How To Create Micro-Moments of Sanity No Matter What's Happening Today | Jay Michaelson

0:04This is the 10 % Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

0:18Hello, gang. How we doing? It is tempting at times to feel a bit selfish or self-indulgent for doing any kind of self-care, including meditation, exercise, you name it, at a time when it feels like the world is on fire. So today we're going to talk about this tricky balance with a meditation teacher who is not afraid to mix it up in the political arena, as it were. Jay Michelson is not only a deep Dharma practitioner, but he's also a journalist, a rabbi, a novelist, and a former activist. Today, he's going to talk about how to use your personal practice as a way to fortify yourself to engage more effectively in the world.

0:57Jay is February's Teacher of the Month over on my new app, 10 % with Dan Harris. That means Jay will be leading live video meditation and Q &A sessions and producing guided meditations to join our growing library of meditations. You can sign up for the app now at danharris.com. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. We'll get started with Jay Michelson in conversation with the executive producer of this show, DJ Kashmir, right after this. Jay Michelson, welcome back. Thanks, DJ. It's great to be here. Yeah, thrilled to have you. I've been looking forward to this. Yeah, curious to hear your answer.

1:36We've been asking all our teachers of the month this question. How did you become a Dharma teacher? At the age of three, I was recognized as perfectly enlightened. And from there, it's just been all downhill. Was this your parents that recognized or were they traveling llamas? I was magically conceived by the force. Nobody knows where I came from. Totally false. Yeah, no, I still am a neurotic Jewish kid. I'm just not a kid anymore, but I was a neurotic Jewish American kid growing up in the suburbs. My door into meditation and into the Dharma is a little unusual. I think most people come in through the door of suffering, right?

2:16We're feeling anxious or fear or grief or anger or whatever. And we hear that meditation can help. And then maybe we go deeper. You know, in Buddhist psychology, you tend toward one of the three poisons, greed, hatred, or delusion. I'm a greed type. I want every possible experience. And that was true for religious and spiritual experience, too. I was interested in mysticism as a teenager, which is pretty weird and unusual. and in my college years, I became what's called a nightstand Buddhist, meaning I had Buddhist books on my nightstand. I wasn't practicing, but I was reading about it a lot. Then discovered actually Jewish mysticism in my 20s and studied that.

2:54When I went on my first week-long silent meditation retreat, it was for, on a conscious level, greed reasons. I wanted to have amazing experiences that I'd read about in books and that I heard were possible using meditation. Looking back, I mean, that was 25 years ago. I think on a subconscious level, why do we want that kind of pleasant mental experience? It's because there's something that feels not enough about this experience, or that's because we're feeling suffering and want some kind of alternative or an escape or something like that. But that was all subconscious. On a conscious level, I had read and even written about these kind of amazing altered states of consciousness that are achievable through meditation and through other ways as well.

3:37And I wanted to have them. I wanted to have a mystical experience. And I did have something like that. The mind gets really concentrated on a long retreat, and you can experience all kinds of joy and equanimity and contentment that you might not even think you're capable of. And then after the ecstasy, the laundry, right? It's like you can have a peak experience, but if there's not integration, if there's not a way to translate that into your life, if there's not ways to stop tripping yourself up and harming others as much, what good is it? And even on that very first retreat, you have to go through the swamp before you can get to the shore.

4:12And so there was a lot of going over, again, material that as a 29-year-old, I wasn't really even aware that I had inside of me. And that got me launched. Then I got pretty serious after that. What made you take the turn from just someone who got hooked on to practice or started taking meditation seriously to then being also someone who's sharing that with other people, making it a huge part of your livelihood? I would say two things. First, I was interested in meditation, but then as time went on, I got really curious about the infrastructure or the conceptual structure around it and in the traditions that it came from, which were Buddhist traditions.

4:53I was doing mindfulness and other meditation practices, most of which are derived from Buddhist traditions. And in the Buddhist context, they have specific purposes, and you can even make progress, which is sometimes a bad word in meditation circles. But with Dan, actually, I remember a few years ago writing about what progress could actually look like in meditation and not turning it into something to own and something to compete over. And I am better at it than you are. But, you know, having a view of how things can develop. I got really interested in the structures around meditation, the conceptual structure and so on.

