Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 82: Cory Muscara, Mindfulness Teacher, Former Monk

Episode Date: June 7, 2017

Cory Muscara, 27 years old, admits he first tried meditation because he wanted to impress his college girlfriend -- but it changed his life forever. Muscara, an econ major who considered a finance career, switched gears and spent six months practicing mindfulness meditation as a Buddhist monk, completed numerous meditation training programs and eventually became the founder and head teacher of the Long Island Center for Mindfulness, bringing meditation into school, health care and corporate settings. 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 y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kee-y Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. I will admit upfront that I went into this interview with not knowing what to expect, perhaps with low expectations. I agreed to interview Corey Muscarra because he was recommended to me by somebody actually out in Hollywood who felt pretty strongly that I should sit down with Corey. He's a very young meditation teacher from Long Island

who has made some appearances on the Dr. Oz broadcast. So I didn't, he doesn't have a book that I could read or anything like that. So I didn't really know what to expect and I was so impressed by this guy. So you're gonna hear me become increasingly impressed and you'll probably feel the same way yourself during the course of this interview. So enough from me. Here he is, Corey Muscarra.

From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Thanks for doing this. Yeah, my pleasure. You've ever listened to the show, I just start off with the same question, which is how did you start meditating? So how did you start meditating? Yeah, yeah. I have an interesting path. Well, I'm sure a lot of people say that,

but unique in the sense that I think many people that come to meditation often come through maybe the realm of deeper suffering, or they're really spiritual, or hipsterish. I got into meditation because of a girl. You're not unhyp. I mean, I'm wearing mylobeads, so I might fall in that category, but yeah, I primarily got into this because I had a hippie girlfriend in college.

She was in a meditation and I basically started meditating more or less to impress her. I mean, that's when I started taking it seriously, at least. I think that's a pretty good reason, just for the record. Oh, at the time, it was great reason. It's still even now. There's no happy ending to that, because you broke up with me several weeks later, but there's a really happy ending, which is that it actually changed your life. That's the thing.

And so, despite it being like a superficial undertaking in a very short period of time, I know some pretty significant results in my life. And at that point, I was someone that used to wake up like 20 to 30 times a night, very restlessly, my mind was constantly going. And this, you know, this is going to sound like a bold sales pitch for meditation, but within two to three weeks of just meditating, I was doing three times a week, 15 minutes a day, lying on my dorm room bed had no idea what I was, just focusing on my breath. I went from waking up 20 to 30 times a night to waking up only two to three times a night,

and sometimes I wasn't waking up at all. And I had taken sleep medications and stuff, and nothing had a shift like that. So, I mean, anyone that suffers from an insomnia, you could just imagine the radical shift that that that could have. I rarely see results like that, that radical, but that was one of my experiences. Do you mean in other people, your students and things like that? That's right.

I mean, we do, I see often, improve sleep, improve insomnia, and the research suggests that as well, but to make such a shift like that, that was huge. And so I just started getting interested in what's going on with this meditation thing, but I was an economics major, and this was in college when I was getting involved. So nobody in the economics department was talking about anything to do with meditation. So the tipping point really came for me when we took this trip to the New York Stock Exchange. Every year at Allegheny College where I went to undergrad, we take this big trip to the New York Stock Exchange. And this year we were to meet with this multi-bearing

hedge fund manager. And everyone said, like, this is a guy, if you could get anywhere, this is where you want to get. If you could learn from anyone, this is a guy you want to learn from. And at that point, I was already questioning is finance what I really wanna go into, but I was like, oh, maybe this guy will rekindle my enthusiasm for the business world. We go there, take the eight hour trip, sit around a table, it's like 30 of us,

he gives a two hour PowerPoint presentation, and it just sucked my soul right out of my body. And I said, I don't know exactly what I wanna do with my life, but I know I do not wanna end up like that guy. And to be fair to that guy, he could have just been having a bad day, he might have rolled off the rocks out of the bed, and I'm not saying he's a miserable person, and I'm definitely not saying all people in finance are miserable because I know plenty of people that are very content.

But the point of that was, for the first time, I really started questioning if that's not what I want, then what is it that I want? And everything, I, every answer that kept coming up could be reduced to the very cliché like I want to be happy. And that's not the first thing I was coming. A lot of it was like, well, I want to have a family and why do you want a family? So I get a few kids, why? Because that'll give me greater meaning.

