Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 247: Weird Dreams, Family Relationships, and Collective Trauma | Dr. Mark Epstein

Episode Date: May 13, 2020

Why are so many of us having such weird dreams these days? How do we successfully interact with family members while on lockdown? Are we all experiencing some sort of trauma? These are just some of the questions with which we grapple during this discussion with Dr. Mark Epstein. It is no exaggeration to say that Mark has played a pivotal role in my life. My then-fiancé (and now wife), Bianca, gave me one of Mark's books (called Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart) back in 2009, and it genuinely changed my life. It was my first introduction to Buddhism. And to hear someone with actual medical experience (Mark is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist) extol the virtues of meditation made me reconsider a practice I had long considered ridiculous. In this chat, we also talk about blurring the line between meditation and therapy, and the profound value of not taking yourself too seriously. Enjoy. Where to find Mark Esptein online: Website: http://markepsteinmd.com/ Twitter: @Mepstein108 / https://twitter.com/Mepstein108 Facebook: Mark Epstein, MD / https://www.facebook.com/markepstein108/ Book Mentioned: The Trauma of Everyday Life / https://www.amazon.com/Trauma-Everyday-Life-Mark-Epstein/dp/0143125745 Other Resources Mentioned: Joseph Goldstein / https://www.dharma.org/teacher/joseph-goldstein/ Roberth Thurman / https://bobthurman.com/ Ram Dass / https://www.ramdass.org/ Samuel Beckett / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett Jack Kornfield / https://jackkornfield.com/ Additional Resources: Ten Percent Happier Live: https://tenpercent.com/live Coronavirus Sanity Guide: https://www.tenpercent.com/coronavirussanityguide Free App Access for Teachers, Healthcare, Grocery and Food Delivery, and Warehouse Workers: https://tenpercent.com/care Get more focus and clarity by bringing mindfulness to your company with a team subscription to Ten Percent Happier! Visit tenpercent.com/work to learn more. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/mark-epstein-247 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. All right. Hello. As you may know, if you've been listening to the show during this pandemic, we've got a little rhythm going on Wednesdays. We bring bring in deep Dharma practitioner. This week we've got a great one for you. Dr. Mark Epstein has played a huge role in my life as I'll explain in a moment.

And then on Mondays, we bring in experts to talk about something topical. So this week we talked about the issue of patients. We've talked about grief, we've talked about, any number of issues. So that's the cadence. Monday, topical issue, Wednesday, we're doing deep Dharma, some A-lister from the Dharma world.

And then on Friday, we dropped some sort of bonus, either a bonus guided meditation or a bonus talk. So that's the way we've been running things. And as I said, we've got a great teacher this week we're going to talk to Dr. Mark Epstein. First though, I just want to do one item of business, which is, I mentioned this the other day, but it bears repeating.

I've got a new offering at 10% happier, where if you run a company, or if you work in HR or people at a company, and you want to buy bulk subscriptions, we can now do that. 10%.com slash work is the place to go. TNP, or CNT dot com slash work, you can get subscriptions for your teams.

People have been asking for this for a while, and now finally we can do it. Okay, let's get to the show and some questions. Why are so many of us having so many weird dreams these days? How do we successfully interact with family members when we're locked down? Are we all experiencing some sort of collective trauma right now?

These are just some of the questions with which we grapple during this discussion with Dr. Mark Epstein. It is no exaggeration for me to say that Mark has played a pivotal role, as I mentioned, in my life. Bianca gave me one of Mark's books. It was called Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart. Back in 2009 and it genuinely changed my life.

It was my first introduction to Buddhism. And really to hear somebody with actual medical experience, Mark is a Harvard train psychiatrist. To hear somebody like him, extol the virtues of meditation, made me really reconsider a practice that I had long considered to be ridiculous to the extent that I had considered it at all. In this chat we talk about the value of blurring the line between meditation and therapy and the value of not taking yourself too seriously, the profound value of that. So here we go, Mark Epstein, enjoy. Hi Mark. Hey Dan.

Nice to see you again. Nice to see you. Thanks for doing this, appreciate it. It's a pleasure, as you know. Alright, well let's go for it. I guess for me it's always interesting when I'm talking to somebody who's been meditating for a long time and is attuned to mental health issues to just get a sense of how are they doing so how are you doing in the midst of all this? You know, I thought I was going to go on retreat when this started I was heading up to the forest refuge for a week in the middle of March and I've been looking forward to it and looking forward to it.

looking forward to it and looking forward to it. And then I couldn't go. Like the virus was starting to happen. And I thought, oh, I can't go. And then they closed IMS and the forest refuge. So I couldn't have gone anyway. But I had canceled all my patients because I thought I was going to be away. So then I came back and we came to the country.

And I didn't know if my patients would return because everything had changed. And suddenly I wasn't on retreat but the whole world was on retreat. So I had to do an about face and reorient myself around who I was and what the world meant and the going on retreat feeling

I managed to access. So I think that has really helped me accommodate myself to this weird limbo, bardo, like reality, because I find myself using all the strategies that I use on retreat to not meditate, because my joke to myself whenever I go on retreat is that there's no time to meditate when you're on retreat, because you joke to myself whenever I go on retreat is that there's no time to meditate when you're on retreat because you have to do so many other things, you know, have to go for a walk and go to all those meals and do your job and stretch and it was like an hour left during the morning to sit. So I think I'm all right. I think I'm doing all right. That's the long answer

to your question. Long answers are welcome here. And just in case anybody was confused by your reference to doing your job on retreat, but if you've never gone on a retreat, you get a what's called a yogi job. You have to clean pots in the kitchen. Clean the hallway or something.

Vacuum, it's very good practice for now because now we have to clean our own house, of course. And so I've been trying to put meditation into action. Like how can you really be in a quarantined, sheltering in place, life, and stay conscious and alert and not just let the mind dwell in worry and media and virus narratives? Can you do that? So, when I'm cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, when I'm cleaning, or when I'm talking to another person, when I'm being a therapist, I'm very good at doing it. Or when I'm watching TV.

