The One You Feed - Dan Harris

Starting point is 00:00:00 I wanted to call the book The Voice in My Head is an Asshole because I just think that's a profane statement of a fundamental truth. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how

Starting point is 00:00:51 other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com

Starting point is 00:01:26 and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us.

Starting point is 00:01:40 Our guest this week is Dan Harris, correspondent for ABC News and co-anchor for both Nightline and the weekend edition of Good Morning America. In 2014, Harris released his first book, 10% Happier, How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Really Works, a true story. In the book, he describes how after a panic attack on national television, he stopped using drugs and discovered the benefits of meditation. Let's hear the interview. Hi, Dan. Welcome to the show.

Starting point is 00:02:12 Hi. Glad that you could join us. I really enjoyed your book, 10% Happier. There's a lot of things that we'll get into as we go through the interview, but I related with an awful lot of it. And I think our approach to a lot of the things that are in this area are very similar. And I was laughing a lot during the book at different points. Great. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. So our podcast is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of two wolves where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. And he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of

Starting point is 00:02:45 us. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like hatred and greed and fear. And the grandson stops, and he thinks, and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work you do. Yeah, I think it speaks to the fact that the mind can be trained. The brain and the mind can be trained. And you can practice for things like happiness and compassion. And that's the radical notion undergirding meditation, that just as you go to the gym and build your bicep, you can sit, close your eyes and practice things, practice to be happier or to be kinder or lots of other things. And that there's science that backs this up.

Starting point is 00:03:42 And we see it in the brain scans that we see that areas of the brain associated with stress, the gray matter literally shrinks the area associated with empathy and compassion. The gray matter literally grows. So this isn't some touchy feely new agey thing. This is hardcore scientific stuff. And and at the same time, life changing. and at the same time life-changing. And this is why we're seeing everyone from scientists to pro football players to entertainers to CEOs engaging with what has always been considered a kind of fringy weirdo activity. And it's why I wrote my book, to try to get people who might be skeptical about this stuff to open their minds a little bit.

Starting point is 00:04:26 Exactly. And I'm going to give just a brief overview of your book for the listeners, and then I'll kind of go into some more in-depth questions. And you can jump in if I say it, you know, if I don't get the summary quite right. But in general, it's a story of you, your journalism career, you going overseas in a lot of war zones, coming home, starting to self-medicate some different feelings through drugs, which led to you having a panic attack on air, which then led you to start searching for some answers as to what was happening, which ultimately led to you getting into meditation and then writing this book. So that's the very, you know, 45-second version. Pretty close? Fair enough. Yeah. All right. So you originally said that you wanted the title of your book to be

Starting point is 00:05:10 The Voice in My Head is an Asshole, which I thought was a wonderful title. You also just referred to the voice in your head as a malevolent puppeteer, which I also absolutely loved. What do you mean by that? I think that the fundamental truth of the human condition is that we have this voice in our head, the inner narrator. I mean, I'm not talking about hearing voices or schizophrenia. I'm just talking about this voice that is what chases you out of bed in the morning and is heckling you all day long and has you constantly wanting things or not wanting or judging other people or

Starting point is 00:05:46 very harshly judging yourself and thinking about the past and thinking about the future instead of focusing on what's happening right now. And when you're unaware of this nonstop conversation you're having with yourself, it is a malevolent puppeteer. He yanks you around and it's why you have your hand in the fridge when you're not hungry or you're losing your temper when it's strategically unwise or you are checking your email when your kids are trying to talk to you. So to me, that's why I wanted to call the book The Voice in My Head is an Asshole because I just think that's a profane statement of a fundamental truth. I agree. I think the first time that I ever got that,

Starting point is 00:06:25 really understood that and heard, and you sort of described a similar experience. When you read somebody describing that voice in their head, it was a complete revelation that most of us have never really thought of, that that voice isn't necessarily us. It's a manifestation of our mind. The central feature of our lives is this sense of me or I. It's the force that has you, you know, making dentist appointments or getting up and leaving the room when you have to go to the bathroom. It's this kind of, it's this propulsion that's with us all the time and is, you know, color commentating on everything. But we take it for granted. We don't see it unless it's

