Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - You're Gonna Be Alright No Matter What: On Facing Anger, Aging, and Loss With Humor and Grace | Sylvia Boorstein

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

The legendary dharma teacher on self-acceptance, the two-sentence trick she uses on her own anger, and what actually makes her happy after 90 years of living. Sylvia Boorstein, PhD, LCSW is a co-founding teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre California and the author of five books on Buddhism, Mindfulness, and particularly That's Funny, You Don't Look Buddhist: On Being a Faithful Jew and a Passionate Buddhist.  In this episode we talk about: Why turning 90 makes the Buddha's teachings on impermanence feel real instead of theoretical The line Sylvia repeats to herself that's become the antidote to ill will and anger Why "there's always a hand to hold" might be the whole point of being alive The four (or three) noble truths, reworked in Sylvia's own words A grocery store treat that turned into an unexpected lesson about where happiness actually comes from What she says to people who are dying, and why it's not a lie And much more Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here Follow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTok Subscribe to our YouTube Channel This episode is sponsored by: BetterHelp:: Don't let stigma stand in the way of support. Start therapy with BetterHelp. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/HAPPIER. Warby Parker: Our listeners can buy one pair of glasses and get 20% off any additional pairs at WarbyParker.com/HAPPIER — and using our link helps support the show. #WarbyParker #ad To advertise on the show, contact [e-mail] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Hey, welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Today we have a fantastic conversation with a legendary Buddhist teacher, Sylvia Borstein. As of this taping is about to turn 90. We'll have turned 90 by the time this thing posts. And we talk about how not to miss your life, how to accept life's ups and downs with a measure of grace, the best way not to be depressed, how to talk to yourself in moments of anger, and the fact that we're all going to be all right. It's an incredible conversation. Just a little bit more about Sylvia before we dive in here. She is a co-founding teacher of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center. She has written five books, including pay attention for goodness sake. It's easier than you think, and happiness is an inside job. We'll be right back with Sylvia Borsstein. A few things before we hear from our sponsors, I highly recommend that you head on over to

Dan Harris.com to check out my newish meditation app 10% with Dan Harris. right now we're in the middle of this really cool series where every Sunday the legendary Dharma teacher Sharon Salzberg is leading a live session where she does some teachings on the Buddha's eightfold path. You can think of the eightfold path as the Buddha's foundational list. It's his cookbook for leading a happy life. Sharon does some teaching on one aspect of the path. She guides a meditation and then she takes your questions. We're in the middle of it right now, but it's not too late to join. You can sign up. at Dan Harris.com and you can watch the first few sessions on video replay and then join the rest of

them live. It's really cool. One of the keys, I believe, and this is an evidence-based assertion, one of the keys to starting a habit or maintaining a habit like meditation is doing it with other people. And that's what we're doing over on 10% with Dan Harris. Life is better in the carpool lane, join the party. We'll be right back after this. I only own one pair of prescription glasses, which I got late in life. My whole life, my vision was pretty solid. Later in life, I started struggling to see things at distance. So I went through the process of getting my eyes checked and then going and getting glasses. And it was really long and arduous and complicated and slightly annoying, which brings me to our sponsor today, Warby Parker.

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slash happier. That's 20% off any additional pairs when you purchase one pair at W-A-R-B-Y-Parker.com slash happier. Sylvia Borestein, welcome back to the show. I'm glad to be here, Dan. Let me start with the obvious question. So you're, as we sit here today, a few weeks away from your 90th birthday. I am. You've been practicing. meditation and Buddhism for 50 years. I happen to know that my first retreat was on July 7th, 1977, which if you write to July

at 7, 7,77, comes out 777, which in a gambling city would be a very good number and I think it was auspicious, so I like to tell people. But yes, and so this, This is 26. In 27, it will be 50 years. So you're coming up on 90 years on the planet and 50 years practicing the Dharma. Yeah. So I'm just curious, what's on your mind, given all of that?

Like, what's up for you in your practice and in your life at this juncture? I thought about writing a book. I might or might not try to do it. But if you write a book, you have to plan two years. And there are all those bad jokes about. At my age, I don't buy green bananas and all that kind of stuff. I don't start to write a book. And I don't know if I'm as witty or as anything as I used to be,

but it's different now to be writing a book. What I started to say was my first book was called It's Easier Than You Think, the Buddhist Way to Happiness. And I thought I would write a book called It's Harder Than You Can Imagine coping with being seriously old, or just being seriously old, because all of a sudden, the skills and the competencies and all the things that you've honed and accumulated and guarded and taken vitamins to maintain, and who knows what, all of a sudden they start not working anymore, and you have to think I can't do that.

I remember the first time I came home from some evening thing that I came home fairly late, and I had a half-hour drive until I got home. And as I was driving home, it was late in the evening, I thought I'm too tired. I really shouldn't be out. Anyway, obviously, I made it home safely. But I got into my house and was quiet. My husband, who's now my late husband, was there. and I remember coming in the front door and there was a little room right there and I went into

that little room and sat down and I thought to myself, I'm too tired. I'm really tired. And I had been in my life a very physically energetic person. It was not my way to be tired. And I can remember that was the first time I thought, ah, I'm tired. Do you get tired? I don't. I don't. I don't. get tired. Or prior to that, I didn't get tired. And now I do. And so that took a little getting used to. Uh-oh, I get tired.