Non-News TV. Non-News TV, right. For I read the news favor. So if you're not doing therapy or cleaning or You know watching Netflix do you slip into worry? Do I slip into worry? Yeah worry is my almost natural state Like what got me into meditation in the first place was worrying When I was young I used to you know

How did I stop myself from worrying by thinking of the worst thing that could ever happen? And then realizing that, oh, I guess I would survive unless I didn't. No, I was always a worrier. So I worry much less now, but everything is relative. That technique of thinking of the worst thing that could ever happen, isn't that the Greek Stoic philosophers would, I have a very passing familiarity with Stoicism, but isn't that actually a time-tested technique?

I have no idea. Okay. I have no Greek history. I have no Greek history. I'm glad I have an expert on the show. This is awesome. Yeah. Okay, so you're not in a,

I mean nobody's in a stress-free environment right now, but you are even though you're comfortably in the country at your home, you are on the front lines in terms of the mental health pandemic that is very, very real. And so I'm just curious how that's impacting you and that I'd like to hear in an anonymous way what you are hearing from your patient. Yeah, well I'm talking to a lot of people. I wouldn't really say I'm on the front lines. I think I'm in the rear guard or whatever,

but I'm talking to a lot of people, mostly people who I've known for a long time and who I feel close to. So I'm tapped into their lives and their realities. And some of them are alone in small apartments in the city. Some of them are with families in small apartments in the city. Some of them are scattered around in Rhode Island or in Maine or on Long Island. And some are more far flung in Europe or in California. So I have a kind of random view of how 30, 40, 50 people are doing with this.

And I would say that on the one hand, everyone is coping magnificently, like it's amazing how people are, it's not just the people I'm talking to, everyone everywhere are really listening to what we're supposed to be doing and staying in place and being careful about who they're in contact with and all of that and doing it for the common good, not just for themselves. So that's remarkable. And on the other hand, I would say that the uncertainty of the moment, meaning nobody knows what this is going to look like on the other side, or if there's going to be another side, or if their lives are going to pick up again, and what their work is going to look like, is the theater going to reopen?

Are the museums going to reopen? Are people going to be able to go back to work, if so, and how? None of that is clear yet. And so people's minds can't help but range into the future, trying to figure it out, and it's impossible. So that's disquieting. And everyone is dreaming, really strange dreams. That's what myself included, really vivid. When I go on retreat, I dream very vividly, and it reminds me of that. But every night I'm dreaming vividly, and I hear that from my patients, too. So I think there's this sort of general clearing out of old memories and material and weighted,

fraught stuff, and some kind of hope for the future that has no form. I'm curious about dreams, because yeah, I'm not special in this regard. I'm having really weird dreams too, and I've heard that from my wife and many others. What significance, you said it's something like washing things out. Why are we having weird dreams and what significance do the dreams have?

Well, again, just because I'm a psychiatrist, I'm really no expert on dreams. I have no idea why we are. I could make up a couple of reasons. One reason I would make up is that, you know, we're in a planetary moment where the Earth itself is really reasserting its primacy in a certain way, you know, without all the cars on the road,

even around here where I'm living. The birds are so vivid and loud and present in the mornings and in the evenings, and the squirrels are jumping all around and the rabbits and the deer, and I had bear walking by my window the other day, you know, like nature is definitely encroaching. But I think nature might be speaking to us in our dreams also, all of us. So that's one new age possible explanation. I think also like when I do go on retreat and my dreams get very vivid, I think it is because I'm able to process subliminally a lot of my past and a lot of my hopes and dreams, you know, waking dreams, dreams it from my psyche, you know. I'm much closer, I'm less distracted when I'm on retreat by

all the busyness of my life. And so the deeper stuff within has room to show itself, I think. And I think that's true now for everybody, because we're all, even though I'm very busy, and I know you're very busy in a certain way our lives are much more circumscribed, staying home, cooking all the meals, cleaning, being with the kids, being with the spouses, being with the pets, you know, it's, we're really with ourselves. And I think that's good material for dreams. And then we're worrying about, you know, our parents who we can't be with, who my mother's 95 and alone in her apartment.

So there's a lot of that kind of anxiety that I think many people of my generation anyway are having. And the younger generation is worried about infecting their parents. You know, I mean, everyone's feeling how they're connected, but cut off at the same time. So I think that's good material for dreams. Do you think there is a sort of a healthy purging that's happening when you're, I've heard on Recreation teachers talking about these dreams as jarring as they can be. It is kind of a purification.

Well, that gets into some talk about meditation, which might be interesting for us. You know, I think there's a tendency in the mindfulness community that I'm part of to be ever so dismissive of personal conflicts and deeper kind of painful emotional material. There's an ever so small tendency to kind of flick that stuff away when it comes up in meditation, like thinking, thinking, you know. But some of that material is deeply important and really personal and where is it going to go, but into the dream life. So I think to make the dream life part of the meditation also, which is the amazing thing for me anyway. I don't usually remember my dreams in my regular life so easily, but on retreat I always do.

So then I'm sitting with the intense feelings of, oh, what was going on there like that. I, you know, so I think it's a way of, it's a sort of corrective. The dreams are a kind of corrective against a prejudice that somehow has accrued in maybe because we set meditation up against psychotherapy as if it's a different thing. That psychotherapy is about dealing with anger and desire

and personal history and memories and early life and so on. And in meditation, we can kind of get away from all that and still improve ourselves. I'm much more interested in how to make the two worlds synthetic, how to make them feel like one thing. It's a point of confusion a little bit for me because yeah, as I understand the

instructions in meditation, it's about having this non-judgmental, but friendly remove vis-a-vis whatever comes up in your mind. So you sit, you watch your breath, and you get distracted, and either you just let it go and go back to your breath or you could investigate whatever powerful emotion has taken you away. But you're not supposed to investigate the emotion in terms of, wow, yeah, maybe I am feeding this pattern with my wife or maybe my dad really mess up