Starting point is 00:07:07 pointed out to you, and when it's pointed out to you, it's like this thunderous truism. Obviously, it's totally obvious. Obviously, it's totally obvious. That's a little bit of a ridiculous statement, but it is obvious and yet overlooked. So when I first encountered this observation, it was a big deal for me. And also, it was not only powerful because it was intuitively true, but also because it explained some of the dumb behavior that you described that I write about in the book, the fact that I went to war zones without really thinking about the psychological consequences, that I came home and got depressed and really wasn't fully aware that I was even depressed. I wasn't self-aware enough to perceive what was really going on. And then I blindly self-medicated with cocaine and ecstasy, and it all blew up in my face in the form of a panic attack on Good Morning America in June of 2004. So for me, this seeing Eckhart Tolle,

Starting point is 00:08:10 who happened to be the first person who I heard describe the voice in the head, seeing it on a page in a book was a very powerful experience. The problem was with Eckhart Tolle that a lot of the other stuff he was writing about, I found irretrievably ridiculous. Yeah, I have to say reading about your experience of reading Eckhart Tolle was one of my favorite parts of the book, because you've got a line where you say, you know, just about when I started to think that Tolle was a sage, and perhaps he held the key to all my problems, he started saying some ludicrous shit, which just cracks me up because that's exactly my, you know, when I've read that stuff, it's I have the exact same experience. It's this, there's so much truth here. And yet,

Starting point is 00:08:59 everything else that's coming on here is just sounds insane to me. And that's one of the things I loved about your book. Because on this program, we've tried to really be focused on what I would say are pretty practical down-to-earth applications of, you know, how do we make our lives better? How do we live better in the world? And you come to all this stuff very, very skeptical. You start reading Eckhart Tolle, and you're intrigued and totally turned off at the same time. Tell us a little bit about where things went from there. And how did you go from being so skeptical to being a believer, at least in meditation, like, as you said earlier, which a lot of people tend to, you know, has a bad has a bad PR program, right? People don't have good thoughts about meditation. How did that journey go for you?

Starting point is 00:09:45 thoughts about meditation? How did that journey go for you? Yeah, I think meditation is a massive PR problem. I think what what clinched it for me was the science. I'm a skeptical guy, but the scientific research into meditation, which I was previously unaware of is, you know, while it's still in its embryonic stages, it is pretty compelling. It suggests that meditation can do everything from lowering your blood pressure to boosting your immune system to literally rewiring key parts of your brain. As I mentioned before, you see it on the brain scans and you see it on the MRIs. I find that very, very, very compelling. And also the other thing that I think really convinced me to give meditation a shot is that it doesn't involve all of the things that I thought it involved. You don't have to wear special outfits. You don't

Starting point is 00:10:36 have to sit in any funny positions. You don't have to chant. You don't have to light incense. You know, you don't have to join any group. It's a, it's a secular, simple brain exercise that you can do, you know, a couple minutes a day and it can have a pretty transformative effect. Again, it's not going to, there's a reason why I called the book 10% Happier. It's not going to, you know, transform your life into nonstop rainbows and unicorns, but I think it does, what it does is it allows you to feed the right wolf repeatedly. And that's what you're practicing to do in meditation. And, you know, just to expand on the on the wolf thing, you know, we we we tend to.

Starting point is 00:11:20 You know, the human condition is that we tend to make our suffering worse than it needs to be. And we tend to gloss over or ignore all a lot of the good things in our life. And what meditation allows you to do is to be present for the, for the things that are good, and to not go down the rat hole of useless rumination over things that you can't change. I think that suffering and stress and striving is all, you know, part of life and a part of trying to achieve anything and be ambitious. But, you know, what I found meditation has helped me figure out how not to cross the line between what I call constructive anguish and useless rumination. And so to me, that's kind of played into the wolf analogy because there's a wolf that is so self-referential and self-absorbed that he gets depressed and anxious.

Starting point is 00:12:13 And then there's a wolf that is actually wise and discriminating and paying attention to what's actually going on. And meditation allows you to feed the latter wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Starting point is 00:12:55 Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today.

