Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 6: David Gelles

Episode Date: March 30, 2016

The author of "Mindful Work," New York Times reporter David Gelles is a self-described "sporadic meditator." During the day, Gelles says he uses so-called "meditation hacks," such as waiting a beat or two before picking up a ringing phone or practicing walking meditation around the office at work. Earlier this month, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times Sunday Review called "The Hidden Price of Mindfulness, Inc.," in which he talked about the "mindfulness economy" and the hundreds of products out there, from books to apps to a dairy-free mayonnaise substitute called Mindful Mayo, all carrying a "mindfulness" label. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey, and welcome to 10% happier. I'm Dan Harris. My guest today is a reporter for New York Times. He writes about social and environmental responsibility and other topics for the Sunday business section.

Before that, he was a hard charging finance reporter, both for the New York Times and also for the financial times. At the FT, he did a big exclusive jailhouse interview with Bernie Madoff. His name is David Gellis. He's also a serious and long-time meditator. In fact, he wrote a book called Mindful Work, which just came out in paperback, I recommend it. It's all about the ways in which the business community is embracing mindfulness, and David, to be fair, is pretty critical of some of what he's seen, and I should also say that David is a friend of mine. So David, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. So, I want to talk about the book and a million other swirling controversies in the mindfulness world, but first, how and when did you start meditating?

I meditated for the first time on New Year's Day 1999, and I know it was that day because the night before it was New Year's Eve, I was trying to figure out what to do. I had been invited to a bar, a bonfire, and a friend's house party. I didn't go to any of those because I picked up a book off my mom's bookshelf about Buddhism and I started reading and I never left the house. She got worried about me at around 11 o'clock. She's like, are you okay?

But I kept reading because what I saw on the pages for the first time suggested to me that there was like a way to make sense of what the heck is going on. I had been a confused teenager. I had maybe experimented in psychedelic drugs. Maybe. Definitely. Definitely.

I- Statutive limitations has passed. I think so. I look that up once. I had read books like Be Here Now, and I had been asking big questions and coming up short on answers. How old were you again?

So I was 19 at the time I read this, and I had been- Which book did you read that up? Honestly, don't remember. It was a basic kind of introduction. I think written by a professor, kind of like, here's what Buddhism is. I mean, started with the Four Noble Truth,

moved on to the Eightfold Path, and kind of, it was a slim volume. It was maybe 120 pages, but I read it, I consumed it. The next morning I woke up, I checked in with my friends. One of them still had his head in the toilet. The other had been punched in the face in a fight on the part. And the third had watched his sister rewraps and do cocaine. And at the most oversimplified level, this basic equation that I had read about the night before, that suffering is originated from desire, that cravings can lead to unhappiness.

It made sense in this completely oversimplified way. And so I did what you did back then in 1999. I opened up the yellow pages, looked up meditation, and went to a retreat the next day at the Green Gulch Zen Center in Northern California. Like a day-long retreat or something like that? It was actually, they had afternoon sits. So I went and it was like a basic introduction to Zen sitting.

And you took it much further than that because then you ended up Going and spending if I have it correct like a year in India. Yeah, before we got on the air I mentioned I don't do things in moderation so I started so we were talking about food Yeah, I was both things food and meditation I Started sitting Zen I did that for about a year and a half. And then yeah, for my junior year of college, instead of like going to Paris and partying in Milan, I went to Bodhaya, India, which is the place

where the Buddha ostensibly was enlightened in Bihar, which is India's poorest state, just south of the Himalayas. And I spent three months in the Burmese Vihar, which is a famous guest house for Western travelers. In Bodhaya, I spent a month roughly studying each with a Zen master, a Tibetan Rinpoche, and also this guy named Maninjurji. And Maninjurji, as I know you know, is one of the great mindfulness teachers of the 20th

century. And I had an immediate, visceral reaction, and whereas I had previously been drawn to Zen practice, my attention very quickly shifted to the Pasinum meditation, which is what he was teaching. Teravodin. Teravodin originated out of Southeast Asian Buddhist traditions, now known colloquially as Insight Meditation, Vipassana more formally.

It's similar to what Goenka does. We're getting deep into the meditation geeklingo very quickly here, and also mindfulness. So I mean, we, since we're geek deep into the meditation geek ringo very quickly here, and also mindfulness. So I mean, we, we, since we're geeking out on meditation, which is totally cool to do on a podcast, Muninjra, who was your teacher, was also the teacher of Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salisberg, who studied with him in India and then came back and founded the Insight Meditation Society, this retreat center that still exists in Massachusetts. And it is at that retreat center

that a guy named John Kabatzen, who was a microbiologist from MIT, had this vision in the 70s, I believe, it was in the 70s to create something called mindfulness-based stress reduction, which is the secularized version of meditation, which is now what has caught on in the science world and created this whole public health revolution that you've been covering. So aggressively. So

Menendra is a key figure in the history of mindfulness. Absolutely. And so I feel so fortuitous that I got to spend some real quality time with Menendra. We would walk to the Bodhi temple, the spot marking where the Buddha supposedly was enlightened, there's a Bodhi tree supposedly descended from the same seed of the original tree. And I would walk back and forth, we would circulate the Mahabodhi Temple together and then at night sometimes I would join them on the roof of the Burmese Vihar and we would just sit under the stars and oftentimes we wouldn't say anything occasionally we would have discussions.