that one time, he said that one thing to me. That's really where you're crossing the line between the process of the mind, which is considered this sort of terra firma for meditators and the content of the mind, which is considered this sort of terra firma for meditators and the content of your thoughts, which is considered more therapy. Am I am I explicating this correctly? I think you're explicating it very accurately for the way it's been explicated to us. So I'm 40 years on be able to explain to you that I'm not going to explain to you that I'm not going to explain to you

that I'm not going to explain to you that I'm not going to explain to you that I'm not going to explain to you that I'm not going to explain to you that I'm not going to explain to you that I'm not going to explain to you that I'm not going to explain to you that I'm not going to explain to you

that I'm not going to explain to you that I'm not going to explain to you that I'm not going to explain to you boundaries between seeing the thoughts or recognizing the emotion but not dwelling in them are starting to blur a little bit for me. In particular, just the other day I was sitting in the morning, I found myself thinking which is not an unusual occupation when I'm meditating, but then I could see that really, whenever I'm thinking, when I I'm meditating I have a slightly aversive response to the thinking like I then think oh I shouldn't be thinking or bad boy. Or yeah, it's not exactly that. It's much more subtle than bad boy, but it's like,

it's like a little bit of disgust like oh you're thinking again like after so long like. And then I sort of can't wait to get away from the thinking and back to what I think of as really meditating, which might be like, oh, I'm in my body now, or I can feel my breath a little bit, or there's that vast empty light space behind my eyes, you know, where I'm more comfortable, like, oh, this is meditating. But then I had the thought, like, what if you let that go and just be with what you're thinking about, just be in the, actually, even in the content, like let yourself think and look at,

look at what you're thinking about. And then I remembered Joseph before I went into a self-retreat at the Forest Refuge a couple of years ago, whenever I go up there and Joseph's available, I stop in, I bring him some cookies, and then we talk for a little while before I go in. Joseph Goldstein just to be clear. Joseph Goldstein, he'll do anything for cookies.

Yeah, that's what I'm just gonna say. No, it's not true, don't send him cookies. I bring him these biscotti, actually, that he could dip in his coffee or tea if he doesn't drink coffee, whatever. This is not about Joseph except that. I was saying to him, you know, he was saying, how are you feeling going in to the retreat? And I was like, I'm always a little sort of, I don't know what the right word is, like apprehensive maybe, even though I really wanna go, but you know, I don't quite know what I'm gonna find.

And he's like apprehensive, like, what about curious, he said to me, what about curious, which I really liked. And so I remembered the other day when I was dealing with my own thinking, Joseph saying, what about curious? And I thought, why can't I just be curious about what I'm thinking about, and not do that very subtle

pushing away of the thinking. And that changed the quality of the meditation, just that little adjustment, so that it made it, I think, less dual in the sense of there's me meditating and then there's me thinking. And it let the flow happen more easily. So then I thought for as long as I thought, which was only a little, it was actually sort of interesting.

And then it was over. And then, you know, the next thing came. It's amazing how turning down the dial on resistance can be a fascinating accelerator on meditation. Yeah. And also that mental space, the mental space where the thinking happens is the space of imagination and that space of imagination is so vast and we're thinking beings. You know, we really have these minds for a reason. I was remembering the Dhamma Pada, that verse in the Dhamma Pada called mind that I love where there's this phrase, look to your mind wise man, look to it well, it is subtle, invisible, and treacherous. And, you know, like those words, subtle, invisible,

look to it well, it's subtle, invisible, and treacherous. But just that vast space of mind in which the thinking is some momentary manifestation of this incredible capacity that our minds have and to dwell there instead of feeling that somehow it's a mistake to be spending any time thinking. I mean, I'm exaggerating, but you know what I mean. It felt so relieving. I hear that though, and this is going to be 0% surprising for you or anybody, but I hear that though and this is going to be 0% surprising for you or anybody, but I hear that and I think, well, if I give myself permission to just think, then I'm going to be sitting

there, you know, planning whatever revenge on my bosses or anything. I'm not going to get, I'm just, that's the whole meditation session is just going to be me lost. Well, would you be lost? I mean, the thing about the mindfulness practice is your conscious, or at least semi-conscious during that time. So yes, we could get lost in thought, and we do all the time. But when you've got yourself set up in the posture and you're pretending to be meditating,

and there's actually some self-reflective capacity happening, then I think it's more like you're going in and out of the thoughts. They are happening a lot of the time by themselves, thoughts without a thinker, etc. But then you kind of catch yourself in them, so you'd see yourself plotting the revenge, but then maybe you would allow those thoughts to unfold a little bit while you're attending to them. And that's such a weird thing that we can do that. But that's part of what becomes interesting, I think.

And then maybe the space around, I mean, that's why I'm like that vast, imaginative mental space that's being occupied, you know, briefly occupied by a thought of revenge. I think that by leaving the thought alone, we actually can take that backward step into our bigger minds, you know, more easily. Because that space right there, right? That space is always there.

It's there. The Dalai Lama calls it the, what does he say? The pure, pure something of perfect spontaneity. I think that's his, I have it written down. I've been writing about it. But that's the quality of our minds. That is thinking. The analogy that often gets used, I think it's

your main to what you're talking about right now. The idea of being aware of your thoughts, you can think of consciousness, just the sort of being aware of your thoughts, you can think of consciousness, just the sort of knowing faculty of the mind, pure awareness as a stage, and the thoughts are the actors walking on and off that stage. And so if you can relax in the face of your own thoughts and not get so uptight about the fact that you're thinking while meditating, that can allow you to drift back to occupying the stage instead of being so stuck with that action on the stage. Yes, but I think it can also allow you to become the actors.

