Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Dr. Mark Epstein On: How To Transform Your Neuroses Into “Little Shmoos”

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

A Buddhist psychiatrist (and one of the key players in Dan’s meditation career) talks about the overlap between Freud and the dharma.Mark Epstein M.D., is a psychiatrist in private practice in New York City, is the author of a number of books about the interface of Buddhism and psychotherapy, including Thoughts without a Thinker, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart, Going on Being, Open to Desire, Psychotherapy without the Self, The Trauma of Everyday Life and Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself. His latest work, The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life, was published in 2022 by Penguin Press. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard University. He has been a student of vipassana meditation since 1974.In this episode we talk about:The insubstantial nature of thoughts Staying present through anything without clinging or condemning. Turning down the ego and focusing on othersHow you transform your neuroses from monsters to little shmoos. And whether 10% is the right number?Related Episodes:Click here to listen to the previous episodes in our tenth anniversary series. Sam Harris on: Vipassana vs. Dzogchen, Looking for the Looker, and Psychic PowersFor more information on Dan & Mark's retreat in Arizona: we don't have the link available yet but will update here as soon as we do!To order the revised tenth anniversary edition of 10% Happier: click here For tickets to Dan Harris: Celebrating 10 Years of 10% Happier at Symphony Space: click hereSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/mark-epstein-10thAdditional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, Dan here. Before we start the show, I want to tell you about a live recording of this podcast that we're doing in New York City on March 28th. I will be interviewing two frequent fliers from this show, the legendary meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, who will be just coming off a three-month solo silent meditation retreat, and Dr. Mark Epstein, a Buddhist therapist and best-selling author. The event will actually be a celebration of the 10th anniversary of my first book, 10% Happier, and a percentage of the proceeds will go to the New York Insight Meditation Center. Come early if you want for a VIP guided meditation and Q&A with me. Thanks to our friends over at Audible for sponsoring this show and the event.

Tickets on sale right now at symphonyspace.org. This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody, how are we doing? We are diving into the deep end today with Dr. Mark Epstein, one of the most important people in my own meditation career. Before we dive in with Mark, let me tell you a little story. I first got turned on to Mark Epstein through my wife Bianca, who gave me one of Mark's books back in 2009, might have been 2008, whatever the date,

this happened during a period of time when I was first getting interested in the self-help world, for lack of a better term. I had been reading books by people like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. I had even hung out with both of those guys. I found them compelling, especially their focus on how we all have a voice in our heads, even hung out with both of those guys. I found them compelling, especially their focus on

how we all have a voice in our heads, an inner narrator, an ego that is constantly launching us into the past or the future, instead of being awake right now, and also frequently serving up deeply terrible ideas. So I was compelled by guys like Deepak and Eckhart, but also quite frustrated, especially with Toley, because I didn't feel like he provided any practical advice for dealing with this aspect of the human condition, the voice in our heads. So my wife, having heard me talk about all of this with varying levels of coagency,

finally remembered that she had read a book many years earlier that touched on many of the same issues that I was wrestling with in the moment. And it was Mark's book. So she handed me the book and I was looking at it and I liked this guy immediately because he had actual credentials. He's a Harvard trained psychiatrist. By the way, the book he gave me was called Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart and it's one of many books that Mark has written about the overlap between ancient Buddhism and modern psychology. That night reading Mark's book in bed, that was my first real exposure to Buddhism. And I realized that 2,600 years before Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra started cashing

their royalty checks, it was the Buddha who was talking about the voice in the head. He called it the monkey mind. And he, the Buddha, actually had practical and doable advice for managing the monkey mind, the ego, whatever you want to call it. The advice was that you should meditate. So after reading Mark's book, I called him up and asked him if he would be willing to grab a beer with me. He was, and we did, and we really hit it off. And he essentially became my mentor and guide during my

on ramp to Buddhism and meditation. It was incredibly generous of him and we're still good friends today. I wrote all about Mark and our relationship in my book, 10% Happier, he kind of plays a Tuesdays with Maury role where I keep touching base with him as I learned to fit meditation into my busy life as a newsman. So I'm having Mark back on the show today because we're in the middle of a special series to celebrate the 10th anniversary of 10% Happier.

By the way, I just put out a special revised anniversary edition of the book with a new preface and expanded appendix filled with meditation instructions. If you want to check that out, I've put a link in the show notes. Anyway back to this podcast series during the month of March I'm gonna talk to many of the key players in the book including Deepak Chopra, Joseph Goldstein and Spring Washam and today It's Mark. When I asked Mark what he wanted to talk about he uttered the following words Emptiness as the mother's love You will hear Mark explain what exactly he means by this,

but for now I will say that that combination of words is classic Mark. It's a mixture of dharma, lingo, and psychological terminology. It may sound esoteric, but it's actually readily accessible and quite practical. We also talk about the insubstantial nature of thoughts staying present through anything

without clinging or condemning, turning down the volume on your ego and focusing on other people, how to transform your neuroses from monsters to little schmooze, and whether 10% is the right number. One last thing before we dive in here, you will notice at the end of the interview, Mark and I hint at getting a future retreat on the books. In other words, we talk about he and I leading a meditation retreat together. As it turns out in the weeks since we recorded this episode, Mark and I have actually planned a retreat together that we will be hosting. It's coming up in January of 2025. We're going to do it at a beautiful resort and spa called Miraval, which is in Arizona.

If you want to come, just click the link in the show notes. And as always, if you want to keep up to date on what I'm doing, you can sign up for my newsletter at danharis.com and follow me on social. First, though, some BSP, blatant self-promotion. Don't forget, I'm doing a live podcast taping in New York City on March 28th. I'll be talking to Joseph Goldstein, the great meditation teacher,

who will have just wrapped up his annual three month solo silent meditation retreat. So we'll talk to him about what he learned. I'll also be talking to Dr. Mark Epstein, a Buddhist therapist who's been on the show many times and has been a great friend to me and a mentor for many, many years. There will be a band there, Mates of State,

and you'll have one of your first opportunities to buy 10% happier merch, which we just started making. Oh, and finally, if you come early and pay a little extra, you can get a VIP ticket where you can get a guided meditation from me and a Q&A. Tickets on sale right now at symphonyspace.org. We're doing this event by the way as a celebration of the 10th anniversary of a book I wrote called 10% Happier. Shortly

after I wrote the book I not only started this podcast but I co-founded the 10% Happier app and in celebration of the 10th anniversary until the end of the month you can get the app for 40% off. Get this deal before it ends by going to 10%.com slash 40 and dive into guided meditations and insightful courses designed for you. That's 10%, one word all spelled out, dot com slash four zero for 40% off your subscription.

