, to mystery. Yeah, yeah, no, that's great. I think, I mean, that's what my

children's book is about. It's called, I wonder, but actually, the original title was, I don't know, which is a much worse title, but is what the point of it was. Let's teach children that it's not only okay to say, I don't know, it's wonderful, it's a source of curiosity and awe and wonder. And yeah, as I said, I think curiosity, it's very powerful. And I think we can't encourage it enough in our kids. I mean, that's what it's about. It's about encouraging curiosity in children and saying,

I don't know when you don't know as a wonderful starting point to learning more and even just sitting in that experience of not knowing. And there's, I think there's a lot to be said in a meditation context to the power, to be a bit grandiose kind of the healing power of not knowing. Yeah. So I wanna get to the overlap between the mystery of consciousness and meditation

in a second, let's just, because we were talking about your meditation career, let's just kind of close that out and get into that stuff. So I know you talked about your experience with migraines as a little girl and then having learned it formally in a yoga context later on, where do you go from there? Because as far as I understand, you've done retreats, et cetera, et cetera. There's also just a little piece missing, which is just after I had that first experience with the migraine,

I started applying that process to a lot of things in my life. And I struggled with various things as a child. But I started just applying that method when either I was dreading something or fearing something that was coming up, I would just get more curious about what it was. And then eventually, in the moment of whatever the thing was that was uncomfortable for me, I would, I noticed that if I just kind of took it one moment at a time, it was much easier to handle than kind of being overwhelmed by the whole thing. Right, there's that.

So when, yeah. There's that, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. No, it's okay. I'm just amplifying your point. There's a kind of cheesy expression of that. I find it coming up in my mind every now and again. Inch by inch, life's a cinch inch yard by yard, it's incredibly hard. Yeah, I have never heard that, but yeah, yeah.

And then when I encountered meditation as a formal practice, that connection was immediate for me. And I realized, I mean, it was such a relief. I was so happy to find something like systematic that I could practice that I could kind of do with that discovery. So yeah, so it was in yoga. I also, I was a professional dancer and I studied dance at NYU. So I danced seriously for many years and what I realized later once I got in, once I was seriously

studying meditation, that that had been also a kind of training and more in concentration, but that was really a meditation practice in itself. I think dance classes and training and everything that you're learning. Like any sport, I think, any athletic ability. If you're not incredibly present and following each moment after the next, you'll fall. You won't be able to accomplish what you're trying to accomplish. I think there was some training there already. But then shortly after that injury, and I started taking yoga classes, I met my husband Sam.

And he had really seriously studied already by the time I met him. And so it was a very natural path for me to start following some of the teachers that he introduced me to and to learn, you know, just biosmosis everything he had learned. And I immediately started practicing regularly and learning from teachers and sitting retreats. And what kind of effect did it have on your life? It had a very profound effect. I, you know it, so I'm trying to think, I'm trying to separate it into pre- and post-retreat. I do feel like there was something about that first retreat that I felt like was truly

life-transforming. I just started to see my mind and consciousness in a completely different way that stayed with me in my day-to-day life. And that hadn't happened for me yet. Before that, I felt that, I mean, at that point I was probably meditating at least 45 minutes a day, feeling like it had this tremendous effect while I was doing it, and for maybe some period of time after, and that it was useful for things like anxiety and pain. I mean, I still have migraines now, but it wasn't until after the retreat.

I felt like I had some insights about both the nature of consciousness and also some illusions that we walk around with that I talk about in my book. And it's actually kind of leads into my lifelong fascination with consciousness and why meditation I think was always such an interesting activity, usually called an activity, but it fair enough. Yeah, and it's a way to you to talk about this in the book and quite beautifully. It's a way to bump up against this fascinating fundamental mystery, right, that takes it out of the abstract or Epstruist or whatever it makes it really relevant. Right. And I think that was always my starting point. I think I noticed all of these benefits and it kind of came to me as a coping mechanism.

And in some ways it is still that. But first and foremost, it has always been for me just a very interesting exercise. It's a way, Sam and I sometimes talk about it as running a scientific experiment of your own mind. It does feel that way. There's something that feels very scientific about it. There are definitely experiences of noticing that things we experience like the sense of being a self or the sense of having conscious will, these things can drop away.

And you kind of have a better sense of the, some of the false illusions that we walk around with in our daily lives. Can we go deep on this? This seems, this seems, center of the bull's eye for me, and for the folks who listen to this bucket. So exactly how does that work? Let's start with the sense of having a self, which is in and of itself a mind, boggling, mind expanding, things to contemplate.