And then in the meditation hall twice a day, if not more, I would try to snag a seat in the front row and practice really diligently. And I remember him sitting there, and talking to me about moment to moment awareness. And whatever it is you're doing, just do that. And these phrases, mindfulness, moment to moment awareness, these phrases that I heard and have been with me since India,

I then started hearing 15 years later in corporate America. And that was the moment when I said, there's something going on here. There's definitely something going on here. I want to talk about it, but I want to stay with you for a second. So you are an extremely busy dude. You have two kids, your reporter for the New York Times.

You just like kind of recently switched jobs. You were coming finance for a while, now you're covering social and environmental responsibility. And I spent more time with you back in your former life, and you were constantly checking your phone because you were covering deals and things like that. Do you find time to actually meditate? How much time, when, and what kind of meditation?

So I recently had a piece in the New York Times about mindfulness, which we can talk about a little later, but I describe myself very overtly and honestly as a sporadic meditator. And that's not just a historical designation, that's actually kind of what happens now. So with two young kids and the absence of a live-in-opair. I do a lot of hands-on duty, especially early in the morning, which used to be the time when I would be able to find time to actually sit and practice. So when you sporadically,

when do you, when, if ever do you find time to meditate? Mornings, when no one else is up, which is occasionally, evenings, when everyone else has gone to bed, and I'm not totally racked from the day. Afternoons on the weekends, when I sometimes still go to places like New York Insight and other, you know, meditation centers in the city. And then frankly, it's the little moments. You know, I think Sharon Salisburg often talks about it. It's not just finding those uninterrupted stretches of 40 minutes to sit in half-loaded position. I can never get into full load. So half-loaded is the best I can

do. I occasionally do. I sit in a chair. You don't have to put your butt on a cushion for 40 minutes straight. It's small moments many times. And that I feel very fortunate to have had a foundation of practice over 15 years has given me the ability, perhaps better than I would have had otherwise, to find those brief moments many times throughout the day, be it walking to the subway, on the subway, at work, at my desk, and I have little hacks at the office, little cues to remind myself to actually just drop into walking meditation even for 30 seconds on my way to the bathroom. It's enough to remind me to actually just drop into walking meditation even for 30 seconds on my

way to the bathroom. It's enough to remind me that everything I'm driving myself crazy with at my desk isn't necessarily the entirety of what's going on. Okay, so I have a million questions based on that. So when you sit, what is your actual practice? What do you do? When I sit, I try to mostly practice open awareness, is where I often start. Noticing the thoughts, the emotions, the sensations, naming them when they arise, and

you're trying to let them go, but not necessarily actively pushing them away. I also, at times, do very specific kind of breath meditation, concentration meditation, picking one sensation often in rhinostrels, air passing in and out of rhinostrels, maybe on the space just beneath my nose, focusing on that and actually trying to concentrate on it. And then also I have a often and I know we've discussed the fact that I actually can find it pleasurable at times, which is controversial perhaps. The body scan is a really rich exercise for me. It's something that is emphasized in the Goenka tradition,

which I did. I sat with Goenka and himself when he was still alive in India, and had some really profound experiences of doing body scans. And so that is also another practice that I do kind of methodically moving from the head to the toe and back again, and noticing

very subtle fine green sensations in my body that don't necessarily present themselves so readily when I'm kind of bashing around through New York City. But when the mind settles down and when the body settles down, you're able to notice all sorts of weird things that are happening in your body that you might otherwise not notice. That's the range of what I do. I love hearing about, I love hearing about people's practices. You made a reference to it being controversial that you find pleasure in your meditation

and let me just explain to you, or that's based on a personal conversation between the two of us, where you, at one point, I asked you, what is your meditation practice like? This was off camera and you said, it can be very blissful. And I went directly into what the Buddha's call comparing mine, which is because my meditation practice at that time. And most of the time is like,

you know, a trench warfare from World War One, completely not blissful. But you then later came back and said that that was just a specific period of time. Right. I was in a place where actually practicing the body scan delivered actually very pleasurable sensations. I tried not to get attached to them. I tried not to go seek them out, but they were happening. I forgot to one mention one of the practice, which is compassion practice. Actually just the practice of metam meditation, wishing well for myself, those I love, others in the world, and even

strangers and all sentient beings. It's a profound practice and I find it especially helpful here in New York City. So meta just for the uninitiated is M-E-T-T-A. It is a poly word which is an ancient Indian, poly is an ancient Indian language spoken at the time of the Buddha. And the word meta means loving kindness which is about a syrupy word, as one can imagine. But this practice that you're describing involves kind of picturing people, people you're close to, people you don't like, people you don't really know, and all living beings, and systematically sending them loving kindness or good vibes.