Well, what is that? Well, it gives me more happiness. I want to make money. Why? So I could go on vacation. Why? So I could be real out. Then I'll be happier.

And so I could just see that so everything was like pushing me in that direction. And so I got fascinated with happiness, well-being. But I could see up into that point, the exploration of it was in manipulating the external world. And I got very interested in what is the possibility of cultivating a contentment that did not derive from external factors. So I came home from spring break and you can imagine a young man going home talking to his father saying, okay, I know I was in a business, but now I think I want to study happiness. You're just going to be met with like, okay, that's great for you, but go get a job.

And instead, it was my father who's a physician on Long Island, was kind of just getting frustrated with the direction of healthcare. And he was looking at just different ways, evidence-based ways, to create positive behavior change and well-being and positive health. And that took him into the realm of the science of positive psychology and mindfulness. And he said, Kourt, if that is something that you're interested in, it's now something that you could explore through an evidence-based lens. It's not exclusive to just religion and philosophy. There's a way

that you can understand this scientifically. And he gave me John Cavazins first book, Folk Attastrophe Living. And just every word of that book, the phrase that comes up is dead poet's society when Robin William goes, we don't read poetry, we let it drip from our tongues like honey. That's what it was like just to read it. And so there was something deep inside me. I couldn't put a name on it was but it spoke Volume saying this is what you need to do with your life. It was such a clear understanding that if this kind of work Could pay these kinds of dividends at least the dividends that they're promising What could be a more worthwhile investment of my time and it all just went like that. And then, you know, like two years later, I was in a monastery with the shape to that.

I want to get to that really quick. But first, just I let your reference to John Cabazin go by and I just I've made a commitment to myself that when people use a name that I will make sure that the listeners know who that person is. John Cabazin has been a guest on this podcast, who is just kind of the grand daddy of modern secular mindfulness. He doesn't like the term secular, but I'm going to get it. Does he like the term grand daddy? He doesn't mind grand daddy because he actually is now a grand daddy.

He has no problem with that, I don't think. Anyway, full catastrophe living is among his books. He's also wrote a book wherever you go. There you are. These are great books. And he's a guy who can talk about he's a he's a scientist himself by training at MIT and then ended up getting interested in how to make mindfulness something that could be taught in a secular context, specifically within healthcare.

And it's just it's it is what has boomed into this big current mindfulness juggernaut we're looking at. Anyway, having said that just to keep everybody up to speed here, you went to a monastery in Burma. In Burma. Okay, how did you get there? How long were you there? What was like to have your head shaved?

What was like to be there? I wanna know everything. Oh, no, no, no. So, I actually started getting, I teach mindfulness-based stress reduction Johns program. So I started getting into this work, I started getting professionally trained

while I was in college to teach that program. So my entry point into mindfulness was through that lens. And then I went on my first silent retreat here in the West and at IMS, it's like, yeah. Insight meditation society, which is very Massachusetts, and is run by some very close friends of mine. Yeah, Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzburg, and Jack Cornfield was also involved

in starting it, so these are also friends. These guys are all friends with John Kabatzin. This is their part of this cabal that I refer to as the Jewish. The Jews, yeah. I'm not alone in calling them that. And anyway, so you went there, and that's an interesting place for you to go on a silent retreat because you were teaching MBSR, which is the secular mindfulness, but IMS is a validly

Buddhist. Oh, yeah, very much so. However, as I'm sure John, I imagine he would reveal, he's coming more out in recent years talking more openly about Buddhism and its role in MBSR. Not that I ever totally shied away from that, but in the beginning you couldn't be talking about, you know, Dharma, Buddhism in the late 70s and expect people to be receptive to it in healthcare. All to say that the underpinnings of MBSR really do come from the the Buddhist tradition and they

encouraged us as part of our mindfulness based rest reduction training We were to be teachers to go on silent meditation retreats And they highly encouraged going to Insight meditation society spirit rock, which is the IMS of the West Coast And so that's that's how I went there and I was more or less going there for seven days of silence Just so I could cross it off. My prerequisite list of like, all right, now I could be an MBSR teacher. And I, you know, I went with my father, believe it or not. It was a seven day loving kindness meditation retreat

where for those that might not be familiar with loving kindness, you're essentially repeating these phrases of wishing well-being to other people yourself, a difficult person may be happy, may be healthy, may be safe, etc. So for someone I came to this from like a very logical, science-oriented mind of like, all right, this is a way for me to observe my experience in a logical way. To start repeating these phrases over and over, it went over my head, I couldn't start repeating these phrases over and over. It went over my head.

