Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris: How to Start A Meditation Practice

31:40You know, in a certain way, we imprison not just ourselves, but each other in our concepts about who everybody is. So it really is about a certain kind of freedom that's available, not after 30 or 40 or 50 years of heavy duty meditation training in monasteries or whatever, but right here, right now, today, today, in this moment, and it turns out this moment's every moment because it's always this moment. So there's something about that that's, I don't know, I just have the sense that more and more people are finding their way to it because of a certain kind of emptiness associated with living on autopilot, even if it's a very successful narrative that you wind up, yeah, everybody else thinks you're terrific and you have all these titles and you have all this prestige and money or whatever it is.

32:31but you're a little bit distant from yourself that's not a good feeling so it's almost like a win-win situation to balance all the doing with being and know who's doing all the doing and that that's the love affair is this making any sense to you dan as i talk like this it is it's i don't want it to sound like pie in the sky this is something that's like i engage in a certain kind away without all this talk every single day and not just for the hour that we were a half hour 45 minutes or however long it is that I'm sitting and that's to say nothing of the yoga mindful yoga which is like a huge part of my life and just the different door into the same room of awareness I mean I'm a big advocate of practicing mindful yoga especially over the decades as the body ages but those formal practices are only the beginning life is the real meditation practice so every moment is really the curriculum so to speak you know the cliche is when you're washing dishes wash the dishes or when you're making love are you even there for it but it's true for everything when you're hugging your child you know and whatever it is can you drop underneath your you know, sort of narrative about it all and be with the actual apprehending of it beyond all description, beyond words in a certain way.

34:03That's where Thoreau's quote about going to Walden comes in, you know, where he said someplace in Walden, I went to the, which is all about, it's a kind of rhapsody about mindfulness. He said, I went to the woods because I wish to live deliberately to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what they had to teach and not when I came to die, you know, that moment right before you die, when you really wake up, discover that I hadn't lived. That's the challenge. So, and I like to say, you know, again, coming back to yoga and the corpse pose, which is said to be the most difficult of all the yoga poses.

34:42Why is it called the corpse pose? It's not like an accident where we just like had to call it something. It's called the corpse pose because the invitation is to actually die to the figments of your imagination that are constantly creating narrative and instead wake up to being in the body in this moment. So you're dying to the past and memory and narrative in that way and to the future and worrying and anticipation and planning and all that stuff. Not that it's all fine. But if it squeezes the present moment, then you're never alive. And if you inhabit the present moment, as far as I know, that's the only way to transform the world because it's the only way to transform the future.

35:28Because if you show up in this moment fully and not caught in the story of me or the story of us, whatever it is, then the next moment is going to be different because you were present in this one. And that is like a virus. It's like COVID. It's like a meme that is infectious. And if you've ever encountered somebody who is really present, we have a very fine game detector for that. We know it immediately when somebody's more present than we are. And it's deeply, deeply attractive because they don't have a selfing agenda. And so it's not all about me. And all of a sudden you feel seen in a certain way that you don't if whoever's seeing you is seeing you through the lens of either their story or your story or how much you could help me or how much I could help you or whatever that is.

36:25I mean, all of that is fine on the instrumental level. But what we're really talking about is this sometimes called the non-instrumental level where there's no place to go when you practice. There's no place to go. There's nothing to do. And there's no special state. There is no one mindful state. There are just gazillions of different states and awareness can hold all of them, but it's not any of them. And it's a mystery. No neuroscientists know how we generate sentience out of billions of neurons in the brain and gazillions of trillions of synaptic connections which are changing all the time.

37:05And all of a sudden, like you get sentience. And now we're worried about that with general AI. Because, you know, the thought is like by the fifth or sixth iteration of these machines training themselves for the next generation, maybe they'll become sentient. And, you know, I mean, serious people think about that. And I don't know what the odds are around that. But maybe human beings need to wake up to being sentient in our fullness before the machines get the upper hand, so to speak, because we've been asleep at the wheel. This is a lot of fun for me. I enjoy listening to you talk. And yeah, I mean, I spend my days interviewing great meditation teachers.

37:52And there are at least two common denominators that I've noticed. One is they tend not to take themselves very seriously. The great ones. I think you would qualify. In my mind, you probably wouldn't refer to yourself as great, but I will. And the second is there's a kind of contact high that I as a listener get when I'm talking to somebody who's done a lot of meditation. Right. Yeah, well, I think there's something to be explored in that because what is a contact high? except again now i'm sort of riffing on my own experience not yours so much but a sense of like recognition of something important that's kind of below the surface of ordinary awareness and all of a sudden you see like oh that person kind of embodies it you know that's a projection of course because you don't really know that person even if the dalai lama or whoever you know put on a pedestal.

