Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 538: The Dalai Lama’s Guide to Happiness | Part 1

Episode Date: January 2, 2023

Dan flies to Dharamsala, India to spend two weeks in the orbit of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. This is the first installment of a five-part audio documentary series, something we’ve never done before now. Over the course of the episodes, we talk to His Holiness about practical strategies for thorny dilemmas, including: how to get along with difficult people; whether compassion can cut it in an often brutal world; why there is a self-interested case for not being a jerk; and how to create social connection in an era of disconnection. We also get rare insights from the Dalai Lama into everything from the mechanics of reincarnation to His Holiness’s own personal mediation practice. In this first installment, Dan watches as a young activist directly challenges His Holiness: In a world plagued by climate change, terrorism, and other existential threats, is the Dalia Lama’s message of compassion practical — or even relevant? Full Show Notes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/dalai-lama-guide-538Other Resources Mentioned:Healthy Minds InnovationsCompassionate Leadership SummitAdditional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/JoinChallengePodSee 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, it's New Year's, and we're making a pretty radical departure from our usual format. I recently flew with a small team to Dharam Sala, India, home to his holiness, the Dalai Lama. I'm sitting on board a giant plane that we're about 13 hours into our flight. Here's the backstory. I went because I got this incredible opportunity.

The Dalai Lama agreed to do a course for the meditation app that I co-founded, which is also called 10% happier. The plan was I would interview him on camera, but how we can all get happier, and then my team and I would edit that down and serve up the learnings to our users. Now, to be clear, I had actually interviewed his holiness before. The first time was back in 2011, and then a few years later, he was the inaugural guest right here on this podcast. Back then, though, I was a fidgety skeptical news anchor with a happiness side hustle, but by the time I was making this trip, I had changed, or at least that's what I told myself. I was still, of course, skeptical about a lot of things, but I had done so much more meditation and general learning.

In fact, I was even in the midst of writing a whole book about love, albeit in my usual Ysas style. Another difference with this encounter was that instead of a quick sit down while he was on tour here in America, I would be on the Dalai Lama's home turf, and in fact his team had agreed to let me kind of hang around in his orbit for two weeks. So I knew this thing would be cool, but I did not expect that so many extraordinary, fascinating and even jarring things would go down.

You're a holiness. With the deepest respect I have for you, when I hear you today, your words feel overly simplistic and sentimental. I've been in Everome since 1992, and that's never happened. His holiness grabbed me by the arm, and he said, don't use my, just like that. Come here.

Come here. There was no guarantee that you were going to respond well to that. I didn't even think about that. Come here. No. There was no guarantee that you were going to respond well to that. I didn't even think about that. That was a risky move. It was the most emotional thing that happened in my life. I was a really rare battle. It had like kind of fundamental identity ramifications for me. This very mind eventually become enlightened mind. So much happened that my team and I decided to put together

an audio documentary, which is a first for us. Every day this week you'll get a new installment of a five-part series that we're calling the Dalai Lama's Guide to Happiness. Alongside all the dramatic moments, there are plenty of practical takeaways for doing your life better on the day to day. I talked to the Dalai Lama about his contention

that the purpose of life is to be happy. What does that mean exactly? His intriguing theory that we all need to get better at the right kind of selfishness, how he deals with difficult people, including the Chinese government, and whether compassion and kindness to get better at the right kind of selfishness, how he deals with difficult people, including the Chinese government, and whether compassion and kindness can cut it in a cold world. Throughout it all, throughout this whole trip, I wrestled with my own demons.

The Dalai Lama's core thesis is that the key to happiness is the cultivation of mental states such as altruism and warm hardiness. That's a term he uses a lot. But I have long struggled to shake the suspicion that I am somehow irreparably selfish. I mean, part of why I got on the plane to India in the first place was selfishness. Was it not? Of course, yes, I was interviewing the Dalai Lama to pass along his insights to you, but it was also a great business opportunity for me. So how much had I really changed from my first encounter with the man back in 2011? We'll get started right after this quick break. Hey, I'm Aresha, and I'm Brooke.