So it's not just the observing the thoughts from afar, but it's also almost embodying the thoughts, but knowing that you're acting at the same time, the way, you know, like, what might it really be like to be an actor, where you're both, you're totally in it, but you're aware of what you're doing at the same time. It's almost like what conscious dreaming might be like, not that I have been able to do that very much. So, what do you think, if any, the quote unquote, real world or off the cushion, non-meditative benefits of this practice as you're describing it would be having a sort of simultaneously,

mindful and more intimate relationship with your thinking process, processes, how would you show up differently in the world? I think it might be good for one sense of humor. I think it might lighten the load a little bit because what you end up seeing a lot is your ego or your own need for control or Defense you know a defense against the world. This is me as a therapist now But so much of those kind of private thoughts even when you're on a retreat when you're meditating all day long But then you go into your room and close the door and get ready for bed and then it's like okay

I don't have to meditate and now I'm just me, you know? But those private thoughts, so much of them, are shame-based, you know? Shame is such a weird, if it's an emotion or feeling or mental construct or something, but the way we eat away at ourselves or criticize ourselves, feel bad about ourselves, you know, our bodies or the way we look in the mirror,

or the way our voice sounds, or who we are, or what we haven't done, what we haven't accomplished, what we know, that's going on a lot. So to be less ashamed of the shame, sort of lightens, it becomes not quite funny, but in a Samuel Beckett kind of way, one can see the mordant humor of one's own situation. And I think that's called vulnerability.

So that makes people less defensive, less rigid, more vulnerable, more open, more actually able to connect, able to love, able to touch and be touched by another person, because we're all sort of really like this. I'll give you an example. I think it's on point. I've been doing, you were kind enough to do one of these with me every afternoon. I've been doing these live meditations on YouTube. And I don't know, I was doing one the other day

and there had been a good exchange going in with the teacher and then it comes time to do the meditation and I'm sitting there in meditation. And I noticed the thought come up. You know, my 10% colleagues are watching this right now. They all talk on Slack or text during the to make sure that, you know, the technical aspects and everything's working during the meditation. And I just thought to myself, I did a good job with that exchange.

I bet they're saying that to themselves right now. And then I was then I had this revulsion of like, what kind of monster are you having this thought? You know, while you're supposed to be helping people meditate in the middle of a pandemic, you are a monster. And then, and then it all just became funny. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know what they say?

Conceit is one of the last fetters. So when the mind is approaching enlightenment and you've had all kinds of realizations, the poly or Sanskrit word for conceit actually means measuring. approaching enlightenment and you've had all kinds of realizations. The the poly or Sanskrit word for conceit actually means measuring, measuring or comparing. So it's not you're not a monster for having that thought you can't help but have that thought. You know when you've done a good job and you know you've done a good job and you know that people are watching and thinking that

thought happens by itself. Maybe when you're fully enlightened, I don't know what happens to those kinds of thoughts. We don't know. But maybe enlightenment, well look, I asked Joseph the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein what's how would you define enlightenment? I've asked him a million times,

but one time he gave me the following answer, which was, you can think about it as lightening up. And maybe we don't know what enlightenment's like. I neither of us speak for myself. I'm not enlightened. I don't even know if I believe enlightenment is what achievable or real. But if you can have absurd, you know, societally unacceptable thoughts, and then you can have the thought, you can see the shame or revulsion, and then you can rub back to with some consistency, a sense of humor about the whole thing. If you can lighten up in the face of the absurdity, the horror of the mind and not take it so personally, that strikes me as pretty useful. I know, I think so too.

You know, that famous story of John Cage's, the composer and musician John Cage, who studied Buddhism at Columbia with D. T. Suzuki in the 50s. He said his favorite story is of the Zen Master, who said, now that I'm enlightened, I'm just as miserable as I ever was. I tell that when I'm teaching with Thurman, I tell that story when I'm teaching with Thurman, he hates that story. Robert Thurman, the great Buddha scholar from Columbia University, there's that quote,

Jack Cornfield, another great meditation teacher uses the quote, I'm going to mess it up, but it's something that's some great Zen Master who says wrote upon last year, foolish monk this year, no change. And you know, I mean, I, I, that can be dispiriting to hear if you're a, you know, a rank and file meditator and your thing, what am I doing this for? If you're still miserable at the end of life, I think it's because you have, I think what they're saying, and I don't, I can't inhabit their minds. I think what they're saying is, yeah,

the UPS still comes to the door with some noxious packages. But if you're not taking yourself so seriously, you may not take delivery of some of these packages. So, yeah, all sorts of horrifying thoughts and old habits can come through, but you're not taking them as you're maybe not as entranced as much. Well, I think it's a lot of our ideas of how we're supposed to change and what change means in terms of developing the personality in a light and direction that a lot of our ideas might be wrong. Because, you know, we think we're going to be free of ourselves in a and direction, that a lot of our ideas might be wrong.

Because we think we're going to be free of ourselves in a certain way, but actually we're just going to become more ourselves. But becoming more ourselves might have this quality. I hopefully has this quality that you and I are talking about, where we don't take ourselves so seriously, where ourselves become a vehicle that we're more in control of, and it's a vehicle that we can use for purposes

that we decide, what are we gonna use this vehicle for, where are we gonna go with it? Now nobody can go anywhere, so. But gas is cheap. I always look for the bright side. I appreciate that about you. More 10% happier after this. Hey, I'm Arisha and I'm Brooke and we're the hosts of

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There was something you said a while ago that I want to come back to. You were talking about what you're hearing from your patients now. You talked about uncertainty. The mind can't help but cast forward into the future and try to plan. But it's impossible. And I see this a lot with myself. I'm back at, you know, levels of anxiety. I haven't experienced for a long time. And it's this looping that I'm doing of trying to figure out what what's the worst case scenario that the Greeks may or may or may not have done or and how can I prepare for that? And and then just I I get in because there's just too many variables and I don't know and and that but just and maybe I can cover myself by saying I don't

know but I'll probably be okay but then it just comes back and back and back and so what what are you recommending to your patients or for neurotic friends of yours like me in the face of this? Well, I've been saying that that we really can't know yet and we're not going to know yet. So this in between time that we're in really is a limbo state. It really is an intermediate state. It really is a time of retreat. It really is a bardo, which is the Tibetan version of the space after one life before the next life. So, and this is what the Buddha was always talking about as actually the underlying reality,

even in regular life, is we don't actually know what's gonna happen even in regular life, is we don't actually know what's going to happen even in the next moment, even though we can be reasonably sure most of the time that what the next moment will look like now, it's so accentuated, you know, it really is impossible like you're saying. So we might as well use it as a kind of retreat time. And I think the people who are doing best with it are doing that in terms of, OK, I'm just home with my family. I'm just teaching the kids, or not.