I couldn't connect with it. Didn't feel anything. And I kind of just, I found value in just learning to sit with myself for seven days straight. But at the end, didn't feel like anything spectacular happened. But I knew all these people were having amazing results from this work. And I took my type A personality that I had my entire life

and just took it right into meditation. I said, I wanna go deep and I wanna do it as quickly as possible. I just graduated college. I had $70,000 worth of college loans. So I'm gonna defer these for a year. And I was gonna dive into this. And I talked to my teachers at IMS, Michelle McDonald was one of them. And I said, listen, I got six months,

I wanna do something that is gonna take me to the heart of this practice. I want it to be difficult, because I felt like at that point, I had lived a mostly privileged lifestyle, and I knew eventually it was gonna hit the fan. And I wanted to, you know, I had the gravy right now in my life,

but I didn't actually, I didn't feel like I had my mashed potatoes yet. So as soon as the gravy was guys, like what else was there? And I wanted to, that might be a terrible example of metaphor, but I wanted to develop my mashed potatoes. Yeah, yeah, you know that. Something to sustain myself, nourish myself.

And again, cultivate that contentment that did not derive solely from external variables. I wanted to cry. Like I just wanted this to be hard and I say, can I find peace in some form of pain and suffering? Is that like a young man? Yeah, exactly. You're very like grit your teeth and go forth.

That's right, that's right. And naive at that point, and arguably still, just you don't get many people coming to this work, looking for that. And I think those people that think that's what they want, have no idea what they're signing up for, and also to acknowledge is no real way to fabricate suffering. So I'm not saying like going into a monastery

is the same suffering as being in war or trauma or But for me at that point in time I the idea of severing myself from all external comforts and family and friends and going into silence That was intense for me. Yeah, and so I said that's what I want and they said all right Well, if you want if you want something like that and you want the mindfulness teachings you should go over to Burmally Really intense teachings over there some of the best teachers in the world. And if you wanted to be really hard, you should study under this guy, Sayeda Upandita, who was my teacher there. And I said, that's what I want. Legendary teacher. Yeah. Yeah. I have, you had some reference system. Oh, well, he was a teacher for Joseph and Sharon. And he recently passed away. And

he's known as being just kind of the toughest, most demanding of all mindfulness teachers ever. Oh God, that guy. I mean, just tough, tough love. He would come around, I mean, I'll go through more of my experience there, but just one, one story that's coming to mind. It was about three months into the retreat, and there were about 150 foreigners there, because he would come for all of December, all of January,

and just give Dharma talks every single day. Dharma talk is just a meditation talk. So everyone from all over the world would come to study under this guy. So we have these cottages set up, kind of like in a horseshoe shape, where one person would hear, hear, hear, hear, hear, hear, kind of like in a horseshoe shape where one person would be here, here, here, here, here, just going around in a horseshoe.

And there was one day, I was ordained as a monk at this point. I was in my room just like really being beaten down, so much physical pain, so much emotional pain, just what the heck am I doing? So I took off all my robes, so completely naked, because you can't own any belongings other than your robes when you're a monk. And I had off all my robes and so I completely naked because you can't own any belongings other than your robes when you're a monk. And I had them hanging in my room and I just

laid down on my bed but naked. And you're not supposed to read in a monastery. But I was just, I felt like I needed something that I could digest that was different than some of these teachings. So I pulled out Joseph Goldstein's The Experience of Insight, which is actually one of the, probably the second meditation book I got. And I just, I just started reading this. And keep in mind, this is Saito Upindita who is just notoriously, like if you're coming to that monastery, you are coming there to get enlightened or get the hell out. And he, he would say things right along those lines. So, and if you're a monk, you're held even to a higher standard. So, here I am in my room, lying naked, reading Joseph Goldstein's book.

And I hear all these knocks on these different doors. And I'm like, what's going on? And I noticed that I should check that out, but I noted it and came back to my breath. And I came back to reading. And then here, this knock on my door, I'm like, oh, I got it, I got it, got it, got it up. And before I can get up and put my robe on, I see the door swing open and Saito Upandita is standing right there, just staring at me. Now he doesn't speak any English and I don't speak any Burmese.