So I think what you're trying to say is, or at least one thing you might be trying to say is, at nearly 90, the teachings of the Buddha around impermanence do not feel theoretical. No, they are real. And as a matter of fact, I remember hearing when I first started to practice, when people said, here's a big thing, is old age, sickness, and death. And because of old age sickness and death, when the Buddha made his way out of his

secluded life and looked around, he saw the secrets, the big realizations of old age, sickness, and death, that those three teachings, which you presumably saw in that fable, he thought, ah, there's got to be something else to do. But, you know, he didn't really say what there was to do, specifically about. old age, sickness and death, except whatever comes along to be able to accept it with a certain amount of grace. One of my good friends, when I was still a young person probably in my 30s, a friend of mine died, a person I still admire very much, because he was actuarially speaking too young to die. He was a young man with a family and a profession and everything going for him.

and he got an unfortunate cancer and he died. He wrote a letter to all his friends to get sent out to them. And he said, I would have wanted more, but I never wanted other. And I thought to myself, wow, that's the kind of mind I want. You know, that I never wanted other means, like now a person is 35 or 45 and gets a diagnosis of something for which there is no cure. to be able to say, well, I would have wanted more, but I never wanted other. It would be heroic.

It would be so different. That's not fair. Why me? Why me? Why me? I think that's the crux of the whole teaching is we get born with this one life at this time, and then things happen. And you don't know whether it's going to be tomorrow or whenever it's going to be tomorrow,

Sometimes I look at a whole classroom of people, and maybe there's 50 or 100 people there, and I say, can you imagine how many streets we collectively crossed our whole life without any of us getting killed? Because all of us are here in this room. That's amazing, you know, there's 50 people living approximately 50 years. It's a miracle that you live a whole life, that one or another accident doesn't befall you on the way. And to be able to say, which I am trying to do these days, it's fantastic. I get to be 90, and I did not get run over yet. And the bridge that I was driving over or being driven over, because I don't drive anymore, that's another big thing.

Okay, you got used to not being able to do this now. Try this. No more driving. Okay, now try this. See if you can do this. And to be able, that, I think, is the job when you start to get. It's always a job. Can you do this? Can you do? Can you accept? Whatever it is. Whatever it is. You have described several collisions with impermanence.

You've lost your driving privileges. You lost some of your energy that you used to have. You lost your beloved husband. But you are bringing to bear decades of pretty intense. Buddhist practice to these moments. And I'm curious how successfully are you bringing it to bear? The honestest answer is better than I was six months ago. It's been about a year since I moved into this new place where I lived.

I had a big old house and I lived in it for 66 years. No. No, maybe 60 years. I was married to my husband's 66 years before he died. And I moved in and every once in a while, just a little earlier, we were in the museum today and we were looking at Fine China. And I thought to myself, I had a set of beautiful Villaroy and Bach service for 12 China. And it was in my house. That was a whole 60 years that I lived in that house.

And innumerable people for dinner. And I love that China. and I had not only the china, but little salt boats. You know what a salt boat is? Is it like a gravy boat? It's a tiny gravy boat. Okay. So you get an individual thing here with a teeny tiny spoon and your individual salt.

Okay. Made by China companies. So I'm trying even to remember which was my, anyway, very beautiful China, little salt with this. And this is back in a day. because I'm as old as I am, people used to say, Sylvia sets a very good table. That was a big thing.

It's not longer a big thing. But when I had the stuff and I had a really big table and I had vitality and I could cook and I had all that beautiful stuff, I love doing that. And now I think, oh, my little salt things,

what happened to them? When we packed up and moved me out, I don't know where they are. What would I do with them if I had them? But it's always a little bit of thing that I used to be able to do. I really see in myself over the last year a change from a tape in my mind that says, what are I doing here in this place with all these old people? They can't remember.

They can't this. They can't that. Don't tell me about independent adults. They're not so independent. Everybody needs a walker. This is a parade of the walkers. A kind of an irritable tape playing in. in my mind.

And somehow I've lived there and been with them and they're people, they're just old people. And I noticed that the climate of my mind changed over the years. Thank goodness I feel much better. All of a sudden, I'm looking at them,

not like those people who are old, but we people, all of us, we're all getting old. And moving along honest moving sidewalk that's going to get us to the end of our life, whether it's next week or in 10 years or when it is or whenever. We don't know when. One of the things I love about your story about moving into the home for allegedly independent seniors, and I've watched my parents go through this. One of the things I love about your story, though, is even after so much practice, you still had some resistance.

And I actually think that's a beautiful thing to be open about because many people get involved in the self-improvement, personal growth, game, and expect consciously or subconsciously perfection. And what you're saying is, no, even at the deep end of the pool, Neurotic tapes are going to start playing in your mind, and that's okay, but you woke up eventually, and that's the capacity that you've trained to wake up sooner or later. This is not good for me. This feeling badly poor me. Look at this. I'm stuck with all these people.

Because I think the whole thing about the mind unfolding is not so that we could have any heroic energy to sit. it immobile for an hour or two or still the mind or not get upset. That kind of heroic conquering the mind was never really interesting to me. What I'm interested in is the ability to turn my mind into something sweet and loving. Because you feel better when you do. Oh, I forgot about that story. I'll tell this story. Okay, then I'll tell you another story on the top of that.

