Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 346: The Gospel of Adequacy | Miguel Sancho & Felicia Morton

Episode Date: May 12, 2021

Often on the show, we bring on incredibly accomplished meditation practitioners or influential researchers who have deep things to teach us, based on their personal experience or professional pursuits. And while many of these people talk openly about their personal deficiencies, they are nonetheless speaking to us from the mountaintop, as it were. Today we are doing something entirely different. Over the years, we’ve had many requests to bring on “normal people.” That’s what you’re getting today. Normal people who survived something extreme, with the help of meditation and other modalities, and are here to talk about it in extraordinarily raw and honest terms. Miguel Sancho is the author of a new book called More Than You Can Handle: A Rare Disease, A Family in Crisis, and the Cutting Edge Medicine That Cured the Incurable. We’ve all heard stories about parents of children with serious, and possibly fatal, illness. Often in those stories, the parents come off as saintly. Miguel takes a very different route. His book is both vulnerable and hilarious. His son’s illness forces him to wrestle with his personal demons, his marital difficulties, and his volcanic temper. He even tells us about getting evicted from the Ronald McDonald House. In the end, he lands on what he calls “the gospel of adequacy.” Full disclosure: Miguel is an old friend of mine. We worked together for many years at ABC News, where he was a senior producer at 20/20. Together, we covered stories about Scientology, self-help gurus, and fundamentalist Mormons. Also joining us for this interview is Miguel‘s wife, Felicia Morton, who is the president of her own full-service public relations firm. We start with Miguel solo and talk for quite a while, then take a quick break and come back with both Miguel and Felicia. We talk about: the benefits — and limits —of meditation, what they learned about creating a healthy marriage, finding meaning in suffering, and letting go of ego and control. TPH Mental Health Awareness: We want to deeply thank and recognize mental health professionals for your support. For a year's FREE access to the app and hundreds of meditations and resources visit: tenpercent.com/mentalhealth Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/miguel-sancho-felicia-morton-346 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 podcasts. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, often on this show, we bring on, as you know, incredibly accomplished meditation practitioners or influential researchers who have deep things to teach us based on their personal experience or professional

pursuits. And while many of these people talk openly about their personal deficiencies, they are nonetheless speaking to us from the mountaintop as it were. Today, though, we're going to do something entirely different. Over the years, we've had many requests from all of you to bring on, quote, unquote, normal people. That is what you're going to get today. Normal people who survived something extreme, with the help of meditation and other modalities, and are here to talk about it in extraordinarily raw and honest terms.

Miguel Sancho is the author of a new book called More Than You Can Handle, a rare disease, a family in crisis, and the cutting edge medicine that cured the incurable. We've all heard stories about parents of children with serious and possible fatal illness. Often in these stories, the parents come off as saintly. Miguel takes a very different route. His book is both vulnerable and hilarious. His son's illness forces him to wrestle with his personal demons, his marital difficulties, and his volcanic temper. He even tells us about getting evicted from the Ronald McDonald House. In the end, he lands on what he calls the gospel of adequacy. Full disclosure here, Miguel is an old friend

of mine. We've worked together for many years at ABC News, where he was a senior producer at 2020. Together we covered stories about Scientology, self-help gurus, and fundamentalist Mormons. Also joining us for the back half of this interview is Miguel's wife, Felicia Morton, who's the president of her own full service, public relations firm,

although she's not here in her role as a PR agent as you will hear. We start with Miguel Solo and then we talk for quite a while and then we take a quick break and come back with both Miguel and Felicia. In this conversation, we talk about the benefits and limits of meditation, what both Miguel and Felicia learned about creating a healthy marriage, finding meaning in suffering, and letting go of ego and control. We'll dive in on that in a second,

first one quick item of business. As you may know, May is mental health awareness month. Over the past year, mental health professionals have not only had to cope with the effects of the pandemic in their own lives, but also help their clients navigate a world that has been turned upside down several times over.

We want to really thank and recognize all the mental health professionals out there for everything you're doing. So if you want to get a year's free access to the app and hundreds of meditations and resources, go to 10% dot com slash mental health 10% dot com slash mental health. This is again our way of thanking you for all the incredible work you're doing at a time when we really need it. All right, having said that, let's dive in now with Miguel Sancho and Felicia Morton. Okay, Miguel, great to see you. Congratulations on the book. Great to be here, Dan, and thank you for all your help all along the way in our journey, including the book part. Be here Dan and thank you for all your help all along the way in our journey, including the book part.

It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. It's really fun to see it actually out in the world. Having engaged in a little bit of happy talk, I'm now going to take you back to the worst thing that ever happened to you. So I apologize in advance. I'm used to it. Yeah, I'm sure you are.

I'm sure you are, but still. The scene that I think it might be worth opening on is the one that you opened the book on with you on an airplane with Sebastian, your little boy in your arms, or it might have been in Felicia's arms, I can't remember, but you're on an airplane and things kind of go, hey, why, can you just take us back to that moment? Absolutely. It was March 18, 2016. We were on route from New York to Durham, North Carolina on a Delta flight. And everybody who's been on a flight knows that it's inherently a helpless feeling. You're strapped in, you don't control anything. And that was kind of our baseline environment. And then what was going on experientially was that our son, who had been born with a serious illness

and was at that time dealing with a significant fever and what we believed to be an infection. And we were seriously concerned for his survival at that moment, had intermittently because we were trying to treat him, had somewhat stabilized before we got on the plane, enough that we felt comfortable getting on the plane. But somewhere roughly over the Chesapeake Bay, he started vomiting copiously. He started crying. He started having shivers and shakes. His fever spiked.

