Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 59: Mary Karr, Best-Selling Poet and Master Memoirist

Episode Date: February 1, 2017

Mary Karr has shared many dark pieces of her past in her memoirs, from a painful childhood, to a long struggle with alcoholism and depression, to living her entire life as an agnostic before becoming a Roman Catholic. It was when she said she found herself "sober in a mental institution" that she first began to pray and meditate, both of which are practices she continues today to stay centered. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I guess I'm now a memoirist. I'm only written one book, but I suppose you could call it a memoir. The person who is widely acknowledged to be one of the master memoirists in American culture, though, is Mary Carr. She's poet by training, but she's written a bunch of best-selling memoirs, including the Liars Club and Lit, in which she tells very colorful stories about her own life, which has been truly, truly fascinating.

And in recent years, one of the interesting parts of Mary Carr's life is that she's become a meditator. So I invited her on and we had a fascinating discussion. I think you're gonna enjoy it. Here's Mary. So the question I want to ask you first is, apparently you got into meditation. How did that happen?

I found myself newly sober in a mental institution. And when you find yourself in a mental institution, a lot of suggestions that people have made that you were too cool to take, you're suddenly you realize, you know, my approach to things, I'm in a mental institution. You know, it's just not working. So I began to pray and meditate, pray on my knees,

and pursued initially and still centering, you know, the sort of non-religious centering meditation where I counted my breasts one to 10 is what I started with. And I've since branched out into various forms, but that still is a large part of my practice. So that was, I'm turning to think, 26 years ago, 27 years ago, and I started. Let me just back up for a second for those, there may be some people who don't know your

story. For those people, tell them, how did you end up in a mental institution? How did I end up in a mental institution? Well, it's, I mean, in some ways it's a story that fills many profitable volumes of my memoirs, you know, Liars Club Cherry and Litt. Well, I think, you know, I've been told I come from a dysfunctional family and I always say that's any family with more than one person in it. Well, yours, I mean, having listened to the line share of lit.

Pretty special in a lot of it. Yeah, my mother's married seven times. They were both my parents were drunk. I was raped when I was a child. You know, it wasn't... I mean, the great thing about a childhood like mine is you're upwardly mobile. The minute you leave the house, you know, if you don't go the state pinnacle or the loony bin, but I think I was depressed my whole

life really. When I look back, I had a suicide attempt as a child when I was about 10. And I had what was called, I was married, I had a baby, I was living outside Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a very patient husband. I was super depressed. When I quit drinking, I kind of awoke to that depression. Alcohol is a depressant drug and it aggravates depression, but at the time, it also feels like anesthetic to you, I think. So when I put that anesthetic down, the amount of noise in my head, and none of it was good

news, you know, my mind had nothing optimistic to say, you know, every bruise was bone cancer. And you know, the jaguar would get the parking, and I would have to carry the baby on my hip for six blocks in a blizzard. You know, it was just, I was memorizing the bad news, I think, for my whole life. And that's what led to you landing in a mental institution or was it quitting? So it was after you gave up alcohol? I was I was nine months sober and that was a triumph, but you know I've been talking to a lot of people. I don't go into a lot of details about it. I've been

talking to other people who are quit drinking and I had mental health professional I spoke to and and people were suggesting to me that I needed to develop a spiritual practice. That quitting drinking was part of it, but that I also needed to find a way to think about my life in terms of service to other people, which really didn't interest me. I was interested in service to myself. And that I developed some sense of a higher power. And I'd been an agnostic my my entire life even as a child we had no God in our house and so. Your mother was interested in Buddhism? She was sort of interested. My mother was a little bit of a deli time and she was also an intellectual in a place where there weren't any in this kind of Texas backwater where I grew up. She did yoga in 1956. I mean she was a I had of her time and she was a feminist and she was a news reporter

She was a lot of interesting things, but but not really anybody with a discipline practice in terms of anything Including you know being a parent probably but probably. But yeah, so I don't I mean I was just very depressed and I got sober and I got more depressed and I developed a suicidal ideation and it felt like the greatest defeat of my life going into custodial care, you know, to check into, you know, McLean hospital, which is, I call the mental maryot, I think, and lit. It was pretty nice, I mean, the campus, it looked like Harvard. I mean, it didn't look that different from Harvard College. So it was kind of a high rent place to go in. And, but while I was there, the people who've been counseling me

and sort of trying to steer me in a direction of developing a prayer meditation practice. I just decided, somebody said, you know, what do you have to lose? You know, pray on your day, on your knees every day for 30 days, and see if you feel better. And I thought, well, I'm here for three weeks anyway. And I began to pray and meditate there. Well, get to the meditation in a second. The prayer is what I wanted to ask you about first, because at the point in the book where you have repeated

over and over again, how what a sort of virulent atheist you were, you said no evidence for the divine. So how did you get yourself to pray and what sort of metaphysical beliefs have you subsequently adopted and how? Well, I literally did it completely by wrote. There was somebody had given me a book that had a prayer that's a Catholic prayer, the prayer of St. Francis, but I didn't know that then I probably wouldn't have said it. But it's, you know, Lord, make me an instrument of your peace where there's hatred. Let me so love where there's conflict, pardon where there's doubt, faith where there's

despair, hope. And I thought, oh, just saying these sentences, just as sentences to say, if you were saying a jump rope rhyme that said these things, you know, it's kind of like a positive affirmation. These aren't bad things to wish for, you know, to be kind of like a positive affirmation. These aren't bad things to wish for You know to be a peaceful person. I've never been particularly peaceful. I'm not that peaceful now, but I'm an armed and that's a good thing. So Yeah, so When I begin to pray that prayer I literally I said it to the light fixture