How does meditation get at that? Well, so it's obviously a very, very strong illusion and even those of us who've had experiences of it, of it's suspending for some period of time, it's basically always here. I mean, it's analogous to a visual illusion that you literally can't break out of, right? If you're looking at a realistic enough two-dimensional image of a cube, you can't not see a three-dimensional cube even though you might know that it's a two-dimensional surface you're looking at. So we walk around with this very strong sense

that we are these selves. But just like many other things, when you look very closely at them, they start to break apart. And actually, I love to quote Galen Strasson, the philosopher Galen Strasson, who says, what you do follows from what you are. And I like it just because it's brief and it kind of encapsulates, like we all know that our behavior, the language that we speak, the feelings, we know that all of this is a result of brain processing. And we know there's no single self in the brain somewhere that is the center of all of

it or that's responsible for all of it. So I mean, just in terms of the science that we now have and know. And neuroscience is very far from understanding a lot about the brain, but we know that the experience we're having of being, I mean, our experience is really of being something separate from our brains. And I think in response to this idea that what you do follows from what you are, we can, I think in response to this idea that, you know, what you do follows from what you are, we think, okay, well, our brain does all this processing and, you know, might, you know, be pushing me to go get that second serving of ice cream, but then I, I, make this decision.

I separate from my brain out, you know, floating out in the world, then I make this can free will choice. And free will and self are very intertwined. They're very much the same intuition and the same feeling. But that can't be the case. It's all brain processing. And we now also understand that consciousness, at least the conscious experience that we're having, the type of conscious experience we're having right now, as human minds with human

brains, that most of that processing is subconscious. And so even the point at which we feel like we've made a decision, there are many things that have happened at the level of the brain to get us to have that feeling. I don't know if that was clear. I don't think there's any lack of clarity in what you're saying. It's just that for regular people, and I count myself as a regular person, it's just hard to wrap your head around. Yes.

Okay, so we're right. So then you jump from what we know to actually dropping the illusion itself. And this is something that can be done that many people have had the experience of all of this new research on psychedelics for treatment, resistant depression, and it's very interesting work. And I talked about some of it in my book, mostly because it acts on the same part of the brain, which is called the default mode network, that meditation acts on. And it's, you know, we guess that that is why this dropping of the illusion of self happens

under both circumstances. Yes, it is a very, very strong illusion, and even for me who breaks through it pretty regularly, it's still hard for me to get my mind around. I mean, it's endlessly fascinating to me. But the truth of what we understand scientifically and just logically, I think, for most people, or for many people, we shake in the illusion is a completely different thing. Most people have not had that experience, but it's possible to have that experience.

Well, that's what I was gonna ask you. Yeah. How do you do it in meditation? How do you do in meditation? It just started happening for me before I even knew it was a phenomenon. I think, and I think that's probably how it happens for most people, is you just spend enough time in meditation. It's just a type of insight that you become aware of.

There's, I'm sorry, there's so many places I could go with this, I'm not sure. Well, one way that comes to mind for me, and I've talked about it on the show before By it's been taught by Zogchen masters. That's what I was going to. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That is the traditional Zogchen practice and it's it's many many different tools for Being able to to drop that illusion of self And actually Diana Winston has a new book out that is on, that is just practices, that are Zoggen practices complete in a, sorry, taught in a completely secular way. So she was sitting in the chair you're sitting in right now. Two days ago. Talking about her wits. Oh, okay. That stuff will be out there. But let me give you one example. Yes.

And I know you'll be comfortable with this because you put it on the internet Our mutual friend Joseph Goldstein has a has You know, gazillion little practices that are incredibly useful, but there's one that goes right at this Which is and this is kind of derived from Zogue Chen which is a school of Tibetan meditation and that's Joseph studied in where he says just close your eyes and listen to all the sounds you're hearing, and then ask yourself, what is knowing, or who's listening, what or who. What is listening, yeah.

And so can you riff on that for a second? You, by the way, you took some of his practices and put them, I don't know if they're still up there, but he had this like kind of joking that nine minute yeah oh no I might be thinking of something else he wrote a lovely article called I'm forgetting the name of it know something no self well he also did a nine minute joke semi-jokingly sort of nine minute turbocharged path to enlightenment for busy people with a set of three practice,

three three minute practice. So I didn't know he recorded this. Oh yes, I did. I'm sorry. He wrote it and you put it on, you put the actual, I don't know if it's still up anywhere. Okay, yes. He wrote it as an article that I put on my website and it's still there. And yes, it's meditation practice for busy people.

But it is, it is specifically the intention is to drop the illusion of self. Yes. Yes. There are those practices. It's interesting. I came about it from such a different angle that some of those zokchen practices, and I forget there's a term for that category of practice, glimpse practices, right? That sounds right.

Because you are glimpsych. You know what, if that isn't the name, it should be. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the name. And that's the name Diana uses in her book. So yes, one side had kind of already hit on this experience of dropping that illusion. Many of the glimpse practices are very helpful for me for just kind of getting there immediately. Some of them, it's interesting.