5:25And so I kind of went hardcore Buddhist in my 30s, including going on longer retreats and practicing in that way. And then as a teacher, I had what a lot of people have, which is like the zeal of the converted in those first years. I just thought this was great. This was like the answer key. Dan's book hadn't come out yet. I definitely thought I would get 100 % happier. And now I make a joke about it. That's how I started, saying I was enlightened at three. But there was that early period of enthusiasm. And that doesn't pan out, generally speaking. And we have to come to a more mature, sophisticated, nuanced understanding of how the mind can train itself and how we can be kinder and wiser.

6:05So even without that initial burst of enthusiasm, it really felt like this is one thing that has made my life measurably better and can help other people. And I still believe a little bit that it's part of one of the things that can help save humanity in the world from total disaster. Not solo, but just having a little bit of spaciousness around our opinions, a little bit less reactivity, so we don't shoot from the hip quite as much. And I've now mentioned Dan three times, but I really was grateful when I met him, which was right before the book came out, before all of the other work, even just for that metaphor of 10 % happier, 10 % kinder, 10 % wiser, just to see, yeah, that's right, that could be an achievable ambition or intention or even goal.

6:52I think just that is really helpful for people. So that makes a lot of sense to me. I'm curious about, you have an entire other life or multiple lives outside of being a meditation teacher. And I was just wondering if you could say a little bit about the other hats you wear and how those influence how you approach the Dharma and guiding people in meditation. Sure. I feel like putting a search in general's warning on what I'm about to say, which is do not follow my path to dissolution. I don't recommend the way. But what I've noticed in now being a kind of grown up for 25, 30 years, that there are these two sides to me and to my personality that if both aren't being nourished in some way, I get really itchy.

7:34I get restless. For me, one of those sides is very worldly. It's on activism of different kinds. I work now as a journalist. I have a sub stack. I was on CNN for a while. Well, when I don't do that work, when I'm only focused on spirituality, whether it's meditation or psychedelics or Jewish spirituality, I just get really, I just, I get itchy. Like, I feel like I also have some blessings and abilities that can be used to help put out some of these fires. And one way I've come to see it is like a short-term, long-term piece. Like, I think a lot of that activist work is relatively short-term. Like, how can we solve this problem?

8:10I worked as an LGBTQ activist for 10 years before turning to journalism. And how do we move the middle? How do we change society? And then when I only work on that side, I just get really hollowed out. I don't have the resilience. It's dealing with negative material all the time. And there's not a base to come back to what's also at least equally important to me, which are ways of being present, ways for me at least of being present with the sacred, with what I consider to be holy or transpersonal. And I have bifurcated my career life for over 20 years now with sort of activism or journalism on the one side and meditation, spirituality, and the last five years, psychedelics work on the other.

8:52The title of my sub stack is both and. It was actually, it's funny, I hadn't thought about this, but I had this conversation with Dan because in each of those worlds, especially the journalism world, there's a concern like, do you have any credibility if you're also like the rabbi who meditates? That's pretty weird, right? I was on CNN for a few years. I would often get introduced as Jay Michelson, legal columnist for Daily Beast, and a rabbi, as if that was like the strangest possible thing. And it is pretty strange, actually, just normatively speaking or statistically speaking. But I think for me, the secret sauce or my own particular personal dharma isn't the overlap of those things.

9:29And I do really believe that at the root of many, if not all, of our political problems, are problems of the human mind, how we are as human beings, how we evolved in ways that were once evolutionarily adaptive, but which are now maladaptive. And it doesn't feel to me like there can really be healing and change and transformation on the political level without there also being technologies of self-improvement or self-knowledge. And meditation's by no means the only one of those, but it is one. You preface that answer by saying, don't follow in my footsteps. You're not recommending that anybody become a journalist, activist, rabbi, meditation teacher, psychedelics expert, which is fair enough.