And it can sound, often sounds to me like Valentine's Day with a machete to your throat, but actually there's a significant amount of science that shows that A, it's good for you and B, that it can work and can change behavior. Well, and it's important to note that you're not doing it with the expectation that anything is going to happen differently in the world. This isn't a prayer for my wife to always be safe. Though, of course, I wish that, and if I'll do everything in my power to ensure that's the case But by practice in meditation and saying may

Allison be healthy may Allison feel kindness. By the way, you're saying this internally internally. You're not necessarily out loud I'm not doing that with the expectation that because I'm saying it. It's going to happen I'm doing it to change my orientation, to cultivate a more reliable, predictable, consistent orientation of kindness, of generosity, of compassion. I think I love that. I mean, I'm not, I think you have more of this than I do. I'm not naturally oriented toward touchy-feelingness or sentimentality. I'm a little bit of a jerk, frankly, and at least by orientation. And the fact that you can, and this was an incredible insight of the of the contemplative of the founders of these contemplative traditions that you can cultivate these qualities of kindness and

compassion. And that will actually make you happier and feel more connected and change your behavior in the world is a totally liberating thing. So I do this practice, too, even though I feel free to make fun of it at the same time. And it makes sense because Dan, well, you innately may be a jerk at a certain level. You have also been habituated to have certain jerk-like attributes. And so the fact that we can train ourselves and habituate ourselves to act in more reactive, more aggressive, more reactive ways, in the same way, we can train ourselves to be more

accepting, less reactive, a bit kinder. So just one more question about your personal practice before we get to your book. You talked about the hacks that you use, because you can't always meditate. So for you, you've got the, you try to do it a little bit here and there. Go deeper on that.

What are these hacks? And what are you actually doing when you're walking and using that as a form of meditation? And I'm feeling myself being very hypocritical here because one of the things that I'm increasingly concerned about is this rush to make mindfulness something that can be squeezed in between like checking Facebook and posting on Twitter. And yet, it can be useful. So I guess when I describe these little hacks that I have throughout the day, I'll say it's with the caveat that they can be very useful,

but they are not a substitute for longer term, more intensive, more rigorous practice. Fair enough, yes, proceed. So, and another caveat, I didn't invent these. Some of these are well-known, Some of these other teachers suggested to me and I have modified and adapted. One is simply the phone exercise, pretty well known. When the phone rings, our impulse,

especially as emergency and acquisitions reporter, is to pick up the thing as if it's like a snake on your desk and you need to get your hand around its neck, otherwise it's gonna bite you. That's how fast you want to pick it up. Instead, let it ring. Let it ring once. Let it ring twice.

The person on the other end of the line is probably not going to hang up after two rings and giving yourself not only a moment to come back to the present moment, let your mind clear from whatever email it is, you were just sending. But also the discipline of interrupting the velocity of your day is one small exercise in creating space, creating just a little more space in your day to, again, break the velocity. I always come back to that word, especially for, you know, busy professionals. We rush through our days and so rarely actually take a pause at any moment. And so that's one way to simply break that velocity. Another hack is walking meditation.

If you go on a meditation retreat or do mindfulness-based stress reduction training, inevitably you'll practice some form of walking meditation, which is similar to sitting meditation, but it's noticing the sensations in your body primarily because your body is moving, but also noticing the thoughts and emotions as they arise and simply trying to recognize them and let them go as they do while you're walking. So what I've found is there's one particular long hallway in my work when I go to the bathroom in the New York Times, in the New York Times building, with a bright red wall. And every time I make that walk, I try to instead of like checking my phone and looking somewhere between my feet and the phone to make sure I don't trip over something. I actually tried to put my phone away and practice walking meditation in that hallway.

Just feeling the sensations of your legs moving. Absolutely. And noticing when I get distracted. And I don't necessarily walk at a snail's pace. It's not as if I'm like in the garden of IMS, walking deliberately one step after the other. I walk it maybe a slightly slower peak than I do when I'm on Broadway

and 66, but not deliberately kind of a naturally slowly, but I use that as again a moment to check in with my body, then to notice what thoughts, emotions are rising, and it takes all of 30 seconds, but it's one more reminder to again try to create the habit of being mindful. This habit you have of being mindful in this practice that you've been engaging in for decades, do you think it's an asset to you professionally in a very competitive environment? Or because some people fear that if you're more if you're calmer happier, more relaxed that you're going to get your launching. So I'll say yes with a caveat. Yes in that especially for what happens in the New York Times newsroom, which can be

very fast paced and very competitive, being able to still be very motivated, very engaged, but without constant self-judging. I do feel like gave me the space to work very hard, but do so without getting hung up when I made a failure, and hopefully without getting too proud of any fleeting accomplishments, knowing that there was another story to be done right after maybe I broke a $10 billion dollar farm deal, or right after I had a story go most emailed.

So instead of clinging to those moments, or clinging to the negative moments, being able to just kind of proceed in a more equanimous fashion, I think is useful. Other people, especially in very competitive environments, can have these wild swings of emotion, which can be very productive for certain people. But for me, it's something that, and this is the caveat, that's been a part of my life for 15 years now. So, as long as I've been a professional, I've been practicing mindfulness. So it's hard for me to say that there was kind of the pre-mindfulness professional that was really angsty and the post-mindfulness professional that's all Merle and Zen. I've generally been kind of relatively

unruffled by the natural turbulence that happens in the office. And plenty of natural turbulence happens. Like, I screwed up this week. I don't need to go into details. But like, I had a mistake in the New York Times, and it was printed. It sucks. It's like the worst feeling I had. Yeah, no, I know the feeling. I've made that mistake, I've made mistakes, too. And I had reactions.