I'm just sitting and meditating if I'm alone, or listening to music, or reading a book, or whatever it is. I'm just cleaning the house. I'm just making the food. I'm figuring out how to go for a walk safely without the joggers worrying about the joggers. So I think it really is a retreat time. The future is going to reveal itself. It's not going to be what the past was. things are going to be really different for, you know, until there's a vaccine or until there's a treatment or until this thing infects everybody, it's going to be really different.

And we're going to find out soon enough, you know. So one way or another, that's what I've been saying to people for as much help as that is. Well, while we're doing free therapy, let me just tell you where I get stuck with that, which is, that's all true. And it's, the story I'm telling myself is that there's some amount of preparation I can do. So yes, it would be, I'm happier when I'm just cooking or assuming that assumes I cook, but just, you know, helping. I know you help. I do help. Yes, so just helping or just playing with my son

or just recording a podcast with my friend, I'm much happier when I do that and that it's very similar to retreat. But the thoughts creep in of, yes, well, there are things I can do. Maybe I can work on X or Y story and that will help my standing in some way or maybe I can do X or Y project with 10% happier that will help secure the company's fate and make sure that the employees stay employed or blah blah blah. So I keep that's where I keep getting.

That's fine. Well, you're not stuck there. That's all important. Of course, you're thinking about all that. That's all very reasonable. It's only when those thoughts start repeating themselves and where you're biting off more than you can possibly chew at the moment, that then that's going to pull you out of the retreat element of this time. We all are worrying about how we're going to make a living, where we're going to live. Can we pay the rent? Should do we have enough supplies in the house? You know, can I go to the bank on my telephone? You know, learning about Zoom. I mean, there's a million preparatory things that are reasonable where the mind, if the mind is stuck on trying to figure out the ones that can't be figured out yet, that's all that I'm saying is it becomes redundant and starts to work against you.

Do you have any thoughts or I don't mean this in the majority of Billik tricks for people when we get stuck in the loop of maybe not so useful future planning. Well, I don't have any extra tricks beyond what we all know. I mean, that's why the point of the general subject matter of the podcast is meditation. And when one catches one's self, tensing up around one's thoughts, you know, where the thoughts aren't leading to productive action, but are just circling and interfering with doing the dishes, getting the food, enjoying the little walk that you're able to take, et cetera. That's when you apply the rigor of meditation

to pull yourself back into the present. There's no great medicine for it. A little bit of Xanax or something might help us. But you're left to watch out for eating too much of that. Yes, yes you do. Right. All right, because addiction is real. But I mean, I think though there is great medicine, the coming back to the present moment, is a great medicine. It's just hard to remember to do sometimes. And I think we're in a circumstance, I'll speak for myself. I feel like I'm in a circumstance now where it's getting harder for me to remember to do it.

Yeah, I could see how the present moment would be more difficult to find. But I also think the present moment, one of the things about now is that the present moment is actually extended. It's in a way, it's more obvious because we're locked into every day and every day has this quality of being kind of the same. So the tasks of, you know, it's like being in a monastery like, okay, you have to go sweep the halls, you have to go wash the bowls, you have to make the food, you have to drink the tea, you have to go for a walk, All that kind of routine and ritual is all about helping to stay in the present moment. So there's a lot of reminders. I think that's what I'm trying

to say here now in quarantine, right. And in sheltering in place. Yeah, we have to open ourselves to those reminders instead of just blur all the hair. Yeah, exactly. They're all there for our benefit. instead of just blur all the hair. Exactly. They're all there for our benefit. Yeah. So now I'm in a different loop, which is more, okay, yeah, it marks right.

I just need to pay attention to these reminders, but I'm not doing that, so I'm a terrible meditator and a total hypocrite. Okay. And after that thought, I think that's where I go back to the humor. I usually, somewhere in the anxiety loop, thanks to this practice that you got me into 11 years ago, somewhere in the anxiety loop, I usually do catch it and start sort of, yeah, realizing I'm being ridiculous. And you can see there's a sort of, realizing that being ridiculous. And you can see there's a sort of remnant there.

If that's in any way actually an accurate representation of what's going on in your mind, there's a remnant there of some sort of punitive way that you talk to yourself. Like where did that come from? When did you start talking to yourself like that and why? Because we all know you're not a terrible meditator. You've become, you know, you're really a devoted meditator, and it's actually hard work

to stay that devoted to something that's so evanescent. And it doesn't give back directly. It's not like you sit and meditate in the morning and your day becomes easy because of it. It's much more subtle and visible and treacherous than that. That's absolutely right. It helps a little, it helps a little in strange ways.

Yes, yes, yes, hence the 10%. But back to your question, when did I start talking about myself like this? Yeah. I blame my parents. They didn't talk to me like that. They were amazing parents, but they talked to themselves like that. And my dad's a Jew, my mother's a uptight Yankee.

Not that uptight, but it's all. You're blaming the religion now? Yeah, I'm blaming the conditioning, the stream of conditioning that's all and landed with me in how I talked to myself, that's my best guess. Uh-huh. Well, there's a kind of ambition in it, right? You're trying to be the best.

Always. You're always? Well, were you like that when you were a little? No, I mean, am I always trying to be the best now, either, but sometimes, and that's very painful, actually, I find. The more self-aware I am, the more self-aware I'm the more meditation, I've done, the more I see that that impulse to that ambition is, you know, I'm largely pro-embitioned when the motivation is right, but it can be painful. Yeah, well, when the motivation is right,

motivation is often really mixed, so it could be like a lot right and a little bit, innovation is often really mixed. So it could be like a lot right and a little bit, you know, doing it for some other, doing it for your parents, more than for yourself or something. But anyway, we don't have to do therapy now. No, no, but I will say that, you know, this issue of motivation is very interesting to me

and I think incredibly important and I'll tell a little story about Joseph. I've said this before or somewhere, maybe on the show, maybe on TPH live. I can't remember, but I'll say it again, just because it's come up. Early on in the pandemic, I was really noticing how... I was stuck in ambition and it felt bad.