Oh, and I also prayed, I asked for help not drinking. And so I would get on my knees. I'd actually sort of started that before I was in the mental institution. I would get on my knees in the morning and say, keep me away from a drink. And I would get on my knees in the evening and say, thank you. So for not drinking. So I didn't have a sense that some higher power or God or something metaphysical was keeping me sober. I thought I was like doing some kind of biofeedback or something with my big smart brain. I just thought, oh, I'm just thinking happy things. You know, the way you would watch Mr. Rogers and pretend,

way you would watch Mr. Rogers and pretend, you know, he was really your friend. So I had zero theology in my head, zero metaphysics. I had no idea concept of any kind of God. It was just completely wrote, completely wrote. And when I tried to do centering prayer, that breath counting thing, there was so much noise in my head. It was like being, obviously you're a meditator. It's like being with a cage of the animal. Yeah, at best. It's like you're locked up with the enemy. Yes. And it's your like one, you know, you count one breath, you count two breaths, you're like, why did that SOB do the, and then, and just every resentment and gripe and terror? And it's like being locked in a room and so, but something started to happen,

both in the prayer and the meditation, is that I would get moments of quiet. is that I would get moments of quiet. And they begin to permeate my life when I wasn't meditating. I developed it's almost like a physical space. So the only way I can describe it is that all my life, I mean, I'm somebody obviously with an active mind and an overactive mind, my head had been chattering like a cappuccine monkey at me, and suddenly I would have these moments of quiet that were south of my neck, this or the only way I could put.

And I would have ideas that felt they didn't come from me because they were not the kind of idea I'd ever had. So I remember specifically being with my son was a toddler, a little bigger than that. And our car broke down on the store drive one day and it was snowing and we had to be somewhere and I was late for something and we didn't have AAA in those days and we didn't have any money and I had a flat and I didn't have a jack in the car, didn't have a spare. And it was a beautiful sunset. The weather was kind of coming in bad, but there was this piece of sky that was beautiful. And I just had this moment where it was like, well, you know, no tiger is eating me, you know, we'll get the eventually, we'll get the car fixed. It'll be okay. We'll find a way to

pay for it. We'll be fine. And these people came up that I knew who were also people trying to quit drinking and wound up helping me fix the car. So it was like serendipity. I didn't think God brought the good people to help me change my car. Now I kind of think that. Now I kind of think that. And that's the leap I'm interested in. How do you get from that kind of skepticism, and in your case, deep cynicism to actually believing

that there may be truly a higher power? Well, I began to make decisions based on prayer. I began to, like someone that advised me, I said, how do you know? You say, God is telling you to do things. I mean, my mind tells me to like buy a gun and kill everybody on the subway. I mean, you know, my mind tells me all kinds of bad. None of it is particularly happy. So how does God speak to you? And people began to tell me their experiences and they would say things like,

you never get a long-term plan and I'm thinking, well, what good is that? I mean, don't you want like a five-year plan from God and people would say, well, no, like you'll get a, like in the moment and it'll have a lot of quiet around it. And I'd never had any quiet in my head or in my life at all, really, even when it was quiet, my mind was, I was highly, highly anxious and very insecure and very afraid most of the time.

But I didn't perceive it that way. I didn't understand. I guess I identified with my fears as the only way. So I guess there began to be through prayer and meditation. I guess the best way I can describe it, I have a, I talk to a young woman who's trying to get sober now has little kids and is frequently, and no money and is doing everything she can do and is frequently frustrated by her children and calls me and says, you know, I'm screaming at my kids and, and one day she called me and said, you know, I'm screaming at my kids and one day she called me and said, I'm screaming at my kids and I think I've lost my mind. Like I think I've lost my mind.

I hit my daughter and I can't. This is not who I want to be. And I think she thought I was going to scold her. And I said, but she was crying. She was quite hysterical. And I said, OK, OK, OK. Well, who's noticing that you've lost your mind? Who is telling you you've lost your mind?

Who told you to call me? If you've lost your mind, you'd be beating them. You know, you had a moment of loss of control, which many parents have, and obviously you don't want to hit them. And I don't need to tell you that. You know, you don't want to hit your, you're just sad. You didn't want to hit her. And I don't need to tell you that. You know you don't want to hit your, you're just sad. You didn't want to hit her. And you did it anyway.

And it's scary to, you know, be scary to me too. So that seems healthy. I mean, and then, so I guess I began to have this notice herself that I identified with more than the voice of fear that was in my head. And I guess I began to think of that as God. identified with more than the voice of fear that was in my head. And I guess I began to think of that as God. Again, for a long time, I would say for three to five years,

it had very secular terms on it. It would be like I had a sober self, or I had a sane self, or I had a self that was unafraid. And it didn't really feel external to me. I had a self that was unafraid. And it didn't really feel external to me. I had a girlfriend who was literally a rocket scientist at MIT, who was also trying to stay sober. And she prayed, and she said, oh, I have this sober self, I pray to.

And I thought, well, that's harmless enough. But after making decisions out of this quietness. My life got better because I was acting, I mean if you think of it in psychological rather than spiritual terms, I was acting less out of fear. And if I didn't know what to do, I would just not make a decision. If I was still had a lot of noise and fear, I would try to just postpone whatever the decision was. What time I was supposed to teach? I don't know, should I teach it eight in the morning?