Like I got, you know, I was frustrated. I was mad at myself. It created like, you know, self-doubt and self-loathing. But I was able to move on pretty swiftly. And I feel like the practice in part, not exclusively, self-doubt and self-loathing, but I was able to move on pretty swiftly. And I feel like the practice in part, not exclusively, but mindfulness practice, at least helps me move on more quickly and not get hung up when I do screw up, which is inevitable. I mean, I will say just having in your in support of everything you just said, I've watched

you go from the from the financial times to the New York Times, which is a huge transition. You were very, you were nervous about it, but you were not in any way debilitated by those nerves. I then watched you at that same time, have your first baby, move apartments, and finish writing your book, and you were pretty economists through that whole thing. Any one of those factors can make people lose their mind. And I just have to imagine, maybe you're just a mellow guy at baseline, but having had the practice in your life for a long time had to have been useful, I would, I just have to imagine. It was.

And again, I talked about kind of having this foundation of practice and helping orient me with a world view where I try not to get caught up on the fleeting successes and failures of any one day and that dominate not only kind of the tenor of my experience for that day or that week, but also trying not to let it inform too many other rash decisions. Like because I'm really stressed out, I need to make some severe changes in my life and do something rash That's tendent not to happen. All right, so let's talk about your book

Mindful work just out in paperback a great read. I actually got that I had the high honor of being able to read it even before it had come out And I said the book in the acknowledgments is at least 10% better because of your input Which I appreciate and maybe overstating it by 9%. You started to write it why? For 10 of the years after I got back from India, continued to practice meditation, would go on retreats, was still a big part of my life. Not once in those 10 years did I even dain't to consider that it might be part of something that was part of my professional life. Then there was a moment, shortly after the Bernie Madoff interview, I was kind of hungry

for a big story. As you know, that feeling as a journalist, if you're not working on something you know is awesome, you have self-doubt and self-loathing. I was in a period of like, oh my gosh, I need to prove myself all over. By the way, I've been meditated for 15 years. That hasn't gone away. It hasn't gone away from me either. I've only been meditating for almost seven years, but it doesn't. I don't think you can expect it to go away. It just gets less, less noxious. Right, so it was a not particularly noxious form of kind of angstsy ambition, knowing away at me.

And then I had one of those moments that you will remember for the rest of your life. I'm at my computer, I'm sitting there, kind of scrolling the headlines, reading business news, and I see a brief associated press article that said, at General Mills in Minneapolis, Minnesota, just outside of their corporate headquarters, they were practicing meditation in the office. And it was like, for me, you know, to be cliche about it, it was like a lightning bolt hit

me. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is something I've been doing for 15 years. This is something that suddenly in the bread and butter of what I report about, I got been doing for 15 years. This is something that's suddenly in the bread and butter of what I report about, I gotta go check it out. So I got on an airplane and I went out there and even as I'm excited, and this is when you were at the FT. Yeah, I'm at the FT at this point.

It's 2000, 11, it must have been, 11 or 12. Even though I was excited going out there, I was also pretty skeptical. I wondered, what did these people know? And what are they teaching executives at General Mills that has anything to do with the mindfulness or meditation that I, you know, maybe sort of hautily said that I like experience firsthand in India. Right, you're going from like the, from Boat Gaia to the place where they make hamburger

helper and you're figuring this is going to be nonsense. Right, this is like the company that's behind hamburger helper, Lucky Charms cereal and I had my debts. But I walk in, it's 3 30 or so on a Tuesday afternoon, big conference room, right off the main lobby, General Mills headquarters. And as I sit there, I'm one of the first people in the room, executives start to show up. These are relatively senior people in the organization.

And as they show up, it's as if they're walking into a meditation hall. They're quiet. They take off their shoes. They're even by the door. Some bring meditation cushions, some bring yoga mats. They all sit down. Most of them sit down quietly, close their eyes, look like they begin meditating. And then eventually there's several dozen of them. They're all practicing. And it all

feels kind of familiar because I've spent enough time in meditation centers and retreat halls. And after a certain point, the woman who's organized and read this group, Janice Marterano, she begins talking. And the phrases she uses, moment-to-moment awareness, whatever it is you're doing, just do that. The phrases I recognized, of course. These are the same phrases that Minindraji had used in India. And yet something had happened over 2600 years and over thousands and thousands of miles. What had been, you know, conventional traditional Buddhist teachings in Bodhgaya India was appearing in Minnesota in a totally secular way. They never mentioned Buddhism. They never mentioned any words like Dharma or anything as a secular form of mindfulness that was being presented to executives as

a way for them to become less stressed, more focused, and maybe a little happier, maybe a little kinder to themselves and to their colleagues. And I thought that was just extraordinary. And you wrote a big article about it. I remember the article. I did. I wrote a big article for the cover of the FT Weekend magazine and right at the same time I was fortunate enough to know some people in the books world and they said let's do a book about it. Hey there listeners! While we take a little break here I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host

Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduka Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discussed their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to

learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty. So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery app. And okay, so I want to talk about what you found in the book because you you traveled all over the country and beyond. I believe I think you may have left the country to do some reporting. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but you talked about international companies, let's just say. And you found sort of good, bad, and ugly. So walk me through each of those. What did you find that you thought looked like the real thing to you?