I'm here for all of it, yes. Okay. I was flying on a plane from San Diego to San Francisco, I don't know, 20 years ago at least, because it involves one of my daughters 30 years ago, flying on a plane. And there's rarely any kind of bump. It's a 50-minute flight. It's not that long. It's rarely bumpy.

And I'm flying along, minding my business. And there's a person sitting here. I haven't even really changed a hello with her. And all of a sudden. out of nowhere, the plane go, some serious shaking. And without thinking, I put my hand out like this, and she took the hand, and we sat like that. We sat holding hands for about 60 seconds, however long it went on, and then it smoothed out.

And the captain came on, and he said, ladies and gentlemen, I'm sorry, that was what we call a mountain wave. and we can't see them in advance. Really sorry about it. But they're rare that's near the coast, so don't worry about it. Meantime, we're still holding. So we let go, and we talk a little bit about thank you for holding that. So part of the reason I like to tell that story

and it happened a long time ago is because there's always somebody whose hand you could hold. And really, when it comes down to it, Maybe if I wrote something, I would call it. There's always, look for a hand to hold. Don't do it alone. Anyway, always a hand to hold. So we start to talk about one thing or another,

and we're both flying up to the Bay Area. And I ask her, what do you do for a work? And she said, I work in the admissions office at UC Berkeley. I say, oh, my daughter just graduated from UC Berkeley. She said, oh, what's her name? So I think to myself, you know, how many people graduate from UC Berkeley every year? Thousands. So I said, her name is Elizabeth Boerstein.

She said, oh, I remember her. She's the person who at the last minute after they got the given out, the diplomas, called her up and said, we just noticed that the three credits that you got from Grinnell and used to allow you to graduate, Really don't count as credits, and you'll have to come in and take another test to get your degree. You have to bring back the paper. And what ensued from that and the fact that she finally got the degree. But thousands of people graduate from Berkeley, what's the chances every year?

What's the chances that she's going to remember Elizabeth Boisstein and her credits from Grinnell? And I think you don't know who this person is. everybody is two stories away from where you are, you know. If you talk long enough and you're interested, you find that out. I just want to jump in on this, there's always a hand-to-hold thing. So I had an experience the other day, I just want to run it by you, see what you would have said. As you know, I have an 11-year-old son, Alexander.

Sometimes he's a normal 11-year-old boy and does incredibly stupid things, and then sometimes he's really precocious and quite wise. And I was helping him get ready for bed the other night, and he, turned to me out of nowhere and said, Daddy, what is the point of life? Not in a nihilistic, depressed way. He was just genuinely curious. He said, I play a lot of video games,

and they try to make you think the video games matter. You're scoring all these points and getting, you know, achievements and your ranking on the leaderboard, but I know it doesn't matter. And so what about life? Because we're doing all this stuff, but we're going to die. I had, he was, I was on the spot, And I said, well, you have to figure it out for yourself, but I'll just give you my answer for me, which I think the answer is love.

There's always a hand to hold. We're in this confusing situation, born without being consulted on the matter. Dying, we don't know when, most of us. And so what's the point of this whole thing? Be useful. Hold somebody's hand. I think that's great. What did Alexander think?

Shockingly, even though I was being very cheesy with him, he considers answers like that to be cheesy. He was like, yeah, that tracks. I like that answer. He must be a nice young man. You know, he's a regular 11-year-old boy in many, many ways, and, you know, makes fun of his father. And sometimes I'll say, good morning, Alexander. I'll say, good morning, loser. But I know, it's funny, and I deserve it. He tells me 75 times a day that he loves me.

So he's just a very sweet kid. That's lovely. Yes. Would you agree with my answer about what's the point of being alive? We are all of a sudden. I have no idea how I got here so fast. It seems to have happened like I missed whole decades. And I didn't.

I was always very busy. I was never incapacitated. But all of a sudden, boom. And where did that come from? It just goes by, and I don't feel like I missed it, but I'm surprised that I think about limited number of years I might yet live. It doesn't matter. Everybody doesn't know how much long are they going to live.

It's a miracle, actually, that we get up in the morning with remembering who we are, as long as we do. And where we came from and what we thought and with a coherent idea of what's going on. When I talk with people who don't have a coherent idea, I'm really moved by it. But the moved is they get moved to say, where are you going? I'll take you there. You were talking before about how what you think the point of the practice is is to make the mind sweet and to be.

warm toward other people because that's what makes you happy. And I sometimes think of that, and I'm kind of borrowing from the Dalai Lama now, as the highest form of selfishness. I don't know if it's selfish, but I think it's ultimately the best way to not be depressed, to connect yourself to, first of all, who's sitting and playing next to you. And second of all, that whatever elision takes place in the mind that connects this event to all events ever, that even when I die, it's not just me dying. It's this whole circle of life just turning and turning and turning and and people borning and people dying, people borning and people dying,

and not separate from me. And sometimes I've had an experience. I was walking along in an airline terminal at some point, 20 years ago maybe, walking along in an airline terminal, and here came a person walking towards me, a big person, I guess a dad, and he had strapped to him with one of those things that you put a baby in,

a baby Bjorn or whatever it is, with the baby's facing out, so not sometimes in facing out, and I'm walking along, and here comes that person with that baby, and baby's got his eyes open, And I look at him, and my imagine is that he looks at me. It seemed like that to me.