And I called Joseph and we were talking about that and he recommended I do some compassion practice. We're really trying to do a practice where you're tuning into the suffering that's all around you by bringing, I know you don't love this kind of practice, but I love it now. I love this kind of practice.

Oh, okay, good. I've changed. Okay, me too. Because so really in bringing in the imagery or the felt sense of people who are in extremist right now, the doctors in the front line, the nurses in the front line, the delivery people, the people who are sick, mildly neighbor, mildly parents, and systematically wishing that they be free from fear or despair or loneliness or suffering of any sort. And that really has been a not perfect but a nice corrective to some of the painful self-centered thoughts. And by the way, he said, don't exclude yourself,

you know, invoke yourself and wish for yourself to be free from painful self-centered thoughts and illness and all the other things that ALS right now. So anyway, I'll stop talking and see if you have any thoughts on that. I have so many thoughts on that actually. You know, I'm trying to write a new book and I haven't been very successful at giving it too much time since the pandemic started, but I've been looking at it a little bit. And the notion behind the book is that for a year, which turned out to be in 2019, I tried every week or so to take notes on one particular psychotherapy session where I thought something interesting happened in the session where maybe I was tapping my Buddhist roots a little

bit in the way I was talking to whoever I was talking to or dealing with, whomever I was dealing with. And I don't usually take notes or anything. So it was a sort of, I was working against myself to take the time to try to preserve what had happened in the therapy. Usually I'm just into letting it go, you know, trusting what happens and letting it go and let it, if it's going to do anything, it's going to do it and I don't have to hang on to it.

So I did that for a year, not really, not realizing it all that it might be the last year of face-to-face psychotherapy that I'd be doing for a long time. And I could barely stand to look at any of it for the whole year, but once it was done, I started looking it over and there's a lot of interesting material there, it turned out. But one of the sessions involved a patient of mine going to Hawaii to visit Ramdas, when Ramdas, the former Richard Albert, a great spiritual teacher of many of us, who I had known since I was in college. But my patient went to visit Ramdas in the last year Ramdas's life and talked to him about one of his issues, which was the way that he was objectifying women who he would see on the subway or in his life or whatever. And he didn't feel that good about the quality of his thoughts, but he didn't really want

to give up that objectification either. And Ramdha said to him, first, love the thoughts. And then try to see yourself as a soul. And if you see yourself as a soul, you might start to see them as souls also. I love the whole thing, so I wrote it down. But I thought that notion of loving the thoughts. It was not at all what I would have expected any spiritual teacher to say, but I found it so helpful. And I think it's along the lines of what you were just talking about. Although I've mostly forgotten what you were just talking about in telling my own story. But maybe it relates. It really does. It really does relate. Yeah, because

you know, another thing that Joseph said, but it wasn't quite love the thoughts, although I like that. A lot. He was by the way, he said, you know, if you're feelings, if you're experiencing self-interest coming up in the mind in the middle of this horribly uncertain time, welcome to being a human being. He gave me permission to not feel that some of these thoughts were as ugly as I was telling myself they were. A step further would be to love, I don't know what would that even mean, but to to maybe it could mean to see, in my case, that this is just the organism trying to protect itself. And maybe it's skillful, maybe it's not. But having bring warmth to the whole repertoire,

which is going to span from altruistic to, societally, we might consider quite ugly, I find to be very useful. Yeah, I think that is why I went off on that story because the idea of developing compassion, not just for the people in the external world, but compassion for your own mind, for your own thoughts, for your own shame, etc. I think that mindfulness really is a compassion practice because that's the quality that you're developing towards your own internal experience. You know, by adopting that stance that we think of as mindful, there's a compassionate

element to that, or there can be. And I think that's what Ram Das was pointing to in terms of love the thoughts. Yeah, and I think what he was also pointing to is, the loving of the thoughts doesn't mean that, you run rampant with objectification of women and that you let that, you know, you treat women or anybody in an awful way. It's actually in the seeing yourself as a three-dimensional human being,

by the way, doesn't have control over everything you're thinking. Having, treating yourself as a flawed, complex human being means that you can treat others that way, and that might actually may make you behave in ways that are more kind. Well, I think seeing yourself as a soul, that he followed it up with C, yourself as a soul, and then maybe you can start to see them as souls, was to pull him out of the complete identification with the thinker, you know, the thinker of the low level, objectifying thoughts, but to start to feel maybe some of the pain that comes with being a soul, if we're allowed in a Buddhist conversation to talk about souls, which I think

is kind of refreshing, that that would also reinforce the compassionate attitude and uplevel the whole thing. Right. It's just that the reason why one of the many reasons why I find that kind of advice so powerful is I think I like many people have had an inner dialogue around my own treatment of other people and had it compartmentalized as an external thing. But it really does begin and now I'm entering into territory that may sound a little trite, with how you're relating to yourself. Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, I don't think that sounds trite. No, I think that's really right. Yeah. Well, talk about why in Buddhism it might be considered inappropriate to invoke the word soul. Well, soul has so many connotations for us in the West. The word had so many connotations in ancient India also,

where the Buddhist psychology is known for proclaiming that there is no soul. But the soul that the Buddha was saying didn't exist was the soul that was being imagined by the local people of his time, which was a kind of transcendent spark, not that different from how maybe we think of the soul a little bit, a transcendent spark that had an element of the divine that was locked into this body in mind, the psychisoma. So the Buddha was countering that by saying there's no absolute entity that's dwelling within you, you know, that you have to get rid of

everything superfluous so that you can connect to that divine quality. He said, instead, you have to cultivate, develop your own best qualities, you know, without resorting to waiting to merge with God kind of thing. I don't know if I'm explaining it very well, but. So then in looking at it that way, the way we start to understand no self or no soul is almost the way the scientists might, that if you take everything apart, there's no thread that connects us from start to finish,