I was something that at least resembled to our layman's eyes a seizure of some sort. And it was exactly the kind of medical emergency that you'd like to have anywhere except a plane that was beginning its descent into North Carolina. And all you could do was try to comfort him and hope for the best. All we could do was comfort him, press the button for the flight attendant and ask if there's

anything that she could do. And the answer was basically no other than call for an ambulance to meet us at the gate if we needed one. And hope for the best and pray and meditate and try to force back the continuous and intense onslaught of stimulus and stressors that so many people have to deal with in various circumstances throughout their lives. How old was Sebastian at this time? He was three and about ten months.

He was able to talk. He was able to express himself in terms of how he was feeling, which is a huge difference maker and game changer when it comes to treating patients who have any kind of medical situation. But he was still very much a little boy. A little boy who wanted to live, a little boy who knew enough to know that he was sick, that his life was in danger. And it was one of those things, Dan, you know, you can read every parenting book in the world, but nobody can tell you how to watch your child suffer. And that's what we had to do. Yeah, I mean, from just garden variety parenting mishaps, you know, an emergency room run

here, a hurt feelings there, et cetera, et cetera. That is incredibly painful just for me. So to extrapolate from my, as I said, garden variety experiences to what I would describe as hell, especially given that I know both of you and by both of you, I mean you and your wife, it's horrifying. So did they call in ambulance? What happened? What happened is he stabilized enough that we were able to kind of race through the airport, get into a rented emerald aisle, Dodge Town and Country, and speed to the Duke Children's Hospital,

where he was supposed to just have a meet and greet for what was potentially going to be a stem cell transplant to give him a new immune system. And it ended up being not a meet and greet, not an overnight stay, but it ended up being basically a eight month stay in Durham, North Carolina, in various phases of hospitalization and inpatient and outpatient treatment. Just to provide some factual foundation here.

What was Sebastian's diagnosis, and then why did he need a new immune system, and how do you even begin to give somebody a new immune system? My son was born with a monogynetic mutation on his X chromosome, the result of which was his body was unable to fight off certain bacterial and fungal infections, like the rest of our bodies when their functioning, quote unquote, normally do. We had to deal with that whole diagnostic odyssey and the impact of that news when he was between two and five months old. And then for years after that, we struggled to keep him healthy and alive. There are ways to do that with this disease, the disease is called CGD.

And we had to have him on medicines every day. He had to be hospitalized intermittently for various infections that needed to be treated in the hospital. And ultimately, after years of trying to juggle our lives and trying to manage his condition, which many people do, like I said, other dads, other people, other patients can handle this a bit better than we did.

But we determined that the only way to move forward for him and for us as a family was to take the chance on this very impressive, but at the same time very risky, very arduous, very long complicated medical procedure, which is commonly known as a bone marrow transplant, is more technically known as a hematopoietic stem cell transplant, but it basically should be called an immune system transplant. What you do is annihilate somebody's existing immune system with, in this case, intense doses of chemotherapy,

infuse their blood system with new donor cells, if you're lucky enough to find a compatible match, and then grow a new immune system from scratch with a child that can't fight off any kind of infection at that point and just very meticulously, very carefully, very cautiously build up a new immune system like you're growing a garden. And it sounds, I just summarized it in 30 seconds. It sounds like, you know, making a lasagna just following a recipe. But in fact, it is extraordinarily complicated. There's hundreds of things that can go wrong along the way. And often do. And we saw that happen with, to a certain degree, our son, he had his own set of complications, but they were minimal compared to many of the intense setbacks and challenges that other

families and other children suffered while we were there at Duke. As I understand it, the choice you guys were facing as parents was, if we do this, there's no guarantee that our son will survive, but there is a guarantee that he will suffer during the course of the treatment. So you knew you were going to be putting yourselves in him through an arduous path, and you didn't know how it was going to turn out. And that strikes me as a exquisitely difficult decision. is a exquisitely difficult decision. It is. I'll say this.

Our son's disease wasn't a disease that gives you a clear path forward. We could have decided to, again, try to maintain and manage his disease, and there's all sorts of numerologies of treatment that make that easier to do every day. Or undergo this thing, which, as you say say correctly involves a number of things that you would never wish on anybody, much less your precious young child. But I mean by that is specifically, again, massive doses of chemotherapy that basically chew up your insides, either in a manageable way or in a profoundly destructive way, if you don't do it right. The after effects of that,

the syndrome that comes with engraftment syndrome when the new cells kind of try to make a new home in the body, all these things, those are guaranteed. And then there's a whole host of other things. Literally, you know, it would take 30 minutes to go through every other nightmare scenario that can emerge in the course of that thing. So there are two things, by opinion, that make this book riveting.

One is you just do a great job of your train storyteller. So you do a great job of, there's the suspense of, is this going to work? Are these genius scientists going to be able to figure out how, is this gonna work? Are these genius scientists gonna be able to figure out how to save this little boy? That in some ways is a story we've heard before. What makes the book truly original, in my opinion, is running alongside that narrative, is often the parents in these stories,

you know, come off as long suffering, sort of saintly, martyr types. And I don't say that in any way to be dismissive, I mean, it's the worst thing I can imagine anybody having to go through. But your story is of somebody who's openly struggling with lots of Issues in how you're handling this and your own sort of flaws and you're really open about that so imperfections is the nice word I've heard you used that word before imperfections, right