Some of them don't work for me and actually are counterproductive. And I've noticed that a lot of people have the same issue. And it's often in the description that you just gave of looking for the look or looking for the seer looking. And there's some, so there's, what I always offer to people when that doesn't feel right to them or when that doesn't feel helpful Is the Douglas Harding method of not having ahead? I can't remember if you and I've talked about this or not, but that that's the one thing that

That's the strongest practice for me and brings me almost immediately to the place that I had kind of discovered on my own after hours of meditating. Douglass Hardeg wrote us, I guess what you could refer to as a kind of spiritual classic, a thin volume, kind of like yours, called on having no head, which was initially recommended to me by your husband and also by Joseph Goldstein, we should say, that Joseph and your husband are old, old friends. And it's a mind-blowing book, kind of literally. So, what does that work for you? I'm curious. It does, but I want you to describe what the practice is, if you're up for it. Yeah, I mean, it's very simple.

You really just imagine that you don't have a head. I mean, within the context of meditating, I mean, once you get the hang of it, you could really do it at any moment in your daily life, but the practice is most effective if you're sitting in meditation and you're listening to sounds and feeling your breath or whatever your focus is in the moment, and then you just imagine that you don't have a head in that context. And I haven't actually thought a lot about why it works so well, but I think it removes the place where you think yourself is. That makes sense.

And since it wasn't there to begin with, it just gives you this window on to a clear picture of reality. And so, I mean, that's the first time I've said that. I thought about it. But yes, that practice has always been very powerful for me and works very well. And I always offer that to people who don't feel that the kind of looking for the looker or looking for the seer practice works. And I do know why I have my theory for why it doesn't work for me and for a lot of people. And my imagination is activated by it. And so even if I can obviously I get the point and I can get there eventually, but the first

thing that happens in my mind is I see a picture of myself, which is kind of the opposite of what you want to be doing with your attention. But it falls apart under scrutiny. So for me, the way Sam sometimes describes these practices is like, it's right there as soon as you start looking, the answer, which is no answer at all, but I actually find that you can do a little bit of discursive or directed thought contemplation that is quite healthy. So if you're looking for what's hearing, you might picture yourself, but then you can say, okay, well, is that really hearing? But that's the thing.

So yes, and I think they're very useful. And I think people should stick with them anyway. But for me, it's a multi-stage process. The certain glimpse practices, if they conjure up an image for you, or if you intuitively feel like you have an answer, well, yes, the cure is right. I know exactly where the cure is. It's right here. And some people do have that initial reaction, then they're then you take more steps and yes, then it's this exercise of curiosity where you eventually get there, but I like the powerful glimpses practices that get you there immediately. Yeah. Two things to say. One small, the other larger, the small thing is we've invoked the name Sam a couple times Sam Harris your husband

Wrote a book with it where he gets deep into these practices. It's all waking up Yeah, which is the name of the app that he has it now. I should say you have because you have Meditations for children on their it's called waking up app or course. Yes great great great stuff And I love that book so much. I've read it many many times So that's just a detail to drop. The larger thing I wanted to say when you put your finger on this so I want to I want to say what I would say in response to what you said and see if you think I'm getting it right which is that for some people they struggle you know they might be frustrated for some listeners

to hear us talk with such enthusiasm about these practices because often a person can try these and get no quote-unquote results and it feels frustrating and like I've experienced they don't have access to. But in my experience, you actually have to do it a bunch and do it lightly. Not like you've got to grit your teeth, you've got gotta feel what it's like to have no self, because of course that desire to feel a certain thing is going to stop you from feeling the thing. Right? It often does, yeah. I mean, for I do this practice of looking

for what's knowing or looking for what's hearing all the time, and it doesn't quote unquote work a lot, but it's just kind of a gentle thing I play with over time. And when everyone's in a while, it does kind of bump you up against this fundamental just this I've used this term before this kind of vertiginous feeling of like oh wow. There's nobody home I know that I'm knowing stuff. Yeah, I know that I'm hearing your voice right now

I can't find what is hearing it Yeah, and the sense of self is just another thing that's up hearing in consciousness. And so am I, am I giving, you think correct instruction here to folks? Yeah, absolutely. And I think what you just said is exactly what Diana Winston would say. And she, this is why I love this book so much. We should call it out. It's called the little book of being, yeah. A little book of being, yeah, and it's wonderful. And that's exactly how she suggests that people use it. And she also suggests that you try different practices and certain ones will resonate and

others won't. And yeah, she's very easy going in her approach. And I do think that's the most effective way to go about it. And yeah, it's all little experiments. So she gives you many different ways and methods by which you can try to introduce these concepts without a lot of pressure and just to see, you know, as an experiment, see what happens. And what's the benefit? Yeah, so it's funny. I'm just remembering some things Sam said that I realized he said in an event with you,

which was, I think I'm getting this right, I think he said, I would meditate even if it were a little bit bad for you. And I'm definitely, I'm of the same mindset. And I think it's partly because of how I was introduced to it, and also just because of my other interests. For me, it's interesting to me that you even ask the question because my first response is, it's so interesting, that that's a benefit in and of itself.