When you visit Audible, there are endless ways to ignite your imagination off your subscription. voices and celebrity talent. Check out Audible Canadian originals, including The Downloaded, a sci-fi adventure featuring Brendan Fraser and Luke Kirby. A first listen is waiting for you when you start your free trial at audible.ca. I'm Peter Francopern and I'm Afro-Hersh and we're here to tell you about our new season of Legacy, covering the iconic, troubled musical genius that was Nina Simone. Full disclosure, this is a big one for me.

Nina Simone, one of my favorite artists of all time. Somebody who's had a huge impact on me, who I think objectively stands apart for the level of her talent, the audacity of her message. If I was a first year at university, the first time I sat down and really listened to her and engaged with her message, it totally flawed me. And the truth and pain and messiness of her struggle that's all captured in unforgettable music

that has stood the test of time. I think that's fair, Peter. I mean, the way in which her music comes across is so powerful, no matter what song it is. So join us on Legacy for Nina Simone. Dr. Mark Epstein, welcome back to the show. Dan Harris. Mark Epstein, welcome back to the show. Dan Harris. It's been probably 15 years

since I met you or something like that. I was wondering about that. Yeah, that's scary. I know. I think it was 09 that I emailed you and begged you to be my friend, and here we are. Wow, I'm glad I agreed. Well, so when we were chatting over dinner recently about what we could talk about in

this interview, you used a phrase that is so packed with meaning that I suspect the whole conversation could be about this. The phrase was emptiness as the mother's love. And so does that sound familiar to you? That sounds like something I would say, yeah. Overdo that. Yeah. As we got into it. Yeah. Okay, so let's just start with that as an intriguing phrase to start a conversation. Perhaps it's best to begin picking that phrase apart with the word emptiness. What do you mean by that?

Oh, starting with the most difficult thing in Buddhism. Let's talk about what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean that nothing matters or that nothing is real or that it doesn't mean nothingness, emptiness. Okay, it's got another meaning from the Buddhist point of view. My friend Robert Thurman always says they picked the word emptiness because fullness was already taken. So, but they could have just as well said fullness. And the other thing he said about that is that the root of the Sanskrit word, which is shunyata, you know,

shunyata means emptiness. The root comes from the Svi, Svi, which means the swelling of a seed, like in a pregnant womb. So emptiness from the Buddhist side connotes like a full emptiness, the equivalent to that of a pregnant womb. So it's like the womb that holds potential. All those notes are part of it. Emptiness as relationality would be the other way to talk about it. Emptiness is the realization that nothing exists in and of itself as an independent self-sustaining isolated thing. Everything including you and me and what goes on inside of us, etc., is

connected in some way to everything else. All that is part of what the word is meant to suggest. And it's thought to be a realization that precipitates out of meditation practice, that if you just sit and watch yourself as we try to do practicing mindfulness, that naturally your understanding of quote unquote emptiness or shinyata will emerge out of that process. Somewhat mysterious thing. That phrase, whatever I used when we were having dinner the other night, emptiness as the mother's love, one of the experiences that I had that led me to that was teaching at Tibet House with Robert Thurman. And he in the midst of, I think I was talking about

Winnecott and the Good Enough Mother, and how to bring a Buddhist understanding to psychotherapy and child rearing and all of this. And he pulled out a 19th century Mongolian poem that he had once translated that began with the phrase, I was like a mad child long lost my old mother. Never could find her though she was with me always. And as he was reciting that poem, something in me sort of started choking up.

Like I was a mad child. I was like a mad child, long lost his old mother on an emotional psychological level I could relate. But it turns out the poem is about the discovery of emptiness, which the Mongolian poet was calling mother emptiness, you know, because the feeling was, oh, I've been searching and searching for this realization, and I thought it was this. I couldn't find it anywhere. I thought it was nothingness. I thought I had to get rid of

everything about myself. And then I was like a mad child, long lost this thing, which had been with me always. And then he discovers emptiness as the equivalent of his long lost mother's love in the pure Relationality of his being that was the point so all of that was Filtering through me when we were talking about this and I could go on about it a few if you dare me I Do dare you let me let me hopefully provoke the next round of going on by probably clumsily Attempting to restate the core thesis. Let me see. Yeah, good. No, you're good at this. Yeah Well, I want you to fact check me. So somebody came up with the term emptiness. Yeah, not Garguna probably. Oh Okay, I thought it was some English translator of ancient

Darmic principles. Well, I think in English it was an English translator of ancient dharmic principles? Well, I think in English it was an English translator, but I think it was Nagarjuna who brought emptiness to the four in the three marks of existence, you know, of Dukha, Nica and Anata. They don't include Shunyata as one of the marks of existence. It's impermanence and substantiality and unsatisfactoriness. And then emptiness comes in a couple of hundred years later.

And it's traditionally Nagarjuna whose poetry was the original source of the concept, as I understand it. You just threw out some terms. Let me just see if I can unpack them. Go ahead. As the dummy in the conversation and make sure that everybody can grasp it. In Buddhism, we talk a lot about the three characteristics. So funny to say we Buddhists now because when I met you I was

anything like that. Yes, I have. We talk about the three characteristics of existence, the three things you can see about reality if you meditate and pay attention to the world. Even if you don't meditate. The three marks of existence, they say. The first is impermanence. Everything's changing all the time. It's not hard to grasp. The second is suffering, which is a tricky word, a better way to say it would be unsatisfactoriness that because things are changing all the time, you're never going to get some sort of lasting satisfaction out of that next bite of cake or the next promotion because you'll always want something more. The thing that you finally manage to grasp is in itself changing. And so life is unsatisfactory. And if you cling too hard you will suffer. The third is not self, meaning that we feel very much like we are isolated egos navigating

a dangerous world, but actually there if you look hard enough internally you won't find some solid core nugget of self. You then went on to say that an ancient Buddhist scholar and thinker named Nagarjuna was the one who said, well, maybe there's a fourth mark of existence and it's emptiness. I always thought that not-self and emptiness were basically the same. I think they are, except not-self is self-referential in a certain way, the way we think about it, and emptiness is a broader instinctive need that we have to impute thingness into ourselves and others extends into all of experience. Emptiness is like a broader way of looking at it, I think. Got it. So the word empty, and this is where I was starting

to go before, I think it was chosen because it was trying to point to the fact that everything is empty of an essence. We might feel like there is some core nugget of us, a soul or something findable within our mind between our ears, behind our eyes. We may feel that that chair I'm sitting on is a thousand percent chair. But actually, if you look closely at the chair or your mind,

you won't find an essence of chair or Mark or Dan. And that is what is being pointed to through the term emptiness. Am I close? I think so. I mean, using the word essence as the definition of it is, I think, one traditional way of talking about it. So, in my mind, as you're talking the word entitativeness is one that I have heard repeated a lot that has sort of stuck with me.