And what did you find that looked a little off? The interesting thing about mindfulness and the corporate world right now is that it's still such early days. And because that's the case, there are about as many variations of corporate mindfulness as there are corporations. So everyone honestly is doing it a little bit differently. And that's in part because there is no kind of dominant provider of mindfulness services to corporate America. Most of these programs are homegrown. Now, we're starting to see some companies like Will

and Headspace and E-Mindful and the Search Insider Self Guys. People are making an effort because I think they realize there's a market here. IBIS World, which is a big research firm, just said that in 2015, almost a billion dollars worth of meditation services were sold. Wow. This is a billion dollar market now.

Pretty soon the 10% happier app will also be in this world as well. It will be a two billion dollar market that absolutely. That's more than that's 100% bigger. So so what I found was in certain companies, like General Mills is a great example, but also at places like Google, Adobe, Intel, Salesforce, a common pattern started to emerge, which was that mindfulness has been around in the US for decades now. And a lot of people have practiced mindfulness-based

rest reduction, but I think, like me, many people, until recent years, hadn't brought it into the office, hadn't thought it was something that might be appropriate. I did it in the closet right That's starting to change the whether it be because there's kind of more data that supports the merits Benefits of some meditation whether it's because of some kind of gradual social liberalization or whatever Meditation is starting to be something people can at least talk about at the water cooler. And in company after company what we saw is a small group of people began meditating. That's how it happened in General Mills with Janus Marcerano.

A few more people heard about it and were interested and they began. And oftentimes what happens is a small group then snowballed to the point where it kind of got on the HR department's radar. And then there were institutional resources to support it, and all of a sudden, lots of companies now have meditation rooms in the building. But at the same time, it's different everywhere. So, in the case of General Mills, Janice was doing the teaching. In other cases, like at Google, they developed a really robust curriculum called search inside

yourself. We're mindfulness is a part of it, but it's not the totality of what they're teaching. They're also talking about emotional intelligence and leadership. So there's also some proliferation, most of which I really want to stress, most of which seemed pretty good to me, from Patagonia to Green Mountain Coffee to Intel to Adobe. Island Fisher. Island Fisher, I mean, the wrist goes on to Ford. Lots of companies are doing it.

They're all doing it slightly different, but most of what I saw didn't strike me as inauthentic, I don't even know that that's the right word, but as nefarious or unhelpful or unuseful or unwise. Most of what I saw was pretty good. The times I got worried were when I walked into a company and I talked about it in the book. They had one guy who had never really taken any formal instruction as a teacher who had

a kind of checkered career as a meditator from what I could tell with kind of dubious lineage. And once a month, he would come in and he would play some Native American flute music in a room that was decorated with these big banners of menacing NHL players. So you're in this cavernous room surrounded by like scowling 20-foot tall hockey players. There's Native American flute music piping through the air. This guy takes his shoes off and asks everyone else to take their shoes off. And what followed was kind of a approximation of the body scam, which is a technique that you'll find in traditional mindfulness practices, but that was about where it began and ended. And to me, that was at best

superficial and unhelpful, and at worst, kind of a gross misconception of what mindfulness and meditation can really be about, because it suggests that that's all there is, and that by doing kind of superficial exercises like that, you might be able to achieve something profound. And I just don't think it's that simple. So there are so corporate mindfulness is being attacked on two sides, from both directions. The one attack is the so-called mick-mindfulness critique. There's a lot of people from the Buddhist traditions say this is a perversion of what has been taught in our tradition

for 2600 years. It's stopped by people who don't have enough training and their desire is to make better hamburger helper or more compliant workers instead of people who are happier and more compassionate. And that's another part of the critique, which is that compassion, which is a huge part of the Buddhist teaching, is in this argument, not emphasized at all or not strongly enough in the secular mindfulness tradition. The other critique is that you're taking religion

and putting it into corporations and worse, some people say, into public schools. So you can't pray in public school, but you can teach somebody meditation, which is derived from Buddhism, which is a really in Eastern religion. So I'll let you start with whatever one you want to start with, and let's start with McMindfulness.

Do you believe that critique carries water? I understand why traditional Buddhist practitioners and scholars might feel that way and there are lots of signs that mindfulness is becoming increasingly commercialized and commoditized. And I'd love to circle back to that point, because I think it's an important one. But I'll say this, as I spent more than a year going around the country, visiting every company I could find that was practicing meditation and that would let me in the front door.

