Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 387: Twenty Percent Happier | Matthew Hepburn

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

In this special episode we’re going to do some mindful eavesdropping. You’re going to get a chance to listen in on a process that rarely, if ever, gets aired publicly. You’re going to hear real students talking to a real meditation teacher about real life issues -- issues in their meditation practice, and issues related to applying meditation to your everyday life.The meditation teacher for this episode is Matthew Hepburn. Matthew has spent the last decade teaching meditation in schools, prisons, and meditation centers around the country. He’s an incredibly skilled, wise, and funny teacher. He’s also worked for many years at Ten Percent Happier, where Matthew is a stalwart on the content team. We cover some fascinating issues, including: how meditation can make you braver at work; undercover practices you can do with your spouse or partner; how to find meaning in everyday annoyances; how to handle fear; and the one thing that will break any meditation practice. You can listen to 20% Happier exclusively on the Ten Percent Happier app and download today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/matthew-hepburn-387See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, we got a special episode for you today. We're going to do some mindful eavesdropping. You're going to get a chance to listen in on a process that rarely, if ever, gets aired publicly. Let me step back for a second. A big question many of you may have is,

okay, I'm meditating or attempting to regularly meditate, but how do I make it relevant to my actual life? On its own, the practice can, for some of us, that sometimes feel a little dumb. I'm watching my breath and so what? This is why having a meditation teacher can be so helpful to remind us why we're doing this thing. Or again, why we're attempting to regularly do this thing.

But of course, not everybody's lucky or resourceful enough to have a relationship with a meditation teacher. And some of you may feel like even if I did come face to face with the meditation teacher, what would I even ask? There's a cool thing that happens on meditation retreats. Another thing that not everybody will have the luck or a gumption to do, teachers on retreats often hold group sessions where you get a chance to listen in on the questions that the other meditators have. This can be super helpful because you hear questions you might not have thought to ask

or because you hear that other people are struggling with the same stuff you're struggling with. Today, on this episode, we're gonna give you a version of that. You're gonna hear audio clips of real students talking to a real meditation teacher about real life issues. Issues in their meditation practice

and issues related to how to apply meditation to everyday life. And then after each of these little clips, the teacher and I will take a deep dive into the issues that arise in the clips. Said teacher is Matthew Hepburn. For those of you who are users of the 10% happier app, you probably know Matthew as the guy who helps you fall asleep. I'm not being facetious. Matthew has one of the most popular sleep meditations in the app. I promise though this conversation is anything but sleepy. Matthew is an ace. He has spent the last decade teaching meditation in schools, prisons, and meditation centers all over the country. He is incredibly skilled, wise, and very funny teacher and human being. I can say all of this with some real authority because

I have worked alongside Matthew for many, many years at the 10% happier app where he's a staffer and a stalwart on our content team. In this episode, we cover some fascinating issues, including how meditation can make you braver at work. Under this episode, we cover some fascinating issues, including how meditation can make you braver at work, undercover practices you can do with your spouse or partner, how to find meaning in everyday annoyances, how to handle fear, and the one thing that will break any meditation practice. Before we dive in, I do want to point out something very, very cool. The clips you're going to be hearing have been called from a brand new podcast hosted by Matthew.

This new show, which is exclusive to the 10% happier app, is called 20% happier. Yes, you heard that correctly. Matthew is going to be taking all the insights you get from this show, my show, and doubling them. As if I wasn't gonna be stuck with math jokes for the rest of my life already, having written a book called 10% Happier I Am Now Doubling Down on the Math. So 20% Happier it is. Mathieu's show offers deep wisdom for imperfect people

and it's available exclusively for subscribers to the 10% happier app. In the show, you'll get to listen in on intimate conversations between Matthew and people just like you, racquet file meditators, because listening in on real people working through real challenges can directly benefit you. As you know here on this show, I talk to meditation teachers, scientists, psychologists, and the occasional celebrity. But for many years, many of you have asked that we focus on regular people, too.

So that is what Matthew is going to be doing on his new show, which is out today inside the 10% happier app. So we'll get started with this episode, the special episode with Matthew, right after this. 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% .com. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. Hey y'all it's your girl Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast. Baby this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts the questions that are in my head. Like it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's time for my space listen to baby

This is kiki Palmer on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcast Matthew Hepburn my friend and colleague welcome to the show Dan Harris my new nemesis old friend Wait the nemesis is new haven't't I been your Newman for a long time? Oh, I mean, I haven't been out about it, but now officially we're making a public. Might as well do it in front of the largest possible audience. That's right, there are larger audiences than just your show, Dan.

You know that. Oh, wow, it's just, it's shots fired. I like this is gonna go well. As you know, verbal abuse is my love language. So like you're you're in a very safe place for this. This is why we love each other so much. The only thing I resent is that you're better at it than I am. And you're better at meditation than I am. So let me let me ask you about that. I'm just curious before we get into these amazing audio clips that I'm excited for people to hear, can you just give us a brief?

Little bio of Matthew Hepburn of you how did you get into meditation? How did you become a meditation teacher? Yeah, well, that's it's interesting because when I think about this question I can pick anywhere and my life is the place to start you know, I could start as I was just a very little kid and talk about my parents and the values that they had and how those things ended up contributing to where I am today. It's kind of an interesting story to have to tell, but you know, if I were going to tell it to you today in a way that, you know, maybe is somewhat succinct and also represents some of my own path, I would say that when I was a young adult and the first year that I got to college, I felt like it was kind of a big brave and scary world out there. I felt like none of the adults knew anything that was going on that I was sorely looking for mentors or people that I could trust to or mentors or people that I could trust to give me a clear sense of how to live well in the world, and that I didn't have a clear indication, a clear read on where I could take my cues on how to live a human life well. And that happened at the same time as I was going through a major, major identity crisis. I had known myself to be first and foremost a performance jazz pianist.