And that it seemed to me, or the story my mind told, is we saw each other in that moment. And I thought to myself, that baby is me. In a newer version, just starting his trip or hers into the rest of their life, and I'm already over the curve, coming to the other. but we're not separate from each other or for anybody else in this terminal who's going and coming and going and coming

from whenever they popped on to wherever they're going to get off this earth and we're not separate from each other and that's the best feeling that I know that there are fancy ways to say it as a Buddhist or as emptiness or whatever but it is empty of anything not me

not us. He is wrong. Us is what it is. All of us. I wasn't meaning to go there with that much, but it's a lovely. I remember it. It's got to be 20 years ago, maybe 30, when I was still traveling around. It turned out that I wrote lots of stories about being on planes and talking to people, because there was a period of decades that I was traveling a lot and teaching a lot and meeting people a lot. And I've been making notes about something, you meet a lot of people and they don't all say something to you. And every once in a while they do. I was teaching a yoga class one time when I was 35 or something. And in a local community college. And I taught a class yoga for senior. and I was at that point somewhere between 35 and 40. It's ridiculous.

People aren't getting married until they're 35 or 40 now. Here I am, an older adult teaching a yoga class. And a lot of people came, older adults. And I talked, and I welcome, oh, I remember he had this kind of Yitzhak Pearlman crutches, half crutches. And he came in and he said, my friend John, here he comes to this class, he said it would be good.

I says, fine, you know, find a match it wherever you want. I will leave you alone and if you need any help, let me know. But otherwise, anyway, my way of teaching was not to fix people up and go around. I did my own practice in the front

and whatever people could do, they did. So I do my whole thing in the front. And at the end the time when it's over, people are putting their stuff away and getting ready to leave. And I say he's getting ready. He's standing up and he's ready to go. And I go over to him and he says, I want to thank you so much. He said, you're a very good teacher and I enjoyed your class, but it's too hard for me. So I won't come back again. So thank you very much for having come, and he walks off to the door.

And he's about to go through the door, and he turns around and he says to me, I just wanted you to know that I was a member of the United States. In 1904, I was a member of the United States Olympic rowing team. You see, I got you. Does I get you? Yeah. Yeah.

That he wanted to tell me that. Now I'm tearing all up. That he wanted to tell me that. at that moment. And I thought, boy, and it's happened a lot of times that somebody says something, and people say, you know,

hundreds of things to me. Somebody said something. And I think that's like a communication from on high. You know, I just want you to know that I was, once upon a time, da-da-da.

And I took away a lot from that. What did you take? I have to tell another story. My teacher, Rabbi Zalman Shakhti Shalomi, said when something happens to you, and it's really important, like it was something you did well or something that you suddenly understood well, he said, make it like a deposit. It's like winning something. Make a deposit in the safe deposit box in the back of your mind and put it in there. And sometime in your life later on,

when you're feeling a little low, go through your deposits and see what you have there. What's valuable? That happened when I was 35, so that's 55 years ago. The fact that he had been an Olympic rower and felt the needs tell you in the context of him not being able to do very gentle yoga, to me it speaks of impermanence.

It speaks of the human need to be seen and recognized. Anything else it says to you? I'm also thinking about it. What I think about was I think he liked me and he wanted to touch me with a story about him that wasn't infirm. Right. And I am glad that I went over to talk to him

so he could tell it to me. And he probably felt good afterwards. So it's another hand to hold? It's another hand. To be able to hold a hand is really, you know, we're all just doing this. Somebody wrote this. I remember if it was Ram Dass who said,

we're all just walking each other home. But that always touches me when someone says that. We're all just walking each other home. Or you didn't take the bait before when I used the word selfish. I was kind of picking up on the Dalai Lama's term of wise selfishness, that we're all selfish by nature. That's just part of the human animal. Yeah. But the highest form of maybe self-interest would be to, as you said before, turn your mind into something sweet so that you're inclined to hold the hands that need to be held.

Yeah. I remember in stories. And what else I'm discovering? is that when I meet somebody and they say, oh, Sylvia Borstein, I read all your books, I'm so happy to meet you,

and the story I like best because I tend, I teach by telling stories because I don't want to pontificate. You know, I have a, my style, myself,

requires that if I'm going to say something like such and such is the end of suffering, I'm going to say, in my experience, da-da-da-da-da-da, da. So that it's just my experience, what, you know. Otherwise, I'm going to say, that's it. It's been my experience. Or I'll tell you a story. At the time that I began my Buddhist meditation practice in 1977,

with all of my teachers, Jack and Joseph and Sharon, we were all young. I was always older than they are, because I am, but we were all young. It didn't occur to me to think about, or didn't, but I let it go. We went on retreats, and I thought I was heroic doing them because I was 35, 40 maybe, 97. I was born in 36, 46, 56, 66. 66. I was 40. And I was a yoga teacher, so I thought my body would be great. And it wasn't. But I did what they did. And for me, what it was in the beginning was I was proud of myself when I finally sit on the floor, on a Zafu, and sit for a whole time and sit still. And I thought that was great. And I didn't even think to say, by the way, what's the end game?

What am I supposed to learn from this? Why am I doing this? A friend of mine who recently died, I'm discovering how many times I'm telling a story now and I'm having to say a friend of mine who recently died because it's a recent phenomenon. Anyway, my friend Mary said, tell anybody. My friend Mary was a Dominican nun. She said, I can really understand, and people will understand, if you tell them what you're doing and towards what end,

and ask them what they're doing, not the name of what they're doing. She's a Dominican nun. What's her practice and what are her? So what would I say about my practice? So I could say I do a meditation of paying attention. and I do it this way and that way, and I pay attention to this or that. But she said, you have to ask, towards what end? What are you hoping will happen?