And we're the hosts of Wundery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one.

Substance abuse and mental health struggles threatened to veer Ru off course. In our series RuPaul Born Naked, we'll show you how RuPaul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting.

Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding and thinking, oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong, what would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen

to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Hey welcome back. We land and drive into Durham, which is a bustling North Indian city with stunning views of the snow-capped Himalayan mountains. The vista is so astonishing, it doesn't even look real. Then we drive up a windy, nausea and panic-inducing road. It's the width of a one-lane road, but the vehicles go both ways here in a sort of chaotic ballet.

I don't think the Dalai Lama could stay calm in this journey. Or maybe you have to be the Dalai Lama to stay calm in this morass. The road crests and we arrive at a part of town called McLeod Gange, which is perched precariously on top of a Himalayan foothill. This is where the Dalai Lama's compound is. Walking through the streets of Darmsala is pretty chaotic for a Buddhist town. We've got sacred cowsming around, people beeping. The beeping is jarring, but actually,

they do adhere more as sonar rather than aggression. Monks, pedestrian shoppers, tons of smells, incense, fresh cooked bread, lots of stores selling pre-blast artifacts from his Holiness the Dollar Lama. Given that I write books and host a podcast about meditation and happiness, it is perhaps unsurprising that I am a huge fan of the Dollar Lama.

But I will admit I've long had just a few little reservations. On the one hand, I have an incredible admiration for and fascination with the man. I mean, just his life story is extraordinary. His birth name was Lamo Thundum. He was just a two-year-old living in a remote village and northeastern Tibet when he was identified by religious officials as the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama. So this little kid was all of a sudden tagged as the 14th Dalai Lama, the spiritual and political leader of the Tibetan people. He was whisked away from his family and brought to the capital city of Lasa, where he lived in a massive palace surrounded by monks,

and where he underwent many years of intense Buddhist training. He was put through a dizzying array of courses and exams. Which covers such subjects as Buddhist philosophy, transcendental wisdom, metaphysics, logic, and dialectics. The candidate, in this case, the Dalai Lama himself, is tested for his ability to question his examiners. And by all accounts, he was a meditative and academic adept. In 1959, with the Dalai Lama was just 23 years old, the Chinese invaded Tibet and took over the country.

The Dalai Lama was forced to escape on foot over the mountains to India where he set up a government in exile. The 23-year-old God King of Tibet makes his first public appearance since his escape from the Chinese Communists. For more than two weeks, he has been sheltered in inaccessible frontier territory, out of reach even to Newsmen. Back in Tibet, thousands of people died fighting the Chinese forces. The struggle continued, and it still does, in fact, and has been marked by bloodshed, political repression, and martial law. During this time, the Dalai Lama became a global figure, meeting with world leaders and promoting the Tibetan cause.

He also became a cultural figure, featured in Apple ads and the Brad Pitt movie seven years into bed. It's an honor to meet your holiness. And he did all of this while promoting a very simple message of compassion. It's what earned him a Nobel Peace Prize. Even in the face of the violence and desecration perpetrated by the Chinese, the Dalai Lama stood steadfast for kindness, for, and I know this is a loaded word, but love. I pray for all of us, of pressure and friend, that together we succeed in building a better world through human understanding and love, so we may reduce the pain and suffering of all sentient beings.

Not only does he have an astonishing biography, but the Dalai Lama has also helped to get the word out about practical actionable tools for training your mind to become more compassionate and by extension happier. In fact, he has actively helped to catalyze an explosion of scientific research into how meditation changes the brain. This work has demonstrated that happiness isn't just a factory setting. It's a skill, which is why I got into this whole meditation game in the first place. So because of all of the foregoing, I, as I said, truly respect and admire the dollar-loving. And yet, there are those little reservations on my end. First, as a lifelong agnostic and a trained skeptic, I do struggle a bit with the fact that he's a religious leader. I was raised

by atheists, scientists, and then when I was a networked newsman, I spent a lot of time covering scandals, involving religious authorities and cases of gurus gone wrong. This is not to criticize all religion, but just to admit that given my personal history and my Western proclivities and biases,