Not once did I see managers promoting this because they thought it was going to improve the bottom line in a direct way. Not once did I see instructors or people in the military think that this was going to make more efficient soldiers who could be more ruthless snipers. Not once did I see people practicing and evangelizing mindfulness and meditation as a way to make kind of more obedient lemming workers. That's just not the intention I sensed and not the language that I heard being used to promote

mindfulness in the office. Instead, what I heard was people saying stuff like this, we recognize that our employees are stressed. If this is a way that you might become less stressed and maybe a little healthier, let's try it out. That was about as prostalitizing as I saw it. So it's in the same vein in the mind of an HR executive as like a smoking cessation program or a gym membership.

I think largely so, especially when it starts reaching that level of finding institutional support for it. Etna is a great example. Etna is a big health insurance company. They have started offering mindfulness and yoga as part of their suite of wellness offerings to their employees. And that includes exactly things like smoke insensation,

cessation, not sensation, better eating practices, and gym memberships. But do you, you were trained, you have a classical training in Buddhism. Do you think something has been lost in the translation to the executive suite in Minnetonka, Minnesota, General Mills? I think it's important not to expect them to be the same things. So if we're saying, are the traditional Buddhist foundational principles being replicated in only by different name in the CEO suite, then I would say no

they're not. But I think that's okay. I think that what we've seen evolve and let's think about it as an evolution. What we've seen evolve over the last three decades and let's go back to John Kabadzin. Through mindfulness-based stress reduction in large part, is the evolution of a new kind of secular mindfulness where the initial and the primary benefits that we can talk about and measure and quantify have more to do with stress reduction, perhaps some degree of focus, perhaps a more accepting mindset that can create kind of a better relations with oneself and others,

and that has less to do with being a tool on the path towards something like liberation or enlightenment. Wait, I mean, I... And I think that's valid. Yeah, I tend to agree with you, I have to say. I mean, I think, you know, I describe myself as a Buddhist. So, and I practice Buddhist meditation, I don't buy into the metaphysics. You know, I haven't seen any evidence for rebirth.

But, so I'm very sensitive to and open to the Buddhist critique of corporate meditation. But I also of the view that more mindfulness is better than less mindfulness at the end of the day. So if it's not a faithful reproduction of classical Buddhist teaching, okay, but it's still teaching people to be less reactive, and I think that's a good thing. What I would like to see is the same amount of hype that we're now seeing around mindfulness be applied to compassion, because there is, as we discussed earlier, a significant amount of science, still in its early stages, but worth paying attention to that suggests

that the compassion practices that you described can make people healthier, happier, and not for nothing less annoying and less of a jerk. And so, I I once a headline about How mindfulness can help people sell more furniture wasn't like in a in a trade magazine for the furniture Industry trade website for the furniture industry. I would love someday if compassion If you just inserted compassion as the thing that helps you sell more furniture or be a better baseball player or whatever Because I do think it is true probably yeah But I take umbridge with the furniture ad,

because I think that then it's the wrong intention. We talk a lot about intention in the Buddhist tradition and practicing mindfulness, so you can be a better sales person. In my book is just not the right reason to do it. Well, then I'm gonna have to quit meditating, because that's why I to do it. Well then I'm going to have to quit meditating. That's why I'm doing it. So I want to get to the critique of the fact that people are upset that this is basically a form of religion in their view of being taught in corporations and also more provocatively in public school.

In a second, but first let's talk talk about, and this falls within the category of the McMindfulness debate. You published an article in the New York Times Review section, and it was called The Hidden Price from Mindfulness Inc. So, the Hidden Price of Mindfulness Inc. What was the thesis of the article, and why are some people so unhappy about it?

I tried to do two things with the article. One was to show the proliferation of mindful products and services in the marketplace today, which I frankly find kind of comical. I mean, if in mindfulness meditation we're simply supposed to kind of observe things as they unfold. We must be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that we are witnessing a great unfolding of ridiculous mindful products. You found mindful mayo for sale at Whole Foods. That's why I wrote the article. I was there in, you know, buying some beets and kombucha and there was mindful mayo and I said, this has reached new extremes. And so it set me reflecting on what does it mean that there is now Mindful Mints, Mindful Meets,

Mindful Supply Company, which makes like graphic t-shirts and Mindful Mayonnaise. And not to mention a few dozen apps on the App Store, including your own that are charging money for teachings. Any number of books on the bookstores, including mine, exactly. And pretty much everyone we know, you know, in our little circle of friends in the Buddhist and Meditation world, everybody's written a book. So let's admit that mindfulness is an industry right now.

Yes, unquestionably. But is that a bad thing? Not inherently. Not inherently. Not inherently. What happens, though, when things like mindfulness become industries is that opportunists glom on the thing takes on a life of its own, and I believe we're starting to see already all manner of bizarre variations of, quote unquote, mindfulness mindfulness spin out into the marketplace.

And I don't know that there's any way to control that. And so what I was trying to do with the article was two things. One, say that, listen, this is what's happening. There's a great unfolding of all sorts of much of it very valuable and legitimate and content with great integrity, things being labeled mindful, and at the same time, it's important not to forget that as all this stuff kind of floods out into the marketplace and you can buy mindfulness as easy as you can buy lul them in pants now, what matters at the end of the day is sincere, serious practice.