It sort of goes with certainty that the instinctive thing for an anxious self in a scary world is to want things to be solid, certain, to have a solidity, to have a structure, to have an entitativeness that we can count on. I think emptiness is undercutting that. Emptiness is said, that's why the physicists or the people who read, who like to read about the equivalency of quantum physics and Buddhism, the underlying quantum reality that the physicists

have seemed to have pointed to fits with the Buddhist idea of emptiness, whether it's actually the same thing or not, who knows. But it's getting at a similar kind of, oh my God, we think this is real, but we could actually put our finger through it. And there's some subjective experience of that that tends to come with meditation, that can be scary, but also can give a sense of loosening up or some kind of sense of freedom

when we see that we don't have to be doing that all the time. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that notion that emptiness or insubstantiality or lack of entitativeness is scary at first, but ultimately liberating, it feels to me that that was maybe what you were pointing to when you talked about emptiness as a mother's love. Yeah, there's some way that all this connects up with love, that the understanding that one's own separateness is illusory. If your separateness is illusory, then you must be connected. And so if we're not separate the way we imagine we are and we're actually connected in a way

that we don't quite understand, what is it that makes the connection? Then that becomes sort of obvious. What is it that connects us all, really? It must be some kind of love. So when they pull back from love some of the Buddhists, then they just talk about relationality or relativity that nothing exists without our observation of it. We're always in a subjective mode in our experience of the world. So the thing doesn't exist separate from our perception of it. That's another way of trying to get at the same thing.

But I feel like that can be too remote, you know, pulls back too much, that the actual experience that tends to dawn in meditation is of some kind of heart opening, that, oh, I'm not this scared, isolated person that I deep down, am afraid that I am, but actually I'm a loving being. And I think that's where the mother's love comes in, that we all come from that. That's what the Mongolian Lama's poem is about. I was like a mad child, long lost my old mother, never could find her though she was with me always. We all come from that. That's the great evolution, the great mammalian evolution,

that the mother gives birth of the child from her own body, we're immediately, like we make eye contact, we're immediately connected. The relationality is there from the beginning. So it's a kind of inherent capacity that we all have as evolved creatures. And there's some kind of recovery of that that comes through the Dharma, through meditation practice. That's the hope. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha I've gone astray but in meditation one way you might experience emptiness is You start to see and I'm basing this just on my own experiences. Yeah, you pull yourself out of the world You're on a retreat That's the only time this is ever quote-unquote worked for me and many of the distractions of the world are gone

You were left in the first couple of days with your Howling neuroses and then over time maybe those quiet down just a little bit and so by day five or six in the silence with no schedule and or you don't have much of a traditional schedule you're sitting and walking all day long a few meals the level of inner chatter might go down a little bit and you start to see the raw data of your senses, seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, thinking, and then you start to see, oh, this is all happening really fast.

It's pain in my knee, random thought of something I'm gonna say to my boss when I get home, making a plan, hearing a bird, and boom, boom, boom, the so-called objects of meditation. The things one is aware of start to speed up as your concentration ramps up. And after a while in this mode, you might see that things are moving too fast

for there to be anything solid, including you. Where is the observer of all of this? You can't find it. And that can compute as terrifying. But the analogy that's often used is jumping out of an airplane. And at some point it's thrilling. And then at some point it's terrifying if you realize you didn't pack your parachute. And then the ultimate liberation is when you realize there's no ground to hit anyway. And so you might realize, oh yeah, there's nobody solid home here on some deep level

and some microscopic level, but that doesn't need to be terrifying. It's actually a sign of some deep and inextricable interweaving into the universe. The apex predator of all spiritual cliches, oneness with the universe, interconnection, et cetera, et cetera. So, okay, I've said a lot of words there. Does any of that make sense as one logical progression?

Yeah, I mean, all of that makes sense. In a way, it makes too much sense. It's sort of a traditional description of the progress of insight as handed down to us through the past couple of hundred years of the rediscovery of mindfulness and the charting of what might happen in meditation. And I think it's valid in a kind of removed way from what the actual emotional experience of the thing might be. You and I have a friend who just went on his first silent meditation retreat and came back and reported how impossibly difficult it was

and what a struggle it was and how after four or five days, hearing an evening Dharma talk about shame and blame and so on, he came back to his room and suddenly and inexplicably started weeping and realizing that he thought he was coming to the meditation retreat to watch his mind and watch his thoughts the way you're describing. But really the retreat he realized was about listening to his heart and that what he felt was all the anger and blame and so on that he had been generating in his attempt to maintain control

in the world, how that had been hurting his own heart. And that's where the tears were coming from. And that was such a profound realization, much more than even seeing the insubstantiality and so on of the momentary thought the way you're describing, that that was such an opening, you know, like listening to his own heart and feeling the pain that he had been causing himself through his own mind. I think that is actually much closer to a true progress of insight than the way we're kind of traditionally taught. It's supposed to look, but I think it's like completely idiosyncratic. And that's part of the beauty and the mystery of it, that each one of us, when we'd let ourselves go into these environments and just do the practice the way we're taught,

it unfolds in a unique and personal way, even though you could chart it as a universal kind of progression. Amen to all of that. Just a question, our mutual friends' recent meditative insight about listening to his heart. What does that have to do with emptiness? Well, emptiness has the mother's love. It has a lot to do with it.