Starting point is 00:13:15 How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Starting point is 00:13:28 Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 00:13:46 We've talked on this show on this show a lot and I'll make the, I like to make the distinction between pain, which is the normal things that happen to us in life that are unpleasant and then suffering, which is sort of that, as you just described, it's that extra layer of stuff that we put over top of it. All the thinking we do about do about what's happening, the feeling bad about feeling bad, or the stories that we tell ourselves around that. And one of the things you quoted in the book, Stephen Batchelor, who's a writer I really admire, and you said, the craving to be otherwise, to be elsewhere, permeated my whole life. Can you tell us more about why you chose that quote and what it means to you? I just thought, I mean, I really like Stephen Batchelor.

Starting point is 00:14:27 He wrote a book called Buddhism Without Beliefs. He's a self-described Buddhist atheist, which is kind of a redundant phrase because there is really no God. There is no God in Buddhism. But nonetheless, he's in a faith that is a very skeptical faith buddhism and it's barely a faith at all he's a super skeptical guy so he's he's uh i like him for a lot of reasons and he's really good at describing this tendency we we have to be projecting into the future or reminiscing or ruminating on the past instead of focusing on where we are right now. It totally actually has a nice phrase here. He talks about the background

Starting point is 00:15:10 static of perpetual discontent. We're like colicky babies. We're never quite happy or okay with what's happening right now. We're always trying to get on to the next thing or we're idealizing the past in some way instead of fully inhabiting what's happening right now. And I just found the way Bachelor wrote about it to be quite powerful and to be accurate in terms of my life. I mean, I am in a deadline-dominated world of journalism. And, you know, so by dint of being in this kind of job, it kind of puts the human tendency to lurch forward to the next thing on steroids. And so I found that phrase very, very powerful. And I'm not saying I've cured myself of that tendency,

Starting point is 00:16:01 but the first step is admitting it. And meditation is good for sort of just, you know, rubbing your nose in the tendency so that you can see it when you're doing it and you can back off. Yeah. And I have a question for you related to that. So you recently, you recently, I guess within the last year or so became the anchor on Nightline, which is something you had wanted for a long time. And in your epilogue, you talk a little bit about how that's been satisfying. I'm curious if you think, had you achieved that place without some of the work you've done on meditation,

Starting point is 00:16:36 whether you would have had the same sort of experience of being dissatisfied with where things were, what they were, and be kind of looking to the next thing. dissatisfied with where things were, what they were, and be kind of looking to the next thing? You know, I have a conflicted view on the tendency we have to never be satisfied with. I think to a certain extent, it's useful, right? Because those who achieve in society often are, you know, like oysters with that little bit of sand that irritates them and that turns into a pearl eventually, you know, like you just never quite, you know, happy. I like that to a certain extent, but the thing is we take it too far, or I realized that I was taking it too far. And, um don't want to totally demean or degrade the insatiability of the human mind.

Starting point is 00:17:35 But I do think that you've got to figure out how to draw the line. When is it useful to be pushing and pushing and pushing? And when is it not so useful? And for me, I've just gotten better at figuring that out. As it pertains to Nightline, you know, I think about this a lot now, especially with the book too. When you have something, you've probably heard this theory before, the set point theory, that we humans have a happiness set point, that good things can happen or bad things can happen. We tend to sort of gravitate over time back to our set point. And that happened to me both with Nightline. I got the job and I was so excited. And then I just kind of gravitated back to my set point over time. And then with my book,

Starting point is 00:18:22 you know, I worked on this book for four years and I worried that it was going to suck and maybe it does suck, but it ended up selling well, which was enormously thrilling. And then over time, you just kind of gravitate back to your set point. What I will say, the difference between the old me and the new me is that I think the set point has gone up over time and that I'm more aware of the gravitation back to it. And so I don't get too carried away with the ego trip of doing well at something. And I don't get too disappointed in myself when it wears off and I start looking around and thinking about what am I going to do next? One of the things in the book that you wrestled with and you just you just talked about it. it wears off and I start thinking, looking around and thinking about what am I going to do next? One of the things in the book that you wrestled with, and you just, you just talked about it and it has been, it has been the fundamental question that eats at me for, for years as I've, as I've