What's the point? And when we all started, do you remember going to your first retreat being clear about why you started? No. I had no idea what I was doing. Yeah. I said, I didn't either, especially in the 70s. They didn't say it was just what was happening.

It's, you know, it was friendly. And my husband went on a retreat and he came home and he said, this is great, so you have to do it. Okay. Then you go and you see what they do. And anyway, fast forward, I got to be able not only to sit still, but actually to be able to quiet my attention and really begin to see things in a new way. and I don't remember a lot of people saying, you know, everything,

your something will fall away and the mind, heart opens. But, you know, what's going to really happen to me? And one time my husband, some years maybe into practice, said to me, what's happened from all your practice still, what's happened, you know, what's changed? And I said to him quite seriously, I said, I became kind. And he said, you were always kind. And I said, well, I became kinder.

And then I think that's profoundly what happened. And I didn't become kinder because all the practice just pushed all the aggression out of my mind or beat me down. I think what happened is that as I paid attention, I began to see. Really, everybody is suffering. Everybody is suffering. And I began to think about things like, we're all living in a hospital ward on a way to be dead and buried. But in the meantime, everybody is sick, and everybody is suffering,

and they can't figure out why. And they get caught some sufferings that are adventurous things, that a bug gets you or a gene gets you and you get sick. But we tell ourselves so many stories that make us in more pain. It took a long time for me to think that what was really developing in all the time that I was learning to sit and pay attention, I am, I think naturally good-hearted. I come from good-hearted people. I come from mild-mannered, good-hearted people who left me and they thought I was terrific.

So that is like a royal flush. I was the only child of an only child. And so they thought I was terrific, which is very good for you, by the way, whether you're an only child or not, to have your parents think that you're terrific. But to discover that the kind er I got, the better I felt,

accidentally, I told you the story about holding the hand. Do you like it if I tell stories? I like whatever you do. Okay, that's wonderful. Card plunge. I can tell you a recent story. The man who told me about being on the rowing team was like 50 years ago. Recently, I moved into my place where I had conflicted feelings about it.

And I came home from a shopping trip to the grocery one day. and I brought home with me. You know those little boxes, they look like mini fruit crate, strawberry crates with strawberries in them or cherries or in this case dates. I'm putting them in my fridge, which I have in my room, and I realize it's lunchtime. and I usually eat lunch with Celine and Jean, who are 84 and 96, and except for hearing difficulties, they think well, which is I love. And so I go to the lunch, and I pick up the little crate of figs that I bought for myself. I say, I'll just take it for Celine and Joan. And I go into the dining room, there's tables of people sitting all around, and here's

Celine and Joan. Oh, here are not Celine and Joan. They're not there. That's it. I come to my table with my little thing of figs, and they're not there. And I've got them. And I look around, and right next to me is a table for six, all full of its people. They're all there.

So I just, on the moment, turn around, and I said, would anybody like you? a fig. You think, who knows? Who could have figured that I said, who will like a fig? This is in August when the first figs are out. And the whole respect, figs. I love figs. My uncle Fred had a fig tree in his backyard. That was the best. So I give them the figs and I'm passing around. Someone else said, I love it. My mother used to make a pudding from figs. And I love figs. And I said, when I all around the table, and I'm starting to be on to something, because my mood, which was, as I told you, I've been working to get to be happy about being there. But now they were so excited about the figs, I could feel myself being coming, all excited. So they finished with

the six of them, and I see, here's another table for six. Say, anybody want a fig? And so I suddenly realized that I am having such a rump, giving out the figs. I wanted to give them out more than I wanted to have a fig. So I'd give out more figs. Then I sit down back and I go back to my table where Celine is then there with Joan. And I give them the last three figs. I don't think I had any. But I thought to myself, you know,

It is kindness that dictated do that. And then as I'm doing it, I realized I was getting really happy. I didn't need the figs. I just need somebody who I can be moved about and do something for, and then I'll feel happy about it. And I really was so buoyed up about that. I think about all the different kinds of Dharma stories I've told. And mostly, you know, I tell Dharma fables,

but mostly I tell people my experience what works. I think what happens over the year, or what I would say now, what happened over the years is I discovered about myself, and I think it's true for other people, that when we are connected to other people with a positive energy, we feel good. Yep. That's it. You said earlier that when your husband asked,

you, what's the impact of all the practice you've done? Sylvia, you said, I got kind, and he said, you're already kind, and you said, well, I got kinder. That raised a question of my mind. We live in a very angry time. There's a lot of political polarization. There's economic inequality, which is creating a lot of anger. There's a lot of fear and anxiety about encroaching technologies. I'm curious, do you get angry? Certainly. Sometimes I do. But I try very hard to not go with it. I tell people when they say, how much do you practice every day and what do you do? What is your spiritual practice? You sit every day. What do you do? You do metap practice while you sit. I say, my practice, I think,

from the moment I wake up in the morning, is to be mindful of the presence or absence of ill will in my mind. And as soon as I feel that ill will is arising in my mind, I address it because you feel it. I'm really getting restrained about not watching television. I don't not read the news. Actually, I get the New York Times in California. I get the New York Times delivered to my door every morning before I wake up. I go to my door at 6.30 in the morning. There's a good old New York Times.