And so what concerns me is not products and services that use the word mindful. I don't care about that so much. What concerns me is these one minute interventions. Mindfulness is increasingly being practiced. And this is why I was concerned about being hypocritical earlier, as something that you can do kind of on the fly, and that's that. That if you can just kind of say mindfulness three times backwards on your way to the bathroom, then that's the beginning and the end of it.

And as you know, that's just not the case. Yeah, but it doesn't, I would, I agree that it's not just something you do one minute a day or whatever, but that was better A, that's better than nothing. And B, I don't think starting a formal meditation practice, especially for beginners needs to go beyond five to ten minutes a day. I agree. Though I was less concerned with people who are starting kind of a formal meditation practice

five to ten minutes a day. And people who might as so many apps and offerings and books and, you know, juice mindful juice bars open up, have the misconception that simply by participating in the mindful economy, they were somehow being mindful. It still takes practice more than the mayo. I think the last lines of the story were kind of summarized it. It was something of the effect of it's not enough to buy into my mindfulness. You have to practice it too. I agree with that. Why have some people been angered by what you wrote? Listen, I think as happens in snarkery written trend stories in the Sunday reviews section of the New York Times,

perhaps I over generalize, perhaps I was too flip, too irreverent. People have strong feelings, and what I didn't mean to do was to suggest that everyone participating in this new mindful economy was participating in this new mindful economy was at all doing anything unethical or that simply by making money or putting stuff out there that they were offering unhelpful or inauthentic teachings. I count myself as much a part of the problem as I do a part of the thing that I'm looking at. I mean, if I'm lashing out at the mindful economy, then I'm lashing out at you and myself as well. That's not what I was trying to accomplish. But for whatever reason, some people interpreted it as me kind of throwing everyone in the mindfulness economy under the bus,

which wasn't my intention. I've wrestled a little bit with, because I do take Buddhism so seriously, it has added so much to my life, that I've sold all these books, and I now have an app, and I've had moments of like, well, am I doing the wrong thing? Am I commercializing something that shouldn't be commercialized?

But if you look at the eightfold path, the Buddha's list of eight things that you do on the path toward enlightenment, right livelihood is right there in there. And the Buddha hung out with merchants. There were some of his most prominent acolytes and kings and things like that. So he wasn't saying you shouldn't be effective in the world, you shouldn't be engaged in commerce. He was saying there are certain kinds of commerce that were unethical, but certainly peddling mindfulness doesn't

seem to fall in that category unless you're peddling crappy mindfulness. Right. And I'm happy to report that the vast majority of our friends at least aren't peddling crappy mindfulness. So let me ask you about the other side of the equation, which is that some people are really upset. In fact, on the day that we're having this conversation, there are a bunch of headlines coming out of Georgia where parents are upset, Christian parents are upset, that that that mindfulness and yoga are being taught in public schools because they believe it's these are it's Eastern religion being peddled to their kids and and going to it's going to lead them away from the faith of their family. Does this argument have an validity in your eyes? In the same way that I wouldn't want my daughter to have to say Christian prayers and say amen in a school. Yeah, I can understand why a parent might not want their child practicing overtly Hindu or Buddhist practices in school. That's very

different though than secular mindfulness techniques being offered to school children in a way that again is like verifiably There's the research to support this really really useful in coming down in the the rambunctious child in honing the attention of the distracted four-year-old We know now that simple mindfulness practices. It's not Buddhism, it's secular mindfulness. We know that simple, intentional practices can be really instructive and really valuable for young children in particular. And this is, I think, where it's useful to bring in the analogy of going to

the gym. We don't teach our children, and we don't rarely teach ourselves how to control our minds, how to concentrate, how to use our focus and train it on something deliberately. And that's what, as you know, mindfulness and meditation can help do. In the same way that going to the gym can build up certain muscles in the body, practicing meditation can build up certain muscles in the body, practice in meditation, can build up certain

muscles in the brain to speak metaphorically. Children need the muscles of attention, and children need the muscles of empathy. And so, my mindfulness can help create those in a secular, purely secular way. I'm all for it. Now, when it gets to the point of saying Namaste, I think that that's a legitimate cause for concern among certain traditional parents and I don't want to deny them that perspective. I would agree with that, but but nonetheless so it's a secular version of a religious practice. This is the argument to play devil's advocate. So you've secularized it whatever that means meaning you stripped the Buddhist metaphysics and lingo out of it, but you're still teaching me

a practice that is predominant in an Eastern faith But I don't know that that makes it a religious practice. I mean you phrased it very carefully there You said a practice that is predominant in Eastern faith. Yeah, because I'm playing devil's advocate But but that that doesn't mean that the practice is inherently religious. Yes, the practices are historically associated with Buddhism. No, they are not reliant on the Buddhist worldview to be effective.