Starting point is 00:19:15 looked at this sort of stuff. And it's exactly what you just said. Where's that, where's that line between, uh, always wanting something different and striving, which is undeniably in some ways positive for humans in general, versus sort of accepting where we're at and being happy with that. And I think you did a lot of wrestling with that in the book, where you came to some answers that were a little bit comfortable. Have you had any more insights or anything else you want to share about that? Because that one still sort of, you know, pokes me in the side. Yeah, I mean, I think it is for any ambitious person, it is the question in my view. And I think it's all about finding the line between, as I said before, constructive anguish and useless

Starting point is 00:20:00 rumination. And that's a blurry and wavy line. And it's kind of like in spin class. I don't know if you've ever taken a spin class where you're on these bikes. Unfortunately. You've taken one or you haven't? I have, unfortunately. Okay, so yeah, it sucks. I do it, but it's a good workout, but it's horrible.

Starting point is 00:20:23 Anyway, the instructor will say, you know, turn the resistance up to six. Well, there's no number on the dial, so you're setting your own six. And that's kind of the same thing here, that you've got to kind of have this internal self-awareness to know, okay, I've now spent 20 minutes worrying about all the awful ramifications of missing a flight. Is it okay now to start thinking about something else? Yes, I think it is. And it's just an ongoing process. But for me, I just find it interesting to watch my mind in that way. You know, that last statement is kind of a larger issue.

Starting point is 00:21:04 The fact that when you become a meditator, you sort of objectify your mind in some ways you, you, you, um, you start to view it with some amusement and some, and in a more dispassionate way. Um, but back to the ambition question, I just think that it's about figuring out how to, when is it okay to be pushing, pushing and pushing and when is it no longer useful. And I've thought more about could that motivation come from a different place or does it sometimes come from a different place? Not one of unhappiness, but one of, I guess, for lack of a better word, a joy or an enjoyment of making and creating things. I think it can, you know, and I think it can come from both places. I found that when I've gone on meditation retreats, you know, when the amount of discursive random thinking comes down because you're, you know, focusing on your breath for hours at a time, I have many more good ideas.

Starting point is 00:22:21 I'm often like running back to my room to scribble things down. And where is that coming from? It's not coming from a striving place, right? It's just coming from getting out of your own way. Uh, but I, you know, but again, at the same, by the same token, I'm not, uh, I'm not against, you know, creating a big ambition for myself or anybody else doing it and then going for it with extreme prejudice. I think, I think there's something to be said for that. And that's how we, that's how we got the iPhone and skyscrapers. And, um, but I, but I also think that, uh, enormous amount of creativity can come from more positive, uh, places too. It's the, it's just not a simple answer. Right. It's not. And I think for, for a long time, I wanted, uh, a simple answer. Right. It's not. And I think for a long time I wanted a simple answer with it.

Starting point is 00:23:06 You did get sort of an answer, and I think it might have been Joseph Goldstein who gave it to you, where you talked about not being attached to the results. Yeah. You know, in terms of just to get back here, you know, there's not being a simple answer. I think there is a romanticizing. And it's in history. You see it from Plato or Aristotle, whatever, all the way back in time, we've heard about,

Starting point is 00:23:35 Shakespeare did it too, I don't have all the quotes in my fingertips, where this romanticizing of melancholy, that everybody who's achieved anything has to be sad and miserable. And that scans to me as like excuses. Now, to some extent, I think it's true. There is a high level of correlation between anxiety and achievement, which is why I firmly believe that a certain amount of stress and struggle is part of achieving. But again, I'm not quite sure based on my own experience and having spent a lot of years kind of attacking this

Starting point is 00:24:11 question internally and externally, not quite sure that if Van Gogh had been slightly less crazy, that he didn't cut his ear off, that he wouldn't have made beautiful paintings. He might have made even more beautiful paintings. And I can just tell you from my own perspective, I feel like I'm doing better work now that I'm less crazy. I'm still pretty crazy. Again, the book is 10% happier. I'm not claiming some sort of perfected state.