38:49It's a human, real human being. But people who have done a lot of work on themselves in the kind of way that we're talking about, I agree there, you know, without idealizing anybody or reifying some kind of perfect wisdom or anything like that, because we're still mortal human beings and totally fallible, that there is this sort of sense that at least they're not so self-centered that nothing else really matters. It's just the universe according to me. And the movie is, you know, the story of me starring me, you know, the greatest thing to ever hit reality or the planet. And I think that's the opposite of compassion and the sort of recognition that for all the narratives around the personal pronouns, selflessness, the recognition of how profoundly spacious we are, because as we said, if awareness is boundless, then you don't need to worry about who you are because you're the entire universe and you can embrace the other and simply be in a way that doesn't have to do with optimizing anything from a me because there's no self-centered ambition or attachment to something happening.

40:13And I feel like if we all related to each other with that kind of deep appreciation for the intrinsic beauty of being alive, then we could govern ourselves differently. I mean, really govern ourselves in our own life, even how we use the 24 hours, you know, And getting up in the morning to meditate is a kind of governing yourself and getting out of bed. That's even more challenging than just practicing in bed. It's not better, but there's something to be said about actually getting out of bed and sitting or lying down or doing whatever one's formal practices are. And I've been thinking about this more and more because the word Dharma, which is the word that's used to describe the Buddhist teachings.

41:00And the Buddha himself said that mindfulness is the heart of the practice. It's a direct path to liberation. So the word Dharma with a capital D is often used to describe the Buddha's teachings. And they are manifold. They're just like huge numbers of teachings over the 45 years or so that he taught. But the word Dharma with a small d means lawfulness. It's kind of like the Tao in Chinese. And so lawfulness is like, if we are in tune with the profound Tao or Dharma of the world, then non-harming becomes virtually axiomatic. And mindfulness will show you how much you may be drifting away from that because of othering, for instance.

41:56and you start harming people just in your thoughts. You start diminishing or devaluating some people and taking sides with other people and creating a kind of a situation that is in some sense very human and in another sense, and I think one that humanity has to really rise to and learn how to govern ourselves differently to minimize war and killing and genocide and suffering, is to recognize that we're all fundamentally the same underneath all the labels and the selfing and stuff like that. And so there's something about that word Dharma, both as the teachings of liberation from the point of view of meditative awareness and how we govern ourselves in our own lives.

42:47You know, Buddhists take precepts, you know. Monastics take hundreds of precepts, But regular people, when they practice in the Buddhist tradition, will often for a retreat, say a two-week retreat or something like that, take five precepts, you know, one of which is, you know, not killing or not harming or not by being intoxicants and stuff like that. you know, we need to govern ourselves in a way that's not just on retreat, but for the entire arc of a human life. And that now we need to develop new levels of governance in the world, again, to minimize harm and to maximize good without it being warped or shaped like spaces warped by gravity by like very large galactic masses, you know, what we need is to jump to an entirely new level of being human on this planet and outlawing, in terms of governance, outlawing certain kinds of behavior, whether it's on the part of corporations or whether it's on the part of religious warriors or whether it's on the part of any agency that would seek their own benefit over the greater good of, let's say, the entire earth, not just humans.

44:03And of course, nobody knows how to do that. And it sounds like utopic, but that may be the curriculum of the moment if we're going to actually move to some kind of new level of being on this planet, given what I said about machine learning and next levels of artificial general intelligence. And what is the purpose of humans anymore? In this new world that we created and with the suffering that we have created as human beings, a lot of it totally gratuitous. And, you know, so there's a political in some sense or a body politic element to this that I think has always been there. I mean, we transform ourselves.

44:43We've already transformed the world in a certain way.

44:48In our remaining time, I wonder if I could ask a few more practical questions about starting a meditation habit. Absolutely. First of all, I wouldn't call it a habit. Okay, why not? The word habit has, you know, a lot of downside to it because, you know, there's so many negative habits. Smoking is a habit, you know. Gambling is a habit. I don't want to turn meditation into a habit. What I think we want is to offer it as a way with a capital W, actually, a way of being. Because we're being anyway, we're going through our lives, we're gonna die. The question isn't, and Oprah once asked me this, I don't know if I've mentioned this to you in other podcasts or something, but I was once talking with Oprah, she was filming away and she had a whole list of questions that she was going to ask.