So like let's start at the beginning like just speaking from my own opinion. There's no greater stressor So your stressors are gonna bring out the thing, the whole McGill, the whole catastrophe. So what imperfections were you struggling with at the beginning, and then we'll go from there? Well, you know, a lot of them relate to ego and, you know, latent insecurities that I'd try to cover up with the trappings of status and stability that a lot of people particularly Educated professionals have a tendency to do right. I had certain assumptions about how my life was gonna go based on Primarily past experience. I had certain assumptions about my role in the world and my status in the world and what I could expect from the world I had certain assumptions about the amount of control I was going to have over my life,

my circumstances, my relationships. And when something like this happens, it cracks you, clean open brother, and it reveals to you the fallacies and the house of cards upon which you've built so many of those assumptions. And I would submit that many parents can roll with that. Many parents perhaps have been tested before in ways that enable them to have the tools to cope with these kinds of setbacks. And some don't. And I was in the don't category for sure. So what did that mean? Well, it meant that a number of kind of negative personality traits that I've always had, anybody would tell you that I was head kind of turned into all caps bold face font expressions of those ugly sides of me. And that included anger for starters, right? Angers, you know, probably, you know, one of the worst things you could have. But I was angry. And I had reasons to be angry, not just because I felt that I was being cheated somehow, but because if there's anything more innocent than a newborn child, I can't think of it

off the top of my head. And why a newborn innocent child would have to suffer, not just intermittently, but for the rest of their lives, was infuriating in terms of how I understand the universe. So I would find myself having eruptions of temper, either hot temper, where I would actually yell or curse or what I was sometimes called cold temper or I wouldn't raise my voice necessarily, but would just say something after which you was there was kind of an unspoken you idiot to, you know, people around me either at home or at work or random people and it became a problem. A problem that I ultimately add to address otherwise I was going to

not just kind of create momentary moments of hell on earth for those in my immediate orbit, but quite possibly result in a catastrophic damage to my family through divorce or any other form of catastrophe that was on the table. What were the sort of lowest moments in this? Well, there's quite a few to choose from. Goodness, I blew up at one of our nannies who basically resigned as soon as she could on the spot. You know, I managed to get ourselves evicted from the Ronald McDonald House when we were down in Duke

and that wasn't a function of anger. It was really just a function of mindlessness, you know. A friend of mine gave me a bottle of bourbon that I left in the refrigerator at Ronald McDonald House and they have a no tolerance policy and they take that no tolerance, think, quite seriously. And right at this very sensitive moment when we needed to kind of have certain things taken care of and have a budding support system. Well, we were down there just arriving. We got evicted from the Ronald McDonald House. I mean, how shameful is that? So we had to deal with that.

And I managed to later on pretty much destroy our make a wish trip because I basically had a crippling anxiety attack regarding some of Sebastian's post transplant setbacks. So these are all things that ultimately led, at some point, Felicia, to say, you got to get your act together, or otherwise this marriage is gonna end, and led me to do a number of things, one of which was to come to you for advice of all people. And I have to say, your advice wasn't just helpful. It was quite surprising.

I don't know how much you want to talk about that or talk about yourself in this story, but you're part of the story. I'm happy to talk about it. Just on the Make a Wish thing, I'm not sure that everybody will know what that is. So can you describe what that is and what happened? So yeah, so make a wish is this wonderful philanthropy and we've donated to them, but I'm reminding myself here to donate more that through private donations is able to subsidize wishes for kids with serious illnesses. And I always thought it was for kids who are like going to die or kids who were seriously impoverished, right?

But no, they wonderful organizations they are, provide these wishes for kids who have, you know, undergone things like bone marrow transplants are now on the other side of it and have a good chance of survival. And they don't necessarily means tests. So we were invited to go and just make a wish with our son, Sebastian, who

Through the course of his young life had developed a intense and ongoing Love of trains and so we wanted to go and he wanted to go on this train trip in Canada and so we did that but While we were literally packing getting ready to go He had his first significant setback and it was his hair started falling out. And actually in the grand scheme of things it was a very minor setback. It happens frequently post transplant patients they have dry scalp and it dries out the hair follicles and some hair starts coming out in clumps. And it really wasn't that life-threatening in and of itself.

Nevertheless, because I had been now through four or five years of stressing intensely about my son's health. And I thought at that point that he was going to be okay, and we had this setback, it sent me kind of tumbling down a well of anxiety and sadness and anger that made me a seriously imperfect travel companion for the course of that trip. made me a seriously imperfect travel companion for the course of that trip. And it almost blew up. In other words, did it almost get canceled or you just make it super unpleasant?

The latter, yeah. We made it home in one piece and I think my wife, Felicia and I had one of our silent period for another week after that. And I wanna say that was one of the things that sent us back into marriage counseling for a good year. If I'm getting the chronology correct. So yeah, it was, I managed to, we did it.

And if you were to ask Sebastian about it, he'd probably say it was a great time. But objectively speaking, it was a troubled experience. Part of what makes this book so great is that you're not just describing your struggles, you're also describing the many things you did to address them. Let's start with wherever you want to start in terms of what you did to kind of address your imperfections as you were going through this crucible.

Well, I mean, when we first got the diagnosis and I was first kind of letting the shock of that wash over me, I tried a number of things that I would not recommend. I tried denial and I tried a kind of macho stoicism, less Marcus Aurelius than Arnold Schwarzenegger or Clint Eastwood kind of stoicism, which is not that practicable. I tried workaholism because work was kind of a refuge in a sanctuary. And I tried kind of junior varsity substance abuse with alcohol and edibles.

And you don't need me to tell you that it's not a long-term solution either. So the combination of all those failed attempts, many of which I think had to do with the kind of somewhat retrograde understanding of what masculinity was and how men are supposed to handle crisis. I had the aforementioned marital crisis that precipitated my asking you for some advice. And we went out to dinner. This is the story, folks. Dan and I went out to dinner and I was expecting he'd come out with his book, the first one, 10% happier. And I was expecting to basically get the audio version of the book.