or if you believe in life after life, as many Buddhists do, what's the thread that connects this incarnation to the next one? And what is it that we are attempting to purify when we're doing meditation? So that comes around to consciousness that we each have within us this very peculiar and unusual quality that the scientists haven't figured out yet, which is our consciousness or our awareness. And that somehow, who I felt myself to be when I was five years old or ten years old or twenty years old or or forty years old or now sixty years old or whatever, that if I close my eyes and go inside, there is some quality of being who I've always been. And if I try to put my finger on it, I come up again against, look to your mind, wise man, look to it well, it is subtle and visible

and treacherous. But there's some quality that I know to be consistent with myself, that I imagine that when I die, that's what I'm going to relax my mind into is that transparent quality, which is me, which will carry me wherever I'm going to go next. And so that I would call the soul. So there may not be some findable nugget of mark between your eyes, behind your nose, but there is some essence of mark that you feel when you close your eyes, even if you can't put your finger on it.

It's like the scented, the unscented shampoo at I, at I, at inside of the society has a scent. That's right, that's good. Has a scent. That's right. That's good. Essence, you have to watch out for Essence when you're talking Buddhist psychology, but. I guess right. And Mark, Mark is just a name that was laid on me,

that I never totally got comfortable with. So I don't know that it's Essence of Mark, but I like the unscented scent of who I might be if I wasn't Mark, you know. Let me just go back to the pandemic for a second. Do you, you've written about trauma? Yeah. You have a great book called The Trauma of Everyday Life, meaning that there's sort of a,

I think it's been a minute since I've looked at it, but I think what you were trying to say was, you know, that there is a trauma to, even if we don't have trauma by some clinical definition, there's a trauma to being alive to existence. And so I wonder what your thoughts are about this pandemic. Is this a collective trauma? Are we all now going to be trauma survivors having merely lived through this? Definitely. I mean, I don't like the survivor word, the invisible enemy and that we're all survivors, etc. But yes, this is absolutely a trauma. This is like a definition of trauma that is affecting everybody. And there will

be post-traumatic sequelae for many, many people who do survive. What's a definition of trauma, do you know it? It's a brushing up against anything like death that threatens our sense of stability or certainty or well-being, such that we have emotions that are too scary for our egos to integrate or to handle or to tolerate. So in the traumas that we think about of a hostage taking or seeing a murder or someone you love dying, the feelings that are aroused are so threatening that the ego in order to preserve itself has to push away some element of the feelings because it's too intensive. If you let it all in, it would be overwhelming and you would fall, you would go to pieces and fall apart. So in order to preserve some sense of, you know, I'm okay, I'm okay. I'm going to be okay.

Some aspect of the emotional response has to get shut away and then the ego or the mind or the self, whoever the hell it is that's trying to deal with this gets agitated because it doesn't want to face those feelings. So in a long-winded way, that's what I understand about trauma. Is there something healthy and adaptive about not letting all the feelings in them immediately? Oh, yeah, it's a complete defense mechanism. It's a survival, that really is a survival mechanism. Yeah, we're not equipped to let all the feelings in immediately. We don't have that. We're not in light.

I think an enlightened person probably could let it all in immediately, because they're not pushing anything away. They're willing to let everything rule over them, no matter what it is. But most of us, yes, that is a healthy thing. It's just that we pay a price for it. So if you're in a car accident, or if you're in a war, or if you're in a war or if you're getting shot at or someone's mugging you or something, you're able to deal with so much in the moment, but we can't deal with everything.

So then when those things are done, often the leftover fear or anxiety has to find a way out or away. I always struck as my job as a journalist, I often have to talk to people in the immediate aftermath of something unbelievably, unspeakably horrible, the death of a child or, you know, having lived through a terror attack or, and often in that first phase, they're strikingly normal because I think they haven't let it all in yet. Well, because they're coping with the thing, you have to cope with the thing in the moment. There's nothing wrong with that. Often people are very calm, very calm, but then the aftermath comes what was too much to experience? So how does that work?

You and Iraq didn't that how it wouldn't you have some of that when you came back? When I came back from Iraq, I mean my my story on this has always and I was just questioning it in my own mind actually Well, you were talking as always been that I don't think I was traumatized by the things I've seen in Iraq or Afghanistan or you know the second in Defada, which I covered in Israel. It was more that I really liked the adrenaline and I came home and was so addicted to the speed of and the intensity of life in war zones that I started to try to get a synthetic squirt of it through cocaine or other drugs. So I don't know.

I've never consciously been aware of being traumatized, but maybe that's a case study in trauma. I don't know. It's possible. I mean, I don't know either, of course, but some of the soldiers who come back and can't sort of settle down into like going to the supermarket and being with the kids and the wife and being in a much less adrenalized world and do, you know, go back or seek the stimulation of the drugs or whatever. A lot of those people are fending off, feeling the pain or the anxiety or the disquiet of what they experienced, the way not to feel it is to go back into the intensity where you don't have to feel

it because there's too much other stuff to deal with. So I think a lot of like in the VA and so on, where mindfulness has proven very useful, very helpful to people, because it can slowly, you know, slowly lower them down into those kinds of feelings, rather than being overwhelmed by them, but they can start to make room for the memories, and even the compassion kind of feelings that you were talking about before,

for the, you know, the person that the sniper was shooting, that they were witnessing or whatever it happened to have been. If we're now in during a collective trauma, how should we hold ourselves, it had to take care of ourselves in this time and how should we think about taking care of ourselves going forward, given that we may all be to one degree or another traumatized? We may all be to one degree or another traumatized. Well, the people who are being more acutely traumatized are the people on the front lines. So the doctors, the nurses, the emergency room people, the ambulance drivers, the fire department, the police, the trash collectors, the supermarket. People working, the supermarket, the cab drivers.