Starting point is 00:24:41 And again, if my wife was on the phone right now, she would give you the 90% still a moron speech. But I think, and maybe I'm deluding myself, but I think that my ability to focus is better now. The quality of my work is better. The quality of my interactions with other people is better. And so I don't think that somehow being happier works at cross purposes with being successful. I just don't. But back to your question, non-attachment to results. Yeah, that simple little kind of bland sounding phrase turned out to be transformative to me. The phrase non-attachment to results is all throughout Buddhism, but the person who first said it to me was Dr. Mark Epstein, who's a very good friend of mine and a

Starting point is 00:25:22 shrink in New York City who writes great books about the overlap between Buddhism and psychology. And he was telling me that, you know, you can try really hard to achieve things. But you have to recognize we live in a universe that is characterized by entropy, chaos and impermanence. And you're not in control. therapy chaos and impermanence and you're not in control and so the the the route to maximal resilience is to do as best you know to work as hard as you can set audacious goals etc etc but to recognize that in the end uh you can't uh be in control of the results so it's so a certain amount of dispassion um vis-a-vis the results is the right way to go. And that'll allow you to dust yourself off and get back in the fray after you lose, which you will sometimes.

Starting point is 00:26:11 Yep. And Steve Jobs lost. I mean, he had a whole bunch of, you know, he had all, by the way, he was a meditator. You know, he had all sorts of setbacks. All of my, you know, Ted Koppel, who's a personal hero of mine, you know, he had struggles. Peter Jennings, an even bigger hero in my world, you know, was the main anchor of ABC News at age 26 or something like that. And they got fired and demoted publicly and sent off to be a foreign correspondent. He rehabilitated his reputation and then came back to become a legendary anchorman. So this is the way of the world. We're all going to have these setbacks.

Starting point is 00:26:50 And you can choose to feed the wolf of negativity and rumination and resentment, or you can feed the wolf of resilience. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

Starting point is 00:27:30 The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us tonight. How are you, too?

Starting point is 00:27:50 Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really.

Starting point is 00:28:02 Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallyn, really. Yeah. No, really. Go to really, no, really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign Jason bobblehead. It's called really no, really. And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You mentioned earlier a little bit about the, you know, is, is obsessing or worrying about missing my flight for the 25th time, is that really useful? And that was the catchphrase that you started to apply to your thinking is, is this any longer useful?

Starting point is 00:28:36 Because to the point, there is some amount of planning, worrying, thinking, all that that's critical and think that that line is, is it useful? And how do you tell that for yourself when it's no longer useful? As I was saying before, it's this blurry, wavy line. I don't know. There's no magic formula for figuring out when you're thinking of useful. It's kind of intuitive. But what meditation does is it gives yous your self-awareness because you're sitting with your eyes closed and watching your mind. And you become, in fact, the part of the brain associated with self-awareness, the gray matter has been shown to grow. You become better at this kind of self-monitoring so that you can see when am I kind of going down a rat hole here and when am I actually engaged in some constructive analysis. Excellent.

Starting point is 00:29:28 I do think your book was really excellent. I've read more of these books than I even care to admit. And I loved your book and I actually got something out of it beyond just resonating with the story as a whole because your skepticism and, and your path, I think Mark Epstein was the first person I read that I really went, Oh, wow, this really makes a ton of sense to me. But you described when you were on your meditation retreat, how you hit a point where you had, I don't know if you'd refer to it as a spiritual experience, but you had an experience of some sort where your mind sort of

Starting point is 00:30:05 locked in and you were ecstatically overjoyed. And you described what that was like. You described how your mind was noting things really, really quickly. And despite all the things that I've read and all that, I had never thought of that as being the experience. And once I did, it was, I won't say I had an experience to the level of yours, but something clicked in me when I started thinking of it that way, really about the whole point is to sit back and just watch the mind. It's about watching. It's about nothing else. And that was enormously helpful for me. So I wanted to say thanks for that. I appreciate it. I mean, I think it's actually about, you know, it's annoying to say this because it's such a stupid cliche with this whole be here now being in the present moment thing. But another way to say it is the way they say it in sports, being in the zone. What's happening when you're in the zone? You're totally focused on what's happening right now. You're making a free throw, for example, or you're hitting a putt. And that's what happened to me on that meditation retreat. I was just kind of dragged kicking and screaming into the present moment for, you know, many, many hours. And that was associated with a big blast of serotonin.