45:38And at a certain point, she just, you know, out of nowhere asked her next question, which was, John, what do you think about life after death? And I said to her, Oprah, I have virtually no interest in the question of life after death. I'm interested in the question of whether there's life before death. And I was deadly serious, sorry for the pun, serious about it, because what often passes for life is just kind of like a driven automaticity that disregards your own beauty, nevermind the beauty of others and of nature. And what this is about, coming back to the word habit, is really that it's a way of rebooting yourself.

46:23It's like starting over. You know, it's just like, cancel that, let it be what it was. We're not denying any of what was in the past moment. But this moment, this breath, new beginning, this out breath, complete letting go. And simply, sometimes I'll use the word awarenessing, just being awareness with no agenda other than to wake up. And this is the way to wake up is to just be awake, be aware. We all have it already, as I said. So it's not like we have to get good at this or be good at it. It's just stringing moments together in a kind of disciplined way. And then, yes, of course, it is transformative and healing and in profound ways over time.

47:10But it's also about not having to get anywhere else in this moment or be a better person, but to actually recognize that you're already whole and already beautiful. And with the years, you know, you're only going to get older, but it's never going to be better than in this moment. So it's a perfect moment for practice and then just let it spill out. So let's go with what you're suggesting and sort of zero in on all of the kind of nitty gritty questions of practice that maybe you want to review or ask. Yeah. So instead of habit, let's say start a meditation practice. Yeah. A formal meditation practice.

47:50Yeah. Is there a time of day, a length of practice, a flavor of practice? All of these nitty gritty questions that people have. I know what my answers are generally, but I'm curious how you answer it. You mentioned meditating in the morning. Is that the time that one really should do it? Well, you know, I don't know what other people's lives are, but MBSR, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, was designed to teach meditation to people who ordinarily would never cross paths with it at all. But when they're referred by their doctors for one kind of medical condition or another, a lot of it often associated with pain of one kind or another and suffering, they actually engage in practice.

48:31And people often ask me, well, why did you establish like 45 minutes a day, six days a week is the kind of core practice of MBSR? And the answer was like, well, if I made it 15 minutes or 20 minutes, it might not be long enough for people to get bored or for discomfort to set in or for anxiety or ennui to set in. And of course, if those mind states don't have time to appear, you won't have time to, you know, you won't have the opportunity to actually see how to be in wiser relationship with them through the lens of practice. So 45 minutes a day, six days a week was like the foundation of MBSR.

49:15And that was in 1979. Now it's like 44 years later. And for the vast majority of MBSR programs, they're still doing 45 minutes a day, six days a week. So there are arguments for that. On the other hand, if you're not doing MBSR in a hospital with a really good teacher and you're just trying on your own with an app or with guided meditations or just on your own with no guidance, time doesn't really matter. what matters is the love. What matters is the intention. And if your intention is not to get better or to improve on yourself or to become a great meditator, but to simply drop into your life and live it in moments where you're not filling it with doing, but just experiencing being, then time of day doesn't really matter or how long you practice doesn't matter either.

50:08Play with it. Experiment. Be the kind of scientist of your own motivation. And motivation is extremely important here. I mean, people who decide hearing this podcast or some of your other guests or whatever, they may get motivated to practice. How long that lasts, you know, New Year's resolutions and everything. We know how long that lasts. And His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, is very, very powerful on this point. Motivation is everything. So you have to inquire in a certain way, what is my deep motivation for doing this? Is it just self-improvement or a little relaxation or a little less or anger management or something like that?

50:51Or is it that I have a feeling that I'm actually missing some essential element in my life that maybe I remember from when I was three or four or five years old and then somehow it got squashed, whether it was in school or not recognized by my parents or whatever. and bullied or whatever it was in my social engagements. And I kind of got onto a trajectory where some of me got left behind. Robert Bly talks about it in a very beautiful way. 30 years ago when Robert Bly was doing his stuff, the great poet Robert Bly, you know, where he said, you know, we're all born with a sort of a bag that we have over our left shoulder, he said.