So I think there are other benefits to that. I think so many of them you talk about all the time on your podcast and we now have so much more science that confirms so much of what we experience, which is that a lot of our emotional suffering is caused by the solution of being a self. And so it actually can help you cut through or manage better a lot of uncomfortable or unhealthy emotions and behaviors that you have in your life. One of the ways that the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein

talks about it is in dealing with powerful emotions, you can move from I am to there is. So the difference between I am angry and how the sense of self in the face of anger that this is my bespoke anger can force you to re-up the anger, sort of indefinitely. As opposed to there is anger, this is this impersonal phenomenon rolling through. And can I examine it from a standpoint of curiosity kind of exactly like you did with migraine pain at age

eight. Yeah. Can that can change your whole relationship with the thing? Yeah. Well, and it also naturally brings in compassion, which it took me a while to understand this actually. I was intrigued by it when I first started my formal meditation practice. And actually, I think it was on my first retreat.

I felt depths of compassion that I'd never experienced before in my life. And I had heard it talked about so much. I came off of that first retreat thinking, why is it that this concentration practice naturally brings up compassion? Why are those two things connected? But I think what you just said is basically what where I arrived at. It's a very different starting point, a very different way of looking at yourself and others. Without the self, there's just a lot more room for compassion.

More 10% happier after this. Life is short and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions, like what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you, but I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they

felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly the lows of their careers. We explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times. But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to ad free on the Amazon Music or Wonder Yeah. You and we talked about this at the beginning to find the mystery of consciousness is how to unconscious matter go from being unconscious to being conscious.

How do the lights go on from a rock to us? Yeah. So that's one way to think about the mystery of consciousness. It's also sometimes talked about as, and this is the way Joseph and other meditation teachers, if memory serves, talk about it, which is, the mystery is, I know that I am knowing stuff. I know that there's visual data coming in right now for me that includes you nodding your head

and includes the sound of my own voice and includes the feeling of my toshana chair or whatever. I know that I'm aware of this stuff, but I don't know of what's aware. You know, I can't find the nowhere. Right. Are those two different questions or are they related? I'm not sure. I mean, so at a very fundamental level, there is consciousness and there are the contents

of consciousness. And that's the more accurate way to talk about it when you're able to drop the idea or the illusion of self. So there's knowing and what is known? I guess. I actually don't love the word knowing because I feel I get invoked complex thought. And I think experience and consciousness, absolutely, I mean, we know that you can have an experience

of something without having thoughts or complex, yeah, complex thoughts in general. I watch my cats do this all the time. Right. Or I mean, even, you know, infants or some people think infants aren't conscious, but it's another, it's another thing that, you know, as young as you want to go, a one-year-old baby, they're clearly not having an experience, anything like the experience you and I are having right now. I'm not sure you would say a one-year-old knows anything. I mean, I guess there's certain things you know the sound of.

There's, you know, there are things you could say it knows. And of course, it's learning a lot at that point. But you can have an experience, a very, very minimal experience experience Without the usual sense of knowing something and I think in the in the Buddha sense That's what know that's what they mean by knowing but I feel like it's a little Confusing you know using it in a Western context because we mean something different by knowing I think this kind of I'm gonna use a term but not in the majority Prejorative but this kind of, I'm gonna use a term, but not in the majority, pejorative, but this kind of persnickety-ness about language, this precision around language,

which is very common in Buddhist circles, is actually useful. So what I say, I know that I know stuff. I don't mean like knowing in the, you know, I know Spanish. It's more like I know, I'm simply aware that I'm seeing something right now, but I can't find the nowhere. Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. now, but I can't find the knower.

That's what I'm talking about. Well, but I think there's even a level deeper. You know that you're seeing something, but there's a possibility that there's an experience of just seeing without knowing that you're seeing. Because you're... And the argument is that in deep states of meditation, you can start to pick these apart. Yes, right. All of which is in service of uprooting the sense of self, which of course is per the Buddhist,

the wellspring of all of our suffering. Because then you've got something, this thing that's not a thing at all, the self that you need to build up and defend and all of this other stuff which is causes not only our own suffering but other people's suffering. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and then I mean once you start contemplating all of this and having long experiences of extended meditation practice, you start consciousness can become even more mysterious in terms of a phenomenon in the world. At least it did for me.

And you realize that there are some intuitions that are misleading us in terms of what we think consciousness is. And that's the main goal of my new book is really that. It's really to shake up our intuitions about what consciousness is. And for me, the primary goal of that is to help us gain a deeper understanding if that's possible. I mean, some people think our brains are just not, they're not able to understand this mystery. I'm a little more optimistic than that. I think it's possible.

I think this is true in any area of knowledge or scientific breakthrough that it seems that in order to get a more fundamental understanding of the nature of reality, it almost always requires that we break through some intuition that's misleading us. Even intuitions that might be useful in our daily lives, they're not necessarily illusions, although I think we have some false intuitions also that are leading us in the wrong direction

with consciousness. But everything from understanding that the Earth is a sphere and not flat, as it seems to us to be. To atoms. Yeah, exactly. Atoms and anything microscopic are the germ theory of disease. It took a long time for people to accept that, because it's so counterintuitive.