And that's what I had gone to school on a scholarship for. And that identity was totally falling apart from me. And I was embroiled in a lot of self-criticism and self-hatred that can show up for kids who are going to art school. And I was looking for a new path and a new identity in the world. And so at the same time that I was having some major grief about the loss of my plans for my future, the loss of the elements of my own positive self-regard that I had relied on to help me feel good about how I moved through the world and who I was. At the same time, I was reading and listening to anything that I could get my hands on that could teach me about what other human beings before

me had learned about how to live well. And so one of the things that I ran into was Buddhist teachings. I think the first thing I read was Herman Hess's Siddhartha. You know, I was a kid. It was like 19 years old. It was a really kind of tender and new time in my life. And so for me, it was a very slow progression between that point in time where I was just getting introduced to these ideas that it was possible to look at your own interiority, to live a contemplative life, to make the subjective your primary interest and see how you're living

and to learn from it, and to build a new relationship to life. And it's been a long road from then to now. And it was a slow waiting in. I started by meditating every once in a while, every, you know, a couple of weeks or something like that. Eventually I started meditating for five minutes at a time every day, and slowly but surely along the way, every single thing that I learned seemed to come out useful in the proving ground of my own experimentation. And the more that I found

that the meditation techniques I was trying were useful, the more time I invested in it. And it took quite some time, but eventually I decided to make a lot of sacrifices in my life leave jobs so that I could sit long retreats and things like that and one thing led to another. And now you just recently graduated from the Insight Meditation Society teacher training program? Yeah, I'm just coming out of this four-year training program to train retreat teachers. And while I've been teaching meditation for the last decade, I'm a student first, and I'm really just kind of beginning

my life and learning how to teach meditation and learning from my mentors about how to do it as best I can. When it comes to the training of meditation teachers, to teach meditation and learning from my mentors about how to do it as best I can. When it comes to the training of meditation teachers, I often compare it to doctors. I live with a highly trained physician. Both of my parents were academic physicians. My wife did a year or two after college before going to med school. I think I had an advanced degree in infectious diseases and then did a sort of a pre-med set of courses, then went to med school for four years, then did residency,

two years, which was three years, and then did fellowship for two or three years. In other words, a lot, a lot, a lot of post-college training. And I think to an even greater degree, meditation teachers put in, you know, accumulated years of silent meditation retreat time, getting familiar with, I think you called it interiority, or as I once heard of meditation teacher describe it on a meditation retreat, was my first retreat that the teacher said something like, you know what your life is all about your actual life You know you might think your life is about all these big things But your actual life from moment to moment is I liked the soup They just served in the kitchen and you know what's what's for dinner and do I need a haircut and getting more and more familiar

With that inner landscape so that you can help people navigate their own the training is intense It's no small thing to do what you've done. I do have a question though along those lines, which is, you know, what's so fascinating about this new project of yours, this new show, 20% happier is that you give people a glimpse into a relationship that I think most of us have never seen, either from the side of being a meditation student, you know, and talking one-on-one with a teacher or, I think even fewer of us have experienced it from the side of being a meditation teacher. And what's so cool about the show is you put us in the shoes of both the student and the teacher, you take us inside your own mind as you're

working with folks. So just before we start playing some of these clips, can you just say a few words about the nature of the teacher student relationship in meditation, why it's so important? Well, geez. The most important relationship that happens in a meditator's world is their relationship to their own life and That relationship is the one that yields all the potential wild successes that are possible of letting go of unnecessary misery making in our lives and actually experiencing a capacity for foundational well-being that we might not have thought was possible before. All that comes from a really incredibly intimate human relationship with our own lives. But at times, that relationship can get lonely.

We can doubt what's going on in our relationship to meditation, the way we practice it, we can doubt whether it's even working for us, we can be confused about what to do next, what's the next step, and in the tradition that I'm trained in, I'm trained primarily in early Buddhism and in the Teraavod and Buddhist tradition. Although I've studied in a few other both Buddhist and non-Buddhist contemplative lineages, but I haven't been trained as a teacher in any of those lineages.

But in this early Buddhist and Teravod and framework, a teacher is playing the role of a, kind of like an older sibling, a good friend who's maybe seen a few things that you haven't seen. And so in many ways, it's like, look, if you're going through a tough time in your life, if you're going through a difficult breakup or losing a job or anything that is rocky in your life, and you have the opportunity to have a real heart to heart with a good friend where you're holding nothing back where you're really open. And this person

knows you well, they know your strengths, they know your weaknesses, they know your best days, they know your worst days, and they can reflect back what they see and understand and support you. Those conversations are incredibly helpful in our life. And so, in the student teacher relationship in meditation, what we do is we basically just come together as good friends. And my job is hopefully to be somebody who's got a little more experience, both my own experience in my own meditation practice, but also having talked to a lot of other people who have been going through the same struggles

that you may be going through. We figure out what the next step is and how to relate to life in a way that frees up the mind. Just in case people think Matthew's being modest about, you know, I show up as a good friend, not as some perched upon a mountaintop expert. The name, and I'm probably going to mangle this, the name in Polly, the ancient language of Polly of the role that a teacher plays, I think is Kalyana Mietro, which translates into roughly like spiritual friend. And that is the posture,

at least in this tradition, the tradition you come out of that meditation teachers are supposed to take. You're really in the mock with the student, side by side, as their friend helping them improve their practice and by extension their life. Do I have that right?

I think you got it exactly right. I think it's beautiful to me. I think it's quite beautiful that the official role, the relationship between the student and the teacher is that of a friend. You know, I would wanna ask you, what have been the things that you have learned from having a relationship with a meditation teacher or hearing how your meditation teacher, like Joseph,

responds to how he responds to other people, other students? I'm not going to say anything new because you articulated it all so well, but I would say there are at least two levels. And maybe a third that I'll mention, the first level is having somebody to talk about my practice with who can point out where I'm just operating on false assumptions or I'm in some sort of cultist act, or I don't know where to go next or whatever, that's super useful. Somebody to get under the hood of my mind and say, you know, the carburetor's not working. I don't know anything about cars, but let's pick that up. The second thing is, as you described, talking about how to bring the practices to bear

in my life. So, Joseph and I aren't just talking about meditation practice technically, although we do do that. We're talking about how do I use it in various aspects of my life. And then the third thing that's been incredibly helpful, you know, I have an unusual relationship with Joseph because really, I mean, he really is a friend and a business partner in a way, you know, is one of the founding teachers on the 10% App Year app. And I've been able to, you know, and he just spent the weekend at our house. So I know him and I get to really watch him behave in many different contexts.