51:30And over time, when you went into social situations where people shame you or they blame you or one way or another, you feel bad about yourself. You take what you did and your real self and you stuff it into this bag. And by the time you're 30 years old, the bag is like, you know, a mile long and getting caught in elevators when you get into the elevator. And you're kind of like you've stuffed some of the most beautiful aspects of yourself because you didn't realize that that beauty was not to be denied. And you tried to sort of make yourself socially acceptable or whatever it is, which is never a good strategy for being yourself.

52:13And so I think there's a way when you devote yourself or come to the idea that you want to live a more mindful life, live a more heartful life, because the words mind and heart are the same word in pretty much all Asian languages, I'm told. And so if you hear mindfulness and you're not hearing compassion or heartfulness, you're not really understanding what this is. That's why I'd say it really is a love affair, but not a love affair that's self-centered, you know, like me, I'm the star, but the exact opposite of inquiring into how empty those personal pronouns are, that you don't know who you are.

52:51And that not knowing is part of awareness and is beautiful, absolutely beautiful. So to start a meditation practice, presumably the people who are listening to this, maybe something that you or I are saying is resonating with them and saying, you know what, this is speaking to some aspect of me that's like actually very old. It's been around as long as I can remember, but I've never accorded it any time or energy. So let me kind of give it a certain kind of nurturance with a formal time that I'm going to actually devote to this, whether it's pleasant or unpleasant doesn't matter or neutral, whether I have a good meditation in quotes or a bad meditation.

53:33There's no such thing. As I was saying earlier, awareness is awareness. So awareness of good feelings, fine. Awareness of bad feelings, equally fine. Awareness of anger, awareness of murderous rage, whatever it is, it's all fine because it's the awareness that is what's most important. And when you can bring awareness to rage or to feelings of self-loathing or anything like that, You can do this powerful experiment or pain in the body. Ask yourself, is my awareness of this loathing or pain or whatever it is, actually experiencing that? And the answer will be no. Your awareness is just simply bigger.

54:16And it can see all those thoughts and emotions as like waves on the surface of the ocean. They come, they go, and we don't have to take them personally. And when we don't take them personally, then we discover a totally new dimension of our own humanity. And that can become the place out of which we live and act and operate and love. Everybody will do it differently. It's not like everybody will look like they belong to some mindfulness cult. No, there is no mindfulness cult. I certainly hope there's no mindfulness cult. And not devotee to great teachers or anything like that. the devotion needs to be to awareness itself.

54:56It's completely impersonal. And we can be incredibly grateful and express that gratitude for however it was that we encountered the practice and it started us on our own journey. And I know everybody who has ever meditated extensively in their lives actually remembers the moment that they really knew this was not some gimmicky thing that they were going to take up for a moment and then let pass. They remember the moment when they knew this is it for me. This is it. This is for life in a certain way. And I love that. And I've asked hundreds of people that. And nobody doesn't know when that moment happened.

55:40And it evokes certain feelings and emotions and memories about what one's apprehension was, what one saw and what one felt. So again, that's another way of saying that my motivation for doing this myself to have this conversation with you at the turning point in the year is that if this program and all your other guests can be instrumental in tilting things in the direction of greater authenticity, that we're living the lives that are ours to live rather than some fiction that we make up driven by either fear or insecurity or unexamined ambition that's actually aggression expressing itself in some way or other.

56:25The world is instantly different because we're transforming what it means to be human or reclaiming, I would say, what it means to be human in the form of you. One last question for me. There are so many flavors. You referenced this earlier. So many flavors of meditation. You can meditate on the breath. You can do a body scan. You can do it sitting up, lying down. You can do loving kindness meditation, compassion meditation, sympathetic joy meditation, open awareness, Zen meditation, Tibetan Vajrayana, Dzogchen meditation. How do we even begin to figure out which style is for us? Not to mention the Vedic and transcendental meditation.

57:08This is just as Richie Davidson, our mutual friend, likes to say, the word meditation is kind of like the word sports. My moniker of the moment is many doors, same room. Doesn't matter what door you enter. You don't stand in the doorway and say, wow, this doorway is beautiful and all the other doorways are like, you know, just can't compare to my doorway, you know, or my teacher or my tradition. The problem isn't the doorway or the teacher or the tradition, but the my is a big problem. That's self-identifying. So to a first approximation, all the doorways, of course, are different. If you have a big hall and you got 20 doorways, yeah, we all know every doorway is unique, right?