Should I teach it three in the afternoon? I would pray about every little dumb decision. Should I use this daycare provider? That daycare provider should. But also, should I take this job? I apply for jobs at Sarah Lawrence and Syracuse. And I was sort of, my husband, my baby daddy, and I were talking about where we wanted to live.

We've been in Cambridge a long time. We were sort of sick of it. And I turned down the job I now have at Syracuse through prayer. And the third time I was offered, and every time they came back with more money, and the third time the guy called, it was strange. I just said, yes, I'll take the job. It was the strangest thing.

It just felt very quiet. And he said, well, you know, I had the next person on the list. This was our last offer. But you're the hardest negotiator I've ever negotiated with. And I said, you're negotiating with God. That's how I sort of felt. I sort of felt like, you know,

and later I met the guy and I got to know him and it turned out he was sober and I said, you won't believe this, but I like, I wasn't negotiating. If I were negotiating, I would have taken the first offer because I was so insecure. And instead I was, I don't know how I came to the decision, just when it got quiet enough,

the decision got made. And so if you think about it when you're, you know, and so, but then also weird things began to happen, like I prayed on my knees for money I had a girlfriend she was a Harvard social theorist and she said well Why don't you pray for what you want? What do you pray for and I'm like? You know I pray to stand it. I pray to get through the day and she's like well, what do you want? I was like why like I made nine thousand dollars this year, you know I'm a poet. I'd like to generate more income and she said well then pray for money and I thought oh great I'm like one of those crazy women who's putting her hand on the TV saying,

Lord send me, you know, $30. And literally, like three weeks later, I got this grant that I got a Whiting Writers Award, which you can't apply for. And, you know, so it literally fell out of the blue. It's not as though I applied for it and was waiting to hear. So it literally fell out of the blue. It's not as though I applied for it and was waiting to hear. And she said then, that same person said then, oh well, so now you believe in God. And I'm like, no, because they would have had to nominate me when I was still drinking and I wasn't praying.

And so I guess you just decide in a way. There's a point of decision. The other thing this person made me do, which is incredibly pure-ile. But if you think if somebody is hard-headed as I am, it makes the most sense, she made me make a gratitude list every day because I was such an in-great for every letter of the alphabet. This one was a Harvard social theorist. I think she wrote on Durkheim or something for her PhD dissertation. So think of it. I would say like for the apples that

we bought. But then I noticed that I was being grateful for things, not that I was actually grateful for it, but things that I thought this invisible God I didn't believe in would take away from me if I didn't say I was grateful for them. So I realized sort of through this quietness that I already had all kinds of magical thinking and all kinds of superstitious nonsense in my head, even though I call myself this sort of rationalistic person, but I realized I thought I certainly believed in evil. I had no problem believing in evil. And so I guess I began to make a decision. And then eventually, as you know, I don't know how far you are in my in-lit, but eventually, strangely enough, I became a Roman Catholic.

So yeah, that's the, I'm not up to that point. So that's the, because that's the mystery. Yeah, well, I've Googled you. And so I saw that you, as part of the book, you became sober and became a Catholic. Yeah, so it's such a leap from where I am in your narrative. That's the part I'm trying to understand. Here's what I want to actually talk more about meditation, but this, the metaphysical part, like how do you go from doubting so severely to actually buying a pretty big body of theology? Well, the Catholic Church, everybody thinks about it in terms of its theology, and it's sort of like any theological structure.

People say, oh, well, I'm a Catholic, every body is a Catholic, every thing. I mean, Jesus was a Catholic, a believer. If you buy the idea that he was in the Garden of Guest, Semini saying, I don't want to do this, I don't want to be crucified. It's not like he was saying, oh yeah, crucify me. Oh yeah, you know, who cares? I'm so holy, I don't mind. So my son decided he wanted to go to church. He was a little kid. Came in as Batman pajamas and said, I want wanna go to church and I said,

why? And he said, I wanna see if God's there, which is kind of like the only sentence he might have said. So we did this thing that we called God a Rama, where anybody we knew who went to any kind of church or Zendo or temple or anything. We would go with them to their place. And so I found myself in this Catholic church.

I mean, there were a lot of interesting people there to bias. Wolf was there, the writer, who's a friend and colleague of mine at Syracuse. Turns out the barrigans were there, those crazy, lefty Jesuits, and Carol Barrigan were both members of that parish. But the priest was a guy I became very close to.

He was not a firebrand, he wasn't a Jesuit, he wasn't an intellectual, but he was somebody who was incredibly humble and not at all wet. I don't know how to explain it in that British terminology. You know, he was just very, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, well, yeah, just very matter of fact, Kai, but very kind and very humble. And so I would bring my son to Sunday school and most of the time I'd bring a latte and a bunch of papers to grade and like sit on the back row and sort of, you know, grade papers and have a coffee because I wanted to know what they were teaching him in this

church. And I got very moved, not by everybody said, oh, every, you know, writers, you know, they liked the ritual. That, I found kind of boring. I actually like it better now, but at the beginning, I just found it dull because they just did the same thing over and over and it didn't seem interesting. But at the time, what I liked was the faith of the people.

There was a moment in mass where people call out their intentions and that means that whatever they're hoping for, praying for, they say out loud. So they would say, a woman would say, you know, in gratitude for my son's heart surgery or my daughter's back from Afghanistan or, you know, my mother just died or we just got a job and we're thankful for that or whatever thing. And just think about it, if you're in a room full of people, just imagine a restaurant. If suddenly there was the bubble visible over everybody's head where you could see what they were afraid of or what they were terrified about or what burdens they carried.