Starting point is 00:31:20 And I think that most of our happiness is derived from focusing on what's happening right now. And, you know, there's another there was a great study at Harvard that showed that it pinged people on their iPhones. All the researchers sent out these iPhone alerts at random times to hundreds of people and asked them, what are you doing right now and how happy are you? And what they found was that that when people's minds were wandering, they were less happy. And so it goes to follow that when you're in the zone, when you're focused on what's happening right now, you can be really, really happy. And what meditation does is just shove you into the moment. I mean, you are basically you're shoving yourself into the moment by repeatedly refocusing on the feeling of your breath coming in and going out every time

Starting point is 00:32:05 your mind wanders. And that can have, if you do it, you know, if you're sequestered on a meditation retreat for 10 days with a bunch of weirdos, you know, and all you're doing all day long is meditating, that can be one of the effects. And that's certainly what happened to me. And when, you know, when I drop all of my obsessive thinking, when I'm standing at a stoplight in New York City or standing in my office looking out the window, I can get just a little taste of that now and again. And I think what's really important about that is meditation is a big part of it. But that's available to us really anytime that we choose to do it. to us really anytime that we choose to do it. And I've found for me that that's a great practice when I'm starting to get swept away with whatever negative feelings is to just come back and try and notice exactly what's happening around me right then. And it tends to interrupt this. I heard an

Starting point is 00:32:55 interview the other day, and I can't remember the woman's name, but it was on a podcast called On Being. And she's studied mindfulness since the 70s. And she doesn't really advocate meditation so much. She's much more an advocate of, hey, you can at any minute, just start paying attention to what's going on around you. And I think that's, I found for myself that meditation is a real way to strengthen that muscle. But it's not the only place that it happens. Yeah, but I guess, you know, I know who you're talking about. I don't remember her name. But I know you're talking about my I have never read her material, nor have I ever discussed this, so I'm going to say something that maybe I'll later regret.

Starting point is 00:33:29 But I kind of disagree. I mean, I agree that, yes, she's right. You can drop into the present moment. Anybody can. But it's really hard to do if you don't have this practice. It's kind of like going out and throwing a 50-yard pass in an NFL game if you've never done any practice before. And what meditation does is it just teaches you how to do it. You have a mechanism.

Starting point is 00:33:56 It's a really simple mechanism. You know, I could teach you how to do it in fewer, as the New York Times reporter had me do, and the New York Times tech reporter had me teach him how to meditate in fewer characters than it takes to send a tweet. It's super, super simple. It's just you learn how to focus. And I think practicing mindfulness is tricky without it. That's just my view.

Starting point is 00:34:19 Most likely, this woman who's been studying mindfulness since the 1970s is right and I'm wrong, but that's just my view. I tend to agree. I've not read her stuff either. What it made me think of a little bit was, and you said it when you were reading Eckhart Tolle's stuff, like the ideas were great, but there was no practical implementation plan. There was no way for you to see how to get from where you were to what was being described. And that's, for me, that's what meditation does is it does strengthen that muscle. The other big one that I come back to all the time is so much of it, it's a skill in knowing how to do it. But

Starting point is 00:34:54 so much of it for me is just even remembering to do it even remembering. And that's I've said this, you know, listeners are probably tired of hearing it. But that's why I started the podcast was to remind myself to feed the good wolf, for example, because I've got a lot of the tools. It's remembering to use them on a regular basis. Well, the one of the many meanings of mindfulness in the Buddha's ancient language of Pali, one of the meanings of the word is remembering. And that's what the practice of meditation is, is getting lost and then remembering to refocus. And what you're doing in meditation is just training yourself to get to remember more frequently. And you can do that with compassion. There's compassion meditation,

Starting point is 00:35:40 which again, just boosts your ability to remember not to be an asshole more frequently. And so remembering is great. And I, that's why I think listening to podcasts, reading good books, it, you know, you're just infusing your life with this stuff, so that when you get swept away, you recover more quickly. Yeah, exactly. Maybe the not being an asshole compassion stuff. Chris, do you want to maybe work on that a little bit? I learned from you're doing for meditation is really important, which is putting it kind of right in the mainstream and demystifying it. So thanks for all you're doing with that. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Okay. Take care. Take care. All right. Bye. you can learn more about dan harris and this podcast at one you feed.net slash dan harris

The One You Feed - Dan Harris

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