You know, in other words, I was expecting to get a heavy-handed but sincere prescription of meditation, meditation and more meditation. And instead, you said, do you remember what you said? I don't actually recall any of this. Where were we going to dinner? It was at Edely, that place on... Oh, yes, yes. Yeah, okay. Yeah. And you said, I would recommend a surround the football approach. And that entailed basically trying everything.

Because I was like, should I do the meditation? You know, my wife says we need counseling. And you said, just do it all. See what works for you. And I thought that was rather surprising. And I was so, I found it so surprising that I thought it actually might work. So I tried that.

And you said something else, which I thought was actually rather insightful too. You said, in my experience, and my wife is going to join us soon, so she can contradict all of this, if it's, if it's, if it's if it's if it's If it's not accurate, but you said in my experience Women do tend to give points for effort

So just make an effort and that in and of itself might help the situation Regardless of what substantive benefits you get from any one of these modalities of treatment or self-help so I took that to heart but one of these modalities of treatment or self-help. So I took that to heart, but one of those modalities of self-help, if you will, was indeed meditation. And we went shortly thereafter, not hand in hand, but almost hand in hand, together to the IMS center on West is a 27th or 28th street. Well, yes, it was right after dinner because Italy is located near the Insight Meditation Center in Lower Manhattan.

So I took you for your first meditation session, I believe. You certainly did, yes. And we walked in there and I remember distinctly, they have like the serious experience meditators room, and then they basically have the kitty table. Like if it's your first time, you go in the little room. And so I went to the little room, and you went to the big room, and of course, coming out of the little kids room, I thought two things.

One was, actually, this was good. I actually feel better. I could use more of this. And the second thing was, actually, this was good. I actually feel better. I could use more of this. And the second thing was, this was the ego talking, I want to graduate to the big kids table. So that kind of launched my exploration into meditation. And now is the time when I really want to emphasize to your audience that I am not a meditation guru. I am not speaking to you from the top of a mountain. I'm still struggling to do this on a regular basis. I make progress. I backslide the whole thing. This isn't necessarily a book about meditation. It feels like everybody's meditated

for longer than 20 minutes. It has to write a book about meditation. This isn't really one of those books. And frankly, I have my critiques of meditation. I think in my case, it had certain limits, but that was certainly one of the tools that I would say helped stabilize me, helped me maybe not excel or attain the kind of sainted level of martyrdom that many

of these families do, but achieve a level of adequacy that enabled me to keep my marriage together, sustain my family, provide for my family, and do my little part to bring my son home healthy in one piece. Can you say more about what exactly meditation did for you and what your critiques are? Sure. Again, with the proviso that I don't have enough experience to speak on it authoritatively, and my critiques can probably be countered with, yeah, that's your experience because you're not doing it right or you didn't do enough or you're doing it a half way. So with all that, as givens, two things. One thing is just the very basic thing

of separating yourself from your immediate circumstances, separating yourself from your immediate feelings, and understanding that you're going through something, you're experiencing something that is coming at you. Life is coming at you right now in a very intense way. And there's part of your mind, the amygdala, the reptile mind, the whole thing that is pushing you to react and engage with these circumstances in a way that could very easily make them worse. And just the ability to pause, the ability to literally think before you speak, even though your

central nervous system is clearly in a hyper-simulated state, the ability to just be silent a hyper-stimulated state, the ability to just be silent when every muscle in your body is telling you you have to engage in some way. And I know that's just the first baby step, right? That's lesson one, but I needed that lesson very badly. Another thing that was just a godsend was the practice of loving kindness, which was introduced to me at IMS in the big room, which was later introduced to me through the writings and interpersonal reactions I had with Sharon Salisberg, other teachers, other people that I met through the song God that you invited me to,

and essentially just taking time to truly concentrate on the fact that there are other living creatures around you who are probably suffering in their own way, and they deserve love and kindness and acknowledgement, and just a silent blessing of peace and wellness upon them. Whoever it is, they're living beings, and they are suffering in their own way. And you don't have to be friends with them, you don't have to hug them, but you do have to acknowledge them in such a way that will, again, try to prevent you from making

their lives worse, which is almost a real possibility. you for making their lives worse, which is almost a real possibility. I think you described the benefits of both practices beautifully. Perhaps you could say a bottom line or a common denominator is you're getting out of your head, you're getting out of your own way, you're getting over yourself so that you're not a isolated, embattled ego, crouching in defense. You're actually seeing that your own thoughts are these passing and permanent phenomena that you don't need to believe blindly, seeing that there are other people around you to whom you are connected in one way or another who have their own experiences that we should acknowledge.

You know, and speaking of somebody who has many of the same imperfections as you do, having that pounded into your neurons can be incredibly useful. Yeah. I forget who it was. Is it Toley or is it you or is it Kabat Zinn? But somebody in one of these books talks about how reality is this baseline that can be boring and can be painful, and we all have these urges to put distance between ourselves and reality. And a lot of people, the easiest thing to do is put kind of negative distance, right? You can go on a screen. You can have a tall glass of bourbon or two or

three, or you can engage in any number of other kind of mindless things that kind of put a Negative space between you as you're putting distance between your reality, but you're sinking below reality What is much more rewarding, but also requires much more work is putting Positive distance between your new reality trying to rise above reality rather than sink below it and You know like I said, that took a lot of concentration and work and focus for me. And I still screw up when I'm not being mindful enough

of that kind of thing. But it's really, really important. So what are the critiques? Well, I'll give you two critiques. One is that, and again, a more experienced, more advanced meditator, more enlightened person, let's use that word, the e-word, might not have this experience. But I found, and not in an abstract, we have a very concrete way that there are circumstances that can be so overwhelming, man, that for me, when I meditated, I instead of kind of pushing away all the negative thoughts, however momentarily and rising above them, I just kind of cleared out the cargo hold of my mind