And something about, I would just cry every time in mass when people were saying their things. I just thought, I would walk into the church and I would think, these are church people. They looked very, you know, churchy compared to me, my little Bohemian self. And then they would say those things and I would tear up and I would find myself feeling like them. Also, the thing I love about Catholicism, it's going to sound very dumb, but it's very carnal. It's very much about the body, you know, in Karnai. That is opposed to say other Christian churches, that there's a body on the cross. Nobody is going to walk in and look at that body and think, oh, you haven't suffered. You don't know anything about suffering. I was always very aware

of suffering and the presence of suffering, you know, crucified Jesus suffering. I don't know, I just, I think people suffer a lot and I think I've always been tender-hearted I think. So, I get why a lot of that would be moving and meaningful, but so I guess I'm trying to drill down on it. What point did you make the leap to believing and maybe you don't? That Jesus is the son of God who was born immaculately and then died and then rose from the dead,

the basic fundamentals of Christianity. I certainly believe in the resurrection. I read there's a group of sort of wild Jesuits called the Jesus Seminars that do a lot of research on the historical sources and and one way I read and maybe this is this is obviously disputed by the the church is it a virgin birth that the word virgin as it's used in the Greek Bible also refers to a woman who hasn't had children. So obviously that's not the wrap in the scriptures, but kind of a day at a time and a year at a time. I found myself going to mass and being very moved and comforted by mass. And also the sacraments of taking communion, I wound up taking communion.

It was a very funny moment. I got kicked out of instruction. There's a ritual for people where you're supposed to take instruction. Anyway, I got in a fight with a lady who ran it. She kicked me out. And so I go to this little parish priest, Jo Kaine, and I say, you know, well, you know, I have to travel and she says that I can't be baptized. And he says, look, why don't you just go talk to Toby?

Toby's a friend of yours. Why don't you go talk to him about Jesus? You're always saying you think Jesus is creepy. I said, I do. I do. I think he's creepy. I think he's like, you know, this is an idea of somebody opening, my idea of hell, somebody says in a poem is this guy opening a shirt saying, look what I did for you. You know, it's just who needs it, you know. And, and so I started meeting with Toby and reading the Gospels, the Greek Bible with him, and having talks also with Father Joe about Jesus.

And I saw that a lot of barnacle on him, that I superimposed onto him. A lot of stuff that I thought was churchy that wasn't necessarily true. And I also noticed something, I was involved in something called the Peace and Social Justice Committee, which is the, you know, chain yourself to the nuclear reactor people, and bring the orphans from El Salvador and get, you know, go to the prison. And I noticed that all these people very into Jesus, and also very into doing stuff for the poor, not just writing the check, but going down to El Salvador, going building the houses, moving people into your home, taking care of children and prison ministries and food, soup kitchens and all of this.

And they all talked about Jesus, just Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. And I don't know how to explain why these people were attractive to me, but they were They had a quality of they were matter of fact. I don't know how to explain it, but they just didn't seem drippy You know like sometimes you go to a church This is also to a Protestant churches and I've seen it in temples. I've seen it in other religions. It was somebody does this really slow thing up at the front, you know, to show how holy they are. You have a priest who'll say the thing, everything's really slow. And and just people are drippy and kind of creepy and you feel like they're they're phony or insincere in some way. I just noticed that all these people were really into Jesus.

They seemed very realistic and they were talking in a very active way about prayer and meditation and I wound up doing something called the Ignatian Exercises eventually. Because a friend of mine who was an Olympic swim coach had these three girls go to the Olympics from doing the spiritual exercises. So really out of this totally selfish, beenal, like, you know, Tony Robbins, like do this in your life will get better. I thought, well, I'll do these exercises. Everybody used into Jesus seems a lot happier than I am. So I kind of don't get Jesus. So I'll do this and see how I feel. And they taught many different

kinds of meditation, many different kinds of prayer, methods of prayer, like Dio Dabina, where you pray with a religious scripture. There's a visualization you do that prints of mine, George Saunders, who's at Tibetan Buddhist, and Michael Hare, who just died recently. Also, at Tibetan Buddhist, it is very much like something they did in their practice. These different kinds of meditations and prayers. And it's a 30 week thing that you do where you wind up praying like, I don't know, hour and a half every day so that was very that's really where before then I've got to

say it was pretty vague when I got baptized I said to father Joe you know I don't think the Pope is the ultimate religious authority and he said maybe you will someday it was like this theological, you know, you go at him and I'd say, you know, I think women should be priest and I think we should practice open communion because if Jesus is such a good egg, you know, why would he have somebody to your house and not feed them? And instead of him arguing with me and saying, I bet the Holy Father praised about that a lot. I mean, just say this little sweet thing that isn't that just not answering the question. Sort of, yeah.

And yet you saw something aspirational in that. I saw somebody who didn't want to betray his vows. Right. And, and yet, who wanted me in his room. Hey, I'm Arisha and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wondery'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 threaten 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. You know, there was a woman who'd gotten up on, who actually got up in the middle of Mass one day

and stormed up on the altar and, and to a fit, and ranting about the Vatican and the Pope and women priest and a bunch of stuff and then said I'm never coming back here until all this has changed and stormed out. And then I noticed like a few months later she came back and I asked Father Joe I said when did how did you get Nancy to come back? He said, I just called her up and said, you know, Nancy, we really miss you. We wish you'd come back. This was just like just a sweet guy, you know.