If it's not there, anger arises. Because anger arises whenever something didn't happen and you thought it should have. It always reminds me of I used to have a dog who, whatever else about him, he would know when somebody came in the house who wasn't a regular person or when there was a that he knew or maybe there was, some animal outside the window, and he could be sleeping right next to me, and he would turn on his motor. Like, he's sleeping, doesn't even get up.

He'll open his eyes, and all of a sudden he going, and he's like starting, he can feel his motor go on when he hears it. I realized that if I stroked him, and I said, it's all right, Nigel, don't worry about it. Then he could turn the motor off. It wouldn't go anymore. And I think that about myself.

Look at that. I read a headline, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And say, don't do that. Just let's just read it. It's just a headline. It's not that I say I never do any other kind of mindfulness practice. I think the whole life is mindfulness practice, punctuated if we have time and situations,

by sitting still and really trying to consolidate the ability to hold yourself together. And I can't, I'm not suggesting that I can all the time do it. Can you say more about the moments when you do do it, when your inner Nigel is starting to rev up the engine? Yeah. What is the mechanism by which you can relinquish the ill will? We'll do this, whatever it is.

I say something to myself. But it's just, I see it, and I feel it, Dan. You know, if I feel it in you, the engine is running. and the body is starting to get tense. Sometimes when I teach people, I say, we're going to do this little exercise now briefly, just so you can see what happens. Feel your body as it's sitting.

We're all sitting here together. Feel your body, breathing in and out. Feel your arms. Any out. And now think about or envision some personage about whom you don't have good feelings. political or otherwise. And notice how your body starts to do that just when you say, think about so-and-so, so-and-so, because your body starts to do that and say, notice what happens,

your arms get tight, your jaw tightens, it's unpleasant. And see if, without telling yourselves any stories, you can just say to yourself, relax, sweetheart, you're going to be all right. This is okay. All right, we'll see. Not happening now. Take a breath, relax. So when you get it, that's the practice. You get up in the morning. They say, how long do you practice every day?

Well, this is sort of being clever. It's an all the time practice. The practice is, in this moment, is anger arising in me. And if it is, how can I relax it? Without thinking any story about it, he'll be defeated. How can I? I realize, because anger, it's just, you feel it in your body. How do you know you're angry? Because your body has done that. Relax and take a big breath in. And if that doesn't relax,

you see, sweetheart, take a breath. I was so surprised to find when I first heard about metam meditation, which probably all of your listeners know as the recitation of goodwill phrases to yourself and to other people. And in order to really get the hang of what that meant, I had to realize that when my mind was getting into a mess, I would say to myself, because it starts again, but he said, he said, back, and I would think to myself, sweetheart, you're in pain. I mean, that's the honest-to-God, mindful assessment of that moment when the mind is doing, or speak out, you're in pain. Get a grip.

Take a breath. But the breath in and out, in and out. Sometimes I say things like, I'm in pain and I don't want to be in pain. Take a breath in and out. Everything that arises passes away. This moment is going to pass away.

But I'm going to pass away first. No, you're not. That's practice. and you do it all day long. It never fails to fascinate and reassure me that we can learn to talk to ourselves. It's like we have our own meditation and Dharma teacher in our head that we can harness and use on ourselves.

A very lovely thing happens to me as years have now passed since I began doing that. I meet people and they say, I sat with you eight years ago, six years ago. And the best thing you taught me was to say to myself, sweetheart, you're in pain, take a breath. And then I do that, and I feel better. I don't solve the world situation, but I don't make myself worse.

You said you wanted to talk about your version of the Buddha's four noble truths, and you might reduce it down to three noble truth. The four noble truths anyway, I think is three noble truths, and the fourth one is just a filler to make an index. for a book. If they're none of them, they all require some sort of exegesis of what this all means. But the first one, which is life is difficult for anyone. And the second noble truth that we make it worse than it needs to be

by not being able to say, this is what's happening. What should I do? Which might be, one of the things I might do, was to do some ameliorative thing or a kindness to myself or something. And the third noble truth, which is lovely, is if the second noble truth is we make it worse, the third one is we don't have to.

The more thoughtful we are and the more kindly we are to ourselves. But I think for a long time in the beginning, I had a trouble with the life as difficult. one of the ways I was always looking for some way to not say life is difficult because it's more dourer sounding that I want to say life is amazing

that we woke up again and that I'm still here but we'll go back to anyway but it's hard once you get born inevitably you feel comfortable and then you don't and you feel comfortable and then you don't in the whole life as you feel comfortable and then you don't. And to be able to feel secure that if you let your needs be known to other people,

they'll take care of you. And for babies, for whom that's true, I feel so good when I see someone taking care of a baby in a solicitous way. And so dismayed when they're not. paying attention to what was his name? No matter. Child psychiatrist a long time ago. Anyway, said,

don't need to have a book on instructions for how to raise a child. You're its mother. You'll figure it out. Child's crying. They're trying to tell you something. They don't feel good. If they felt good, they wouldn't be crying.

So if they don't feel good, is to figure out what's going to make them feel better until they're in a place where they can tell you. what they don't feel good about. I read that book, I don't know how many times when my first children were born, and I didn't know what. But I said, don't worry about it, Mother, because it's your baby and you love it.