the Dalai Lama's metaphysical claims about things like reincarnation, enlightenment, and the existence of various deities can be just a little hard for me to compute. All right, rules done. Prayer Wheel Circuit. All over Darmsala, there are prayer wheels. These engraved cylinders that if spun clockwise are believed to purify

negative energy and accumulate good karma. There are also huge murals of various Buddhist deities. But then you have a lot of protector deities up here. These are like ferocious looking, they're standing on corpses, they have like heads, they're drinking from skull cuffs, and they're like terrifying. The Dalai Lama is considered to be an emanation of a Buddhist deity named Avaloki Teşvara, who has a thousand arms. And on the palm of each hand, there is an eyeball scanning the world for

suffering that can then be relieved. And this brings me to another issue that does come up for me, vis-a-vis, the Dalai Lama. All of his talk of compassion, altruism, and kindness, it sometimes provokes a kind of imposter syndrome for me. As I mentioned earlier, in my low moments, I sometimes wonder whether I might suffer from some sort of terminal self-involvement, like maybe I'm a thousand armed being, but my palm-based eyeballs are just scanning for self-centered gratification. Anyway, I have long figured this was just me. I mean, who else other than maybe the Chinese government could possibly have any sort of beef with this figure?

But then I show up for my first audience with his holiness and a young activist in the room goes after the dollar Lama. We everyone in this room is losing to the forces of power in this world. Tibet is losing. As we speak today, Xi Jinping is assuming a third term as a Chinese premiere, and it's creating a authoritarian state that will be very difficult to defeat through words of compassion and love. And so that's what we're going to tackle in this first episode of our series. In a chaotic and often brutal world, is the Dalai Lama's message still relevant?

Is he still relevant? That's coming up after the break. Okay, welcome back. Even though my one-on-one interview with the Dalai Lama isn't for a few days, we've come about a week early in order to attend an event called the Compassionate Leadership Summit, where his holiness will be meeting with young activists from around the world. It's early on Tuesday morning, and this is our first official event with his holiness, the Dalai Lama. Everybody's bustling around as we anticipate the Dalai Lama's arrival. There's definitely a palpable buzz in the air.

To tell the truth, we didn't really think this event would be that exciting. We figured it would really just be an opportunity to get some extra footage and audio tape. This was an underestimation. So indeed, I'm very, very happy our meeting. That is, of course, his holiness, the Dalai Lama. And particularly, youth teacher. Youth leaders. Youth leaders, youth leaders now. And that is Thoepton Jindpa, who has been his Holiness's translator for nearly 40 years.

It's the first morning of the summit and his Holiness is delivering some opening remarks, hitting many of his usual notes. I always say seven to eight billion beings, we are same. Now we have to think, we all human brothers, sisters, we have to live on this planet together. So I firmly believe, now we really need concept oneness of 7-8 billion human beings, we are same.

Here he makes a reference to the indigenous group from New Zealand, the Maureus. New Zealander Maureus, the way of greeting is trash nose. Now we all human being same except to some bigger nose. So the morning starts off warm and fuzzy. We're in a large conference room on the second floor of the Dalai Lama's compound which is a heavily guarded facility on the outskirts of McLeod Gange. We've all had to be searched and COVID tested before gaining entry. The room has yellow potted flowers, golden statues of the Buddha, and small tables for cake and tea, which are distributed at the midpoint of the morning. The 15 activists are sitting in a semi-circle, facing his holiness, and

the rest of us are in rows behind them. The summit is split over two days. They keep these events quite brief, just two hours a day, because the Dalai Lama is really getting on in age. And there's a very structured format. Each activist is a lot of just a few minutes to introduce themselves, say a little bit about their work, and then ask the Dalai Lama a question. My name is DeShan, I was born here in India. My name is Grace, I'm from Ghana. My name is Ramseys, and I come from Mexico.

