10% Happier With Dan Harris

Today we’re diving into a concept that is simultaneously one of the oldest contemplative cliches and one of the most profound head scratchers — oneness. Can *you* be one with everything if *you* don’t really exist? And, even if we manage to grok this idea, what are the practical ramifications? Actually, this is just one of the many riddles and paradoxes we’ll be exploring today.  My guest is Roshi Norma Wong. She was recommended to us by frequent guest and friend of TPH, The Reverend angel Kyodo Williams. Roshi Norma is a Zen Master, a life-long resident of Hawaii, a former State legislator, and abbot of a Zen temple called Anko-in. In this conversation, we talk about: • Understanding -- and experiencing -- oneness • Removing the binary between relaxation and focus • Why she thinks we need to cultivate pride and humility simultaneously • Why she thinks that before we try to solve the world’s problems, we need to become better people • And why our current moment of compounding global catastrophes presents us w

We all remember that fateful week, almost exactly a year ago, when it all seemed to sink in for so many of us–when Tom Hanks got sick, the NBA suspended games, and the (now former) President addressed the nation in primetime. The big question now is: When and how will this plague end?  My guest today has a clear vision for how things are likely to play out from from here. His name is Dr. Nicholas Christakis. He’s a physician, sociologist, and director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale University. He’s written a number of books, but there are two that we will discuss in this episode. His latest is called Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. The other book we’re going to talk about is on a related subject. It’s called Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. In it, Christakis argues that human beings are fundamentally good. In fact, as you will hear, it is our goodness that the virus exploits.  One more order of business: when COVID began affecting our

To mark the first anniversary of the week in March 2020 when Covid fundamentally altered our lives, we’re launching a special two-part series. Today, we’re going to be talking about anxiety, which has been spiking during the pandemic. My guest is Dr. Jud Brewer, a psychiatrist and deep dharma practitioner who argues that anxiety is a habit–one that you can unwind. Then, next Monday, we’ll talk to Nicholas Christakis, who is not only a doctor but also the head of the Human Nature Lab at Yale, about when the pandemic will end, and what this ordeal has revealed about our species. But today it’s anxiety with Jud Brewer. Some of you may know Jud from the Ten Percent Happier app, where he teaches a mindful eating course. He’s also been on this show several times. He is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University. He’s got a number of apps that use mindfulness to treat addiction, including Eat Right Now, Craving to Quit, and Unwinding Anxiety. He also has a brand new book, c

Before we dive in, a warning: this conversation includes descriptions of abuse and violence. As you may know, March 8th, the day we’re dropping this episode, is International Women’s Day. We have a story today about intimate violence, which has long been a problem for women around the world, and has only intensified during the pandemic. My guest is Tanya Selvaratnam, a writer and artist who I’ve known socially for many, many years. I was truly shocked when Tanya’s name surfaced in the media three years ago, in connection with the case of Eric Schneiderman. Eric was the celebrated Attorney General of New York State. He was also a regular on the local meditation scene. I knew Eric and Tanya were dating. What I did not know was that, behind the scenes, Eric was allegedly physically and emotionally abusing Tanya. She has now come out with a book, called Assume Nothing, which goes into searing detail about not only the alleged abuse, but also about how she flipped the script, regained her agency, helped bring her

I know you guys, and it is pretty clear you love deep dharma episodes. Today we’ve got a dharma episode that is quite timely. As you all know, we live in a time when most people are getting their news from carefully curated information silos. As a result, we often create very specific views— about public figures, current events, our fellow citizens — and we can cling pretty tightly to those views. Today we’re gonna talk about how useful and even pleasurable it can be to dig into the roots of these biases and dismantle them— to pop our bubbles of delusion. It can be a relief. It can be eye-opening. It can change the way you relate to yourself and to other people. My guest is Andrea Fella. She is the co-teacher at the Insight Meditation Center and the Insight Retreat Center in Redwood City, California. She has been practicing Insight Meditation since 1996, and teaching Insight Meditation since 2003. She is particularly drawn to intensive retreat practice, and has done a number of long retreats, both in the Unit