I mean, all the people who are still working in the supermarkets, yeah, the cab drivers, the, I mean, all the people who are still working in the field, they're having like the big T trauma, I would say, you know, the capital T trauma. So, the rest of us, who are, what are we being asked to do, you know, we're not being asked to fight a war or work in the hospitals or anything. We're just being asked to stay at home and take care of each other. But I think in terms of the society being able to help eventually the people who are being acutely traumatized now, there's going to be a lot to do for those people. And if our society functions the way it usually does, we're just going to run roughshod over them, like have a parade and then not think about them anymore.

There won't be a VA hospital for those people. So I think collectively, we could remind ourselves now that we're lucky being able to be locked up and safe, and that there's going to be a lot of people needing a lot of help who have gotten us as a culture through, as a society through all of this. I think for it's like the more low level kind of trauma, which is, you know, that those of us who are reasonably safe and are watching the news or reading the newspaper and worrying about the future, I don't think there's going to be a, except for the economic impact of all of that is going to be huge. And I can't really speak to how bad that's going to be. I think for people who get through it, they're going to end up looking back on this time,

almost nostalgicly, because of the way everything is slowly slowing down. And people are actually having good experiences being in their homes with their families, with themselves, they'll be glad when it's over. But I think they'll end up looking back on it almost fondly, we'll see. That's not speaking to the trauma question so much, but maybe to how well people are coping actually with what's happening now. You said before at the beginning of this conversation, I asked, how are you doing, given the fact

that you're on the front lines of the mental health crisis? And you reacted saying, well, I'm not on the front lines of anything. I'm with these, it's the, you know, the nurses and the doctors, et cetera. But in terms of the mental health crisis and I think it's huge. I think this is, this is the quiet pandemic. I mean, you are on the front lines in that way and I wonder, is it invigorating and in liveening

for you to be able to do therapy at a time like this or does it take a toll? No, it's invigorating and in liveening for me. I think where I'm not doing it, I would be much more betwixt in between and, you know, trying to figure out what to do with myself. It's good to feel useful and and engaged with I feel so fortunate to be engaged with all these interesting people who I care about. For me, there's nothing better than that.

So to actually be helpful in a little bit to some people, that's a very positive feeling. I can imagine. Anything, is there something that would have been good to discuss that I didn't bring up in some way or anything you had on your mind to discuss that I didn't give you a chance to talk about? No, I really went into this the way I am at my best in a therapy session where I have no idea what we're going to talk about or what might come up. And those sessions always end up revealing some bit of something that's interesting

where I feel good coming out of them and hopefully the other person feels good coming out of them. So that's, we'll see how people respond to listening to this if they feel similarly. I've been reading these Zen poems as part of the book that I'm writing that actually feel very connected to this moment. Like written 200 years ago, 300 years ago,

terrible things happening. Like one poet, Issa, whose name means cup of tea, wrote in 1819, he wrote 200 years ago about his, he had a terrible stepmother. His mother died, he had a terrible stepmother, we hated, he wandered around Japan for 20, 30 years, finally made peace with a stepmother. Settle down, married a younger woman, had three children quickly who all died before their first birthday. Had one daughter who lived for one year

who he and his wife totally loved. And through all of that, he's like totally attuned to nature and to the poignancy of life and the fragility of life And he's the one you've probably heard this haiku Joseph quotes it sometimes. It's Go I'll read it to you. I marked it here The world of do is the world of do and yet and yet And he wrote that after the daughter died. The world of do is a world of do and yet.

D-E-W-D-E-W-Do, yes. Morning dew, like wake to the morning dew, my darling, you know, grateful dead. So what do you read into that? It's... The And Yet, the world of do. Like, he knows, he's a Zen monk. He's like 57 years old. He knows that the world is basically a losery.

But he's not gonna... And yet, here he is with his wife and his daughter who he totally loved. It was the best year of his life. He's writing, 1819. And then the daughter dies. So the and yet and yet, you know, like that, that we do care, it does matter. You know, you can't just dismiss everything as empty or illusory that are, that are, our love is, is the most important thing. I read all that into it. Yeah, the unscented shampoo has a scent.

Exactly. Yes. Yes. This is not a new observation, but one of the big thrusts in many of the Buddhist teachings that I've absorbed seems to be, can you hold in your mind to hard to reconcile truths? One is that on some very important fundamental, ultimate level, this chair I'm sitting in is actually mostly empty space and spinning subatomic particles and it there isn't it's it's all it's all an illusion. Some other level like I'm sitting in the chair is holding me up and maybe my child is a bunch of spinning subatomic particles too but I really love him and can you keep both

those things in your mind in some way. Absolutely. And that you really matter. You've Dan Harris, you know, you really matter. You're not just empty subatomic particles dissolving into emptiness. And what you do with being Dan Harris really matters. Well, since I like to make every conversation about myself, that's probably a pretty good place to leave it. Can I read you one other of these hikers? Please, please. So this is from Esau also.

And he was known, he loved, he loved even the smallest creatures, you know, the flies and the ants. And so a lot of his poems are about them. So this is one I'm leaving. Now you can make love my flaws. You know, I really... It's a good one to end on. It is. I really relate to that. I mean, I'm, I guess I'm 10% sappy over these days, but you know, I do, I like, I love all the creatures. That's why I stopped eating animals. I'm getting soft in my old age, but I like the flies. I can't help it. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to do this, Mark. Thank you.

It's fun to talk with you, Dan. I always learn from it. Big thanks to Mark Epstein. Check out his books. As I've mentioned, going to pieces without falling apart, played a huge role in my life, but he's written other books such as Advice Not Given, Opening To Desire, and the trauma of everyday life. Many others going on being, that's another book he wrote. He's written a whole series of beautiful books, so go check those out. Big thanks to the team who put this show together. Our captain is the indefatigable Samuel Johns. He's our producer, our sound designer is Matt Boynton and Anya Sheshik of ultraviolet audio,

Maria Wartel is our production coordinator. We get a lot of very valuable input from our 10% colleagues, Nate Toby, Jen Poient, and Ben Rubin. And as always, I to thank my guys at ABC Ryan Kessler and Josh Kohan. We'll be back on Friday with another bonus and then on Monday with one of these topical episodes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon. Hey, hey prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music.

Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. survey at Wondery.com-survey.