All of their remarks are pretty tightly scripted, in fact, the whole event is, really. The activists have been workshopping their questions with the conference organizers for the past two years. I want to ask you, if you have ever felt powerless, and how did you overcome that, and how do I overcome that? As the activists begin to speak, there's a real heaviness, a sense of desperation even. They're wondering if they're doing enough, or if their work even matters. How do we motivate ourselves, even at a point where we feel like our contributions might not be significant?

And the Dalai Lama responds by basically repeating the same message from his opening remarks, talking about oneness and how the seven to eight billion human beings need to view ourselves as brothers and sisters. It's the same answer whether the question is about women's education in Afghanistan, climate change, or mental health. I'm sitting here starting to think, is the Dalai Lama maybe whiffing on this?

Maybe it's because his hearing has gotten worse or maybe it's because he's gotten older, he's 87 after all. In any event, my doubts are starting to build. 7 to 8 billion people are being, we are the same. Then, the last scheduled speaker of the day takes the mic. How can we organize our compassionate action to whom shall we begin with? to organize our compassionate action, to whom shall we begin with? So, his holiness feels that actually if we work hard, we really should be able to promote this idea of the oneness of everybody, so that people relate to each other at this fundamental shared humanity.

How? Can you ask him how will we do this? Okay, it's a little hard to make out that last comment, but that is one of the activists breaking the tightly structured format and asking, how? Can you ask him how we do this? Somebody is finally saying what you can read on all of the activists' faces. They want some practical answers here. At this point, the whole choreography of the event goes entirely out the window when a political strategist and climate activist named Ronan Harrington, who has clearly had enough, gets a hold of the mic. Your holiness, there's a quote that I often remember from Martin Luther King,

that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. And I'm going to be honest with the deepest respect I have for you. When I hear you today, your words feel overly simplistic and sentimental. And I believe that it requires more than a shift to realize that we are one. It requires political organizing. It requires power. It is illegal for women to get secondary education in Afghanistan. I do not believe the Taliban will be overcome with a spiritual shift in perspective. I believe they will be forced out of power or they will be isolated and strangled until they relinquish. We, everyone in this room, is losing to the forces of power in this world, Tibet is losing. As we speak, today, Xi Jinping is assuming a third term as a Chinese Premier and it's creating a authoritarian state that will be

very difficult to defeat through words of compassion and love. I don't have a question for you, but that's how I feel. While Jinta is translating, you can see the activists trading glances and nods like visual fist bumps across the room. Ronin has clearly articulated something they're all feeling. But the reality is the many of the challenges that we experience collectively does call for that kind of oneness of humanity. The whole humanity, I think eventually have to think oneness of seven to eight billion human beings as a one human family. At least oneness is the make of the point. In a sense, we don't have a choice. We have to move there. Again, oneness without concrete action.

So the activists start to pile on now, taking the mic and again pressing for specifics. Today in Afghanistan, women are demanding their right and Taliban are holding gun to their faces. Where do you preach oneness with a group that truly doesn't understand or believe in the power of oneness? And yet again, the Dalai Lama talks about oneness, seven to eight billion human beings, one human family, until finally the meeting just ends. Everybody empties out into the courtyard of the Dalai Lama's compound. empties out into the courtyard of the Dalai Lama's compound. I'm very curious to get your fresh response to the intensity of those questions and the flood will happen.

That is Rochie Joan Halifax. She's an American Zen Master who has a longstanding relationship with the Dalai Lama, and she's here serving as a mentor to some of the young activists. Because something broke open and Ronan spoke for many of us in the audience. You know, he was the one who sort of broke the trance of goodness in that meeting. It's one of the most valuable acts I've seen in that room. I've been in that room since 1992 and that's never happened. Really? No. Somebody speaking up in such a tart and direct manner.

Yeah. And also speaking the harp hines, many of the people who were in the room, but would never go over that edge. It was really courageous. But did he give an answer? He did. At the very end. I mean, it was subtle.

You'd have to. Oh, no. Oh, no. Roshi Joan leans over, cupping her hand to her ear, pantomiming somebody's straining to hear. She says his holiness did answer the question, but perhaps in a way, people may not have heard both literally and figuratively.