So he's just giving me this death stare. And it's not a compassionate like Dolly Lama, oh, I love you, but you should, it's like, what the hell are you doing in my monastery? You get the hell out, you do not deserve to be here. And then he just shut the door. And he was with these other two monks, and he pointed to my room number and just wrote it down in this sheet. What he was doing was going around every single room,

just opening people's doors without any permission Seeing what they were doing and then jotting their room number down If they were doing something wrong and then he would talk to the other teachers who were doing the meetings with us and Basically have them scold us and say like I heard that you were doing this this and this and this if you're gonna If you're gonna be here, you got to take this seriously so You know that that was an interesting encounter with my teacher. So did you get scolded?

I did. I did not buy him, not by himself, but from someone else, because it has a lot of different teachers that are doing these interviews. And yes, so I knew something was going to happen. And so I came in to the meeting the next day and you have to do this bowing thing, bow down, and report what's going on in your practice and at the end of that five minute meeting he said you know, Saito Upandita came to your room the other day and he saw you reading you know these are against the precepts you're not supposed to be

reading while you're here make sure that you're taking the practice seriously there's something along those lines so So, so that, you know, you meditated diligently, obviously out of a love for being there, but also there was an element of fear, because he would call people out in the, in the Dharma hall, like there'd be 150 people there. If somebody was looking at the clock, he would call, he'd point to you,

and he would tell one of the other, you know, one of his teachers that were sitting up front to go over to that person and say something along the lines of this yogi is not paying attention. Good yogi, yogis are just a meditator. Good yogis should have their gaze down, be focused, not wandering. So I mean, when you are in this guy's presence, his mind is vast, the wisdom is there, but it's intense. It is intense. Yeah, it is. Sounds like it.

Wow. Yeah. So how long were you on this retreat? That was about six and a half months. Wow. Yeah, just silent, intensive practice. And you ordained as a monk at your head shaved, a whole deal. Yeah.

And have you done it since or was that it? Not to diminish it. 60 and a half months. Yeah. No, I haven't been back to Burma since. I mean, I try and do at least a 10 day silent retreat every year, but yeah, to do something longer like that just gets harder and harder.

Yeah, so for some reason. Unless, you know, if I were a Dharma specific teacher and like I made my life specifically teaching the teaching Buddhism, I would have my priorities in a different order, but and making time to go on longer retreats. But for right now, I teach primarily secular mindfulness, mainstream mindfulness in keeping it as practical as possible, as non-polarizing as possible for people, and reaching as many people as I can. And I wouldn't be able to, if I were teaching,

you know, three, one, three, trees, that would be amazing. And my heart is in that as well, but 90% of the people that I teach have no interest in that whatsoever. So for me, it's important to stay grounded in the world in a similar way that many of my students are. And I found when I first came back from Asia, it was actually hard for me to relate to

the person waking up in the morning at 5 a.m. and like the idea of a retreat for them is the five minutes they get in the bathroom before the kids wake up. So I found it helpful for me to not go away for as long and just to have my you know my daily meditation practice. So I want to hear more about that in a second, but just back to the retreat, you write his want to hear more about that in a second, but just back to the retreat, you write his emphasis is on enlightenment by which he refers, by which he is referring to or was referring to when he was alive, the uprooting of negative emotions, which is a pretty radical thing that happens in a stepwise progression under the map that he uses. And the first step in this progress is stream entry.

And the second one is once returner, and then you become a non-returner. As I've said before, it sounds very dungeon and dragon. But there is sort of, like you're not supposed to talk about how far you are in this map, but so I don't know how comfortable you are. But did anything interesting special happen to you while you were there for six and a half months?

Yeah. Yeah. So it is interesting there. It's not kosher to talk about your different levels of insight and enlightenment. So I will share one experience that happened around the five and a half month mark right before I was about to leave.

It's very difficult to track your progress on a retreat like that that because the progress is often very incremental. And I remember getting to the fifth, like five months in and taking some time just to reflect on like, how much have I actually gotten out of this? And I wasn't actually sure because your reference point is just, uh, Saito Upandita saying you need to do more, you need to do more, you need to do more, you need to, so it's never good enough. Um, and so I actually kind actually started coming to the end feeling like, where's the big experience that I've been looking for?