And it's enormously faith inducing small f faith, you know, just not necessarily faith in anything you can't prove, but confidence inspiring to, because he's never let me down. I'm not saying he's a perfect human being. He actually has lots of foibles and he owns them, but that's part of the never letting me down. He doesn't pretend to be anything he's not. He really is pretty remarkable person though and watching him behave and over all these years,

it gives me a lot of confidence that the practice isn't pointless. Now granted, he's done it at a dosage that most of us are not going to achieve. He's been doing it for 55 years and spends three months every year in silent meditation and so that's a pretty high dosage. But so I may not achieve Joseph levels

of personal integrity, exquisiteness in my communications, et cetera, et cetera. I'm going to screw up a lot more than he does, but to know that I can put myself on that spectrum, on that trajectory is really gives me a lot of confidence that I, you know, when I sit down on the cushion, I'm not wasting my time. So one last question before we dive into the clips.

And again, you're really going to hear these sessions, which we've never done on the show before. So I'm excited for that. What's the difference between the type of work you do with your own meditation teachers and therapy? Well, you know, what I would say the difference is is that in meditation, differences is that in meditation, like I said earlier, the primary, the active ingredient in the medicine is your relationship to life. And particularly is what you do when you're meditating. And in therapy, the active ingredient in what is therapeutic in therapy is the relationship between the therapist and the client in the midst of the session.

And so when a meditation student comes to talk to me, I'm like a coach that's talking to them in the locker room after the game, and I'm going to say, you know, get in there and try this next time and watch out for that. And in therapy, and I only know this from the client side, but I actually am a strong believer in the benefits of Western psychotherapy on its own, but also as a supplement to contemplative practice. And in therapy, the dialogue and the relationship in many modalities of therapy, particularly the psychodynamic modes, that's the medicine. And so you don't need to be leaving the therapy session and doing a meditation practice outside

of it. Now, there's some psychotherapeutic modes like CBT and others where you have a whole set of exercises that you are doing outside the therapy. But these are some of the ways that it's different. And one of the things that I joke about with my students is that when they come to see me, they don't have to rehash their life narrative.

They don't have to tell me about their mom. They don't have to tell me about their mom, they don't have to tell me about their family history, right? What we're looking at is their relationship to life here and now in immediacy, not trying to understand what's happened in the past and how that affects this moment, but trying to understand what's our relationship to the present moment and how that affects this moment and future moments. That's really helpful. Much more of my conversation with Matthew Hepburn right after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes.

You never know if you're just going to end up on page 6 or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears.

When Brittany's fans form the free Brittany movement dedicated to fring her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which sets its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. So I actually have more questions about the difference between therapy and and working with a meditation teacher, but I'm going to let those flow out of the clips we're

going to hear. So let's actually let's dive in and start listening to some of these clips. The first one is this first bit of eavesdropping we get to do here is on a conversation between you and a student named Jacqueline. Can you give us some context before we actually listen? Okay, so in this clip, Jacqueline's telling me about a moment where she tried to use her budding meditation practice to help her in a pinch. She was writing the car with her boyfriend and got a really difficult phone call

from a family member who she has a somewhat contentious relationship with. And she tried to use a technique called rain. This is an acronym, R-A-I-N. And this is a meditation technique that was developed, I believe, by Michelle McDonald, a meditation teacher and has been made very broadly popular by Tara Brock.

And so Jacqueline is explaining to me, what's happened is she's tried to use this technique, rain, and it doesn't seem to have worked so well for her. And just to say, rain stands for recognize, allow, investigate, and N can either be non-identification or nurture, I believe. And so it's a little kind of checklist you can run through in the midst of some sort of

emotional storm. One of the things that I heard you say there was that, use the word that you felt like you failed because you weren't able to get yourself to feel better and get back into that headspace. And I could hear, as I listen to you, that you were employing rain as a tool, as a means to try to feel different

than you were feeling in the moment. And that is the one thing that will break any meditative tool. Oh, no. Oh, no. OK. Continue unpack for me, please. So there's a really common, maybe one of the most common, phenomenon for human beings.

Every day, we're swinging back and forth between experiences that we like and experiences we don't like and some experiences that we don't really care about very much. And it is so natural for us and incredibly common to want to have more of the experiences that we like common to want to have more of the experiences that we like, jamming out in the car and feeling good, want more of that. And less of the experiences, we don't like super complex, intense family relationship that feels unresolved and that I'm not too happy with. Less of that, please. Does that track for you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is, that makes a lot of sense and it's pretty reorienting. It's like how human, right? This is what we all do. I love that clip. And it reminds me of, so, a lesson I had to learn and still have to learn all the time, which is that meditation isn't about feeling a certain way. It is about feeling whatever you're feeling clearly so that your emotions, feelings, thoughts,

urges, etc. aren't owning you all the time. I mean, this is, I think something that we all have to learn again and again. And it's a subtle shift in attitude. And like I said to Jacqueline in this moment, right? It's like how human we hear that meditation is supposed to reduce stress. So then we feel stressed and we try and employ a meditation. So we don't feel stressed anymore. I mean, that seems like pretty straightforward.