You'll figure it out. I didn't understand in the beginning when it said life is difficult for everyone because I was young and healthy. My children were young and healthy. My everything, I loved my work that I did. and I thought about people who live really terrible lives, sometimes through their own missteps or their own misfortune

or the state of the world or something. But I didn't actually get life as difficult until much later, and it didn't have anything to do with being a Kardashian or the king of the world or having everything in the world. It had to do with since we're alive, we're going to lose things. And we start in losing from the beginning. It starts to be demanded of us

to pull it together and get your body together. And I have five great-grandchildren now. And it is so cool to see the fifth generation of people are remarkable with their baby machines. Their baby, you know, they make another garment, and it looks like the prototype garment. It's really amazing.

I remember James saying something that he got quoted. James Barras said something about when his son was born like, you're on your own now. But, you know, he wasn't on his own. His mother and his father were taken care of. of him. And if we're fortunate, we're born into situations that take good care of us. If we're fortunate, we take good care of ourselves and the people we're taking care of. It's not that everybody is homeless or everybody is starving, but everybody is vulnerable to, at any moment, could any of us

get a phone call that say so-and-so was run over, so-and-so had a heart attack, so-and-so died. And that existential alarm, that it's all frail, it's all temporal, that really that the Buddha's final words, presumably, was where transient are all created things. And the best translation of his last line after that, I think, is move into the future with confidence. There's another translation that says, drive on with diligence,

and then you want to say strive. Move into the future with confidence is good. When you hear all things are transient, and you look around at the people you're living with now, and you look at the people you've referenced repeatedly in this conversation who have died, and you think about, how none of us is exempt,

does that bring up any fear for you of death personally? I don't think so. I think I'm old enough. I mean, I hope I don't die all of a sudden with nobody around. I want to die with somebody holding my hand, preferably one of my family. But I can arrange that unless I'm sitting in a dentist chair with someplace else, and then I won't know about it.

It won't matter. But if I can organize it, I'll be with the... my family and they'll hold my hand. But I'm not afraid of being dead. I remember when my father was dying, he said, I could just hear him saying when I just said that, he said, I'm not afraid of being dead, he said, but I'm just afraid of the minute that dying is happening. I think it'll be terrible, and I'm afraid of that. And I said to him, nah, I don't think so. I think you'll probably be in a coma, and you won't even know about it, and then you'll be, so, because you'll be already in a coma and then you'll just die and you won't know about what's happening.

And he thought about that and he said, yeah, I think you're right. Turn on the television. We'll watch the ball game. That was it. I was talking to our mutual friend Joseph Goldstein recently, the great meditation teacher. We were just talking about what we think maybe our respective final moments will be like. And one of us came up with the phrase, we want to go out in a haze of glory at meaning you know, let's be kept comfortable.

And if that means opiates, if that means whatever they need to give you, let's be kept comfortable. And hold hands. That's part of being kept comfortable, in my opinion. There's research to show that holding hands with somebody you love reduces the subjective experience. Yeah? Of the diee or the die?

Of anybody, whether you're dying or not, The way the studies were done, I think, were they were actually just delivering mild electric shocks or something like that to people. And they found that the people who were holding somebody's hand found those shocks or whatever infliction of mild pain was being inflicted less severe. There's a book called. It doesn't matter. Cutting for a stone. Anyway, the book is about intensive care units. and paramedics go out and pick up people in a terrible shape

that have been in an accident and the first thing you say to a person is you touch them and you say you're going to be all right and it's not a lie because if they die they're going to be all right and if they don't die and they get saved they'll be all right but if the person gets reassured you're going to be all right then you don't have to do anything

That's why if you get to talk to people who are in a bed right there and dying, he said you did a good job, you don't have to do anything else, now's your chance. I'm laughing because when I was doing that with my father, he spent some days in a coma trying to die, and he didn't die. And every once in a while he'd wake up suddenly, and he'd be breathing that kind of agitated breath that people do before they die. And I'd say, this is it, Dad, now is your time. You did a great job.

Everybody loved you. You did a wonderful job. You don't have to do anything. And then he'd go back to sleep in his coma. And another four or five hours would go by and sit. And then he'd wake up and start the breathing again. I say, this is it, Dad, now's your time. Finally, he gets up to her, and he's doing that stuff.

And I get up and I start in this is it, Dad. he opens his eyes and he looks at me and he says, you know, it's not that big of a deal. So that's it. This is like the Seinfeld version of the end of life. That's it. That big of a deal. And also just the absurdity of having to give the speech over and over. The first time, it's really meaningful by the third time.

So for you, again, you don't, even as you've been surrounded by people, passing away, you don't experience terror at the thought of the end, whatever that means. I have a fear that something will happen, or I don't have a fear that's active, but what I really don't want to have happen is any of my progeny or their progeny should die before me. I get to go first. That's, you know, otherwise be too hard for me and for any of my children, you know. You know, I actually know in my right mind that whatever happens, you deal with it and you can't change it. But maybe I feel like if I just say it out into the world, then the cosmos listens to me and, you know, that I really have some power over it,

which I know I have nothing. Meaning if you say it aloud, it somehow forestalls the eventuality? No, if I say enough, just, you know, like, I don't think there's anything that I can say arrange my death this way or the other way. I don't think there's anybody listening to what I have to say about that. But if there was, I would say, if there were, I would say, I go first. That's my thing. Because I don't want to deal, God forbid, with the pain of my children were they to lose somebody. I don't want to do that. If you could go back at age 90 and talk to Sylvia at, say, 40 or at some point in midlife, what advice would you give?