I think the way it has something to do with emptiness is that in his... I want to say in his previous incarnation, which is overdoing it, but in his pre-retreat mind, part of what must have been motivating his inner critic, which you've called it in your own book, part of what was motivating that was the need to be right, the need to control, the need for certainty, the need to blame. So that's all anti-emptiness. That's all what's the real opposite of emptiness. Taking it personally. Yeah. And being separate and trying to control and all of that. So when he feels the pain

of that, the self-inflicted pain of that, what opens up is his heart. So what's opening up is the mother's love or the father's love love, or the husband's love, or whatever he may be. What's opening up is love, which is relationality, which actually is emptiness, because it's interconnection and the lack of separateness. It has to be. If any of this is real, it's not like there are alternate realities that you can stumble into. It's love or emptiness. It has to be intertwined. I would think. That to me seems like it's worth unpacking, not because I'm skeptical, but just because I don't yet fully understand it. But I think what you're saying there is one can open one's heart, in other words, experience love and a sense of connection with other people. And that is, I think you're saying that is emptiness. That is seeing. Yeah, that's what that is what I'm saying. You might not

get the classical Buddhist insight into the self being an illusion or the insubstantiality of everything in the universe, but simply seeing that you are connected to others, that you have this capacity to love, that is emptiness. Well, the big critique, you know, of mindfulness as you and I have practiced it, the big critique from people who like sort of try it, but find, I don't know if it's for me or not, or who are coming from other spiritual traditions, the big critique is that it's too dry and that it's so mental and that like, where's the love? But I think it's there and it's there in this way

that we're trying to unpack. But it's not always presented that way. It's often taught in the way that you were first formulating it, that you're sitting from this observing place and you're seeing things on a finer and finer level, that your notes per moment, your ability to know, you could define it mathematically. And as it increases your understanding, your insight also dawns, et cetera. And there's a way that that is, I think keeping the emotional experience, the actual emotional experience

of sitting with yourself mindfully over time and what are the actual realizations, the personal realizations, you know, how are you really, what are you reflecting on in your mind, what motivation is changing as a result. And that's just not always talked about so easily. But the personal experience, you know, when someone comes in reports, when you're there as a teacher and you're really listening to people's emotional experience,

it's much richer than just the generic progress of insight. Coming up, Dr. Mark Epstein talks about critiques of mindfulness, the paradox of the self, and spiritual bypassing. spiritual bypassing. Okay, maybe that's a stretch, but if I say pop star and shuttle cocks, you know who I'm talking about? No? Short shorts? Free cocktails? Careless whispers? Okay, last one.

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or listen early and ad-free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. AirPods Pro with adaptive audio automatically keeps out the sounds you don't want to hear, so you can listen to your music and lowers your music to let in the sounds you do need to hear. Hi there. Hi, what can I get you? I'll have a strawberry mango coconut probiotic smoothie with wheatgrass. Anything else?

Extra wheatgrass. Here you go. AirPods Pro with adaptive audio, available on AirPods Pro's second generation when enabled. Don't forget to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the 10% Happier Book. We are offering subscriptions to the 10% Happier app at a 40% discount until the end of the month. Get this deal before it ends by going to 10%.com slash 40. That's 10% one word all spelled out.com slash four zero

for 40% off your subscription. I love the fact that as soon as you start talking about enlightenment, you're in an argument. And so one view of how enlightenment happens is in the old school Buddhism is called the Progressive Insight. And you, Mark, are saying that there's a way in which that can be a little bloodless.

And I'm wondering when you talk about the important realizations that are there to be had about your emotions and your relationships, from a Dharma standpoint, couldn't those be kind of dismissed as content or stories, the type of thing we're trying to transcend through seeing the reality of momentary existence. I think all too often it gets dismissed a little too easily. Like even in your book, you know, like what's the subtitle of 10% happiness?

I can't fucking remember. It's too long. You can't. Come on. It's like how I reduce stress, tameamed the voice in my head without losing my edge, a true story. I found self-help that actually works, a true story. Yeah, you had so much. But anyway, it's like for me, what I remember from it, from that beginning story of yours, it's like the inner critic thing.

And then you play with that as, you know, I'm 10%, you know, maybe it improved me by 10%. Like you discovering the sort of nastiness of your mind that had affected your personal interactions, you know, that was huge. And people relate to that. That's not just like an incidental mind moment to be treated like any other. That was a real life-changing insight in your own way, similar to our friend that I was talking about, where you were feeling the pain that you were causing yourself. And instinctively, once confronted with that, instinctively you wanted to change.

Like that kindled something in your heart. You know what I'm saying? You're a million percent correct. I could imagine from the standpoint of some schools of Buddhism, the argument might be, and it's hard for me to play devil's advocate with much authority because I'm not a Buddhist scholar, but I could imagine the argument would be, well, what's truly liberating isn't just seeing how nasty the inner dialogue is, but seeing that the inner dialogue itself is insubstantial, is empty, you don't need to take it personally, it's all just spinning subatomic particles of the mind.

Yeah, I think that's really important and necessary because just seeing, oh my god, look what my mind is really like, doesn't automatically free you from it. When you come home from the retreat and your family is irritating you like they always have, and when I come home from a retreat, my family is like, oh no, he's like worse than ever. Because I'm like sensitized to my, everything is like too much. It's not like it's a miracle transformation. You see how painful it can be

and then you have to work with it. And in working with it, that's when, oh, those critical thoughts that seemed so valid, like I know I'm right about this and I have to make my point and extract the apology and so on, those are just thoughts. When you really look at them, they're completely insubstantial

and I don't have to be run by those kinds of thoughts even though they keep coming. They're as relentless as ever in my mind. But as Joseph Goldstein always says, it's not what's happening in your mind, it's how you relate to it. And so what's changing from the meditation is that I don't have to relate to those thoughts as if they really matter. You know, I can start to see them just for what they are as like a drag.

But the last retreat that I was on with Joseph, he was like, I realized that a thought is just a little bit more than nothing, you know? And I thought that was such a good phrase. I mean, working with thoughts is a great way to see the three characteristics right there. One is they're just changing all the time. Two, if you cling too much to them and take them personally or too seriously, you will suffer.

And three, if you look for the thinker of the thoughts, you won't find them. Yeah. But the motivation, see, I think the motivation for even doing all of that comes from those kinds of emotional experiences that we were talking about before. And then when you start looking at the eightfold path in that regard, right intention or right motivation, even right speech, right livelihood, whatever they all are, that starts to come alive for me as, oh, you've had a little bit of a realization now, how are you going to work with all of this in real life? So just a reflection and then a question. For people who are new to Buddhism, the Eightfold Path is one of the first pronouncements of the newly enlightened Buddha 2600 years ago, if you believe the scriptures. And he laid out the path to enlightenment and it was there were

eight steps and then it's not quite a cookbook in that you do the eight steps and you're done. There are eight, maybe a better way to say it would be eight components or ingredients and they include things like right mindfulness, right livelihood, right speech, etc. etc. So there's an ethical component, a meditative component, a viewpoint component or philosophical component. You're Mark, I believe we're saying that, yes, you can get pretty technical about emptiness, not self, etc., etc., and those realizations are powerful, but let's not forget the quality of the heart that drives you to meditation in the first place and that can change after you've done the practice. Yes.

And so what does that quality of the heart, in other words, my suffering might lead me to the meditation cushion. Yeah. And my insights on the practice might lead me to being less of a jerk to myself and others. Yeah, that's the phrase you use. Less of a jerk.