And so, I used to do this seeing meditation after breakfast every day. There's a little bridge as you're walking back to the meditation hall that overlooks a pond. And I would just sit there for about an hour during our hour long break and Just look over the pond and seeing meditation is you know, same thing is just focusing on the breath instead You're just being aware of anything that you're seeing without the story of oh, I like that tree Oh, that's beautiful. I wonder if I should bring trees back to my backyard. You know, that would be the story Just alright just seeing just seeing and so I would do that

I probably do that for about two months straight just as as hour long seeing meditation. And there was one day in particular where I woke up one morning and just something felt different. There was a different degree of heat in my body. And my concentration was stronger that it had ever been before. You know, I before, like my mind was just all over the place. But when I focused on my breath, it was like my attention was glued to the breath. If I would focus on my foot stepping, it was like my attention was glued to the foot stepping. So I was like, all right, there's something going on here today. I'm not what it's about.

So I go through the motions, you know, wake up at three, do a couple hours of meditation, go to breakfast. You wake up at just, we don't want to let that slide by. You wake up at three in the morning in this place. Yeah, you wake up at three in the morning. Yeah, so that's a whole other level of intensity. So, you know, by the time breakfast is over,

I had about three, yeah, four hours with the meditation. And so I'm sitting at this bridge, and during those four hours, the intensity of the concentration is getting deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. And I'm sitting there and I'm looking out over the pond. And as I'm doing, so my eyes latched onto a tree that I was looking out in the distance. And things in my peripheral just started to get a little darker, darker.

And then I felt this heat continue to arise in my body, concentration getting stronger. And then just in one moment, it felt like everything evaporated. And the biggest evaporation was the sense of self. And in just an instance, I came into this felt sense of a communion with everything that was around me. There was no longer any division between myself and what I was seeing. There was no longer quarry, there was no longer pond, it was just being, just seeing, just raw experience. The world, just the world, yeah. And, you know, that sounds like stream energy. You know, I won't put a label on it,

but it was a radical experience. And transform me moving forward, how I see myself, how I see the world in that space of communion, non-duality, there was just this innate sense of compassion and care. And I'm not someone that that comes very naturally to. I was not involved in volunteer work growing up. I didn't have this natural altruistic sense of service toward other people in a way that my peers did. And in that experience, it shifted everything for me. All because you were trying to impress a girl. That's right. I got to thank her one day for that. Okay, so that's amazing. That's an amazing story.

I gotta thank her one day for that. Okay, so that's amazing, that's an amazing story. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia,

and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident, not so expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego

in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. And so just to orient us in time here, so how old do you now? I'm 27 now. Okay, so you're still really young guys

And this is all happening like six years ago, probably yeah, yeah about that So you came home and basically became a full-time MBSR teacher. Is that right? Yeah, what you do now? Yeah, I have a lot of different trainings one of the things being young in this world every every training I went to I was the youngest by 10, 20 years. And so there was a part of me that I wanted to make sure my credentials were solid. So people is like, who was this young kid know about something that's often associated with wisdom, like mindfulness, meditation, wisdom. So I got obsessed with doing these different training.

So I did full MBSR, teacher training, I did training through mindful schools, I did training through the search inside your self program, the mindfulness program at Google, breath works, chronic pain. You know, got my master's and positive psychology from you, Penn, and it became a Duke integrative health coach, just like training after training after training, NLP, hypnosis. And part of it was like, I did want to make sure my resume was good, but the majority of it is like, I was fascinated by this stuff and all the different ways that these different teachers were teaching it. So, yeah, so my training is, I teach in school settings and healthcare settings and in organizational settings and just to the public.

On Long Island. On Long Island and, you know, a lot of, do a lot of corporate stuff all over the country and sometimes I saw the country as well. And you do a lot of stuff or some stuff on Dr. Oz? Yeah, so they called me up several years ago to do one of their segments and then that spiraled into some other stuff with them.

So yeah, I do some stuff with Dr. How regularly are you on there? I actually haven't done a segment with them in a year because you can only talk about mindfulness so many times and you know that's getting into the whole wave the fat of mindfulness kind of maybe coming not crashing yet, but anyway that's a whole another topic. So yeah, I haven't been on there probably in a year, but yeah, I did a number of stuff with them. So it's interesting to me because you teach mindfulness and I think Dr. Oz does transcendental meditation.

Yeah. It's a different modality. Was that at all an issue? No, not at all. I mean, he's brought on, I think, some TM teachers in the past to talk about that realm. The research with TM is more robust than people are aware of. It's just mindfulness is so hot right now that that's one of the reasons he was bringing it on the show.