so that all the anxiety could flood in and occupy every single thing, you know, brush out every distraction. Specifically, this is a case in October 2013, when our son had been diagnosed, we've been juggling everything, we've been dealing with his intermittent hospitalizations, all that stuff. I'd begun the meditation, I'd learned to kind of deal with that, but then on top of it, we have another child, a beautiful daughter. She had another diagnosis with another funky medical condition, not life threatening. But it was such that it sent me into a tailspin. And at that point, I was like, okay, this is

the moment that the meditation has prepared me for. This is going to enable me to kind of deal with this and rise above this and not let my daughters health issues turn me into a mush of jello, and I was totally wrong. I tried the meditation and, you know, Dan might have maybe 10% happier, but I needed to be like 100% happier at the time, or 100% less miserable. And so that was the moment when it became clear to me that there are certain times in life when you need to explore other things. And one thing that I had been resisting as long as I can remember was psychotropic medication. And there was reasons for that.

Egoistic reasons for that, right? I am not the best looking guy in the world. I'm not the most physically fit guy in the world. I don't make my living with my body. I make my living with my brain. So the idea that my brain was malfunctioning, right? That was like telling Aquaman, he needed water wings or something. That was a serious hard thing for me to get my head around. Yeah. My one little superpower actually is malfunctioning. So I ended up

going on a low dose antidepressant and I had-needed basis anti-anxiety medication. And I remember the time, and I think it talked to you about it, or I talked to somebody, and I felt a little bit ashamed, not for the aforementioned egoistic reasons. Not only, I should say, for the aforementioned egoistic reasons, but because I felt like I was failing as a meditator, I was blowing it. I wasn't getting. I was disappointing all the ancient monks who had been spent all that time laying out the path before me. And I felt like a loser. But somebody, maybe you, said that, you know,

you don't have to feel like you're cheating on your girlfriend when you supplement meditation with medication. I don't know if it was me, but I agree with the sentiment wholeheartedly. And I also agree with your critique. Even if it's even a critique, I mean, often I would tell people, you know, if you have endured trauma, tread lightly with meditation and make sure you're doing it under the care

of somebody truly experienced, mental health professional, and something as omnidirectionally awful as what you were experiencing there, you know, to open up to it fully, I can see why it would be too much. A, why would be too much, and B, why you would be in the market for something well north of 10% happier, given the baseline at that moment. And so I think it was quite wise to reach out for other modalities and, and, you know, back to the surround the football idea. So, but you have another critique. Well, the other critique is kind of the clubbyness or the, you know, if I were to be a little bit more stern, it would be the sectarian nature that can kind of pop up. I mean, I remember

again, you invited me to the songa, which was full of wonderful people, experienced meditators. I will say that each one of them is probably a better person than I am. It's not hard for me to say. And we had these great sits. And then there would be these talks afterwards, which also were quite helpful many times. But there are also times when, you, and it felt like I was part of a, like a Menshivic Bolshevik dispute between the mindfulness cadre and the TM cadre. And I remember at one point I raised my hand and I said, you know, I wish you all the best. I agree more people should be meditating, but but you know, I'm not leading a charge here. I'm not on a minute. I'm just a guy trying to keep it together.

And you know, beyond that, and maybe it's just because I'm ambivalent about being longing to any kind of group, but that part of it just didn't really speak to me. Again, we agree. Just by way of background for listeners, there was briefly a sangha, or just a group of practitioners that was put together in New York City, and back in the mid 2010s, and Miguel and I were part of it. And I'm not anti any form of meditation.

I'm pro taking care of your mind and whatever way works for you. The meditators also tend to be, at times, rather proud, at Daria's they stride in atheists. And I have no problem with atheism, but I also don't have any particular problem with faith or with Christianity in particular. And the meditation crowd really, really tries hard

to establish that we're not a religion. And okay, you don't have to be a religion. I'm not trying to slap that label on anybody. But in terms of like my grab bag and certainly when Felicia comes on, you know, the faith was a major part of what sustained her. You know, I have learned through direct experience that people of faith are not just kind of blind zealots or, you knowots or superstitious ignoramuses. They're people who'd try and deal with life on its own terms as well.

And they have found that the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth or Saint Augustine of Hippo or whomever are equally valuable as any other form of teaching that is subject to interpretation and cleaning of messages. Well, yet again, we agree. Let me just ask a few more questions before we bring in your wife, because you sent me kind of a note before we went on here with a bunch of fascinating ideas that I just wanted to chase down.

You used this word earlier, but I'm going to take this word and also put it in a larger phrase that you also used when you sent me a note before the interview. Use the word adequacy earlier, but then you actually have a phrase, the gospel of adequacy, which I love. Tell me what you mean by that. Well, it circles back to a point that you made earlier, which is that oftentimes when you hear of this genre of story, shall we say, often that involves, you know, sick kids, somehow the parents magically become martyrs. And by the way, I've seen this actually happen. Some parents actually do, you know, are able to tap into this infinite reservoir of compassion and love and patience and strength. But not everybody does that. And oftentimes,

there's research on this, of course, serious diseases in kids can have all sorts of effects on families, right? Yes, it can bring them closer together. Yes, it can bond to them. Yes, it can strengthen their connections, but it can also tear them apart. It can also bring out the worst in you. It can also fracture you in ways that may not be repairable. And so I think it's for families going through stuff, I just want people to know that you don't have to be heroic every single second of this ordeal. And what you should strive to be, I think, what I strive to be with some modicum of success was indeed adequate. And there's a lot to be, I think, what I strive to be with some modicum of success was indeed adequate.