The answer, she says, came in this key moment just as his holiness was having his microphone taken off. I want to share my daily practice at tourism. That really gives you inner peace, inner strength. That brings fearless and your mind truly peace. I want to share my daily practice, he said, altruism. That really gives you inner peace, inner strength. That brings fearlessness, and your mind is truly at peace. What he's saying here, and to be honest, I actually missed it in the moment, but what he's saying is that if you can cultivate an inner attitude of generosity, of compassion, of care for the suffering of other people, no matter how difficult those other people might be,

that will give you the confidence and resilience to navigate any challenge. To be clear, to be super clear about this, that does not mean that you should be a doormat or that you shouldn't speak up for your needs. Actually one Tibetan teacher has called that posture, idiot compassion. Instead, it means taking care of your own inner weather so you can handle whatever the outer world throws at you. That is the really that I think the most important thing to understand. Autism is not the self-sacrifice thing.

It actually builds resilience. It's a resource that very few people understand. They have this idea of altruism as sacrifice, but actually it's the generative, it's liberative. This is a tricky concept to understand. So later in the day, I sit down with Rochie Joan to get her to unpack it a little bit more. Let me see if I can sum up what I took away

from both your comments and from the Dalai Lama's comments. I think what he was saying in a way was, yes, the world is harsh. Yes, there are people out there with weapons who don't necessarily buy into my message of oneness. And yes, you do need to work with these challenges. But how do you want to do it from a place of rage or from a place of compassion and altruism?

And that, the latter choice of compassion and altruism will help you navigate these challenges just as effectively and you will be happier and calmer while you do it. Yeah, and one of the things that you're pointing to, I think, is really important. And that is, you don't really want to mirror the misery of the other. In other words, you know, someone is holding a gun to your head, you don't want to experience the same kind of suffering that they're experiencing and holding the gun to the head. That's suffering too. It is really powerful to be able to see the truth of suffering, of a person who harms another in that way. You know, we're in a very messy time.

Compassion, altruism, essential at this time. Wisdom, essential. This all sounds nice, but if you're one of the activists in the room, it's gotta be a something of a bitter pill. Compassion means asking a climate change activist to consider the suffering of oil executives. Altruism means asking an advocate for women's education in Afghanistan to act in a way that

benefits everybody, including the Taliban. When the dust has settled, I catch up with Ronan after he's had some time to process to see where his head is at now. Do you walk away with anything approaching even a pointing in the right direction? Yeah, I suppose for me, you can't be expecting the Dalai Lama to have sophisticated answers on the how. We can figure that out on the ground.

But what he's saying is that those attempts will be futile unless you actually really understand what it means to embody this position of a global perspective and oneness, which is very easy to talk about and sound bite, but actually incredibly difficult to do. And his job is to hold that pole and stay and emphasize that and in a way the healing and the teachings that I received on that level are more resourcing and inspiring from my work than any technical discussion on systems change. So, where you net out is, yeah, he didn't answer the specifics of how do you use compassion and force together, but he did give you advice about how to work with your own mind, so everything you do is more effective.

Yeah, and there was also just profound teachings that on some level, we're straight out of this. It will take probably weeks and months and years to integrate. I mean, people spend lifetimes teaching and studying and practicing Buddhism and these concepts. So I don't think it's meant to be immediately totally viscerally understood. Yeah, and it's not an exam anyone has to pass today. Correct. Yes, and I think you said it beautifully with he's holding the pole. And he's really not movable.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in a way, it's almost more interesting that he's holding the pole of oneness and isn't as interested in talking about the how when he's been doing the how for so many decades. Right. That's an important point. The Dalai Lama does in fact have unimpeachable credentials when it comes to dealing with the hard realities of the world. He's a master political strategist who has spent 70 years in a face-off with China arguably

the second most powerful country on earth. Even though the Dalai Lama has not gained independence from China, he has, in the face of massive resistance, put the Tibetan cause firmly on the map. And instead of fading into a relevance after having been ousted, he's made himself into a household name globally. So he's not advising these young activists from some blissful, problem-free mountain tops surrounded by rainbow-barfing unicorns. And his advice to cultivate mental states such as compassion and altruism is not just relevant to activists.