I don't know. He had gay and lesbian masses. And he was kind of a right-wing guy. But he was somebody that there's something in Vatican II where they say there's something called informed conscience, which is kind of the great loophole for Roman Catholics where if in the moment the Holy Spirit, you feel the Holy Spirit is guiding you to oppose church doctrine. So, they're about to burn somebody at the stake and you have a chance to protect the person and the church is saying,

well, we've got a burn them at the stake. Well, maybe your conscience moves you to say, no, this is a bad idea. So Father Joe, I think, was very big, unimformed conscience. I promise our listeners that I will start talking to you about more about meditation, but I'm just, I'm going to do one last question on your embrace of Christianity because I just think it's so interesting, and anybody who's read your book released as far as I have in your book will find it very interesting. You talk about Jesus, and I'm not an expert in anything really, but definitely not an expert in Christianity nor am I an expert in Jesus.

But what I do know about Jesus, he sounds like an incredible human being who... I didn't like him. Well, love thy neighbor as thyself is a really radical injunction. And it's a great thing for other people. You know? Yeah, I'm not sure I can do it, but I just think it's a great bar to shoot for and it's hard to argue. He's not the first person.

I mean, the golden rule. I mean, you know, the Jews were saying that thousands of years before the Buddhist. I mean, they're all said, all religions have a kind of, don't be a jerk. A nasty person. I have all kinds of bad words for it. But nonetheless, so you, let me play the skeptic for a second I think we can all agree that if you look if you judge Jesus by the words that most of us know or that he is said to have uttered Sounds like a phenomenal guy, but why do you have to take the leap to oh? Yeah, he rose from the dead

Well, I don't think everybody does. No, but you do I'm interested in how you got to that. Okay. Well, again, I have a very ecumenical. I believe the Holy Spirit assumes many forms. And so I don't believe that everybody who doesn't believe that Jesus rose from the dead is going to burn in hell or anything like that. Do you know what I'm saying? I do, but I'm more curious how you work. How did I go for this? I guess very gradually you begin to see that there are things that happen that don't make any sense. I'll give you one example. When I was doing the exercises, there's a period and length where you pray every day to be shown your own sinfulness in all its ugliness. And it's kind of a scary time.

It's people often describe odd things happening. I, my mother, long complicated person in my psychological life, I was moving her out of the house, I grown up in where she let bullet holes all over the house and tried to kill me with a butcher knife. And I was feeling very pious and kind of self-righteous that I'm helping this woman. And I wound up at her new house, which I bought for her in outside Houston. And I had left my Bible, which I was using to pray with, on the airplane. And so I wound up having this huge screaming cusp fight with her where I essentially spoke to her the way no one should ever speak to anyone, especially an 80-year-old woman who's

just moved out of the house. She's been living in for 50 years. And then I had these terrible night terrors, like terrible, like just awful. And I woke up and I had been given these prayers to pray by my spiritual director in this program. So all I can find in her house where we had just moved was her Bible that she happened, she was a little girl. So my mother's born in 1921. So she's from like 1926, 27, this whole Bible is.

The only passages marked in the Bible were the passages I had been given. Now my sister was at Physics major, I remember calling her, they were marked in blue chalk, and I remember calling her and saying, what are the odds of this? What are the odds? I'm sorry, I was given three passages, two of them were marked. What are the odds? And it's not like they were like one of them is a very famous song, one of them not so much.

So you could say, well, that's just a coincidence, but it's a very, it's not like the bullet going, you know, going in the front of your helmet and coming out the back and your head's not touch. It's not that kind of miracle, but it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. And a number of things like that, that feel, I had a breast cancer scare, it's a long story, not that I didn't have breast cancer, but I wound up running into a breast surgeon, running into a breast surgeon, whose daughter I had coached in Little League When they were telling me they couldn't operate on me and he said, oh, I'll do it like right now Like bizarre Just things were like if you had turned left instead of right

Coincidate complete coincidences, but things that were very odd and I guess you one begins to think You begin to credence those things and you say, what if? I know you had the experience of not having talked to somebody for many years and then you think of them and they call. Is that ever happening? But I feel like it has, but I can't think of a specific occasion.

It doesn't. People say it happens to my husband or wife all the time. They call all the time. And you think about them all the time. But often I'll have something very odd. Somebody haven't talked to in 20 years and they'll call. And it's just a very strange. It's very odd.

So I believe there are things that we don't know about. So it's almost, if you think about the odds that Jesus was born a first century Jewish peasant who pissed off all the religious and civil authorities to such an extent that they killed him. Everybody agrees that a bad guy they killed him. What are the odds we're still talking about him? How likely is that? Think of it.

How likely is that? Not so. I mean, even if you look at other religions, everybody's a prince or a king or he's he's born on third base, you know, he's Donald Trump. He's got a head start, you know, but this guy is just from Luzerville, every, he's like a hell's angel, his little sect or whatever the hell it was in the first century that come in. It is easier for me to believe that Jesus rose from the dead than it is to believe that the meek will inherit the earth. Given what I know about the meek and the earth, hard for me to buy, tough sell, Lord. But so I guess you begin to believe many things and the idea of him rising from the dead,

and it's not just a resuscitation, you know, but is an actual resurrection. Something is actually happened to him. So yeah, I believe that. Okay, so meditation. Are you still meditating? Every day. And what is your meditation practice? Well, I have several things, but in the morning, the first thing I do is a centering prayer.