That's how most people go about it. It's how most people do go about it. But the trouble is that meditation instead of being a tool in our hand that we can use to, and this is gonna be a strange mix metaphor, I can feel it already, it's gonna be a tool in our hand, we can use to become more connected and aware of our present moment experience. It turns from a tool to a weapon and we use it to fight the present moment experience

that we don't want to have. And as soon as that happens, it starts to lose all its power and its function, unfortunately. And all the meditation techniques that have worked so well for us in the past seem to come up short. And we're stuck usually just adding fuel to the fire of whatever difficult experience we're going through. So, but you're asking us to overcome millennia of evolution here, where we are sort of reflexively going for the pleasant

stuff, recoiling in the face of the unpleasant stuff, and numbing out in the face of anything we find neutral. Those are the three habitual responses. You're calling for us to do this radical move of just like hanging out with whatever is there. How do we learn how to do that on the regular? You know, it's actually I was having a conversation with another student of mine in a one-on-one conversation, and he said something that really cracked me up, and he was encapsulating his entire understanding up to this point of meditation practice. And he said, you know what I really understand that I'm doing with all of this is moment by moment, I'm basically

just giving a big FU to evolution. And he said, I'm taking it a moment at a time and I'm saying, I'm not going to follow the evolutionary response to whatever the present stimuli is. So if it's an email that feels threatening, I'm not gonna go caveman saber-two tiger on this thing. And I'm just gonna take that one moment and see if I can connect with a sense of one agency to make a choice in how I respond.

And two, my core values. What matters to me the most, how I actually want to show up in the world. And so, you know, the answer to your question is, you can't just flip off, you know, any of the either culturally ingrained habits or evolutionarily inherited habits that you may have developed, but you can take it a single moment at a time and try to have a different relationship to experience than the inner urge tells you that you should have. Well said, respond not react. It's my the only meditation cliche

I actually like. As I have said before, if I wasn't so afraid of pain, I would get a tattoo somewhere on on my body. Saeed, he's the star of this next clip. Can you can you give us a little context before we listen? Well, this conversation, you'll hear, I think, really, it's a personal note with me. I'll just say something about why actually, to start. When I was getting really heavy into meditation practice, studying Buddhism, and I wanted to spend more and more and more time studying intensively on retreat, and less time on the other things in my life.

There was a point at which probably I would have run off and joined a monastery, you know, shaved my head, put on robes and not come back. There was a point where I was really, I had that orientation and a handful of my close friends did exactly that and some of them are still in robes to this day. And I was in a different life situation. I was one of those statistics that left college just after the financial explosion in 2008. And I graduated with over six figures of student debt. And so I spent this period of time where I was falling in love with dama practice

and wanting to spend all my time on retreat and needing to hold down a job or multiple jobs in order to make payments on all my privately held student loans. And so it forced me to do something which I really would have avoided, frankly, which is to figure out a balance between being a working stiff and being a Dharma bum, having the heart of a Dharma bum and the schedule of a working stiff. And Saeed is asking me a question in this clip about how it can be possible to train ourselves

systematically to be more sensitive, more attuned, more open, and more aware of what's happening in our lives, even if it's painful and difficult, when we hold high pressure, you know, jobs, when we hold a lot of responsibilities, where we may be working in a corporate setting where other people don't value being open and attuned to one's emotions, maybe so much as we personally do. And so he asked me this question about how to hold that tension. Let's listen. I think working in somewhat of a corporate setting, somewhere where you're sort of like,

you sort of have to put shit away in order to get shit done. It could feel dangerous to exist in those spaces like that. It can feel dangerous to exist in a space like a corporate setting and feel like, I'm gonna be a person who feels everything all the time because that can inhibit your work. It could feel like it's slowing the process down.

People may not have enough time to make space for that. You could just be the weird guy who feels everything. Well, yeah. Oh my God, I can really relate. How long did it take you to think to develop that balance? Well, yo, let me just say first and foremost, I'm not done. I'm not done. It's all work and progress, oh God.

I think that after about four years of real intensive, five years of really like going for it and making this a priority, I probably made like three or four like very memorable mistakes around figuring out this balance of being too wound up around work or to open at work. You know, and it's a seesaw. I still go back and forth, but like I made some serious mistakes in both directions, but ultimately it's worth it to me because of where I've seen like that I've got to.

And I hope that it goes even further and further because I'll say to this day, sometimes I'll have a really tender meditation session or really intense therapy session. And I gotta go into work and it feels like, wow, is it? Can I go into this meeting and talk to six people about all the things that were behind deadline on while I'm in my feelings around this? into this meeting and like, you know, talk to six people about all the things that were behind deadline on while I'm like in my feelings around this and it's not easy, but it's possible.

But it's possible. Yeah. Hoof. Yeah. Yeah, that's, that is, that is something that I want for myself. I wanna be able to strike that balance. Emilean questions here, but I do want to point out one thing that some

listeners will have picked up on, which is that you guys are not talking, at least not specifically about meditation there. No, we're talking about what it means to live a more meditative life. The more that you meditate, the more that your relationship to life changes, the more that when things happen that are difficult, you actually don't have the impulse to completely shut that down. You actually want to be attuned to how it feels when somebody says something to you that's off, right? That just hits different and doesn't feel quite right. And that attunement will clarify how you interact with that person in the next few moments.

If you shut it down and just keep moving, you don't learn from that moment in that relationship as thoroughly as you might when you are more open, aware, clear-minded, and attuned. And so as we meditate, we live in a more meditative way. And so when students are coming to talk to me, sometimes we're talking about what's happening when you're sitting down with your eyes closed, but most of the time, we're just talking about life and how to live life in a way that's much more aligned with what we're learning through our meditation practice. Let's talk about work.

I know you have to hurl yourself into the lotus position every time you and I are in a meeting together because I'm so stressful, stress-inducing. But there are people out there who are worse, and many people listening to the show may feel like they're working in environments where it would be dangerous to be more mindful, more sensitive, more open, more compassionate in the workplace because it's, you know, doggie-dug. What would you say to people like that? You probably, if you're in a workplace like that, you know how to move strategically in political ways in your organization.

Probably. I say that as somebody who has had to do that. And what I would say is, you employ your development in mindfulness or your spiritual development. You employ that strategically as well. Right. And so you know the relationships at your work that feel the most threatened by a steep power imbalance and where there's a personality clash. And that's probably not the place to try the cutting edge of the areas of living in a beautiful mindful way that you're not so familiar with and haven't developed a really strong ground. And that's maybe an area to just trust the professional skills that you've developed up to this point

to be able to navigate the conversation with tact. And there are other places when maybe you are responding to an email, where you've got a little bit more space. And you can say, okay, let me stop. Let me slow down before I fire this response off. And actually see if what I'm about to write is really in line with how I want to speak and the impact that I want to have in the world.