Yeah, the fact that matter is made up of mostly empty space. I mean, there couldn't be anything more counterintuitive than that, right? Well, all we see is solid matter around us, but it turns out that at a fundamental level, that's not the way the universe is structured. And there are always these periods of time, sometimes very long periods of time, before the information that we've gotten to or the scientific understanding that we've reached, we have this period where we go back and forth and check it against our intuitions and the moment we say, no, no, no, that can't be, that can't, we must have this wrong somehow. There's some period of time

before we're able to recognize that yes, this actually is the way the universe is structured and we have to let go of this intuition that's misleading us. And I think we're in a place like that in terms of consciousness. And so I think if it's possible for us to understand it better, it's going to require that we really shake, shake free some intuitions. It's interesting to read your book because you clearly in terms of your own motivation evolved from just sheer curiosity that you've had that appears to be long standing for you to a desire to help as you say shake up our intuitions around what's known as the hard problem of consciousness because it's hard to understand solve etc etc. I can actually get a little more into that if you want to describe why the hard problem

is called the hard problem. Yes, but let me just finish this, because I do want you to talk about that, but it's very interesting to note to see how your motivation went from just like, wow, this is I'm kind of obsessed with the subject to maybe I can do something that will Help us solve the hard problem by shaking up our intuitions because it's from that state of not knowing yeah, which we've been talking about out of it's out of that state that we often Evolved toward a real knowing I mean look the Zen folks talk about beginners mine. That's yeah The not knowing can be very, very powerful.

Yeah, absolutely. So anyway, having said that, good diving and good job. I was also, I did just remind me though, that the book came about for that reason. So I actually, so I've been working with neuroscientists for about 12 years. And I've been thinking about this stuff my whole life,

but started to really To do more research and to try to figure out you know to understand everything I could possibly understand and so this topic kept coming up more and more in conversations with friends and I realized that I wasn't the only one Who was interested in this topic and so I actually just started writing my ideas down. I kind of wanted to work through my own ideas and I'd come across this category of theories that postulates that consciousness could be a more fundamental feature of the universe.

And this is under the unfortunate term of panpsychism, which I think are obvious reasons, is not the unfortunate term of panpsychism, which I think are obvious reasons, is not the best term. It's something that I completely discounted the first time I came across it, but the more I thought about it, the more these ideas seemed interesting to me and worth exploring at the very least. The idea of panpsychism is, I understand it,

just from reading your writing, is that everything has consciousness. Yes. So with this chair of sitting in or my shoe to use another object that was invoked earlier, actually does have some consciousness. Well, we don't know. And these are the theory. Yeah, the theory. And I actually say in my book that the more I thought about it. So the book, oh, so what I was saying is the book itself became at first my writing was just a way for me to work through my own thoughts, because I couldn't quite believe myself that I was being convinced by this line

of thinking. And so I just started writing for myself. And then I knew I had some friends who were interested in the topic, and I was sharing it with them. It was just kind of a thing. We were intellectual game. We were doing for fun. And a few of them said, you know, you should you should build this out and, you know, submit it as an article to Scientific American or something like that. And anyway, the more I worked on it, the more built out it got it actually turned it turned into this book. So it actually once I got deeper into the process

of writing and interviewing scientists and once I started seriously contemplating this this type of theory myself that possibly consciousness is a more fundamental feature of the universe. I actually sent what I'd been writing to about 10 scientists who I thought would give me the harshest criticism. And I was a little bit worried about expressing these thoughts publicly, and I wanted to get a bit of a reality check on how crazy are these ideas, and if I do publish them, how much criticism will I get on the other side of publication and what really surprised me was that most of the scientists that I went out to and these

are well-respected mainstream scientists were open to these ideas, had thought about them already. Some of them kind of came to theories like this on their own without even really knowing about panpsychism. None of them were willing to admit this publicly or to talk about it publicly. And there are some scientists who I talk about in my book who are and who are doing some interesting work. But the ones who I figured would deliver the harshest criticism were actually very grateful that I was writing about this because they do think there's something interesting there. Those who I figured would deliver the harshest criticism were actually very grateful that I was writing about this because they do think there's something interesting there.

So, part of my goal kind of shifted from just wanting to share this mystery with everyone to really hoping that I could help make the topic less taboo, because if we are ever going to make any progress on the hard problem, it has to be that scientists can think about it and discuss it publicly. How would panpsychism work? I mean, this microphone that's in front of me right now is actually conscious is making judgments about the tone of my voice,

but how would this work? So first of all, it's very important to distinguish consciousness from complex thought again. So our brains are very particular configuration of matter. There's a lot of very complex processing. I mean, our brains are the most complicated thing we know of in the universe. So what it's like to be brain processing, we would never expect, if some version of