It's applicable to all of us, to all of our lives. Reams of research have shown that cultivating compassion, or as I like to say pulling your head out of your own ass, so you're less stuck in self-consciousness and self-judgment and have more bandwidth for other people. All of the scientific literature indicates that this can make you healthier, happier, more likable, and more successful. But again, as one of the young activists

demanded to know during the summit with a Dalai Lama, how do you actually do this? Okay, so at this point, I have some good news for you. There's a whole menu of practical options. Are you feeling? All right, I'm feeling good. That is Dr. Richard Davidson, his friends call him Richie. He and I actually planned this trip to Durham, solid together as part of a collaboration for the course we're

shooting. Richie is one of the world's leading neuroscientists for 30 years. He's been partnering with the Dalai Lama to research what meditation does to your brain. There are very few other people who stand at the crossroads of deep contemplative practice and the cutting edge of neuroscience in the way Richie does. And this extraordinary conversation between modern science and ancient Buddhism has shown that the brain is trainable via meditation.

Our research shows that even five minutes a day of practice is sufficient if a person is able to do that consistently for a month. And what we find is that when we teach people simple, short practices that they can sprinkle through their daily life, it really can make a difference. And it doesn't take that much to begin to change these systems in our mind and our brain. I think that the evidence is very, very clear. And it shows measurable changes in happiness and well-being and decreases on standardized measures of depression and anxiety.

And so I do think it is available to all of us. We are born to flourish. This is part of our nature. When Richie talks about simple, short practices, these can take any number of different forms. One is mindfulness meditation. You sit down, focus on your breath, or some other neutral object,

and then when you get distracted, which will happen a million times, you just notice that you've become distracted and you start again and again and again. A lot of people think that they're failing when they get distracted, but it's actually the process of waking up and starting over, that is the whole point. This deliberate collision with the voice in your head gives you a kind of self-awareness,

which we in the meditation world call mindfulness. And when you're more aware of your thoughts and urges and emotions, you're not so yanked around by them. And that can make you much nicer to be around. Ask my wife. Another practice is called loving kindness. You sit quietly, close your eyes and call to mind a succession of people. You start usually with an easy person, like a pet or a kid. As soon as you've established a mental image, you silently send four phrases. May you be happy, may you be safe, may you be healthy, may you live with ease.

And then you move on to yourself, and a mentor, a neutral person, somebody you might overlook, a difficult person, and then all beings everywhere. There is radical good news here. As I mentioned earlier, we know that pro-social, as opposed to anti-social states of mind, make us happier. But we also now know that these attributes are trainable through meditation. In other words, you can change. To be clear, meditation is not the only item on the menu here. There are simple, informal practices that you can sprinkle throughout your day. For example, before you do anything, before any daily activity, you can just take a second to quietly dedicated

to the benefit of everybody. We can do this when we eat. We're eating to become strong and healthy, not just for ourselves, but so that we can be of service to others. We do this with all the other things that we do. The work that we do is not just for to get money for ourselves, but why are we getting money for ourselves? What we're going to help feed our family? We're going to take care of others. So there's always this altruistic motive. If we can remind ourselves as much as possible, as we go through the day, it is an elixir for the soul. Let me just say here that when Richie uses the term elixir for the soul,

he basically means happiness. These practices we've just described really can make you happier. And when we use the term happier here, we're not talking the, I got a lot of likes on Instagram, kind of happiness. Or even the I won the lottery, kind of happiness. We're talking more about the Dalai Lama version of happiness. It's really not about being happy all the time if you've just been confronted by some tragic loss. It's not really appropriate to be happy in that moment. It's healthy to show sadness.