We’re all creatives, whether we think of ourselves that way or not. In so many aspects of your life, from planning your future to planning a meal to curating your social media, you need to be able to both envision and then execute. And how you work with your mind in these moments is key. Today, we are going to hear from a master creator -- the mind behind brilliant Pixar movies such as Inside Out, Up, and the recently-released Soul -- about how to run a creative process at the highest possible level. (I have a six-year-old, and, in my opinion, one of the worst parts of the job of being a dad is sitting through insipid children's entertainment. But the aforementioned films have been both thrilling and moving to consume, for both me and my son.) My guest today is Pete Docter, who directed all three of those films. He is the Chief Creative Officer of Pixar. He is also a meditator and a practicing Christian whose films are each motivated by a big, pressing question he is posing to himself about his own life. In t

The stereotypical depiction of fighting addiction makes it seem highly unpleasant: White knuckling, sweating it out, detoxing, going cold turkey–you get the picture. This applies to classical addiction, and also to the less dangerous (but nonetheless nettlesome) unhealthy habits and compulsions that we all wrestle with. My guest today takes a very different approach. She aims to harness the pleasure centers of the brain as a way to handle addictive habits—and, controversially, she doesn’t believe you need to go cold turkey on alcohol, which is the main intoxicant she has targeted. Her name is Annie Grace, and she is the author of a very popular book called This Naked Mind. (Shout out to my friend and colleague Steve Baker, the executive producer of Nightline, who has gotten a lot out of Annie’s work, and turned me on to her.) This episode is the second in a two-part series we’re doing this week on addiction. If you missed it, go check out Monday’s episode with Buddhist teacher Kevin Griffin, who has worked to

This is an episode about our craving, grasping minds. Whether you have struggled with a classic addiction or not, we all have addictive tendencies; we all wrestle with desire. I often think about a provocative question once posed by my friend, Dr. Jud Brewer, a Buddhist practitioner and addiction specialist: Are we all addicted? The implied answer is yes.    My guest today thinks about addiction in a similarly broad and compelling way. He talks about addictions to substances like drugs and alcohol, but also addiction to self and addiction to racism. Kevin Griffin is a longtime Buddhist practitioner and 12 Step participant, and is one of the founders of the Buddhist Recovery Network. He has trained with many of the legendary teachers we have interviewed on this show, including Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein. He has written many books, including One Breath at a Time: Buddhism & the Twelve Steps. His latest is Buddhism & the Twelve Steps: Daily Reflections: Thoughts on Dharma and Recovery.   This is

Today we’re going to talk about a massively useful acronym, which can be used both on the cushion and in your free-range living. The acronym is RAIN -- R-A-I-N -- and rather than explaining it myself, I will leave that to my guest, who has become one of RAIN’s primary proponents. Tara Brach is an author, therapist, and meditation teacher. She has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, she founded the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, and she has written several books, including her latest, which is called Radical Compassion. We first posted this interview in January 2020, shortly after that book came out. In this conversation, we talk about: What RAIN is and how to apply it in many areas of your life, including relationships; a Buddhist list called The Eight Worldly Winds; and whether most people harbor a suspicion that there's something fundamentally wrong with us. But we start and end the conversation with a touchy subject. In my first book, I made fun of Tara a little bit, which didn’t go down that well

We’re now almost a full year into the era of Covid restrictions, and I suspect that many of you, as I am, are starting to internalize the fact that, notwithstanding the vaccines, there’s likely a ways to go yet. And the mental health issues are piling up: The depression, anxiety, and addiction. Moms, people of color, and elderly people who can’t see their families are among those getting hit especially hard. To inject a little sunshine, and perspective, and wisdom, we thought it might make sense to re-post one of our favorite conversations of the last year. Pema Chödrön has seemingly been trying to prepare us for this pandemic for years, through a series of popular books, with titles such as When Things Fall Apart, Welcoming the Unwelcome, and The Wisdom of No Escape. But as you will hear, she is anything but gloomy. Like all of the great meditation teachers I’ve met, she has a lightness and a sense of humor about her. She was born Deirdre Blomfield in Connecticut. She lived a conventional life, going to UC B