10:16But it does strike me that we are all on some level trying to find some balance between these competing forces of, on the one hand, how do we make an impact on the world around us, our family, our community, our society, right? And on the other hand, how do we go deep and find happiness and care about what really matters? Maybe the way you've balanced those is unusual, but it doesn't feel unique to have that need. Oh, I totally agree. Just don't try to get a paycheck that way. I've settled in. It's been a long time that I've been doing this. And even when I was in law school, I was taking religion classes on the side and I was actually I was teaching meditation on the side at that point I was just like i've always been this way and for a while I remember actually talking with my therapist once about you know, I really should make a choice I can identify specifically Ways in which if I just focused on one or the other I could really move forward in a more effective way And my therapist taught me a phrase I hadn't heard before which was Let's create a permission structure for you to keep living the way you want to live and that was really helpful.

11:24I don't think that's always helpful, but in that particular case, that advice was really helpful. And it was just coming to understand that this is what makes some of my work distinctive. You want to have a lane, certainly as a journalist and as writer, and you want to have something that makes you different from everybody else who's doing that work. I do have that, but it's also true that I divide my 80 ,000 hours that we have in our lives to spend on work in a couple of different places. So that's the advice part. But no, absolutely. I think we're all, hopefully, complex beings who live in multiple worlds.

11:57We wear our different hats. I didn't even realize that until I became a parent eight years ago. All these people who are big business types and high-flying are also playing with their kids at home and doing baby talk. And that's not a very profound insight, but it's something I had to experience myself. I was like, oh, you know, everybody's like this to some extent. I just may be a little more weird than most. I'm curious, partly selfishly, because I can relate to this feeling of getting itchy if you're not getting to scratch particular interests that you have. And I guess I'm curious about, like, given everything that Buddhism teaches us about letting go and about no fixed and permanent self anyway, etc., etc., like, how do you think about what are the parts of you that you just, like you said, want to create a permission structure for, want to just allow to be as they are, versus how do you know when, you know, oh, actually, that's really ego that's driving that desire, or that's something I do have to let go of?

12:55Yeah, I mean, that's the$64 Dharma question. I think I'm enough of a Western humanist to believe that a little bit of ego is okay. These are profound desires that we have, and I'm not so Buddhist that I would just exclude those. but it's certainly the case that it's very mixed, right? With my activism work, some of what I was interested in was impact. Some of what I was interested in was fame and power. I, of course, have the best ideas. So I wanted those ideas to have the biggest possible platform. Even apart from my brilliant ideas, like I am just so great that I want to have the biggest platform.

13:31And, you know, I see that really clearly. And I certainly see it in a lot of my colleagues, not only myself. For a while, I did feel like the non-self piece was really helpful for me. It's like, well, why, you know, we don't want to like identify too much with any one of these social roles that we have, right? So isn't it great that I have lots of social roles, so I don't, but then I noticed I was still identifying with all of them, just in a kind of schizoid, multi-personality way, like I was still actually doing that selfing. But I think on a more practical level, certainly, I just don't know how people do full-time activist work, or I'm an opinion writer.

14:10So I see my journalism work largely as a kind of activism. It's so draining and depleting. I have this story one time back when I was doing LGBTQ activism. This was during the years when America was debating same-sex marriage. And I went out on the road a lot. I spoke at something like 110 educational or religious institutions in this two-year period. It was a lot of stuff. And I would get heckled once in a while. And one time, somebody heckled me. Immediately in that moment, it was very insulting. He was like, gay people, that's no different from bestiality. So that's pretty insulting, right?

14:43And so obviously, I felt insulted. And I wanted to punch him in the face, if not literally, then verbally. But at that moment, there was that little bit of spaciousness. Viktor Frankl maybe never actually said that in between the stimulus and response, there's freedom. And there was just that moment where I could think tactically about what can I do in this moment? Obviously, I'm not here to persuade this guy. He's not in the persuadables. But there were like 100 other people in that room. And I could be the bigger person. I could be more calm and I could be more reasonable. I don't always live up to that.