It's just a 20-minute breath counting, not breath counting, but just following your breath. How is that prayer? Well, the prayer comes after. Okay. The prayer that I do... This Zen folks do counting the breath and... Right. It's a centering prayer. No, but after there's something I do call the Examiner of Conscience, which is a part of this Jesuit spiritual practice. So I do that for 20 minutes and then I do something where it's like you're supposed to do it at night, but I'm always I want to watch TV at night so I don't. So I do this emptiness thing and then I do this thing where you like go through your day. Wait, emptiness thing? What does that mean? Well, I mean, you know, you're clearing your head when you do centering prayer.

You know, you've got a lot of noise in your head. What about this? What about that, my turkey? What about who's going to come? I need a tree. What am I going to get? You know, will I win this, the lottery, all those things. So you've got all this stuff in your head. So you, the sitting for 20 minutes, sometimes 30. Right now I'm in 20 because I'm lazy. What can I say? Then I do something called the Examiner Conscience where it's like you, you press a, a VCR play on your day

from the 24 hours before you sat down and you go through your whole day and you look at moments where you think God was present in your life. And the word St. Ignatius uses is you savor those moments like you literally taste them. And you're supposed to like put yourself physically back in that moment. So just a sweet exchange with somebody in the bakery. I mean, sometimes it's eating something yummy or you get something you want. But more often, it's the... somebody I was angry with, I just... I had prayed about it and I just had a sense of

them and how much I love them and how great they are. And it had nothing to do with any... but I remember that feeling. And so you're supposed to go back to each of those moments and savor them and feel grateful for them. And then you kind of do the same thing and you play your day back and moments where you sinned. And so sin the way I was taught is not breaking a rule. It's like any moment you turn away from God. So any moment where you say, yeah, you want to kill everybody in the subway or you jostle somebody harder than you need to or you're brusque with someone you should be kind to. Or your self-centered fear for me begins to eat my head up and I just cease to be present.

I'm not there anymore. I'm in somewhere else. I'm in somewhere else. I'm like a dog over a grolling over a bone. So, and you ask for forgiveness for those moments. So, anyway, that's the other thing. And then at night, I do all these other prayers for people, people are sick or struggling or for our leaders or something, people at war, people are hungry.

You described what you described as centering prayer, which has actually been some Buddhist traditions, just basic meditations. You've been doing it for more than two decades now? 27 years. So have you described your early experiences in a mental institution as being very, very difficult? Is it still very, very difficult? Some days, but it's funny. I just meditated with a friend of mine

who's a Buddhist practitioner and sat with him. And he ran a little piece of Dharma before we sat where it said it talked about not being attached to how your practice is supposed to be. Great advice. And I realized that I mean again in this crazy spiritual thing I do there's something called consolation and desolation. And so, consolation clearly better, you know, big chocolate cake better than, you know, bag full of coal. So, but in that moment, I realized that I had that kind of grasping mind that the Buddhist talk about, where I, where you, you know, that punishing voices says you're

not doing it right or... I live with that voice. Well, we all do. Yeah, nobody, especially in meditation, right? Absolutely, but I think I've gotten better just the past five years at realizing there's a great Christian practitioner named Thomas Keating. I don't know if you know about him. We also talk a lot about Buddhism and he's a very ecumenical kind of guy. You can

follow him online, but he's kind of the you know one of the big Christian, he's a sister, and you know one of those don't talk dudes monks. So he talks about how even when you don't realize you're being healed by centering prayer, that you are, that it's sort of like, I often say to people it's like lancing a boil and when you first start to do it, it's like the infection has to drain off. But it's also just in your day, he describes it like sediment, that just sitting there, you might not have that clearness at all. And I guess this is where the faith comes in for me as a Christian that God is healing me or that. But, you know, let's say you're not, you're listening to us today and you're not a

Christian, you think I'm full of horse stooky, which is also good. I just urge you to try meditation because whether you believe you're being cleared or not, they know that your mood's better, your immune system's better, your stress levels better, your blood pressure's lower, you know, your smarter, faster, funnier if you meditate. So whether you believe God is healing you or you believe your big smart mind is just being cleared out of its fear, you think of it in psychological terms. It's two different models, but it's the same. He believes it's like sediment that it's being cleared. And often, yeah, at the end of a meditation, there's still noise.

And you'll think, well, I didn't get there. And so that's what was good about sitting with other, you know, Buddhist or Christians or whoever. Yes. Well, three things. One, and yes, on that last point, absolutely. I refer to group practice or practicing with anybody other than yourself as like an HOV lane, because I do think you can move faster. You have somebody there to point out to you where you're in call to sex. But why?

Even if they don't talk, why is it? I know, obviously, you have a serious enough meditation, Brian, that you've noticed this, that it's better when you meditate with other people. I'm not even referring specifically to meditation. I'm just referring to doing life together where you're with people who you can talk about your practice. But yes, I do think there's something powerful to meditating in a room together.