panpsychism is correct, we would never expect a microphone to have any kind of experience like ours, to have a mind, to have thoughts, to have intentions, none of that would be, would exist. And in fact, I think our experience of being a self and all of the complicated thoughts and things we can think about, if consciousness is pervasive, that would be a very, very rare form of consciousness. So if there's actually something it's like to be an atom or an individual cell or some collection of cells or the material that make up this table in front of us, it's not, it's in no way a unified

mind, like I said with thoughts and intentions. So I sometimes joke that, you know, we wouldn't expect a rock to write a novel or to get up and start dancing and so we wouldn't expect it, we wouldn't expect it to behave the way that humans behave and we wouldn't expect it to feel anything like the way a human mind feels especially as an integrated thing. I mean a rock is not a real integrated system of any kind. You can break it apart and it's still a rock. So it's not like toy story where we leave the room in the toys to have these complex lives

and rivalries, etc. No, although., etc. No, although it does, I mean, and these are questions that come up all the time now in the age of AI and are quickly developing technologies, yes, artificial intelligence. What would constitute the type of processing that's similar enough to a human brain, that if everything, if there is some level of consciousness in all matter, if it's a property of matter, then yes, well, the things we create that are close enough to human beings, will that entail an experience

like being a human being? Do we have ethical obligations and all of these interesting questions? Let me just give that to a question I was answering before because I don't know if we ran it to ground. That maybe there are mysteries of consciousness because you talk about the mystery of consciousness as being, you know, how do we go from a conscious matter to the light being on. And I was saying, well, some meditation teachers talk about it as, like, I, or one knows that one knows something in the technical sense of knowing but there is no nowhere. Are those, I was trying to get before those two

different mysteries of consciousness or is it the same thing looked at from a different angle? I would call one a mystery. There's the mystery which is, you know, the hard problem. And then I would say there's a lot we don't know. And not necessarily everything we don't know is a mystery with a capital M. And it's interesting because I think that's what most people assumed the hard problem was, and many people still do. I think most scientists still do. So, and I was certainly one of those people, we assumed that consciousness is analogous to something like a light bulb, where if you don't know anything about electricity and the mechanics of light bulbs, you're in a dark room and you flip a switch and suddenly the room is flooded with light.

That seems like a miracle. That seems, you know, like a completely mysterious phenomenon. But once you understand electric currents and, you know, all of the science that goes into why this is a phenomenon, it's no longer mysterious, it's pretty basic science. And I think most of us assumed that consciousness was something like that. It seems mysterious to us, it seems like it's miraculous thing, but that's only because we know so little about the brain,

and at some point we'll figure it out, and then we'll see, oh, it's just like flipping on a light switch, and neurons do their neuron thing in this specific way and then all of a sudden you have experience. But there are there are many reasons to think that that actually that those are not analogous and that the hard problem of consciousness is is a much deeper mystery than that which I was referring to as mystery with a capital M. Do you think we'll solve this? Hard problem.

I really don't know. I really don't know. I could see it going either way. I could see this just persisting as a mystery until the end of time, at least for human beings. Maybe some AI will figure it out. But no, it does seem like one of those things that it's hard to imagine how we could.

I just know that there are so many things in science like that that seemed that way. And we've made progress. We understand things that we couldn't have even contemplated not that long ago. I mean, we're so young as a species in the scheme of things that I'm definitely optimistic that at the very least we can understand a lot more than we do. One last question, just in terms of shaking up our intuitions, you talk early in the book about plants and whether plants are conscious. Are plants counted?

Mike, you're December conscious? Right, so I have no idea if plants are conscious. I don't necessarily think that they are. And again, I think if there's any form of consciousness in a plant, it is nothing like the consciousness we experience. There's no complex thought or anything remotely like being a human being. But the reason I bring up plants in my book is more to discuss behavior and how we usually look at behavior as evidence of consciousness.

And I think this is one very strong intuition that is interesting to probe a little bit and to shake up. So I actually begin early on in the book. I give these two questions that I think are very useful for getting us to really look closely and answer for ourselves. What we think consciousness is at an intuitive level. And so the first question is, can we see anything on the outsiders, any behavior that we witness that is conclusive evidence of consciousness of that system. So if I go to my friend's house and her

cat just died and she's sobbing on the floor, that to me that's a reflexive answer. Like yes, my friend crying on the floor, absolutely that's evidence that consciousness is present. And it seems crazy to question that, but I wanted to kind of go at these places where we feel almost 100% sure that we see evidence of consciousness and figure out why is that,

and is that correct? And so the first question is about, is there behavior that we can definitely say as evidence of consciousness? The second question is related, but it's a slightly different question, which is, does consciousness do anything? Is it affecting our behavior? Because that's a very, another strong intuition. It seems crazy to ask, because our reflexive answer is, yes, absolutely. We need consciousness to think about all kinds of things, to, that

they're really the driving force of so much of our, that consciousness is the driving force of so much of our behavior, even just planning out my day today, you know, what time do I have to catch a cab to go meet Dan, and all of that seems to be driven by consciousness in some sense. And what's interesting is when you look at these reflexive answers and intuitions more closely, they actually do start to fall apart.