No, I think this research for both, for sure. Yeah, but no, it wasn't this year at all. He was very fascinated by it. And do you think, because I've been on Dr. Ozz's show before too, and I mean, he's a great interviewer and I think he totally gets it. I just wonder like, do you think it makes an impact being on that show? Do you think his audience gets it once it, et cetera, et cetera? It's a good question. I had a number of people that reached out to me, you know, at any time I'll go on there saying

they either found a beneficial or it helped clarify something. They're going to be different levels of how this work is beneficial for someone. And you can make the argument that going away for 10 years and living in a cave is like going to be the most beneficial if you're on a path to enlightenment. It's like, are you going to do that? Probably not. Well, then what would next, well, maybe an hour a day. Well, you're going to do that.

Most people probably not. Maybe that? Paulie not. Well then what would next, well, maybe an hour a day. Well, you're gonna do that. Most people Paulie not. Maybe 20 minutes, maybe not. Maybe taking a mindfulness-based stress reduction of course, maybe, yeah, maybe that'll be good. But are you gonna do it? Maybe not. Maybe listening to, you know, 10 minutes of this guy talking about basic practices of meditation on Dr. Oz.

Is that gonna do it? If that's the thing that allows you to maybe be open to the idea of mindfulness and then 10 years down the road, that's the memory that was there. It's like, oh, I saw that, I'm kind of into it. Then I think that's great. It's not for everyone at every point in time and I can't give my whole pitch about why I think

this work is important in a seven minute segment interview. But I have, I don't people that watch Dr. Oz read religiously and drive tremendous value. Yeah, yeah. I'm with you. I agree with your analysis. In the meditation world, the analogy that sometimes gets used, this is actually a business analogy, but is of a funnel.

So the top of the funnel is people who are either skeptical or maybe mildly meditation curious. And the bottom of the funnel is people who are either skeptical or maybe mildly meditation. Curious, and the bottom of the funnel is, I'm in Burma with my head shaved, like commuting with a tree. You're actually, you're dealing at the top of the funnel. It sounds to me like what you're teaching in corporations and hospitals, and going on TV, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm curious from that perspective,

one of the things that I've become really focused on as a person who talks about meditation publicly is what are the obstacles? Like what's getting in the way of people meditating? I have a friend who's at Google who's in charge of getting people to meditate at Google and his name is Bill Dwayne. And he said, he has some expression, I don't know if I'm gonna get it right, getting people to meditate at Google and his name is Bill Dwayne and

he said he has some expression. I don't know if I'm going to get it right, but it's like we know the medicine works. We just can't get people to take it. So from your perspective, again, at the top of the funnel, what are the major obstacles and how do we get people over them? Yeah, yeah. Um, all right. Well, I'll start with maybe the obvious one, which is time, you know, even though you can tell people you don't need to do this for an hour a day, they still have this feeling like, you know, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. And so if you wake up in the morning

and the thought is like, oh, I have to do 20 minutes of meditation a day. If you came right off of a workshop or, you know, retreat and you're really inspired, you could probably gonna do that 20 minutes, but after a couple of weeks of that, it's like a 20 minutes of meditation a day. If you came right off of a workshop or a retreat and you're really inspired, you're probably going to do that 20 minutes. But after a couple of weeks of that, it's like a 20 minutes of meditation or get this news button or go watch an episode of Modern Family, you're probably going to start choosing the latter after a point in time. And so that in itself just becomes a barrier to entry. The cost of opting in for many people is too much. The opportunity cost is too great.

So what I have been telling people, if they find themselves in that category, that camp of like, I can't do 30 minutes, can't do 20 minutes, then just come into one minute. And why? Do I think one minute is like going to be the thing that changes your life? You know, it could be really powerful, but not so much. What I love about one minute is there's very, there's a very low cost option, very few barriers to entry, because if you start saying, oh, I don't have a minute to meditate, we really got to start evaluating some things going on in your life, because you definitely need more

of the meditation if you make that argument. Even if it's like, you know, do it while you're in the bathroom, and if you say, I don't have a minute more to do it in bed, like do your meditation business while you're doing your other. And if you say, I don't have a minute more to do it and about like do your meditation business while you're doing your other business. You can fit one minute in. So with that, it's hard to argue yourself out of it. And now when you get somebody that wakes up in the morning, he's like, all right, it was 20 minutes.

Well, what if I just did one minute? So that, I could do one minute. So I sit down, do one minute. Usually happens people get to the end of one minute and I go, you know what, it kind of feels good. And let me do two minutes, all right. Then I do two minutes. And I like this, oh, let me do three.