Just get quiet for a moment, right? And those little moments that you take in the areas that feel safe are actually going to snowball. Those little moments are going to snowball and you're going to find more moments where you actually want to work in line with who you are and your values and work in integrity. And the more that you do that, in fact, from my own experience, people are drawn to you because even in very toxic work environments, people wish that they could be clearly anchored in who they are and their deepest values. And if they see that somebody is bullying folks at work

and that there's a person who can't be bullied, that's really inspiring. I have many moments in my own history at work of through my own bravery that's been developed in my meditation practice, being willing to give really difficult feedback to people who were a lot higher up on the ladder than I was. And I don't know that I could have done it in a way that would have been so skillful without my meditation practice, but the outcome was that both that person, but also people laterally to me were very appreciative of being able to be brave and to speak up.

And so, you know, our meditation practice doesn't just make us soft and susceptible to being caught up in our feelings when we're at work. It also makes us more attuned to when something's not going right. And we actually need to speak up. And all of those outcomes of meditation practice don't just benefit us, but they improve our workplace in general

for the people alongside us benefit us, but they improve our workplace in general for the people alongside us, above us, below us. What is the mechanism by which meditation might boost our bravery quotient? Well, I think the number one thing is that bravery is just being willing to feel fear and take action. And through meditation we can, if we're willing, feel fear and develop a relationship to it that is unafraid to feel it. When we are afraid to feel fear, we will be afraid to act in any way that confronts the source of what we're afraid of.

And if you've taken some time to even just sit for 10 minutes and feel anxiety and not fight it, after that meditation, you're going to feel a little bit less like that anxiety owns you, like it's driving the bus in your life, that it needs to make all the choices for you. And so if you've got a problematic relationship at work and you haven't said anything about it and all of a sudden, you get anxious about what's going on. If you've meditated with that anxiety, you actually may feel some empowerment to say, you want to know what? I'm really anxious about how this conversation might go, but anxiety doesn't run my life anymore.

And I'm going to try and say something and see how it goes. It reminds me right before the pandemic, I had a meeting with one of my bosses where I needed to go in and give some really hard feedback and I was incredibly anxious and angry about it for a while. And I remember meditating right before the meeting and kind of having this agenda going back to Jacqueline of like, cure this please, cure the anxiety. Of course, it didn't do that. And I've done enough practice to have caught myself

in the moment and just kind of just sitting there with the anxiety. And it didn't, you know, I walked across the threshold into this person's office, still anxious. But I felt like it wasn't some big beast under the bed. I couldn't see. It was something that I was, you know, kind of high-fiving and, you know, appreciating

because I understood that it was just, you know,, now I'm invoking evolution in a good way, evolutionarily bequeathed program I've been running in order to protect the organism, because I was going in to take a risk. And so, yeah, you should have a little bit of fear. And so, I was still feeling fearful as I entered the discussion, and it was not a smooth one, but I was less owned by it. It was less terrifying because I was looking at it in the face. Does that make sense? Yes. I mean, this is willingness to look directly at what is difficult is one of the greatest

skills that's developed in a meditation practice. And that turns into capacity to do things that seem brave to us at times or anybody who's feeling like looking directly at what's difficult is not an easy thing to do. Much more of my conversation with Matthew Hepburn right after this. We've been talking about how work can be stressful. There are, of course, other stressors, including marriage and parenting. And Molly talks about that in the next clip. The practice of gratitude starts to train us to look for things to be grateful for. And so it's a really beautiful and powerful practice to do in your relationship. And but I, I, I, I'm so curious about you playing with a whole, a whole another thing on the side.

I wonder what in your life routine with your husband, what are the times of day that happen at least to handful of times a week where you feel like you're like you don't have a bunch of pressure on you and you're around each other and you can be casual and relatively eddies. Is there any times like that that come to mind for you? Those times are sadly scarce because two full-time working parents is no joke. But I actually want to suggest that you make him the object of your meditation for like 60, 120 seconds at a time. And so you make him the bird calls that you're listening to in the morning. And you don't let him know. It's like a secret, you know, undercover practice that you're going to do. And you and the mornings go from there being nature around that you're not

tuned into at all to the moment when you close your eyes and all of a sudden it comes alive and you're paying attention to it in a different way. And find a time where he's like washing a dish and you can take 60 seconds in the kitchen and maybe you're interacting a little but really under undercover, you're just seeing if you can see this person as like a phenomena. Like if you looked out over the whole globe, right? There's like geysers shooting off. There's like trees losing their leaves. There's animals, you know, drinking water.

And there's this guy who's like washing this mug. And I think that there's going to be something that happens that bridges some of the qualities that you're experiencing in your daily morning meditation and brings them right into your home and life and relationship. That's very interesting thought. I've never considered making a person object of my meditation, but it's very interesting because what you're asking me to do is what I naturally do for my daughter because she is a phenomenon in my home. But so is my husband. I just don't think of him in that way anymore. Yeah, we just forget.