I don't know that I can argue for that as powerfully as I can argue for having some sort of community of people who are like-minded. Even if you may have metaphysical disputes, but you are doing some sort of, for lack of a better term, spiritual practice, because there are lots of cul-de-sex in which you can find yourself

and just discussing these things with other people who are doing the same thing. There's just a real power to that. No question, no question about, but I actually think there's something really of fairy dust, like you say it's h o v lane there's something really obviously talking to people but there's something magic that happens

through meditation i mean i in a group or just she just even more just two people even if it's not thirty people but there's something i started a i don't know hamplory years ago back at Syracuse University, where I teach with my graduate students, a meditation group, just to centering,

you know, we just sit like one day a week. And I'm always amazed how much better my practice is. When you're with a group. It's just weird. I have a thing where I get with a group and I start having to swallow all the spit in my mouth and then I get, and then other people, I notice it's like this, it metastasizes around the room and I get super self-confident Maybe you should just start drooling. Yeah, just drool just spit. Thank you Maybe I will just keep a little cup. You'll look like a stp or nard on like kind of tied around my neck

I'm dead. Yeah, I'm dead. Yeah The other two things I was gonna say in response to the a few paragraphs ago, one is in terms of faith. I mean, for skeptics, I would just reposition that as confidence. I think the science that you reference that the meditation is doing a lot for you is, it's really important to know that you can, or as my colleague, Robin Roberts, was told by her meditation teacher, on some sits, you're not going to go to the deep end of the pool but you're still getting wet. Well my friend of mine who runs the New York Hospital Cornell Medical Center runs the internship program for shrinks. You know, sent me, you know, a double-bind study maybe

three or four years ago. You know, tens of thousands of people over many, many years, you reduced that meditation is as useful as medication. Yes. In relieving symptoms of stress and depression. So, I mean, it's, it works. And all you have to do is do it, And you don't even have to do it well or right. But that's the, and that's the whole, that's why I love this Buddhist friend of mine giving me this little window. I thought, I've been doing that, been doing that for like nine months where I'm like, why am I not more peaceful? Yes. So that was the third thing I wanted to say in response to, because I was taught

on the phone last night every couple of months I get on the phone for an hour with my meditation teacher and I was my constant lament is I'm not doing it right. And I know that's a that is not a that's not a constructive thing to be mulling but I just can't help it. Part of it is because I read so many books and interview so many people for this stupid podcast that I get in my head. Everybody's got these different conceptions about how to do it right, I started getting my head around it. And he said that he've been playing with this thing recently of just dropping in a little

mantra or a little saying into your meditation of not wanting. Just every once in a while just say not wanting. And that will reveal to you all these subtle ways in which you're wanting your current experience to be different. You're wanting more clarity than you're achieving. You're wanting a cookie. And just seeing that is what takes the teeth out of it. It's like they say in recovery the first step is admitting it. Right. It's also I think it's, yeah, that pressing the bar to get a pellet. And that's how we live our lives.

Of course. Also, I think the, it's like my little friend, I say little, she's physically little, with the children who smacked her kid. I mean, she's not the kind of person who smacks her kid. I think that's happened once in eight years. But when you correct yourself, there's so much aggression in it, when you criticize yourself. Yes, yes, yes.

It increases the noise. Yes. And so that's the problem with it. And that's what I said to her about the, I said, look, you know, your kids five years old, you're apologized. You said this was a wrong thing to do. You know, you corrected it.

She doesn't remember. She's like a dog or a cat who can talk. You know, I mean, you gone past it. You're not, it's over. Just go over it and stop. You're making it bigger in your own head Then it is and that's often what I think is true for myself with Meditation that anything that has aggression around it

Makes you more attached To your performance absolutely and that's why I mean I know the move at least of in school of meditation, the move is just to make a soft mental note of, oh, you're judging, judging, anger, whatever it is. And that can, can, can detach you from that process. It's just that I suck at making that move where I have to make it so many times that I start to doubt whether I'm making it correctly. Nonetheless, it is, that is my experience, the move to make. But haven't you always, haven't you noticed then, you'll get in those places where it's sailing? Yeah, yes.

And then I ruin it. Because I notice, oh my God, I'm sailing. You're not. You're not ruining it. I'm the best. You're the best one. You're the very best one. I would ask you about a quote that I love

from where you're talking about giving birth to your one and only son, Dev. Yeah, young Dev. And you're talking about trying to describe what your feeling is in that moment. How old is Dev now? 30. Okay, so he's still young, but not a toddler. I have a toddler. God love you. Yeah.

He's a delight. How old are they? He's almost two. Master of destruction. Oh my, yeah. Oh, it's amazing. Oh yeah. He's really gotten into ordering me around that. That's it. He started screaming last night that I needed to march. And then I stopped marching and he cried. So that's how I started marching again. Anyway, you're talking about your emotion in that room and you say, quote, joy it is, which I've never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing because it's

focused exists outside the self, delight in something external, not satisfaction or some not satisfaction of some inner craving. That seems to me you are hitting on something. Well, it's huge in Buddhism, the difference between happiness and excitement. Yes, exactly. Well, I think for all my entire drinking life, I mean, I got sober, I guess I was, I don't know, started trying when I was 30, I guess by the time I was 33. I started trying when I was 30, I guess by the time I was 33. I started putting time together, 32. But I later found a quote from Merton, who Thomas Merton, who also studied Buddhism.

And Merton makes a distinction between pleasure and joy and says, if you don't know the difference between pleasure and joy, you haven't begun to live. And I remember the, for me, the distinction, it always involves, somebody asked me what it was, it always involves others. Even if you aren't in the presence of others, it's some not thinking about yourself thing that you're able to kind of, you know, crack the back of.