Yes, well, I use asshole, but what does that have to do with emptiness? Well, again, I think it comes back to, like, when you're observing your own mind, you're not just like seeing random thoughts. It's not just the incidental randomness of your mind that makes such an impression. What you're seeing that's bracing and potentially motivational and transformative is you're seeing what a jerk you are or what an asshole you can be, what an addict you are, how much pain you're causing yourself, how angry you are. That's what the real emotionally laden experience is. And that's where they,

you know, what are we longing for? We're longing to be free of a lot of self-inflicted pain. Certainly, there's enough other inflicted pain that we are also longing to be rid of, but so much of it is self-perpetuated, even when there's been terrible experiences that have happened earlier. So much of the residual feeling is self-perpetuated, and that's what one sees when one sits down to meditate. So what does that have to do with emptiness? We naturally take all of that very seriously. One of the writers and psychoanalysts who I look up to the most is this guy, Adam Phillips,

who's a British child analyst who wrote the first biography of Winnicott, who's another important figure in my mind. But Adam Phillips, in one of his many books, talks about how the nostalgia for how we were mistreated in our childhood, the need to go back and extract an apology or an acknowledgement or make things better. That's our most violent nostalgia, as he is the phrase that he uses. Like, we really want that. We really feel aggrieved, or at least I do.

And that desire for, it's almost a kind of vengeance is deeply embedded. And I think that's one of the most profound meditative experiences. So to begin to unpack that is to experience emptiness. If that desire for vengeance is empty of self, then imagine how liberating that could be. So that, and that's where my me being a psychiatrist and a therapist and so on is the Buddhist view has been helpful for me.

The Buddhist view is helpful, but you've spent many years and many, many books wrestling with some of the tensions between the psychological view and the Buddhist view. And I think a lot of it goes back to the question I asked earlier that this temptation from a Buddhist standpoint to dismiss might be too harsh of a word or maybe it's the exact right word that the stories of our lives. Yeah. I don't think there's any need to dismiss the stories because the stories themselves contain the emptiness that is real.

So you can look at the Desire for Revenge or any other story that's been swirling since childhood or since through your ancestors or through your past lives, if you believe in that kind of thing, you can look at any of those stories and see the insubstantiality and there's emptiness right there. You can look at any of those stories and see the insubstantiality and there's emptiness right there. You can look at any of those stories and see the clinging.

You can see the way that those stories are being turned into self. You can see the selfing, we might say, or the clinging. And it's in seeing the clinging that it liberates itself. When you release the clinging what's left, then that's the insubstantiality that you're talking about. But I don't think you can leap over the clinging just to see the insubstantiality. Like the Tibetans say, in order to find the self that doesn't exist, you first have to identify the way you experience the self. You can't just say, oh, it's, you know, not real. You have to really feel it deeply how you experience your separate self. Where's the Dan Harris in you? You

know, where's the mark in me? And to not do that might be a kind of, what's referred to as spiritual bypass. Yeah, spiritual bypass usually means, oh, something's bothering you, but you're not gonna look at the thing that's bothering you, you're just gonna watch your breath. And so you're never gonna deal with, you know, what's wrong in your relationship to your kids

or your spouse or your work or whatever. You're just going to be like, I'm cool. But this is like a bypass on another level. Like if you really want to understand selflessness, you first have to find the self that doesn't exist. And where is it in you? And only you can find it. And to make this even trickier, there's a paradox at work here on a deep, deep

level on the subatomic level, the self doesn't exist, but on the conventional level, the chair I'm sitting in is a chair and the guy I'm talking to is Mark. And so you kind of have to hold these two things in your mind simultaneously. Yeah. The guy you're talking to is Mark, but who is Mark talking back? From inside of Mark, it's much murkier inside of me. Like, where is the Mark? Like I remember myself from nursery school when my mother would come to pick me up and

I didn't want to go. But she would say the Mickey Mouse Club is on, you know. And I wanted to see Annette Funicello, you know. And I remember that. Like that's an early bit of Mark. But when I dig down looking for like what do I find? But it's not like there's nothing. There's like stuff like that. So what do you do I find? But it's not like there's nothing. There's like stuff like that.

So what do you do with that? You know, and there's a grievance that I've been nursing since before I can remember about maybe something should have happened, something more should have happened than did happen that got preserved in me as a different kind of emptiness, you know, like what's wrong with me, something's wrong with me. I don't really know what it is, but you seem to have more of whatever it is, you know, than I do. And I'm a little insecure as a result. And

is that that's like, I really could identify with that as that sort of essence of Mark, but that's ridiculous. So I think what you're saying is that you can look inside yourself and when you look inside yourself you see, as you said, a different kind of emptiness. Like part of the story of Mark is that there's some dysfunction, there's something missing or wrong that other people seem to have and we all I think have stories like that whether they're examined or not. Not everybody does, but there are some people who don't, but a lot of people do.

And well, everybody's got some story internally. It might not have to do with a unique thing. Most people seem to. Most people seem to, yeah. And there's a way from a Buddhist standpoint that this may be a misinterpretation of what's being said from the front of the meditation hall, but often at least is an intimation that, hey, let's not get too hung up on these stories

because the point here is to see not the content of the mind, but the process of the mind, the way the mind works. And I think your, much of your work has been about, whoa, whoa, whoa, actually, there's data in these stories that can bring us to deep dharmic understandings of things like emptiness. Yeah, I think that's accurate.

I think that a lot of my work has been trying to make room for that and to see the validity of that approach. That there is material there that's worth paying attention to from a dharmic perspective, that the seed of the self that doesn't exist, it lies in those in that content, or at least in the clinging to the content. And you can't get to the, you know, you have to get to the clinging in order to not cling. And the way to get to the clinging might be through the content,

not just dismissing the content. Yeah, just to see how am I relating to this old story I've got. Once you can, this is a tricky word, but like detach or be non-attached vis-a-vis these ancient story lines, as you said earlier, okay, well what's left then? What's left then? As you can see, well, this is a passing, a repeated pattern in the mind, but I can't put my thumb on it.