You know, you've seen him, you know, put on his shoes so many freaking times. It doesn't seem to be anything to look at. Yeah. It's such an interesting idea. And I really relate to what Molly said. You know, I can achieve so much awe when staring at my six year old. It's harder to do that with, I mean, I love my wife, but, you know, 15 years together,

it's easy to start overlooking things. And at least as I hear it, what you're recommending there is to make your spouse, your partner, the object of your meditation as a way to kind of re-animate them, to re-vivify their relationship. I'm going to share something here that I may botch a little bit because I just was having a conversation with a friend of mine who is a computational neuroscientist. And he said that for a long time, we have thought that the brain works by recognizing patterns. And so as we look around and see things, as we listen and hear things,

we recognize whatever patterns. So right now I see a pattern in front of me and I say, oh, that's a computer screen. Okay. I also see, okay, there's a table that the computer screen is sitting on. And so we have this thought that the brain is recognizing processing all this raw sensory data and pattern recognizing it and saying, do I need to pay attention to this or do I not need to pay attention to this? And recently, some of the newer thought that it's developing in the computational neuroscience field is that

it actually is impossible for the brain to process quite that much raw data. And so instead, what may be happening, as my friend was telling me, is that we are not hearing things and recognizing what each thing we hear is and deciding whether it's relevant to pay attention to or not. But instead, we are just hearing our expectations and we're just seeing our expectations. And so the mind projects what it expects to be there. And it consumes that as the sensory data. And only when something diverges from what we expect, do we actually start tuning in and taking in the real raw sensory data

that's coming in. It's as well, we need to pay attention because this is slightly outside of our expectations. And so, hey, you spend 10, 15, 20, 30 years of marriage with somebody. And you might not actually be perceiving them at all. You might mostly just be perceiving your expectations of them. And this is one of the most incredible things that mindfulness can do. It is a training of our attention. And when we can wield our attention, intentionally, we can transform how we experience our lives.

And that may be most profound in the areas that are most familiar, totally transforming what's familiar. Kind of smirking a little bit because hopefully you'll see the connection to this little story I'm about to tell one of the funniest things my wife ever said to me that she's pretty good for one liner once in a while. I was giving a talk and my wife was there and afterwards backstage I saw her and she was laughing with a mutual friend of ours and I said, what are you laughing about? And she said, well, I just told her that I like you so much better in public. And it's right. I mean, it's like opportunities that we might have to see our,

we rarely get opportunities to see our partners in a fresh light, and that can be very interesting. But those are sort of opportunities that may not come along that often. Whereas what you're calling for is something we can do in the most mundane of circumstances, which is, you go into meditation mode while your partner is washing a mug. Yes. Yes. Yes.

And it's totally true. It's like, you know, and not to say that one is better than the other, but to your point, you may not have opportunities to put what is familiar in a new context, like go hang with your partner or spouse in public, but you can. And you do have the capacity to change the way that you perceive them intentionally whenever you want. Just have to remember and be motivated to do it. Right.

That reminds me of an expression that will wing us nicely to the next clip, which is, I remember Joseph Goldstein, my meditation teacher, got your very familiar with. I was complaining to him once about how hard meditation is. He's like, it's not hard to be aware of your breath or be aware of what's happening right now. It's just sometimes a little hard to remember to do it. And this complaint that I was articulating to Joseph is not the only one who's had this complaint before. And in this next clip, we're going to hear a little bit of something along those lines from a student of yours named Harriet. Anything you want to say before we listen to this clip? Harriet asks a question that seems

maybe innocuous but is quite profound and really it's about how to transform the suffering in all the little moments in life. It's hard for me to put words to, part of it is an inability for me to really focus my energy on anything that I don't want to do, I suppose. And this goes to a question, like, how do I show up when I don't want to be there in the first place? Such a good question. Yes, I want to say, I really respect your bringing this to this session because there are so many different modes in our life that we have of struggling and suffering. And some are big. You talked about having this real serious fear, you know, over the past year, and they're big and obvious.

But many are actually subtle, and it's like the suffering of a thousand paper cuts. And yes, and if they could be drastically shifted, our quality of life, our sense of freedom and ease and well-being would feel radically different because it's like these little ways in which we resist life or we fight with things or we struggle that fills in all these little nooks and crannies. So this is an area that I think will be one that if you are Exploring in your meditation practice and start to gain some ground and wisdom and compassion and a sense of freedom, it's really going to yield some

serious dividends. I get it. Can you say more about that? What are you pointing to for Harriet that we could all apply in our own lives in those situations where we're just like, I don't want to do this. Well, we're actually just, we're just kicking off the conversation. That was basically a real cliffhanger there because you didn't get to hear me say anything except wow the potential that's in this question. And I think it's probably it might be a little cavalier of me as a meditation teacher to tell Harriet or a broad number of people, right?

Like the listeners here today, this is how you approach all the little moments of resistance to life that can show up. The first thing that I did with Harriet was really respect that this is going to be one of the most meaningful investigations that she can make as a meditation practitioner. Not how can I be less stressed at work, not how can I overcome my habit to overeat or how can I stop my addiction to scrolling on Instagram, but in all the little ways that I feel like I don't want to deal with whatever present moment is showing up. How do I respond to that? And most people don't even get to the point of asking that question. And the answer will start with bringing our attention to that exact area. And most serious meditation practitioners will get here. We talk in the Buddhist contemplative tradition about three types of duka. Duka is the word that's often translated as suffering, but could

also be translated as dissatisfactoriness or struggle or stress. And one of these types of duka is duka-duka, which is the pain and difficulty of just things that are unpleasant and not easy to like. So physical pain or terrible smells, right? That's duka-duka. And the second type, let's talk about is we parinama duke, which is, I've heard sometimes translated as the duke of seasonality, that which is pleasing comes to an end. Our favorite show has a series finale and now we've got to find a new show.

It's for, you know, middle-class American listeners that you may have right but anything has seasonality whether it's a period of time in our life our health declines over time but we parinamaduka is the stress the dissatisfaction the challenge and the difficulty that things don't last and that constantly things are changing. The third is San Kharaduka, which is a little bit more difficult to describe, and it is the fact that in every moment nothing is even stable for a second. Sometimes I've heard teachers talk about it, it's the duke of entropy, that there is a fundamental instability to every moment of human

existence. And much of our human struggles are just in resistance to any of these three levels. But those three levels go quite deep, right? And if we start to pay attention to any degree that we're struggling with anything from the bad smell to the loss of something that we love, but even to just the fact that we've got to keep up with the constantly shifting sands of the present moment, right? When we start to pay attention to those struggles and see, how can I not resist this anymore? What might it be like actually to live in harmony with this. That opens a potential for non-conflict with life that is way deeper than we might have ever imagined. And so as I hear Harriet asking this question, I hear a student that's on the cusp of some real potential depth. And so the place that I start as a teacher is commending her exploration and saying, Hey, this rabbit

hole goes pretty deep and it can get quite profound. And so this is a place for you to dig into. Reminds me of another expression from the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein, which is, he's got all these little Joseph isms, little phrases he uses, and one of them is struggle as a feedback, noticing when you're struggling or resisting whatever's happening right now, and that should be a little bell to wake you up that there's something you need to be mindful of.