15:16But in that particular moment, I did kind of a tactful response, trying to address the rest of the audience and not him, and definitely not descending to his level. And that happens every day, right? I'd be around a table on CNN with people who I strongly disagree with and trying to think, carefully and tactfully, not always making the right decisions, but at least having the space inside to see where I'm triggered, see where I'm activated, maybe not act from that. And sometimes, one time in particular, actually, I really failed at that. It was right after the 2024 election. It's like looking in a mirror, you can see where meditation practice is working and where it doesn't.

15:57That makes me curious about something you've brought up a few times, which is this notion that mindfulness meditation and other sort of contemplative practices or contemplative technologies, potentially you have some level of faith that they could be one key part of surviving as a species. And I guess I'm curious, on the one hand, it feels pretty inarguable to me that if every single person, for example, who held elected office or every single person who was a CEO or was on the board of a Fortune 500 company, if we could flip a switch and all of those people would have 20 years of meditation training.

16:32We might have a less reactive world. But of course, in the absence of that switch, it's easy to be cynical. So where does your hope lie? Yeah, I mean, I'm both and on this too. I'm a pretty cynical, sarcastic bitch. So I think you're the first teacher of the month to self-identify as a bitch. That's good. One person actually, since we're talking about my multiple careers, one person once called me an intellectual drag queen, which is definitely the best. You could put that on my tombstone. You just wrote the title for the episode. Great. I'll live into it. I embrace it. You and I have both seen in our years in this business that mindfulness can be co-opted and cheapened into McMindfulness, and that it can just make the worried well feel like a little bit better about themselves.

17:18And it can even have this kind of perverse impact where I can calm myself, and therefore I don't look outward as much, or I'm tending so much. It's a balance, right? We want to tend to our own resilience and our own self-care, right? But it can also slide into we do that so much, right, that we just turn away from things we maybe shouldn't turn away from. And I don't mean like the news right now. I think whatever balance people find with regulating their news intake is fine. But I just mean it more generally. It can be used as a technology of selfishness. I still feel like, though, that it doesn't have to be 100 % of people become like suddenly kind and compassionate.

17:54it. If 10 % of people get 10 % more that way, that's great. Or at least it's a decent start. I agree about your point about, you know, political leaders and CEOs. But what about like people who are commenting on Facebook or Twitter or something? Like if there's just a way to turn down some of the rancor, obviously, it's like a cliche at this point to note how polarized America is. And left, right and center can all get like pretty activated, to put it mildly. And we do have a kind of media culture and a political culture that just loves cortisol, right? The stress hormone. We just love it when people do that.

18:31And one reason we love it is it's easy to monetize, right? The most successful content. That's why the 10 % app is doing so well, because it just angers people so much. That's why you have so many downloads. Just kidding. Right? That's a challenge, right? It's whatever generates the strongest emotional response, which is usually a negative emotional response, gets rewarded financially to the people who are serving that to you. So we do have that culture in place. I don't think that just individual action will save the world. I think we need collective action on the most important issues that we face.

19:00However, individual action can really shift the way in which we relate to one another, the way in which we navigate difference, the way we think a little bit more introspectively, before dignifying our fears or our rage with a kind of verbal or physical response. So yeah, I share the cynicism, and I also think it's really both and, you know, and a lot has to do with how it's given over and how it's taught and what people's intentions are. Like I said before, it's not a short-term fix, and there are plenty of meditators who are also assholes, but it makes the odds a little better that at least I won't be one of them or you.

19:44I still have asshole moments, but I think it is inarguable that I have less than I would have without the practice. It's helpful to be in relationship around that. It's funny actually now because I've been meditating doing this so long. I don't have a lot of friends who knew me 25 years ago, but I do have a few and they can just report back. So it's not even a self-assessment. that's really powerful for me. I've seen it in myself also countless times. There was one time I was leading meditation. I was meditating with my eyes open, which is a way to meditate. And I saw someone in the group that I was leading move, which is a bad thing.

20:17You're not supposed to move. But my first thought, my actual first thought, not what I thought I ought to think, but my actual first response really actually was compassion for that person. They were moving because they were uncomfortable or they were feeling pain. And I hope they can get back to their meditation. I hope it didn't disturb them too much. And it's easy to say you ought to think that, but I actually did. That was my first reaction. That was already many years ago that happened. That just showed me it is actually possible, thanks to neuroplasticity, to get in the gears a little bit.