And there's a lot to be said for being adequate. When you're being adequate, you're not making things worse. And I think that is for people like me, that's a pretty, can be a pretty challenging goal. So one of the messages of the book is that, you know, do whatever you need to do and don't be ashamed about it and don't be shy about it and don't let things get to the point of no return before you avail yourself of whatever it is you need to do to be adequate. Don't you think the advice of the gospel of adequacy scales beyond people who are in extremists? Yeah. I think it sure could. You know, I keep wanting to invoke that beautiful,

parable or the story of Pac-win and the Samurai that I actually heard at IMS. You know that one? I bet you have people telling that on this show like five times a week. No, I've never heard it. So the way I've heard it, Pac-win is this well-respected Buddhist monk in Japan. And there's some Samurai, who is journeyed far to come get wisdom from Pac-win. And the Samurai comes up and he's in his full armor and he's got his Samurai sword and he says to Pac-win, tell me

Pac-win, what is Heaven and what is hell? I demand that you tell me and Pac-win says something offensive to the samurai who are you That I would need to bestow my wisdom upon you? You're nothing but a, you know, a man of the material world. You've done another's work. You're not on my level And of course this infuriates the samurai. So the samurai pulls out his sword and He prepares to be head to Pac-win right on the spot and just easy about to bring the sword down on Pac-win

Pac-win says that's hell and then and just easy about to bring the sword down on Pacqun. Pacqun says, that's hell. And then this is hard for me to get through. And then the samurai falls on his knees and he starts crying because he realizes that the things that he thought were valuable and the things that were meaningful in life were actually not just meaningless, but their own form of prison. And he starts crying into his hands. And then Pacqun says, that's heaven. And for me, that was one of the most meaningful stories. And the point is, you know, it's not just people in extremists who can kind of learn from this, but it is actually indeed noble, very well-established, samurai warriors who are completely comfortable with their lives who, in my opinion,

can benefit from that kind of wisdom. You invoked this earlier that there's a way in which masculinity can be a big block to happiness. Well, yeah, well, especially if you associate masculinity with control, which I did, that was kind of one of the things about my life, is that I always wanted to be self-sufficient. I was wanted to be able to say, you know, screw you to anybody because I was going to be able to take care of myself.

And I always wanted to have a certain degree of authority over my circumstances and my environment. And when, you know, believe me, when you go to hospital, go into hospital world, as I call it in the book, all that's taken away, an extreme lesson in humility because you don't control your comings and goings. You don't really have any authority. You're not a doctor. It's the doctors who know things. You don't know anything.

Really, you can try to challenge them. You can be an advocate for your child patient, of course, but your expertise is not relevant. Whatever your expertise is here, it doesn't apply. And that, again, it's just a complete immersion in a other circumstance where your ego is burned off. You did so many things to kind of work on your own mind while you were under this stress. And you know, you talked about meditation, medication, marriage counseling. There was somebody you spoke to at Duke whose name is John Cescovitch. And you were talking to him about the sort of meditation versus religion debate, and he said, and I'm going to read you this quote, and then maybe you can talk

about what it means to you. John, who I've never met, but John, you're clearly quite involved, human being, for having said this, there's only one miracle, but I've seen it thousands of times. It's called love. Yeah. Yeah. So John was, I'm going to get his title wrong, but he was some sort of patient counselor, grief counselor, something. I get it right in the book, I promise. But he had seen literally tens of thousands of patients and families of varying faiths, right, from militant atheism to Islam to wickedness, you name it. And, you know, for him, the faith science or the faith meditation tension was actually very easy to resolve. He was just positing it as a vocabulary and a set of tools that one can use to try to assimilate the Dharma, the craziness of life and the things that are constantly coming at you and finding

a way to be with your feelings, be with your suffering, acknowledge the suffering of others, and also acknowledge the immense beauty and grace and salvation of this thing that we call love in as all its various expressions, which is this miraculous force that changes and sustains us and that needs to be supported and appreciated in all its expressions big and small. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. And after the break, we'll hear from Miguel's wife, Felicia, and a little bit more from Miguel himself. Hey, I'm Arisha and I'm Brooke.

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Amazon Music or the Wondery app. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. Okay, we're back. Let's hear now from Felicia. Hi, Dan. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for having us. You've been listening to your spouse for a little bit. Before I ask any specific question, any responses, anything you want to add,

clarify, reflect upon. Well, the word that keeps coming up for Miguel and also when reading your book and hearing your podcast, the word that comes up is control. And that is something that I've come to understand we try to do, but control in a way is like a prison in and of itself. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to control. And we ultimately know on some level that it's impossible. And we're trying to control in many cases because we are looking at things in such a negative way that we feel there is so much out to get us, someone's out to get us.

These pathogens are out to kill us. And so our control, our need to do that goes into hyperdrive and that just creates so much more anxiety and depression. And as Miguel was talking about control, I was really thinking about our sun's disease, chronic currently tomas disease and how I'm a carrier for this disease. What we're finding out now about carriers of CDD and many excellent rare diseases is that women can have a lot of issues. They were previously thought to be asymptomatic. And now research shows that we do have serious symptoms. And

when we have this mutated gene, it can manifest in a lot of inflammation that can cause feelings of anxiety, brain fog, confusion, and all kinds of problems in terms of concentrating. I could, with my status as a CGD carrier, find that on certain days days I perform very well. I function at a very high capacity in school. I scored very well in all standardized tests, but I couldn't always manufacture or manifest

that in the classroom. And this continued into my career. And I began to doubt myself. I began to confuse the inflammation that was occurring in my brain with being not very smart. And that led to a lot of behaviors that weren't very productive for me in my teens and 20s, one of which is that I rebelled against the Christian faith in which I was raised. So to answer your question, what I really took from what Miguel and you were talking about,

I really came back to this word control. And I had really tried to control things during Sebastian's illness because as we've heard Miguel was completely out of control. So sometimes I felt like I had three children, I had Lydia's, Sebastian and then Miguel. And so I was doing everything I could to keep our son alive. And that included his daily medication that he had to take, keeping him away from things with with CGD. We have to keep our children away from all kinds of pathogens that are normally innocuous, like wichips, hay, soil, lakes.