Like, I can't find these thoughts. It's like grasping at a cloud. And that is where a key learning can take place. The other day, I was listening to one of your podcasts, can take place. The other day I was listening to one of your podcasts and you were quoting Ram Dass as being a connoisseur of his neurosis. That's where the meditative path had led him. And I remember him talking, instead of seeing them as big monsters, they start to appear as little shmoos, he would say. And so I really like that. Like, that's a moral on the lines of what I think you and I are talking about here, that by not just dismissing, but by finding the way we inflate the content,

or cling to the content, and then seeing the humor in that, the sort of tragic humor in that, that we can lessen either the whole that it has over us or that's one way of saying it or the way we cling to that violent nostalgia. You could talk about the progress of insight in those terms also, you know, that in becoming a connoisseur of your neurosis, you're also becoming a connoisseur of the insubstantiality of your neurosis. Coming up, Mark talks about turning down the volume on your ego and focusing on other people

and self-acceptance and compassion. Hello, I am Alice Levine and I am one of the hosts of Wondries podcast British Scandal. On our latest series, The Race to Ruin, we tell the story of a British man who took part in the first ever round the world sailing race. Good on him I hear you say, but there is a problem, as there always is in this show. The man in question hadn't actually sailed before. Oh, and his boat wasn't sea worthy. Oh, and also tiny little detail almost didn't mention it.

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And those plans are the opposite of quiet. Sing along to new favorite songs, try your luck at Titanic tongue twisters, have some fun with wondrous wordplay, and most importantly, bring your family along for all of the adventures in the Cat in the Hat Cast. Follow the Cat in the Hat Cast on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to the Cat in the Hat Cast early and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Wondery Kids Plus on Apple Podcasts today. Let's get back to Mother's Love. The way I hear it is, and it kind of goes back to what we were saying before about jumping

out of an airplane, seeing the insubstantiality of, of like everything can be deeply destabilizing, right? It's like, I have nothing to stand on here. There's no ground. They often refer to this as the rolling up the maths stage of meditation. I think what you're saying is, yeah, my compute initially is scary, but it's pointing to something deeply reassuring, which is this embeddedness in everything that exists. There is no essence of Mark. Mark is made up of all sorts of non-Mark elements, atoms from the

first exploding stars, etc., etc. And that actually should be really comforting and that's tied to the mother's love because it has to do with relationality. Let me say it a different way. There is an essence of Mark and the essence of Mark would be love. What is a mother's love? A mother's love is such that in the face of the child or the infant's ruthless attack or aggression, a mother neither abandons or retaliates, right? A mother stays present through anything that the infant throws at her because she loves the child, because the child came from her.

That ability to stay present, to not retaliate and not abandon, that's what we're doing in meditation with ourselves. We're staying present with everything. We're not clinging, we're not condemning, we staying present with everything. We're not clinging, we're not condemning, we're not holding on, we're not pushing away. I mean, at our best, not that anyone really can do this, but we're trying. But a mother really does this. There's no choice. A good enough mother doesn't retaliate, doesn't abandon. And that capacity to be neither one nor the other is what helps a child, what helps an infant, relativize their anger, their aggression. That's what helps a child not

think that their anger is totally destructive because no matter how angry they get, no matter what they throw at the mother, the mother survives. So therefore, their anger is not murderous. Because the mother survives, then the child gradually grows into an ability to empathize with her as a separate person who they don't have total control over. You follow all this? Yes, in the back of my mind I'm trying to connect it to emptiness, but I'm with you

thus far. The mother's love, her ability to stay present no matter what, makes the child's anger not be total. That thing about the the entitativeness of the anger, it makes the anger be relative because it can't totally destroy. So that right away is the experience of the emptiness of the anger. It's like, okay, it flares up. It doesn't destroy. The mother's still there. The child thinks, you know, I'm going to pound you to bits because you didn't give me what I wanted immediately. But there she still is. And what a relief. You're still here. And that in a reduced primal form, that's what we're doing in meditation also. We're both mother and child in the meditation. Right. And this is what is sometimes referred to as reparenting?

Yes. A term you don't love. I don't mind. We're replaying something where there's a second chance at all of that. It doesn't always go perfectly when we're young, which is why we're left with these feelings of grievance that we hold tightly to. But then when we're on the meditation retreat and we're just with ourselves and we're seeing how all that patterning, all that conditioning has affected our minds, we have a chance to do it over again in a different way. Because we're not just the child anymore. And I apologize if any of this is obtuse. I'm struggling in my mind to connect it to

insubstantiality, emptiness, this kind of absolute interconnection. And I think what you're saying is reality is doing for us what our moms, if we had one, did ideally, which is, yeah, that's as far as I can take it. The word absoluteness that you just used, I think that's the, when we're angry, we're really angry. We think we're absolutely right. A baby, an infant angry is absolutely angry, right? There's like nothing but the anger. The mother's ability to temper that, to ultimately to joke about it,

to lighten it for the child. You have a kid, you remember when he was little. When the child's hungry or tired or can't get what they want and having a fit inside you, you might feel like you just wanna slap them down and shut them up or leave the room, but you're not gonna do either. You're gonna stay with it.

And if you're lucky, you're not going to do either. You're going to stay with it. And if you're lucky, you're going to gradually like distract them or give them something to play with or joke a little bit about, I know it's all right, you're pissed. Come on. So that the gradual lightning that you're doing instinctively, that's what we're doing in meditation. The thoughts come, the memories come, the anger come, the emotions come, the difficulties come, and we're just there. Okay, another thought, not clinging, not condemning, not holding on, not pushing away, just allow, be open, see the humor in it. We're just doing that. We're just doing that to ourselves because our minds are like that angry infant that we haven't really come that far, except we

have that maternal capacity. It's not just maternal. It's paternal also. We have that parental capacity. That's what mindfulness is. A mother does it instinctively. She doesn't have to go to a meditation retreat to learn how to be a mother. It's there in us already. We're on the meditation retreat, we're laboriously bringing it out, you know, listening to Joseph Goldstein tell us how to do it. But it's in us already. When you find the balance in mindfulness, you know that you have it. It rings true, and you can kind of settle into it. And that has a calming effect on the emotional body, not just on the thinking mind. All of that makes complete sense, where I fear some level of thickness on my end is connecting it to insubstantiality.

Well, that relationship between absoluteness and insubstantiality. Well, that relationship between absoluteness and insubstantiality, I think that's the important link. Like we take ourselves so seriously, but when you start to lighten up about it, that's where the insubstantiality starts to creep in. And I think maybe where I'm going in my head with this that's causing the confusion that I fear is almost entirely on me is I

keep waiting for you to make an argument that you may have already made but I missed which is something about that like once you see through this illusion of entitativeness some sort of stop imbuing some sort of permanence and essence and core-ness to yourself and others and other people and other things in the universe, what's left is a mother's love. What's left is relationality. Well, what's left is everything. What I'm imagining, listening to you, rephrasing what I'm trying to say. Like when I go on a meditation retreat, just do it from a personal point of view, when I come into the retreat,

I'm basically obsessed with my own reality. When I sit and close my eyes, I'm thinking about my life, my family, my patients, what I'm upset about, what I'm not upset about in the deep recesses of my own, what I'm upset about, what I'm not upset about, in the deep recesses of my own mind, I'm very self-centered. Because what else would I be?