How do you relate to the more difficult— and even ugly— aspects of your personality? How do you feel about yourself when you are, say, in a judgmental or vengeful or jealous mode? Is that an opportunity for self-laceration? My guest today agrees with me that one of the healthiest possible inner moves is to learn how to hug your dragons, instead of attempting to slay them (which is only likely to make them stronger). Dr. Richard Schwartz is a psychotherapist with a Ph.D. in marriage and family therapy. He founded something called the Internal Family Systems model of therapy, often referred to as IFS. His basic idea is that our consciousness is broken down into several parts. These parts can become rebellious and troublesome when traumatized or unattended. In this conversation, we talk about: how to relate to your parts more successfully; the overlap between IFS and Buddhism; and why meditation isn’t enough, in his view. We also attempt to dive in and do some IFS therapy work together. I’m not sure I was a part

We have talked a lot on this show about how perfectionism can have pernicious impacts on your psyche. Today we’re going to talk about how, by contrast, a certain kind of perfection is very much worth aiming for. We’re diving into another Buddhist list in this episode: the six paramitas, or the six perfections. These are six mental skills that you will never perfect, most likely. But simply working on them can confer massive benefits. My guest is Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo. She was born Diane Perry in England, but 55 years ago, she traveled to India, where she ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist nun. At one point, she quite famously spent 12 years living and practicing in a cave in the Himalayas. She’s now the Founding Director of the Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery in India. We start by discussing her extraordinary life. Then we dive into the six paramitas. We talk about: why patience is a kind of armor, why we need other people to push our buttons, the importance of dissolving the small self to get to the perfection that l

My guest today makes a fascinating and potentially life-changing case. He argues that we need to reconsider how we view intelligence. He says that instead of viewing intelligence as the ability to think and learn, we should view it as the ability to rethink and unlearn. My guest, whose name is Adam Grant, says there is evidence that, in a fast-moving world, what he calls the “critical art of rethinking” can “position you for excellence at work and wisdom in life.” Not for nothing, in a world where many of us are stuck in our own information silos, the ability to rethink and open our minds may be one way we can dig ourselves out of our current societal divisions. Some of you may know Adam. He’s been on the show before. He’s an organizational psychologist, a TED speaker, a professor at Wharton, and the author of four New York Times bestselling books, including one that has had a big influence on me, called Give and Take, which is all about how generosity can contribute to professional success. I am happy to rep

Today we’re talking about one of the Buddha’s first and most important lists: the Eightfold Path. I’m kinda surprised we’ve never done a deep dive into this list on the show before, but better late than never. Some context before we dive in: The Buddha, as many of you know, was a congenital list maker. His first and foundational list was the Four Noble Truths. This is the list that begins with “life is suffering” -- which is something of a mistranslation; it basically means that life will be unsatisfying if you are constantly clinging to things that will not last, given the nonnegotiable fact of relentless impermanence. The second noble truth is that the cause of our suffering is thirst or clinging. The third is that there is a way out of this mess. And the fourth is a sort of manual for waking up and suffering less. That fourth noble truth is the Eightfold path. It’s a list within a list. And to help us unpack it all is a fascinating person named Brother Pháp Dung. He was born in Vietnam, came to the US with

For an audience of meditators (or aspiring meditators), the idea of doing nothing shouldn’t be foreign. But, speaking from personal experience, it is very possible, especially for Type A people, to approach meditation with an agenda. In which case, sitting on the cushion can be very far from truly doing nothing. Enter Jenny Odell, who makes a very compelling case for truly… doing… nothing. In her work, she is challenging what for many of us, myself included, is a deep-seated and sometimes subconscious reflex: to constantly optimize and constantly be “productive.” She is a Lecturer in the Stanford Department of Art and Art History and author of the bestseller How to Do Nothing, which just came out in paperback. She comes to the subject of time from a very different perspective than our guest on Monday, Ashley Whillans. (If you haven’t listened to that episode, go do it; these two make a fascinating pairing.) In this conversation, Jenny and I talk about: letting go of our constant demand for productivity and le