So suddenly the world became even more scary to me. And that brings us to the point when we were in the Duke hospital where I ultimately found that I needed to give up control and what a tremendous relief that was for me for the first time in my life. So it sounds like you went from the person with the sword to the person crying into your hands where you gave up control and gave up the egoic thought

that you could run everything in a universe that is in traffic. Absolutely. I was not planning to live in North Carolina for nine months. I was planning to go there for two days. I had packed for two days and it turned into nine months. I was not planning for them to tell me we have to take your sun now into the transplant unit. And so my life in New York was stripped away. All of my friends were stripped away. My ability to control anything was just ripped from me. And I was brought down to my knees, literally like you said, Dan. I didn't know what to do.

Even Miguel, Miguel and Lydia were sick. They got sick. They caught the flu. And so they couldn't come into the transplant unit. And so even my family, my small family, that was there. They were stripped away from me. I couldn't even see them. These are the things family, my small family, that was there. They were stripped away from me. I couldn't even see them. These are the things, the catastrophic things I had been

facing. And when you're stripped and you're at such depths where the pressure is so intense, I was so grateful that I could go back to my faith and be able to just say, Lord, I can't take this, take this from me. And to my surprise, after rebelling against the way I was raised, this inter-dominational faith, church, I found that this well that was running deep within me was still flowing and I just felt washed. I felt flooded with this love, just lifted up and loved in a way that was so profound that I'll always be grateful for that moment and because I felt such profound love, I was able to feel immediately a sense of peace and a sense of calm and I was able to focus on what sense of peace and a sense of calm, and I was able to focus

on what I could do to support my son. I was able to focus on what I could control within that moment and within that environment. It's interesting the difference between, you know, Miguel and I were talking before about loving kindness meditation where you train up your ability to love. Whereas if I understand it, what you found in that moment where you felt your knees in hospital world as Miguel calls it in the book, your family stripped of you, your friends stripped of you, your life in your city stripped of you. You felt loved.

It wasn't like you were training up the ability to spread love into the world. You felt like the universe or God or some larger, beneficent force was holding you. Do I have that right? Yes, exactly. It's like that story from the prodigal son. Even though this person from the Bible turns his back on his father, on everything, which I had done, I'd left where I grew up in Chicago.

I went out to the world, I lived in Prague. I was all about my achievement, all about showing everyone. I didn't need God. I didn't need anyone to tell me that I couldn't do it, that I wasn't smart enough, I was going to prove myself to everyone. And the thing about faith is that faith is faithful, even when we're not, and we're loved, even when we don't show love back. And I had known that once. And I was able to know it again.

After that moment that you described of being in the hospital and having this kind of awakening, how do you practice going forward? What do you do to get back in touch with that feeling so that you can kind of, I use this phrase before, kind of get over yourself and get over your desire to control everything and do what you can, give it and what's available to you. I go back to that prodigal son story because there's such a compelling moment when the son comes back after he's done all

these things. He's been in the den of ill-reputed. He's done all these things. He's been in the den of Il Repute. He's taken all his inheritance. He's blown it. He's doing wine, women, and song, you know, who knows how long and his dad was still there looking for him. And when he saw his son return, he ran out to greet him with such love. And I think this is something that we would all do if our children ever decided that they didn't. Our daughter wants to move to Japan, you know, when she goes to college. So if our children just decided that they wanted to not be around us for a while, we'll

always be waiting for them at the door, looking for them to come down the road and running to them when they appear. So that's how we can understand it and that's how I felt. And I felt that all the way through because that love that I started to feel was love for myself. That was the love that I needed. That was the love I was missing. And once I started feeling that love, then other people who felt that love had faith came forward to me in ways that were I would call them miracles. So for example, someone from the people with whom I were raised in the church

in Chicago knew someone, who knew someone who they said well you can contact this person and then I just tap into call her when I was there. I didn't even have time to call her before I left. And I said, Jessica, I, you don't know me, but I know Maria and I know Annette. And I'm here alone and I don't have anyone who can help me and my son's in the hospital. And she said, Felicia, I actually am going to nursing school in the building right next to where you are. I'll be right over. And so these are the kinds of things that we experienced. Miguel had said also, we don't know anyone in Durham Police, we can't go there, we don't have a support network. Well, when you have faith,

and I didn't have a really strong faith at that time, before we went there, and lo and behold, Miguel has a really good friend who's also mentioned in the book Tina, who turned out to be a wonderful person to us. She was working as a high profile business consultant and she became everything to us. She became a sister to me. She dropped everything to help us to take care of our daughter. She was there for us and now she's become a nurse and she works at Duke. So there's a lot that we have learned through our experience. There's a lot that I'm not gonna say I can understand it.

I can't, it's mysterious and that's what's wonderful about it. But these are the kinds of things I wanted to share with you that perhaps in a way answer the questions that you've asked. Yeah, I appreciate it. Let me ask you one more question. How is Sebastian? Sebastian is great. He just auditioned for a role in Annie Jr. The Musical.