Does that resonate for you? It resonates for me so much. It's like, it's a perfect artichoke. I can't even add anything on to that, but it's, you know, I've actually heard, you know, mutual friends, colleague of ours, Jeff Warren talk about one of his favorite ways to meditate is just simply to pay attention to if there's any resistance of any kind and just try and open. Right? And that's like a formal meditation practice that's built on that same sensibility

that Joseph is talking about. And so it's one of the things that, as we develop, a true love for contemplative practice, and we see the true potential for a sense of ease and freedom at any moment in life. This is one of the things that all of us become really attuned to. Ah, if I just notice any type of struggle, no matter how subtle, it wakes me up, it makes me come alive, it makes me want to see if I can feel a new way to relate to this moment. That's actually in harmony with things. It's not fighting with things. It's actually at ease. Not hard to do, just hard to remember to do. Another clip here is from Michael. Why don't you set it up for us? In this clip, Michael is a really dedicated meditation practitioner who is holding a tremendous amount of responsibility in his life,

particularly as a physician who is holding life and death in his hands on a day-to-day basis. And through his meditation, he's been digging into feeling the weight and the struggle with meeting the life situation that he lives through day in, day out. And the way he talks about what he's starting to uncover in seeing his relationship to these responsibilities is quite brave. The thing about when you get kind of deeper in practice, and I don't know where I am in practice, I don't think about that much, but like when you start to unravel some things, emotions get trickier, they get more sinister, they get more insidious.

And so it's harder to figure out how things are operating. And underneath all those is fear. You know, like, what am I afraid of? Why does this striving help me feel safe from? And that's a question that has been difficult to answer because when I look deeper, it feels like I'm afraid of everything. I'm afraid of loss losing the security.

Obviously life and death, I see death all the time. I, you know, not being successful, not making people proud, not being a good meditator. I mean, there's all this fear. It's just, so that's what underlies everything, I think, and that's what creates the drive. But I don't know if that's just me rationalizing and not feeling it or not going deeper to feel what's really happening or if that's indeed what is happening. What happens when you let people down? Oh, hopelessness profound, you know, and the thing about the space I operated in and

geriatrics, you know, there's always an end, you know, that's the one thing that's not unique. We all pass, you know, from these physical bodies. So, so letting people down is very complicated. The profound feeling is hopelessness. And that's a dangerous one to get lost in. Yes. This insignificance, like, it doesn't matter what I do any day.

Anyway, I say that sometimes I'm really bad days, but it's like it does, it matter every moment matters. But, and I know that, but that's what the fear and the letting people down results in. Do you see that in your own mind that maybe this is vastly diminished since your you know big-time meditation teacher and everything? But I really resonated with what Michael was describing that we've done episodes or at least one episode on the show about internal

family systems where you, it's a kind of therapy where you name these various characters. We all have little mental modes we go into, a jealous mode, an angry mode, an ambitious mode, or whatever. And in this kind of therapy, internal family systems, you give the characters names and you kind of develop relationships with them and that's a way to defang them and not have them be so strong. I apologize if I'm getting this wrong, but that was my understanding of it. And I've done a little bit of that. It's just kind of trying to identify what are my neurotic programs that have been running

since I was five and can I give them a little name and can relate to them a little differently. And it took me a little while to see this, but underneath all of them is actually something that I haven't given the name to because I can't make it cute, which is fear. And so I really resonate with what Michael said, but I'm wondering, or me and Michael, or Michael and I alone on this or have you seen that in your own mind too? What is this thing that you mentioned? You said it's called fear. I don't know about that.

I think, you know, this is part of our human inheritance. All of us are living through the experience of fear on a day-to-day basis. I can say to you, Dan, that I've been, it's been strange in some ways, but over the last several years of my life becoming more established as a meditation teacher, I'm brushing shoulders, right? With the other meditation teachers around,

and I haven't met anybody that I would say does not experience fear anymore. And so it's important, you know, to say to your question, it's like, here, Michael, and I, the only people who experienced this at a really deep baseline level. One of the things that I love in this clip, you know, as I listen, I hear a pretty experienced meditation practitioner. Michael is immediately naming. Ah, I notice that fear is at the baseline of a lot of these things. In fact, I see a lot of hopelessness. Hopelessness is a really unfortunate one to get caught up in. You know, it can come up, but when I get caught up in it, that's really problematic. When we start to be unafraid to name and recognize the way that these very difficult emotions

and experiences come up in our lives, then all of a sudden we have the power to actually establish a relationship with them that doesn't feel consumed by them. And that's probably one of the most beneficial things that IFS does. I don't know it well, but many of my friends are either IFS therapists or have done the therapy, but to have practice in naming some of these deep core elements that drive us, that drive our unconscious behavior gives us some agency in how we relate to them. One last question I want to ask you here. I worry a little bit. I mean, it's been so cool to listen to these clips, as I said before, to kind of mindfully eavesdrop on this relationship between a teacher student. I do worry a little bit that people might be have gotten to this point in the show and

think, well, you know, it's hard to find a meditation teacher. I don't even know where to begin. So is this just some big tease where I can't actually follow through on it? What would you say to anybody who might be having those thoughts? Well, what I would say is that I felt like I struggled to build relationships with meditation teachers in my meditation practice. And I was just able to connect with people who I was meeting on retreat and get some guidance from them. Eventually I did build some relationships with meditation teachers. But one of the most beneficial things for me was actually meeting in small groups with a group of students and one meditation teacher and hearing how the teacher would respond to each different person. And that's what I do now.