And one of the places, as you said, I bring up behavior and plants, which I learned a lot actually doing research for this book, there's some very interesting and bizarre plant behavior that is close enough to human behavior, that it starts to get you to question because we assume plants are not conscious. So you see this behavior that's similar enough to human behavior that we would use as evidence of consciousness. In a plant we assume there's no consciousness, so does that actually rule out some of these behaviors?

Plants react to a lot of the same things. We react to touch and light and heat and sound. They are processing all of these cues from the external world by processes that are very, very similar to the way our brains process these same types of things. And Daniel Chamovitz is a scientist. He wrote a book, What a Plant Knows, which I cite a lot of my book. He's done some very fascinating work, but he's actually, in his work, he identifies a gene that is responsible in plants for determining whether they're in the light or the dark. And it turns out this gene is part of the human DNA as well and has a similar function.

I mean, it gets more complex with humans. It has to do with circadian rhythms, but it is, it's the same gene that detects light and dark. And the way that electrical signals get passed in plants, IV when it needs to change direction and change its rate of growth when it starts, you know, notices an object nearby that it wants to wrap itself around. There's a Susan Samard, I think, is how you pronounce her last name. I may have pronounced it incorrectly. She does fascinating work on the underground root systems and system in forests.

So how trees are interconnected and how they share carbon and other minerals. And one thing I mentioned in my book which I find super interesting is that the quote unquote mother trees can notice, can distinguish between the trees that are there kin from the other trees and the forest and they actually deliver more carbon and they deliver signals that warn, defense signals that warn of poisonous things in the area, things like that where there's all this communication happening through what's called micro-risal networks, these fungal networks, where the behaviors

when you witness them seem like the types of behaviors you would need consciousness to perform. So that's just the beginning in my book. That's just the very beginning of asking these two questions and then beginning with plant behaviors. The beginning of this exploration of our intuitions leading us toward the truth or where are they leading us toward the truth and where they perhaps misleading us. I don't know if we're going to solve the mystery, the hard problem, definitely not in this podcast.

I don't know if we're going to solve it in our lifetimes. And I'm not even sure how much it matters at the level of an individual life or mind, but I will say what does matter indisputably is that this feeling of awe that you have evoked for us in this conversation and that you do incredible skillfully in the book is salutary. You know, it does put you in perspective, it does take you out of yourself. There's a selflessness in that. So thank you to you for that. Appreciate it. Yeah. Before we go, I always close with the plug zone. So can you plug the book where we can find you on the internet, et cetera, et cetera?

So the book is called Conscious, a brief guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind. And you can find it at any bookseller. And my website is just onikaheras.com, a-n-n-a-k-a-haras.com. I have some guided meditations for children available on my website and other resources related to my book conscious and also my children's book. And I now have all of my guided meditations and lessons for children are now on Sam's waking up app. Thank you again. Appreciate it. Thank you. It's fun. Always great to see Anika. Big thanks again to Anika. Let's do some voice mails. Here's number one. Hi Dan. First and foremost, thank you to you and everybody at 10% happier for all the work you're doing. It's very appreciated and making a big impact on my life and many others.

So thank you. I have a fairly well-established practice of meditating for five or six years and actually been doing about an hour a day recently, which is kind of a new development and I've definitely noticed some benefits from continuing to kind of lamp up and take it further. My question comes in the fact that I have a baby boy due to enter my world here, actually, as due date is one month from today. So I fully anticipate that to throw somewhat of a wrench in my current routine. So given that I know you have a young boy yourself and have maintained a pretty rigorous practice through that period of your life.

I'm wondering if you have any tips or advice on how to navigate that and how to, how I can keep meditation, you know, largely for the benefit of my wife and baby boy. Keep that up, you know, expecting it to not look the same or be the same length or time or whatever, but any tips you have will not be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Thank you. Congratulations to you and your wife. Having a baby, boy or girl is awesome. I was very glad to hear what you said at the end

Which is that you don't expect it to be to your practice to look the same When you have a child so you're not Sounds to me like you're not overly attached to Continuing the same exact practice one hour day same place every day, etc Because your life's about to change in a big way and I think think you need to be flexible, and I think you need to be in it with your wife. So just going in with an open mind and a sense of flexibility and curiosity, I think it's going to be really helpful to you. And I think giving yourself a break that, you know, this is a time of your life where you've done all this work, and it's going to pay off. You're going to be

less, you act around by your emotions, less, more focused, more, you know, sort of a wake and a wear for all this amazing stuff and difficult stuff that's going to happen. So let the investment pay off for a minute and don't get so worried. In my view, this is just one person's advice. Don't get so worried on rigidly clinging to the way it was before you had the child. So the way I did it was to really just kind of, for sure, I made a lot of mistakes. We can talk about those too, but just to think really

strategically about my schedule and to know that, and every day is going to be different. Some days I'm not going to be getting enough sleep. Some days I'm going to be, I'm going to have plenty of spare time because the baby is sleeping a lot and just catch it where you can. I think that kind of having a supple attitude can be really useful in terms of mistakes. By the way, and being, being okay just to say this again, being okay with your maybe days where you only get one or five or ten minutes in and that's fine