And he said, Mom, you didn't tell me that I actually have to audition before we went. I said, well, you have to sing something. And he began to get really upset. And he said, I can't do this. I can't do this. And then I said, Sebastian, I think you can. I believe in you. And he got that same look on his face when we were in the transplant unit, just this resolute determined face.

And he walked in there and he won the president Roosevelt role. So he's going to be singing with Annie. The sun will come out tomorrow. And it will. And how old is he? He's eight. And he has a functioning immune system thanks to the doctors at Duke. Yes, you would never know when you look at him that he's been through stem cell transplant.

The one thing I do want to add though that of course it is of course thanks to the doctors and the nurses at Duke who are you know heroes beyond description, but also we are constantly grateful and mindful of the patients who came before us, the people who's suffering, and in many cases, people whose death contributed meaningfully to the evolution of the medical science that have made these breakthroughs possible. We're kind of fortunate enough to stand on the mountain that they built through their sacrifice. That's a great point. Absolutely. I really believe that faith is the union and works in tandem with science and medicine. It's not binary. Coming back to you, Miguel, as we come to the end of our time here, how would you say you've changed after all this?

I mean, I've known you for a long time. I could answer it, but I'd be curious to hear what you say. Well, I mentioned in the book that there are some ways that we've changed that are a little bit hackneyed, a little bit trite, a little bit kind of self-help bookie cliché. I will say, as one can imagine, we have a rather profound change of perspective in terms of what's important and what's unimportant. And that manifests itself in all sorts of ways. You know, parenting in this country in particular can kind of be a competition. It can be an industry where you have to buy certain products and pay for certain services in order to kind of qualify as a good parent.

And I would say the collision, I have both successfully distanced ourselves from some of those more obsessive pathologies. We also found ourselves at certain key moments, just separated rather dramatically from other things that a lot of people think are really important among them would be the ongoing and continually acidic political schism. And, you know, I'm a journalist, I, you know, I'm participating in this to a certain degree. But I've certainly no longer really let things that are on a TV screen upset me the way they used to, which is not to say that political apathy is what's needed. But it just helps me not feel that that needs to dominate my mindset on a regular basis. There were some other kind of quirky ways that it changed us. One is that we, I think, and I don't want to speak for Felicia, but I do think you would agree. We have much less tolerance for things like on-screen violence as entertainment. When you see how easy it is for the human body to get broken and how hard it is to repair it,

watching, even if it's just make believe violence, the people are shooting each other up or, you know, engaging in fist fights on TV, you know, I'm not saying we should ban that stuff, obviously, but it just doesn't entertain me. I don't have the reaction to it that I did before I had this experience. And then finally, you know, I think it made us a little bit more eager to try to help others because yes, you need to take care of yourself. Yes, you need to, you know, meditate and do whatever you need to do to address your own problems. But it's really good to get away from your own problems and stop gazing at your navel

every once in a while and focus on someone else's problem and just help somebody else who's dealing with their own stuff and be of use in some very practical way. So that's something that we've done Felicia is doing that big time with her advocacy for the CGD patient community. And it's something that, as I said, I'd started to do on a small, kind of local level and want to do more of going forward. What about the imperfections we talked about at the beginning of the show, again, which I say without judgment,

I say more with empathy because your imperfections map quite neatly on top of mine, but do the sort of ego, the anger, desire to control, etc., etc. I mean, I would like to say, and I think empirically, I can say that I don't have grade A anger episodes that often, I would like to say that I've let a number of things go that I used to think were very important about, you know, my kids, their performance and other material things. And I'll tell you this, I'm certainly more comfortable with the idea of dying than I was a bunch of years ago

when this all started. I'm not looking forward to it. I don't want it to happen tomorrow. But having seen the kind of beautiful and graceful and transcendent ways that some people can approach the end of their life, I'm much less resistant to that process than I would have been a while ago. Felicia, let me give you the final word. You can comment on anything Miguel said or offer anything else that come to mind. To circle back to your question down is really good one.

How do I maintain this feeling of not needing to be in control? I certainly am not perfect at this. I have my periods when I'm just very down, especially during the pandemic. I was really, I went through a feeling of hopelessness and some really dark days, but I've been able to find people who come forward and seem to just help me out of that. He'll say, come on Felicia, let's talk. Let's just do something to them. Let's just go for a walk together. And this is real fellowship that I have with people who are a faith or people who just understand the importance of an authentic conversation.

In addition to doing that with my friends, I do that with the CGD Association of America and we get together and talk. And having been through what we've been through, it's just such a refreshing thing to not have walls up to be able to say, here I am. this is who I am, this is who you are, and just as you said, I'm enough, I'm okay, and I'm accepted and maybe even loved, you know? So those are the kinds of things that are really valuable to me and I think to our family now.

And I'm just really grateful for you Dan, because I think you've really put a light on this that we can have an inauthentic experience or we can have an authentic one. And ultimately, it might look like the inauthentic experience is great, you know, with all the trappings of things that we might covet, the house, the car, the vacations, but it can be very empty as well. And so I'm really grateful to you for helping people to start looking past those things and talking about what really matters.

Thank you both. I think you've done this incredible thing of taking one of, if not the very worst things that can happen to a human being and then turning into something useful through a dis conversation and through an incredibly well-written book, which again, for the listener is called More Than You Can Handle.

And I recommend it and you can get it wherever you get your books. Miguel and Felicia, thank you. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Dan. Thank you to both Miguel and Felicia. Really appreciate them coming on. This show is made by Samuel Johns, DJ Cashmere, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartell, and Jen Plant

with Audio Engineering by Ultraviolet Audio. As always, a big shout out to Ryan Kessler and Josh Kohan from ABC News. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus. 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.

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