In fact, I often create the opportunity for my students to meet me in a group and they love being able to hear how I'm responding to each different person's question or life situation because we can all relate to it. None of us have any emotion that no one else has ever experienced before. And so, it's really what I'm hoping to do on this show is to give people essentially the opportunity to sit and listen in to a dialogue between other people and a meditation teacher because all of what we talk about is universal. There's nothing that we talk about that's so personal to one person that it's not relevant to the rest of us.

And Michael talks about fear and you're like, oh yeah, that sounds exactly right to me. Said talks about the pressures of work situation where it feels like you can't open up and feel vulnerable. How many people can relate to that. And so what I hope is that if you can listen to people who are sincerely practicing, listen to people who are living an average everyday life, talking to a meditation teacher, if you can't find a meditation teacher yourself, it's going to be the next best thing at the very least. And well, I got to say that it's been a pleasure to have this conversation with you, Dan.

And I hope that your relationship with Joseph does continue to translate into the developments that I have seen in the way that you show up in your life, you know, being able to name your own foibles and living more and more and more with a deep integrity, that it just continues to flourish. And you're going to keep making this show and making the rest of this stuff that we're working on. And that's, I think, a real result that comes out of that inspiration and that dedication. And also, if it wasn't for all that work and you're on Joseph's friendship, I'd be

working for some other company. So it's a part of my paycheck too. So please keep it going. So huge loss for head space. You know, I love that comment. You just made both because it's very, I take it as a compliment and I appreciate it. But I also love how it's like kind of slick

and that, you know, keep doing this work, Harris, because I have invested interest in you being less of a pain in the ass, which you do. And I think it's a fair thing to say, even if you met it. It's a compliment. It's a compliment and it's an encouragement. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Well, I take it in the spirit in which I believe it was intended. And where can we hear this show on my proprietary app called Matthew Hepburn's 100% Happy, no. You can hear this show right in the 10% happier app. So there's a podcast tab that's got a okay show I heard of from a friend called 10% happier, but in fact, you can find this show 20% happier.

And if you get bored, you eventually can take a listen to that other show. I don't know who the host is. I mean, if you're gonna pick one show, do the math. That's right, that's right. It's our most statistically effective podcast. I just want to say to the listeners, I have had a chance to listen to many clips of the show,

many even more clips than you've just had a chance to listen to, and I know Matthew for a long time, and I know that people were making this show, including Marissa and Kimmy, were two of the producers, and it's gonna be excellent. So I really strongly encourage everybody to check it out. Also wanna say, well, Matthew's still here, that if you're in the TPH universe,

check out our guided meditations and our challenges we're increasingly doing, you're gonna see more and more of Matthew on those challenges and right here in the podcast. So that's good news and I encourage you to keep tuning into what we do because I can promise you more Matthew, less than Matthew. Thank you. You did phenomenal job with this interview and I really appreciate it.

Yeah. My pleasure and I'll see you around for better or worse. You as you will. Oh, thanks, Dan. Thank you. Thanks again to, Dan. Thank you. Thanks again to Matthew. Love that guy. To listen to 20% happier Matthew's new show, download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps, open it up and tap on the podcasts tab at the bottom of your screen.

By the way, before we go, let's listen to a trailer that we put together for the 10% happier show. Here it is. What up? I'm Matthew Hepburn. When I tell people I'm a meditation teacher, I get asked a lot of the same questions. Can I meditate lying down? Yes. What if I have an itch? Go ahead, scratch it. If I sit for long enough, can I transcend space and time? Time. Yes, but not space. But enough about them. Let's talk about you. If you're a fan of 10% happier,

you could probably answer a lot of these questions yourself. But my hunch is that despite everything you know about meditation, there's still parts of your life that feel anything but mindful. It's time to change that. Together, we're going to take the insights you get from Dan Harris and double them.

This is 20% happier. The show where I talk to people who, like you, are learning to level up their ability to live mindfully, you'll get to eavesdrop on people getting real about the challenges all of us face. I'm going to work every day with my mind and chaos. You'll get to ease drop on people getting real about the challenges all of us face. I'm going to work every day with my mind and chaos. Every day I'm getting up and trying the best I can and every night I go to bed feeling like I failed.

I'm just waiting for the next bad thing to happen. It feels like I'm afraid of everything. And you'll hear how through meditation those challenges are transformed. I feel just incredible lightness, like a welling up of joy. It was like I had this permission to enjoy it. All of me is welcome. I have good intentions, like I want to do good in the world. I'm going to forgive myself so I can be happy. I might not be a jerk for the rest of my life.

What we experience on the inside isn't personal, it's universal. So seeing how someone else goes from stuck to unstuck can be a template for your own breakthrough. In fact, meditation teachers go out of their way to give students this opportunity. And it's my favorite part of my job. I'm here to help you see what's actually possible for you. I want to push you to take a kind and unantimidated look at what gets in your way and embrace the imperfect. And together, we'll have fun with the messy stuff that makes us all human. I haven't done a session with the meditation teacher, but I started virtual therapy this year.

Okay, well, you don't have to tell me about your mother if you don't want to. The good thing about meditation is it's simple. The unfortunate thing is that it's not easy. It's simple, but not easy. It describes my experience, yes. Yeah, that's it. So that it's less about how much of this can you endure and much more about how much you just want to do it. Yo, I couldn't have said it better myself. I mean, you just think from my perspective as a meditation

teacher, do I want people coming to meditation thinking about it as how much of this can I endure? It doesn't matter if you're just starting out or if you've already tasted Nibana. When you see that what's been holding you back doesn't have to hold you back anymore, everything shifts. So let's get started. Listen to 20% happier today. To listen to 20% happier, download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps and tap on the podcast tab.

Come kick it with us. The show is going to be great. Go check it out. Today's show was guest-produced by the 20% happier production team, Marissa Schneiderman and Kimi Regler, two Aces. And as always, I'll shout out our regular team, Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davie, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartell,

and Jen Poient with audio engineering from Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you in a few days for a fresh episode. 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 add 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.