Absolutely fine. You should be calling that a victory and I made that this made last for a long time The other thing I'd say is I made some mistakes about being rigid really setting saying to myself You know, I'm mr. Meditation guy now. I need to do I decided maybe I'm Mr. Meditation Guy, now I need to do, I decided maybe a half a year or a year into our son's life that I wanted to do two hours a day. And I was flexible about I could get it done anywhere. And in any time length I wanted, and I was often just doing in the back seats of taxi cabs or in airplanes as I traveled or in my office. But I do think it was too rigid and it's created, it created some stress with my wife and

she was in the right on this one. And so over time I got much better at making it so that she wasn't even aware. I just didn't meditate much at home and certainly not if there was something that needed to be done. But then I eventually cut, eventually cut back to an hour. Now I don't think she ever really notices that I'm meditating because it all just happens when our son's off at school or when I'm on traveling or I'm at the office, etc., etc. I think it just comes down to flexibility and giving yourself a break. You've done all this good work. I can imagine you might be attached on some level to continuing with the practice since you're

getting so much out of it, but understanding that life is, as you see, under meditation, cushion always changing and you get a role with it. So congratulations and good luck going forward. Here is Voice Mail number two. Hi Dan, my name is Julia. First, thanks so much for your book, your first book, and your podcast and app. I confess I haven't got to the second book yet, but I just started using the app and I found myself wondering, and I know that that's doubt, but I'm wondering, what's a soft mental note? How do I know I'm not doing a hard mental note or yelling at myself out, out, out, out,

and not, you know, in, out, softly? How do I know what's loud and what's soft? Thanks. That's such a great question. I've struggled with this for years. So I'll give you my answer, not from the mountaintop, like somebody who's mastered this, but as somebody who's in the trenches with you as a reconfiled meditator. So just for the uninitiated, she's talking about the soft mental note.

Mental noting is a tried and true technique in the meditation world, which is the skillful use of thinking to connect you to your direct experience. So if you're meditating on your breath, you can use a soft mental note of in on the in breath or rising rising as you feel your belly rising and then falling, falling as you feel it falling or in and out if you're more focused on the nostrils. You can also use this in a more open awareness meditation where you're not so much focused on one thing but you're just noting whatever arises. So hearing much focused on one thing, but you're just noting whatever arises, so hearing, seeing, if you're seeing lights behind your eyes, or you've got some mental imagery, pressure, burning, twisting, itching, just little notes that connect you to the raw data of your

experience. And by the way, you can also note thinking. Oh, yeah, I'm thinking, I've just, or anger or whatever. So it's incredibly useful for me because my baseline powers of concentration aren't that strong. So instead of just feeling the breath with no notes, I, and with, you know, that I can often get very lost if I'm doing that. If I use the notes, I can stay with it longer. I've noticed for myself. But your question was, the instruction is often use a soft mental note rather than a

hard mental note. This is definitely art, not science. And you're really just going to have to probe this for yourself. But the phrase that's often used is like a whisper in the mind. So you're not screaming in your mind as you screamed using your outside voice. And you're not screaming into yourself like a or in and out or rising, rising, falling, falling to yourself like a drill surgeon. You really just want to keep it the volume low. And I can't, you know, there's no dial here, so I can't give you specific instructions, but you can see for yourself

just through your own experience. What is, is how loud is this in my mind? Am I really, is it very soft? And the volume is low enough so that I'm more focused on the feeling of the breath than I am on the volume of the note. Another thing that Joseph Goldstein, one of the primary teachers on the app, talks about a lot is the tone of the note. This is very much related to what we're talking about right now. Is there sort of aggression, anger, self-flagulation in the note? You've noticed you've become distracted and you're making a mental note of thinking, thinking,

but you're doing so in a way like thinking, oh my god, you're such an idiot, I can't believe you were thinking again. By the way, that's gonna happen, but then you might notice maybe you'd use the note judging, judging. Everything can be co-opted. Everything can be included, but ultimately you do want to get to a point where the noting has a gentle non-judgmental feel to it. Like I said, you will at times, I'll just speak for myself, inevitably even after all these years of meditation, laps into self-judgment, but that's just another thing to notice. And then you can start noting in a way that's softer and less judgmental. As I've said a million times before, this is like a golf game with a million Mulligans, it's all about starting again and again and again.

So thank you for that question. You've really honed in on an important thing. Thank you to everybody who's listening. I really appreciate it. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review or talk about us on social media or rate us. This all really helps. It boosts our visibility so we can get more listeners and keep doing this thing.

We so enjoy. And speaking of the Wii, big thanks to the folks who produced this show, Ryan Kessler, Samuel Johns, Grace Livingston, likes on the boards today, Mike, who does do you. And we'll see you next Wednesday with another show. Hey, hey, prime members, you can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music.

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