And you can see what happens. You go from one to two to three to four to five. But what's key there is you go from this space of arguing yourself out of the meditation to actually arguing yourself into it. And why that is so important, more from a psychology perspective is. I'm literally gonna pull my phone out

and start typing this down. So this is not me being distracted. This is me being the opposite of distracted. And I'll tell you why in a second, but keep going. Yeah. So, one of the reasons that's so important is because it leverages something called autonomy. And if you study intrinsic motivation, self-determined behavior, specifically research by this guy named Ed DC and Richard Ryan out of University of Rochester.

They have like 30 plus years of research understanding what drives people to do things. Autonomy is foundational to that. And so I have this theory that I've been working. I haven't written anything about it yet. But when you set a timer or you have an external standard stipulation of like 20 minutes, 30 minutes, I have to do that. It's a subtle form, very subtle, but still a form of external regulation, where it's kind of like the difference between your mom and dad, you saying like, I wanna go to soccer practice,

and like now you're driven to go to soccer practice versus your mom and dad saying you have to go to soccer practice. Yeah, now I have to. That sometimes the timer can act, like I have to get to the end of 30 minutes. So when you're opting into every subsequent moment after that one minute mark, now there is full autonomy there. And because that there's going to be greater curiosity, there's going to be greater interest.

It's like you chose to be in this moment. You chose to be with this moment of pain if it's coming up. That's very different than having to grit your teeth and get through it. So I get that there's going to be different arguments around this. and people will say, well, you got it, you know, sometimes you got to grit your teeth to go through to understand and how to be with it. And you got to do the 30 minutes and sit through. I totally get that. But for many people, it's either the one minute or nothing at all. And I'd rather see them at least start with something they're going to do and then

feel like they have autonomy and interest in sustaining it moving forward. Okay, I've just taken a bunch of notes on my phone as you were talking and here's why, aside from the fact that that was just really interesting in and of itself, I'm actually, as we speak, in the middle of writing a chapter for my next book, which is like a little book, the next book I'm going to put out, which just comes out in a new year, is a sort of a companion piece to 10% happier. It's like the book is a road trip. We took across the country where we tried to find people who want to meditate, but aren't and made a taxonomy of all the reasons people aren't doing it. And then

we're trying to come up with great rebuttals to the reasons people aren't doing it. And so I'm in the middle of writing a chapter about the time issue right now because time is the trickiest issue. You just taught you, you just engraved a great disquisition on it, but a part of what, when people, there was something you said about before, like if somebody says they don't have one minute, well, we need to really talk about your life in some ways. Actually, what I found in my research is, and I'm sure this is gonna bring true to you, when people say they don't have time,

they actually sometimes need a bunch of other things. Yeah. Including, I don't believe in the benefits, I don't wanna make time. Yeah. It can speak to just laziness and inertia. It can also speak to a fear of seeing what's there, what I refer to as the Pandora's Box issue, that if I look, I'm going to see all

my trauma, all my ugliness, all mess. The other issue is people feel like, I don't deserve this. You know, I see this as my wife. My wife who is a scientist who knows the benefits, and is married to a guy who's much less of an idiot than he used to be because he meditates and yet she can't do it. And part of that is because she just doesn't believe she deserves the self-care on some level. And I see this with a lot of people, particularly people in the helping professions of my wife as a doctor.

And I've seen it also in the course of my road trip with social workers, et cetera, et cetera. So this time issue, which is the number one thing, is a kind of a window into a much deeper, darker place in our psyche. Yeah, you're right on. And you alluded to what I call the P word permission, giving yourself permission, actually do this. And one of the reasons why I say sometimes that if you just did a minute, let's say you didn't do the one to two, the three, but you just did one minute for the rest of your life.

You're showing yourself that you're at least worth showing up for yourself for one minute a day. And that is gonna carry over into subsequent moments. But above me on that, when I will first, usually like if I'm guiding people through their first meditation, it'll be about 12 minutes long, I will spend about three minutes in the beginning

with people's eyes closed, just walking them through the fact that I'm sure there's been plenty going on in your life right now before you came here, once this is over, plenty to do, but keeping in mind that you've allocated this time for yourself right now. And because of that, there's no place else we need to be, nothing else you need to do, nothing you need to accomplish.