20:47I just wish it didn't take so much work, which is one reason I've been to psychedelics in the last few years. They're a little more dangerous, but they work faster. a couple of shortcuts couldn't hurt. Yeah. Yeah. I want to ask you to talk about these guided meds you put together for us in a second, but just one more question before we go there. You started off early in the conversation talking about being this neurotic Jewish kid in the suburbs. And I just wonder, given all of these years of meditation, how neurotic are you now? What has your personal path been in terms of just settling, given your conditioning, given what you inherited in your nervous system.

21:28Yeah. First of all, should I go get my partner? He's right downstairs. I think he's the expert on that more than I am. I'd say two or three things. One, it's, and this is like one of those weird things that people who do meditation a while recognize instantly, but people who are starting out, it might seem a little weird. Just being aware of the state you're in is different from being captured by that state. And that has a lot of immediate impacts, right? So I still can get angry, but I can be aware that I'm angry and take some steps. I could take space, or I could just shut up and not speak back.

22:05Just in that moment, I can see just having that internal barometer. I can even embody it. I feel it in my heartbeat. I feel heat. I feel my arms tense up. I've just seen it so many times in meditation, in the laboratory of sitting meditation, that then in regular life I see it, I'm like, oh, all right, just be a little careful, right? So even when I'm triggered, there's like just that, and again, it doesn't need to be 100%, there's better chance that I won't respond in that moment. And triggered is now like one of those annoying 2020s words. Maybe you could just say activated, right? I'm just having a response.

22:41And that's clearly, that's before and after, right? That's really changed. They pass more quickly. It doesn't take as long to get back. And it's then easier, this was a second thing, to be with the uncomfortable, which includes things like apologizing or owning your mistakes or being accountable. It's actually possible to be in those difficult moments a little bit better. Every relationship has its dynamics, but we've gotten pretty good, my partner and I, at making sure that some repair is done when there's been a crossed wire of one kind or another. And the third, I would say, and this could transition to talking about the meditations, because what did I say?

23:21I'm a cynical, sarcastic bitch, right? So I picked some of the meditations that I want to give over just to irritate Dan. because I would say like the third impact that I've seen for me again does have obviously Dan and I are good friends I love what he's done in the world where we differ a little bit is I like the idea of spirituality I like these kinds of states of consciousness that feel close to love and close to what I understand to be the sacred and in relationship it doesn't have to be a deity or whatever, but just in those aspects of life that are fleeting and beautiful and can really interrupt the default mode network for a moment and provide a quick glimpse or a quick immersion and transcendence.

24:06And in this last almost decade of my life as a parent, I've stopped going on long meditation retreats. It puts a lot of burden on my partner. It's just it's not what I do anymore. And I've been doing a lot of small moments many times. And just having the capacity, which I built over a long period of time, which I love to teach, of just settling back in a micro way and dropping into awareness, what one friend of mine calls going upstream, like upstream of what we're thinking about and upstream into consciousness or awareness itself. Just doing that over and over again really is like a source of happiness.

24:43And that, I think, for me would be the third major change that I'm really, really grateful for, motivated enough by it to try to share it with others. At least one of the meditations that you're offering in February comes to mind. There are some warm and fuzzy vibes, but there's also one, to your point, that's really about quite practically training on the cushion to, as you say, drop into awareness, learning that so that it's a thing you can do throughout the day. And that really lands with me as someone also. I've got two little kids and going on a long retreat is pretty hard to figure out how to do right now.

25:21Things that take 10 seconds or things that take 30 seconds, you know, still hard to remember to do them, but really great to practice those, to get instruction in those. Totally agree. There's a decent amount of science now on meditation, both how it works and the impacts it has. I don't think we really understand and some of the mechanism. There is something, even if, let's say, if you sit 20 minutes in the morning, and then you get into your busy life, and the kids are screaming, or whatever, and there seems to just be some kind of resonance or residue left over that carries over. And again, it's not like magic protection armor that repels everything, but it does seem to, and I don't know that we really understand that.