57:55Because it's located where it is and it's not where some of the doorway is. So the view is different inwardly and outwardly. But once you enter the room, it doesn't matter which door you came in. And the room is the room of the human heart. When it is willing to put the welcome mat out to itself. I don't know why it's just, I know why it just popped into my mind, that famous poem, which I probably recited for you in other programs, by Derek Walcott, called Love After Love, because it's talking about just that, when you will love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine, give bread, give back your heart to yourself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, who you have ignored for another who knows you by heart.

58:44And then he says, take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes. So that's like your whole story of me, your whole history. Take down the love letters, the photographs, the desperate notes, the full catastrophe of the story of me. Peel your own image from the mirror. And then the last words of the poem. Sit. Feast on your life. So here's somebody who, you know, didn't do Buddhist meditation or any other kind of meditation as far as I know. He got to it. However, he got to it. And when he says sit, I don't think he actually means sit like, you know, a Zen monk or something like that or none.

59:32But just beyond any tradition, take your seat in your life. Show up. Be awake and aware and love again the stranger who was yourself. That means reclaim all your narratives and then be the knowing and the not knowing of what the whole thing is all about. And when I say the knowing and the not knowing, that's what awareness is. I mean, we need to be aware of how much we don't know, but think we do and have opinions about. And so, yeah, it's important to be aware of what it is that we know and feel in our values and our ethical foundation, which is absolutely key to this practice of non-harming.

1:00:17But we also have to, just like every great scientist, what we know can be profoundly blinding and oppressive because it, in some sense, creates some kind of barricade to what is right over the horizon that we may not know yet. And there were like an insight into the nature of things would produce a new view, like all of a sudden an aha moment. I mean, scientists know this because this moment of discovery where you're the only person on the planet that has realized this thing, whether you're Albert Einstein and general relativity or special relativity or whoever, that not knowing is really important.

1:01:03So awareness, mindfulness is both being the knowing. It's an invitation to actually live in that space of knowing and the knowing of not knowing. And that's really pregnant, fecund with possibility for insight and for, say, an appreciation of people you may not have appreciated in the past or see how you write some people off or some things off. or, you know, you get caught in, you know, sort of one thing or another with only partial information about it. And to find a way to live with integrity and then take stands, become, you know, an activist, so to speak, of mindfulness, where you take stands, but really deeply informed stands that might help contribute to the kind of governance I've been pointing to, where we create boundaries that make it less allowable to cause harm in all the infinite number of ways we're so good at and actually make unbelievable fortunes causing harm as much of corporate America does.

1:02:21So minimizing the harm in whatever ways we can and maximizing benefit and well-being and peace and health. You know, it's not a rocket science. It's something where the Congress would benefit enormously from being more mindful and practicing together, sitting together before making decisions, you know. Of course, there's a long way before we can reach a point like that. But it's also true that things happen very fast when they happen. 50 years ago, nobody would have predicted that millions and millions of Americans would be meditating and that the NIH would be funding millions and millions, scores of millions of dollars every year to fund meditation research and mindfulness research in particular, that would have been considered the heart of insanity, and yet it's come to pass.

1:03:15And so I, for one, really want to stay in the kind of non-deluded but really open-hearted kind of appreciation of possibility and that every one of us is in some sense an exponent of that. Emily Dickens said, I dwell in possibility, a fairer house than prose. And prose is that kind of linear thinking that carries you away from your meditation practice. And then possibility is the awareness that just opens to, oh, that's the mind just doing itself and I don't have to get caught up at it. And when you exercise that muscle over days, weeks, months, years, decades, right into your grave, as far as I can see, in a certain way, you're contributing as best you can to not only your own life, but the life of the world in ways that are non-trivial and going to be more and more essential in the coming decades.

1:04:16Jon Kabat-Zinn, always a tremendous pleasure to talk to you. And thank you for your time. I really, really appreciate it. I love talking with you, Dan. And I love our connection over so many years. And may it be a benefit and a deep bow to you for everything that you're doing to curate, in some sense, the kind of interface between this sort of ordinary world and the world of possibility that mindfulness or whatever you want to call it can offer. to people. And I just bow to you for the work that you do and the position you take in the world in that kind of a way. It's like really beautiful. Thank you.

1:04:56That was the 10 % Happier podcast hosted by our friend Dan Harris with Jon Kabat-Zinn. I hope you enjoyed it. On Friday, by the way, we have a brand new TED Radio Hour episode coming out with even more wisdom to help you navigate 2024. It's gonna be a doozy. So stay tuned for that.