That's a really interesting question, Dan, because one of the things, I feel like my life in a certain way has been blessed, not in some magical way. But at different points, people have said, well, I should try this, Sylvia. And I said, okay, I'll do that. And someone else would say, well, did you try this? I said, okay. I tried a few things that I didn't like. They just weren't my thing.

Different meditative paths. I've been a psychotherapist. I watched my interactions with people. I got trained as a psychotherapist. It's not formulaic, you know, psychotherapy. You really can't teach people. I mean, nowadays, you can tell people about pharmacology, and there are a lot of things that people do,

which I certainly don't have any problem with people doing. I really discovered that I like sitting with people and talking to them about their inner experience and encouraging them to keep on. So there wasn't some sort of preventable, avoidable suffering you were doing at midlife that if you could go back now, you'd be able to turn the volume down on? I don't feel like I had a suffering life.

I really had such good luck. I met my husband when I was just before my 16th birthday. And I married him just before my 18th birth, 19th birthday. I stayed married to him for 66 years until he died. And we liked each other. That was very good luck. that somebody, some Dharma teacher about whom they said, I don't know if it was Maureen Stewart or who it was,

but she was dying and they said, do you have any last words? And she said, and I think it was Maureen Stewart, but I'm not sure. Thank you very much, I have no complaints. That's really good, isn't it? Yes. Thank you very much, I have no complaints. I think I've had a very lucky life.

I worried more when I was a child. My mother was sickly. She had chronic heart failure from childhood rheumatic fever, and she died when she was 47, and I was 23. And that had been at that point the worst thing that I didn't want to have happened to me because I loved her. And I worried more than I let on about being worried because I didn't want my parents to think that I was worrying. But I think we all worried about her.

But really, she was a great person. Maybe I'll tell you, we must be finishing our time. I'm going to tell you one more story because we're ending talking about my mother and her untimely death. My mother died when she was 47. I was 23. And she had been sick all those years, but they weren't thinking that she was going to die right then. And I was in Fort Sam Houston, in Texas with my husband, in his basic training to go into the Army, to do compulsory Army service. We had just driven from San Francisco to Fort Sam Houston with two babies in the car,

and we got to where we were staying, and we found a motel and stayed overnight. And early in the morning, the phone rang, and I answered it, and a man's voice said, is this Sylvia, not my father? And I said, yeah. And he said, give the phone to see more. so I knew he was going to tell him some terrible news on my mother. So I hand the phone over and they talk, and they hang it up, and he said, your mother died last night.

And here we were exhausted. We just driven all the way from San Francisco to Fort San Buston. Now we've got these two babies and this news, and the funeral, as is the case always with Jews, you have to bury the next day. So we bundled them all up. We got tickets. I have no recollection of doing that.

But we got on a plane, and we flew to New York, and we stayed overnight. And the following morning, I was getting dressed to go to the funeral with my mother's sister, Miriam. We're standing in my mother's former bedroom and getting dressed to go to the funeral. And I said, Miriam, I'm very... just thinking about putting on lipstick. Do people wear a lipstick to a funeral? And she said, I don't know. She said, it's too bad Gladdy isn't here.

She would know. And it was so funny because it was really too bad that Gladdy wasn't there. But not as a cosmetic consultant. It was just too bad that Gladdy wasn't there. It says too bad Gladdy's not here. She would know. And I laughed in that moment, and I realized that in the middle of my really very extreme grief, I had laughed. And I knew in the back of my mind that I was going to be all right, because I laughed in the middle of this most terrible moment in my life so far that it happened to me.

That that moment, it all happened. She said, I laughed, and I realized, I'm going to be all right. That seems to be the through line of this conversation. It's what you say to somebody if you're a paramedic. It's what you say to yourself when you're experiencing ill will. It's what you experienced in that moment of grief. You're going to be all right? We're all going to be all right.

We're all going to be just how we are. We can't be another way. I'm so much more charitable about when I think about the people I really don't like. Because they can't be another way. They can't be another way. They are unfortunately the way they are. An old friend of mine said, I never say, when someone says to me, how are you, Gwen? She said, I never say I'm fine.

I say I couldn't be better because I couldn't be. But none of us can. That might be the best thing I taught this whole time. This is it. Don't you think? I think it's the best thing you've taught the whole time, or do I agree with the point? agree with the point. I definitely agree with the point.

Okay. I don't know if I could rank your teachings. I think they've all been great. Thank you. Thank you. This is awesome. I'm so glad I and my team and I were able to talk you into taking time out of your vacation here on the East Coast to spend some time with me. And by extension, my listeners and viewers, really appreciate it.

I'm really happy to do it, and I love doing it. You know that. Right back at you. Sylvia, thank you again. You're welcome. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.

Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Also, one last thing before you go, remember to sign up for my new app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. You can sign up over at danharris.com. On the app, you'll find a growing library of meditations from world class teachers.

Add free access to the full expertise of our podcast guests, meaning you'll get this podcast with no ads. Exclusive live stream events, which we do weekly, sometimes twice a week. Robust discussion threads to connect you with our team, with our teachers, and with one another. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. Peace. Thank you.