And see if you can give yourself the permission to be here. And then I'll cite a quote by Parker Palmer. And he says, self-care is never a selfish act. It's simply good stewardship of the only gift we have, the gift we were put on this earth to offer others. Anytime that we can take care of ourselves in this way, we do it not just for ourselves, but for the many others whose lives we aim to serve. Well, yeah, I don't know, a less, a less fancy way of saying that is what they say during the airline safety instructions. Don't put other people's oxygen masks on until you put your own on first. You can't be of use.

If you're a mess, that's right. It's just, it's just what it is. I'm going to make it a mission. All right, you might not like this. You'll like it the answer. Well, you will like it at the beginning. So I had some misgivings about having you on not because, because I didn't really know who you were.

And I, I, this guy who, I don't know, this guy who's a big agent, Hollywood agent, reached out to me who I didn't know him either, but seemed like pretty impressive dude, and he was like, you know, you should really take a look at Cory and so I just was like, all right, fine, I'll do it. And you are really impressive. I'm glad that I, because I came, I mean, I thought I was gonna like you

because we have a lot in common, but like I was a 27 year old guy who was on Dr. Oz, not that I made against I came, I mean, I thought I was gonna like you because we have a lot in common, but like I said, 27 year old guy who is on Dr. Oz, not that I made against Dr. Oz, because I've been on Dr. Oz. But anyway, you are a massively pleasant surprise. Let me just say that as a compliment that it's very genuine. Thank you, I really appreciate that.

But I'm almost done. I've just had to cut two more questions for you. Before we finish, I want to pick up on something you alluded to before that maybe the mindfulness wave is crashing or cresting or something like that. Do you think that's true? It's so hard to tell. I don't think people's attention spans can continue to see mindfulness on the cover of Time magazine more than two more times. I have been, you know, a scientific American.

What's great about this is that the research is so strong and foundational that even if it goes away as a fed, as an efficacious modality for reducing suffering and improving well-being, it's going to be there in medicine in a huge way. I think we're just scratching the surface of getting into business, so that's going to continue to grow in education that's only going to continue to grow. But in terms of just seeing it plastered all over the place, I mean, I even just saw an article in time the other day talking about work

place ways to reduce stress. And then underneath it says, don't worry, we're not going to tell you to meditate for five minutes. So I think there's already an acknowledgement that it's getting a bit overused. But let's keep in mind for anyone that's listening. This has been around for 2600 plus years. So I'm not saying meditation is going away.

I'm just saying kind of the hype around this, most of which is, I would argue is not a sincere interest, it's just people like latching onto something. Yeah, you know, New York magazine used to do this thing, I don't know if they do it anymore, they talked about like the hype cycle, so you get like the build up and then the, a thing, whatever it is that's being hyped reaches a peak and then you get a backlash, then you get a backlash to the backlash. Oh.

And so like, I think hype cycles are a good way to sort of pan back the camera and think about this from a more geologic perspective. Cause I do think we're gonna see a lot of that. But at the root of it is, at the root of the proposition of mindfulness and meditation is, like this thing has been tested,

not only in the labs, but also in the individual labs of human minds for thousands of years. And so I do think it's gonna be around and we may get some bad presence, some good press at various times, but I think we're kind of on an inexorable march toward this thing being a public health staple.

I hope in the long term. Yeah, I agree. Here's my last question for you. People who want to learn more about you. Where can they do so? So there's this new thing that I started doing. So anytime I give a presentation, people want follow up resources.

I don't always have the best way to do that. So I have this number that if people texted their email address to this number, in three minutes, it'll send them a follow up email that has like five of my different guided meditations by my server page. So this is, the number is 917-980505. 917-980505. And so if you just text your email address to that, it'll give you all my contact information but also like five of my different meditations, a seven-page mindfulness starter kit with app

recommendations, books and all that stuff. So just to get started, it's all there. But I'm on the normal social media. I Facebook live one of my Tuesday night meditation groups. I write a post called Coffee with Quarry on Instagram and Twitter if you want to check that out. So all that is there. But my primary teachings on Long Island, you know, I've run a number of groups, retreats in the Long Island, New York area. So if you're nearby, it'd be great to have you. And if not, you could come by for a retreat.

You know, I've run those a couple times a year on Long Island. Awesome. Yeah. Great job, man. Thanks, Dan. You killed it. You really did a great job. OK, 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 guests we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at DanB Harris. I also want to thank Hardly, the people who produced this podcast and really do pretty much all the work. Lauren, Efron, Josh Kohan, 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 Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. at Wondery.com slash survey.