For many of us, in this pandemic, our relationship to time has become particularly fraught. You may be noticing that, with no limits on your work time, you are going into overdrive and feeling more crazed than ever. Or you may be feeling like you have too much time and are bored out of your mind. Or you may be feeling both. My guest, Ashley Whillans, is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School and author of the book Time Smart. She was recommended to us by a former guest, Laurie Santos, a professor from Yale and host of The Happiness Lab podcast. Ashley has a radical approach to managing your time -- or taking your time, to put a new spin on an old cliche. Her goal is to get you from a state of "time poverty" to "time affluence." In this conversation, we talk about: how to do a time audit; funding time, finding time, and reframing time; the surprising extent to which prioritizing time over money predicts happiness -- and what to do if you usually do the opposite; how to handle "time confetti"; and th

We’re diving in on another Buddhist list today. One of the many things I like about the Buddha is that, as far as I can tell, he pretty much always aims his messages, even the hard-to-swallow ones, at the pleasure centers of the brain. Even when he’s talking about ethics, which could come off as preachy or overly abstemious. Today, we’re going to talk about the Five Precepts. The Precepts are kind of like the Buddhist version of the Ten Commandments. Except, as you will hear, there is, by design, an enormous amount of flexibility in how you can interpret and apply these precepts. And undergirding it all is, as mentioned, self-interest. The reason not to steal or lie or kill is that, in the end, it protects your mind. My guest is Jozen Tamori Gibson, who has trained in the Sotō Zen and Theravada traditions, is on the Teacher’s Council for New York Insight Meditation Center, and teaches in a variety of other settings, including the Insight Meditation Society. Jozen’s pronouns are they/them. Quick note before we

On this Martin Luther King day, it’s tempting to fear that America, and the world, may never have been further away from the kind of inclusive society that Dr. King called for so eloquently. So today, we are, I hope, going to give you a little hope -- and perhaps also some ideas for how you can be an engaged citizen without losing your mind. My guest is Loretta Ross, who describes herself as a radical Black feminist, activist, and public intellectual. She’s a Visiting Associate Professor at Smith College, and she also teaches an online course that caught our eye. It’s called, “Calling in the Calling Out Culture.” She believes that “calling out,” which is quite common on social media these days, is adding way too much toxicity to the discourse and alienating people who might otherwise be allies. Instead, she believes in “calling in,” which steadfastly insists on a large measure of grace, and rejects the impulse to dehumanize. As you will hear, she is a longtime leftist, but no matter where you stand politicall

This is exactly what I needed right now: a huge, helpful dose of perspective in the midst of the political crisis gripping America -- a crisis which, of course, has ripple effects for the whole world. Jack Kornfield trained as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, India, and Burma. He went on to co-found the Insight Meditation Society and then its sister center, Spirit Rock. He holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and is a father, husband and activist. His books have been translated into 20 languages and sold more than a million copies. They include, A Wise Heart, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, and his most recent book, No Time Like the Present. You may ask: what’s the point of meditating when the world is on fire? Jack has extremely satisfying and practical answers. We talk about how to deal with anger and fear, how to talk to our kids, and whether people can feel it when we send them compassion or friendliness. Two quick notes before we dive in: you may hear a little ticking noise on Jack’s audio for the first ten

If you’re either seething or scared — or both — in the aftermath of the attack on the US Capitol, this one’s for you. In times of national and international strife, we’ve made it a habit of turning to Lama Rod Owens. Rod was officially recognized as a lama by the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism after doing a three-year retreat. He has a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard. And he has written several books, including his newest, which is called Love and Rage. In this conversation, which we recorded just yesterday, we talk about how to work with the anger and fear many of us are feeling right now. We also talk about how to communicate with people with whom we disagree; how to strategically divest from people and technologies that are depleting us (rather than self-medicating with distraction); and why the most important way to play a constructive role right now — although this may be counterintuitive for some people — is to start with yourself. Where to find Lama Rod Owens online:  Website: https://www.lama