I've seen the Dalai Lama cry with sadness when tragic circumstances have been described. But the next moment, you know, he could be laughing. That is to us a sign of well-being. It's a kind of fundamental okayedness. There is a sense in which everything is really going to be okay. And so I think that's really what the Dalai Lama means about happiness. He sometimes uses the qualifier genuine happiness or authentic happiness. And what he means by that is that happiness that is not dependent on external circumstances. Happiness that is not dependent on external circumstances. This is pretty counterintuitive stuff.

So many of us believe consciously or otherwise, the exact opposite that what makes us happier is the external stuff, promotions, vacations, falling in love, having kids, etc. I do want to be clear, all of that stuff is super important. I'm not denying that in any way, but given how insatiable the human animal is, external rewards will never be enough. The pursuit of happiness and trying to America's founding documents can become the source of your unhappiness. By contrast, mental states such as compassion, warmth, and generosity are a cleaner, burning

fuel, infinitely renewable. I want to say yet again that I'm aware that these are all pretty grandiose words, and I've got to use an even more loaded term, which I've already used a few times in this podcast, but I'm going to do it again. Love. I know that word is confusing since we use it to describe our feelings for our romantic partners, our family members and those ridiculously addictive dried mango strips or whatever. But I think of love as our evolutionary capacity to give a shit.

These, by the way, are probably not the exact same words that Dalai Lama would use, but I believe we're probably aligned on the core thesis here, which is that love is our capacity to cooperate, communicate, and connect. This is what allowed our species to thrive. If you ignore this, it's at your own peril. Now, that does not mean it's easy.

Other people can sometimes be rather difficult. They can be extremely annoying or downright dangerous. So how do we deal with them? And here's another question, don't we need to be a little bit selfish sometimes? Or maybe I'm just trying to justify my own overweaning ambition here. So these are the questions we're gonna be tackling

in the rest of the series. And the answers we're going to uncover for you, I promise, will be both surprising and deeply practical. We're going to spend a lot more time with his holiness, the Dalai Lama, who is perhaps the happiest person I've ever met. We're going to talk to him about how he musters compassion for difficult people, including the Chinese government. We're also going to go way into the deep end and hear about his holiness's own meditation

practice. And while we're at it, Richie and I will wrestle with whether there's any scientific evidence for ideas such as rebirth and how Western scientific materialists who happen to be fans of the Dalai Lama can deal with these kinds of metaphysical claims. Plus, we are going to watch as the Dalai Lama, who is believed to be the avatar of compassion, works to alleviate the suffering of other people live in real time. And I got to say his moves are not what I expected them to be.

And they produce quite a reaction. Then, come here. That is coming up tomorrow on the second installment of the Dalai Lama's Guide to Happiness. And just to say here as we're wrapping up. If you're interested in learning more about all of the various meditation practices we've been describing, coming up on January 9th, we at 10% happier are launching that meditation challenge that I mentioned earlier at the top of the show. It's free. And you can find it on the 10% happier app. Every day for 10 days, you'll get a short video featuring the Dalai Lama, Richie and Rochi Joan, followed by a guided meditation to help you pound all of the lessons from this podcast and from the

videos into your neurons. So I highly encourage you to go check it out. 10% happier is produced by DJ Cashmere, Gabrieuckerman, Justine Davey and Lauren Smith. Our supervising producer is Marissa Schneidermann, Kimmy Regler, who I have to say has been driving force behind this series and is amazing. Thank you, Kimmy. Kimmy is our managing producer and our executive producer is Jen Poient. Audio services are provided by ultraviolet audio, with scoring mixing and sound design, by the great Matt Blointon, and we had additional engineering by Peter Bonavent. Nick Thorburn

composed our theme check out his excellent band Islands and there are a lot of other folks I want to thank from the wider TPH universe and beyond they include Liz Levin, Jade Weston, Gemma Vardy, Connor Donahue. I also want to thank Richie Davidson and the whole team at Healthy Mind's Innovations as collaborators on this course. You can find out more about them in our show notes. And I do want to give a special shout out to Daniel Goldman and Tara Bennett Goldman, who are two of the prime movers

behind the Compassionate Leaders Summit. Thank you, Danny and Tara.