Yeah, there's a book by Jennifer Sr. about child rearing called All Joy and No Fun. I disagree with that. Actually, I think it's a tremendous amount of fun, but it's also a ton of joy, and it's not always fun, but it's not always fun. It's not always exciting. I mean, I can sit with it. It's very tedious. Yeah, while sitting watching my son take a bath or something like that,

that there can be enormous swells of joy, even though it's definitely not fun by any conventional measure unless we're doing something. No, no, it's not fun. It's not fun. It's a lot of repetition. Yeah. A lot of poop. Yeah, there's a ton of poop a lot of poop a lot of pee a lot of food

I won my Buddhist friend said when that my baby came he said he sent me an email It said there's nothing more grounding than handling human feces Gosh gee, I wonder where I might have that experience Well, you go working a nursing home. I guess so. So, or when Dev has a kid? Well, actually, now he has a pit bull puppy. So I'm a grandmother to a pit bull puppy. Not quite human, exactly.

So the three books in the PS series were Liars Club, Cherry and Lit, but you've also have some volumes of poetry. I've published, I don't know, how many, I don't know, four, five, and I have a book out just out called The Art of Memoir. Right, just out in paper back, right? Just came out in paper. And well, let me ask you about that book,

let me ask you from a very selfish standpoint, because I have only written one book, and it was a memoir, and it was also published by Harbor Collins, although my next one is not going to be. And I'm actually going to write a sequel. And one of the things that I find interesting that you, because Litt is the first book of yours that I've read, although I guess I'm listening to it,

so I don't know if that counts as reading. But you do some things where you, I'm curious how you made it, so satisfying in and of itself, without having to go back and read the others. Because I want to write a sequel to 10% happier, but I don't want people to have to have read 10% happier in order to read this next book. And you do some deft things where you tell things that were in those previous books and you say, I skip forward if you read those books. Any advice for somebody like me was in this position of wanting to write another memoir, but not wanting people to have to go back. And wanting to be able to sell that memoir as a not a sequel

that's dependent on having seen the first. Just go ahead and do the dumb work of writing down everything, the information you think they need to have. I bet you could do it in three to five pages. It feels forever, forever big. The other thing is to find an organizing principle, and this is one of my major suggestions in Art of Memory find an organizing principle, and this is one of my major suggestions in Art of Memory, an organizing principle for your new book, which I don't expect you to know before you write it, but as you put things down, I think you'll find one.

A way you're in conflict with yourself, like an inner enemy enemy and organize it around that inner enemy. So what is the struggle after 10% happy or going forward? And what you're going to do is you're going to start in that struggle and then you're going to have a little flashback and it's going to be just put it all in there. Maybe it's three to five pages and then soldier on and don't think about it. But the problem is we all, we have that language in our heads from that other book and it's so delicious to have those sentences standing there you've already written, ready to deliver and that's the hard part.

It's just getting your head out of the other book, I think. Yes. Is that a big use? Yeah, that's a really, so yes. Yes. Is that a big use? No, it's a really. Yes. I mean, basically the answer, when I was struggling with writing the first book, one of the people, one of the best pieces of advice I got was just sit down and do the thing, put some clay

on the wheel. And it's actually my friend Mark Halveron who wrote the game change and doubled up. So, yeah. And it was just put some clay in. And it actually took me four years of putting a lot of terrible clay on Rikitty wheels and wrote uh... game change and uh... and and and it was just put some play and and actually took me four years of putting a lot of terrible clay on on rickety wheels and then finally uh... shaping it uh... but you really nothing can happen unless you just vomit up what whatever you got right my

friend my friend Rodney krill uh... was working on a memory said uh... i'll give you some pages and he gave me about thirty pages and i gave him back four and i said, I'll give you some pages and he gave me about 30 pages and I gave him back four. And I said, now write me 150 pages, I'll give you 30. Yeah, that's about the, yeah. When I handed it in my first draft, it was twice as long as what I ended up publishing. So that's normal.

People assume that if they, you know, I threw away 1200 pages of lit. Whoa! 1200 pages! Well, it's like finished pages. Not draft. Finished pages. That's a ton of pages.

Ton of pages. I threw away and it took me seven or eight years, took me a long time. So three memoirs and then the art of memoir and a bunch of poetry books. Are you going to do another memoir? Well, isn't that the big question? I'm actually working on a novel now. I'm trying to finish a book of poems. But that's a big leap going into writing a novel. I know, right? Although you're the memoir I've read is quite novel. No, the list is that even I've been told I've been told that they that they read like novels. Yes, they do it does and I don't know what that means except that They're not boring. I don't know. Well, that's that's what we're going. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's what we're going

Well, so it's so it's it's some of the of twists and turns or so like unbelievable But they're like what? Just the stuff that you listed that your mom did with you She was here raising no, I know she took my kid. Yeah, she played pulp fiction for my kid, one Thanksgiving. Give him a gun to play with. I mean, you know, she was just a... Well, you found her standing over you with a hatchet

or a butcher's eye. It was a butcher's eye, but you're not. Not exactly a hatchet, but in the hatchet family. Yes, absolutely. Sharp. You tell me she was... Yeah. Speaking of sharp, it's been great to speak with you.

So fun talking to you. Thanks for thinking of me for this. Okay, there's another edition of the 10% Happier Podcast. If you liked it, please make sure to subscribe, rate us, and if you want to suggest topics we should cover or guess we should bring in, Hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. I also want to thank Hardly, the people who produced this podcast and really do pretty much all the work. Lauren, Efron, Josh Cohan, Sarah Amos, Andrew Calp, Steve Jones, and the head of ABC News Digital Dan Silver.

I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-3-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-slave-survey. us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com-survey.