I'm just carrying my own experience, you know, whatever it is. I'm carrying my whole history. And then gradually, a lot of those thoughts will repeat those memories, all that will repeat themselves and I'll get like sort of bored with them. But some of them will be very sticky and I can feel how identified I am with being, you know, this person or that person and the whole trajectory of my life. And I might spend more time on the stickiness of those particular things. But as all that loosens and fades out, as I'm less self-centered as a result of just being exhausted by it or seeing through it, you know, as one tends to do, if

you're there long enough on the retreat, what's left? Joseph would say open space. There's that famous Zen haiku. Barn burns down, now I can see the moon. So the barn burning down is like the self centeredness burning down, disappearing. What's left? Now I can see the moon. What's the moon? And then your awareness or the night sky illuminated by the moon. What is the experience on know, what is the experience on the retreat becomes? It's like the outside, the walks and the wind and the trees and the birds, the outside landscape or the inner landscape. And what's the inner landscape when you're not so self-centered that I think that's where

the mother's love comes in. You know, what's left when you take everything out? It's not just empty. There's a lot of love there in all of us. And that tends to fill the space. The way this has worked for me, I think, is when I can get to the point of not taking myself so seriously and not being so self-centered, which is rare,

but when it does happen, yeah, I do see that what is left is Everything is the world. There's another Zen haiku. I think it goes something like this We sit together the mountain and me the mountain is all that remains Something like that. Yeah. Yeah, so it's like the me is out of the picture. It's just the world and Love is a bit of a loaded term because we think about it as, usually we buck it in. Romantic love. Yeah, romantic love or even parental love. But I think of love roughly as anything north of neutral, like the innate capacity we all have to, and this is a little glib, but to give a shit, to care on some level. And that just, I think if knocking it off its plinth

and that way knocking it off its pedestal just a little bit makes it a little, it makes it more achievable and understandable. And when you get a sense of how interconnected you are, you start realizing that of course it's natural to care about everyone and everything else, because it's you. Yeah, it's natural to care about everyone and everything else because it's you. Yeah, it's natural to care. I think it's a real visceral experience. I think it actually comes and fills you and that's incredibly enlightening, like clarifying that we really are relational

creatures and we really are all here part of this bigger thing. And we really do care, and that just becomes true. Do we need to go on a meditation retreat to have this dawning realization? Can we have it in regular life? I think one can get it in all different kinds of ways. It's mostly that it doesn't stick around. Like, you can take a psychedelic drug and have a big experience of it. But, you know, I know a lot of people who've taken a lot of psychedelic drugs and not really been transformed by it. And I think you can have that experience in a good therapy. You can have it and just taking

a walk. You can certainly have it on a meditation retreat. It's more the persistence of it is, I think, where the real challenge is. To know it in an ongoing way so that it actually changes the way you behave, that's a hard one, I think. Well, you called it a challenge. How do you personally meet that challenge? Personally, in doing the work that I do, in terms of being a therapist with people. When I'm just doing that, it's sort of like being focused in a meditation. It's much easier to keep myself out of it or to hone whatever it is that I am

for a distinct purpose, being trying to make a difference for the other. I think I'm much more dangerous in my regular life. Because the eye reasserts itself. Yeah. Our mutual friend, Michael Vincent Miller, who used to be your therapist when you were younger and is a couples therapist for me and my wife. You introduced me to him. Thank you. He's amazing. And Michael, if you're listening,

I know you're working on a new book. When that comes out, I want you on the show, please. We had a conversation that I found to be devastating. He didn't mean it to be devastating, but he basically, he said that you Dan, this is him talking, are kind of like the apex of the Western man, Western human in that. You've worked a lot on eye skills, the letter eye skills,

you know, achievements, oriented skills, but you need to get better at you skills, other people stuff. And I heard that as well. This kindly elderly therapist is telling me I'm a monster, but he didn't mean it that way. And this was five years ago and I have spent a lot of time thinking about that. And I'm saying this because I think it rhymes with what you're saying about the challenge of remembering our relationality is you need to develop these skills that help you turn

down the I, that's Miller's term, and be more focused on other people. So for you, it happens naturally through eight to ten hours a day of therapy. For the rest of us, we need to find the skills, meditation, being a patient in therapy, taking walks in nature, whatever. We need to find the skills to turn down the eye and turn up to you. Does all of that, does that go down easy for you? Yeah, I think that all sounds right to me. I would just add what I was trying to say before, which is that I think the way of turning down the eye is to truly experience the eye. Yes.

So in taking that walk, it's not just getting away from the eye, which is a little bit, you know, when I was saying that in my work, there's a little bit of that in what I'm saying, that I'm just turning myself off. And so then, you know, when I come back into my life, there I am again, you know. Optimally, that wouldn't be the ultimate best thing to be doing. In taking the walk to pay attention to the eye, thereby to release some of the clinging

to the, to the eyeness of it, to the grievance of it. Our friend who I talked about at the retreat, that like listening to his heart, feeling the self-inflicted pain that's been going on unconsciously. I think that's where the hope is that we can, we actually can do that for ourselves. And there's some of the re-parenting

that's going on in that, the way the mother helps the child not take itself so seriously because his or her diaper is wet, that we can help ourselves in an analogous way. Another little anecdote here, personal anecdote, I always hesitate to do this a little bit because I'm interviewing you and I don't want to turn up the eye on myself, but I'm saying this because I think it might be illuminating or helpful, or at least I hope it will be. For me in my own practice, the introduction of what is often referred to as loving kindness or meta-METTA practice

has been very helpful in doing what I believe you just described. So many people listening know what meta-practice is, but it basically is, you know, where you envision a series of beings and then send them phrases like, may you be happy, may you be safe, etc. etc. And many people don't like this practice because it feels forced and trickly and all of that stuff. And I was definitely in that category. What it helped me do, I believe, is to be okay with the horrors of my own personality, to see my greed, my selfishness, my anger, my hatred, and not take it as personally. It kind of just turned up the warmth in my own mind so that I could do what I believe you're describing, which is turn down the eye by getting comfortable with the eye.