But, so, one of the interesting critiques of the secular mindfulness world that I actually really does resonate with me. You hear this from people like Willoughby Britton, who is a neuroscientist at Brown, very, very smart person, who has said that, the way we offer up these practices in the West now are in some ways like disconnected from the way

in which they were offered up by the Buddha. And this has nothing to do with religious, with metaphysics. It really is the Buddha's goal was not for you to be less stressed. It was for you to see that the you, that is the propulsive force in your life, this you that chases you out of bed in the morning and is yammering at you all day long, actually doesn't exist. out of bed in the morning and is yammering at you all day long, actually doesn't exist. It's called no self or selflessness, and that can run very much counter to the core of the theology of Abrahamic faiths, which is built around the notion of a soul. And so, I just wrestle with whether these practices should be taught in public school, because can't it inextraably lead you to conclusions that would

be counter to the faith that your parents want you to embrace? If it's placed in a religious or more kind of Buddhist framework, those discussions might happen. But I don't know that the simple mindfulness practice inexorably reads towards the practice of Buddhism. I really don't. And this is why I tried to draw that distinction really between, you know, the historical and Western embrace of Buddhism, which is still ongoing and has a really rich and wonderful history. And what we've started to see, and, you know, John Cabot's in, is right at the

heart of kind of amplifying this, of secular mindfulness, which doesn't, I don't believe, I really don't believe, it doesn't necessarily lead towards kind of a realization of no self at the end of your eight-week MBSR course. Right. And again, I'm not even sure that no self is anathema to the idea of a soul. I mean, there was a book written by a theologian here in New York City at Fuller Theological Seminary that was called Without the Buddha, I couldn't be a Christian. So, and I know a lot of people have deepened abiding faith

who practice all sorts of meditative techniques because they believe that it helps them feel closer to God. So, I'm playing devil's advocate out of curiosity and out of a desire to provoke my friend. Is there, you've been a fantastic interview. Is there anything, well yeah, there is one last question. I want two last questions I want to ask you. One is, one of the problems that you identify in the book that I really agree with is that

there isn't a good housekeeping seal of approval. It's a wild west out there when it comes to teaching mindfulness. What is the answer to that? Can we have, how do we know if I'm in anywhere America and I want to learn how to practice mindfulness? How do I know that the person who's teaching me knows what he or she is talking about? Well, you don't and I think that's a problem. And in the book, I try to put forth an idea, which so far no one seems to have picked up on,

which is that we do need some sort of national organization of mindfulness. And I think the people you bring around the table are actually pretty obvious, and I talk a kind of propose a loose list in the book, but it's the people who have been at the heart of the mindfulness movement over the last 30 years here in the U.S. as a place to start.

Both the secular mindfulness and I think also to some extent the more traditional Buddhist community as well, because there's a lot of overlap there. And I think it would be instructive to both know to what extent to ensure rather that mindfulness as it might be kind of given a good housekeeping zero approval, if you will, is not done with any Buddhist undertones. And also, that at the same time, the essential practice of it is somehow kept intact. And I think if you get the right people around the table, I think it's possible to create a baseline curriculum, whether that's 50 hours, I'm talking about kind of introductory

instruction, or call it 20 hours. And then to create a baseline curriculum that is then adapted for military institutions, for schools, for corporations, for prisons. Now, that's a dream. I have no indication that this is actually happening. I know there have been like various cabals of mindful leader types getting together and thinking about how this might work so far, nothing seems to happen. But the reason I think it's important

is because in the absence of that, we're gonna have more people taking their socks off and playing Native American flute music and saying that's the end of it. So here's my last question. We've got, that has discussed the good, the bad, the blue, we've got pan flute music in Mindful Mayo and we've got all these apps and we've got people teaching meditation and all sorts of corporations and I think a lot of this is really really good. But there's also plenty of controversy and the science keeps marching forward and there's lots of controversy over the science too because

not all the quality is as high as it ought to be. So here's my final question which is where is all of this heading? At my least optimistic, my most pessimistic kind of dystopian worldview is that it becomes like yoga and worse, which is to say that today there is all manner of kind of bizarre mutations of yoga out there. There's doge, where you hold your dog as you're striking your yoga pose. Now, I'm not necessarily dissuading someone from having their cat sit in their lap

as they practice mindfulness. Indeed, some cats are very attracted to the meditator. And yet, I have a concern that mindfulness, as we know it, as we're talking about it, could become unrecognizable in some of its permutations left unchecked. That's my most dystopian view. I think even if that occurs, pockets of traditional teachings will still endure, but I think at this rate, and I think we're headed there, it will become increasingly commercialized, increasingly commoditized, and that it will be harder for the lay person coming to mindfulness fresh for the first time to find quality teachings.

And I think that's a real risk. At its best, I think, and even if that all happens, what we're seeing now is more people take interest in mindfulness. And if that's a proxy for more people taking interest in their own mental health, in their own ability to regulate their stress, in their own ability to be a little more accepting, a little kinder to themselves, a little kinder and gentler to those they deal with,

and perhaps even a little more compassionate to themselves, a little kinder and gentler to those they deal with, and perhaps even a little more compassionate in the world. Then I think that's a very good thing indeed. Even if it's a attendant with a kind of broad unfurling of bizarre mindfulness industries of all sorts, which I might add you and I are a part of. Yeah. Well said, my friend. Appreciate it. David Gellis, the book is mindful work just out in paperback. Really appreciate you coming on. Thanks for having me.

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