How did it do that, do you think? I find that interesting what you're saying. It made me view the contents of my own consciousness with more warmth just the way I was developing this capacity through this very forced exercise of envisioning people and saying, may you be happy, safe, healthy, live with ease. And then in the progression of meta or loving kindness meditation, and for you skeptics out there, there's been a lot of science around this practice and seemed that science seems to indicate that it has all sorts of physiological and psychological benefits and the progression of these beings you insert at some point yourself. And so what I found was that as a frosty New Englander forcing myself to bring out something

that was always within me, which is this warmth, you might call it love, but again, in the broadest understanding. Yeah, compassion, you could just call it, yeah. Yeah, compassion, absolutely. I like friendliness. Yeah, I like that too. When inevitably in my practice, the parts of my personality that I don't like

would trot onto the scene. I think my practice, hitherto, was to note it with some sort of clinical clarity to see, oh yeah, that's anger, that's anger. But I think there was a subtle aversive flick within the mindfulness that was preventing me from really being cool with it. And once I was able to bring the meta on board, the whole machinery became more tractable.

Yeah, I really like what you're saying. I wrote this little piece for Tricycle a couple of years ago about an experience I had when I was doing the audiobook of Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart. So it was a long time, it's like 25 years ago now, 20 years ago, something like that. But you probably, well, you know, as a podcast, hov TV person, all that. But for me, doing the audiobook, I had never done anything like that before. And so I was in a recording studio, and like in a little telephone booth sort of thing with headphones on and the engineer outside of the booth.

And I had to read the book perfectly. You know, I couldn't change any of the words or cough or make a movement or anything because it had to be a pure recording. And when I was little, I used to stutter. And I would have a really hard time, like when we went around the room in school and had to say our names. I could never get the M sound of Mark out. And so I would get all hot inside myself and twisted up and very embarrassed and so on.

And my parents sent me to a speech therapist who really helped me. I think it was like an early kind of teaching about meditation, like just how to relax myself instead of being so down on myself. But anyway, when I was in the recording booth, the beginning words in Going to Pieces, I couldn't get the first sound out. It was like a regression to when I was little. And one of the tricks that that speech therapist had showed me was, oh, if you can't say the word,

if you can't say Mark, you know, if you just started a different way, so I would often say my name is Mark. And somehow by inserting the phrase my name, I could trick myself into like, but so always like I haven't stuttered in a long time overtly, but inside I could sometimes feel the tendency and I would just change the phrase a little bit and be fine.

But because it was my own book and I had to read it perfectly just as it was, I couldn't change the phrase of the beginning of the book. So I was stuck inside this booth. And it was like probably a couple of minutes, but it seemed like forever. And finally I heard the engineer in my ears saying, Dr. Epstein, is everything okay in there? And I was like, oh no, here I'm like the Buddhist psychiatrist, you know, writing about meditation and I can't even like read my own words.

So I've tried, many years later, I tried to write about that experience in some kind of Buddhist dharmic way for tricycle, the Buddhist review. And I labored over it, and but finally got to the end. And I realized through writing about it and reflecting on it that much, I could feel a kind of compassion in myself for my younger self, my younger self who I both was and wasn't still that person. I'm mangling the grammar of it,

but I did it better in the piece. The younger me that in some sense was still in me and yet wasn't. And that was such a essence of, even though we're not supposed to have an essence, that was such an essence of meta directed towards a place in myself that's very sticky, you know, very, still very embarrassed about, identified with, ashamed of, you know, it was actually in the writing led me to that feeling of kindness as you would say, friendliness. Something nice about writing sometimes. Oh yes, absolutely.

And there's, there are a lot of things that are not so nice as well. But I really like that story because it does, it is absolutely what I was trying to say that, that if you can develop some warmth, compassion, kindness, friendliness, visa, the, the most difficult and sticky aspects of your personality, then you can relax, you're not taking it seriously, and then you're more available for other people because you're less stuck with your head up your own ass. Yeah.

And you're more available for yourself too. Yes, of course it's all, yeah. Yeah. In the end it's all the same thing in some ways. Yeah. Anything I should have asked but failed to ask here, Mark, this has been a lot of fun. God knows what you should have asked. I think you did fine. Anything I should have said that I didn't say?

No, no, no, no. I wasn't looking for reassurance. I just want to make sure I didn't, if there was something I, you wanted to say that, I didn't give you a chance to say. No, I always like talking to you. Likewise. Actually, along those lines, I do want to say thank you because you are in many ways a sine qua non of this whole crazy adventure that I've been on for the last 15 years, for sure, the last 10 years since the book came out. Meeting Mark was a key juncture for me in terms of getting interested in Buddhism and meditation. And I have clear memories of, you know, having labored over this book for five years and it came out and I really was worried that it was going to ruin my career or just whatever

and then ended up doing really well. And nobody was happier for me than you. And I remember being at an event with you to help launch the book and it was a week or so after the book came out and you asked me how it was doing and I told you where it was on the chart or something like that. It was uncontrived what the Buddhist called Mudita, this very hard skill of being happy for somebody else's happiness. So anyway, long way of saying thank you for everything.

Well, total pleasure. Thank you. Anything else we should discuss before I let you go? Anything else you want to let people know about that you've made and put out into the world? I'm going to plug all of your books. But do you have a website where people can go or anything like that? There's a website that just has my books on it.

So it's markupcmd. And it just has the box. Although you and I have been plotting, we haven't figured out the details yet, have been plotting doing a meditation retreat that people can sign up for. We haven't figured out where or when. I know, I'm excited that.

Yes. I'm interested in how that might be. Yeah, well, I owe you an email with some more details, but yes, just everybody know that Mark and I have been plotting something special, a small little meditation retreat that people can sign up for if they're interested. And so details to come. Mark, thank you again. This was a huge pleasure. Really appreciate you. Totally welcome, Dan. Nice for me too. Thanks, Ante Mark. Always great to talk to him at any time. And I'm so glad I sent him that email as promised,

because we do now have a retreat on the books. As I mentioned at the top of the show, it's coming up January 17th, 2025. So plenty of lead time here. It's going to be at MiraVol, which is a beautiful facility, a beautiful spa in Arizona. Details in the show notes. Thank you as

well to everybody who worked so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davie Lawrence Smith, and Tara Anderson. DJ Cashmere is our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor, Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post-production, and Kimmy Regler is our executive producer. Alicia Mackey leads our marketing and Tony Magyar is our director of podcasts. And finally, Nick Thorburn of the Great Band Islands wrote our theme.

We'll see you right back here very soon for a brand new episode as we continue our 10th anniversary series. If you like 10% happier, I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus and the Wondery App or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. AirPods Pro with adaptive audio automatically keeps out the sounds you don't want to hear so you can listen to your music

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