10% Happier

by Dan Harris

his theory was that, just as I had used drugs to replace the thrill of combat, I was now inflating the drama of the office war zone to replace drugs.

Maybe. I was conflicted. I was absolutely aware that worrying could be counterproductive. Furthermore, I did not enjoy harboring competitive feelings toward people I liked and admired. But I still firmly believed that a certain amount of churning was unavoidable, especially in this business, and I had no intention of abandoning the whole “price of security” thing.

He told me how he and Jim Dobson had clashed over Ted’s desire to focus evangelicals on issues like global warming. In Ted’s account, the behind-the-scenes maneuvering included behavior that was surprisingly ruthless.

It was fun to talk to Ted. You might think that the yawning cultural and philosophical gap between us—he was a guy who believed that he had a running dialogue with Jesus, after all—would make a genuine connection impossible, but that clearly wasn’t the case.

Yes, people would always ask whether we were believers, but when we said no, there were never gasps or glares. They may have thought we were going to hell, but they were perfectly nice about it.

There are few things the media loves more than a self-appointed paragon of virtue falling from grace.

America, as then senator Barack Obama had noted after Hurricane Katrina, “goes from shock to trance” faster than any other nation on earth.

It was a giant relief to sincerely want what was best for Bianca—to worry about her life and her career, rather than just fixate inwardly.

Sorting out my romantic life after decades of often aimless bachelorhood was like scratching a huge existential itch.

When I pointed out that it was his religious beliefs that forced him to live a lie for so many years, he countered that it was the “culture of hatefulness” in the modern church that did that, not the core teachings of Jesus himself.

I had read the research showing that regular churchgoers tended to be happier, in part because having a sense that the world is infused with meaning and that suffering happens for a reason helped them deal more successfully with life’s inevitable humiliations.

Up until my interview with Ted, I had derived a smug sense of self-satisfaction that, unlike the believers I was covering, I did not have a deep need for answers to the Big Questions; I was comfortable with the mystery of how we got here and what would happen after we died. But I now realized that a sort of incuriosity had set in; my sense of awe had atrophied.

I might have disagreed with the conclusions reached by people of faith, but at least that part of their brain was functioning. Every week, they had a set time to consider their place in the universe, to step out of the matrix and achieve some perspective. If you’r...

Superficially, at least, he was the type of person who, if you met him at a cocktail party, you would either ignore or avoid.

Instead, I had my forelock pushed back and was scrutinizing a hairline that seemed to me about as stable as the Maginot Line. Bianca had busted me doing this on more than one occasion in our bathroom at home. She pointed out that, other than some thinning in the back and a receding divot near my part, I basically had a full head of hair. But every now and again, a stray glance in a reflective surface would send me down the rabbit hole. Here in this cramped airplane bathroom, I was flashing on a future that looked like this: Baldness → Unemployment → Flophouse in Duluth

“Your demons may have been ejected from the building, but they’re out in the parking lot, doing push-ups.”)

Corny or not, I found that old journalistic injunction to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” inspiring.

In my eight years at the network, I had witnessed seemingly immovable fixtures of broadcast news fade or simply disappear. Among the missing were Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather. When I had arrived at ABC News back in 2000, I was the youngest correspondent on the fourth floor. Suddenly, at age thirty-seven, I was nearly the oldest.

That had sparked a lot of discussion about the fact that she was a Pentecostal, a strain of Christianity sometimes described as “Evangelicalism on steroids.”

Talk, talk, talk: the voice is constantly judging and labeling everything in its field of vision. Its targets aren’t just external; it often viciously taunts us, too.

Some would label this Satan.

The ego is never satisfied. No matter how much stuff we buy, no matter how many arguments we win or delicious meals we consume, the ego never feels complete.

The ego is constantly comparing itself to others. It has us measuring our self-worth against the looks, wealth, and social status of everyone else. Did this not explain some of my worrying at work? The ego thrives on drama. It keeps our old resentments and grievances alive through compulsive thought.

Perhaps the most powerful Tollean insight into the ego was that it is obsessed with the past and the future, at the expense of the present.

I was a pro, I realized, at avoiding the present. A ringer. This had been true my whole life.

In eighth grade, an ex-girlfriend told me, “When you have one foot in the future and the other in the past, you piss on the present.”

One observer described him as looking like a “Communist-era librarian.” Another called him a “pale, kindly otter.”

When the dermatologist first discovered the milky patch on my cheek—basal cell carcinoma, a nonlethal form of skin cancer—I was tempted to just leave it there.

But then a funny thing happened. After all my reading about the empty nattering of the ego, I realized: These fearful forecasts were just thoughts skittering through my head. They weren’t irrational, but they weren’t necessarily true.

What made this different was that I was able to see my thoughts for what they were: just thoughts, with no concrete reality. It’s not that my worry suddenly ceased, I just wasn’t as taken in by it.

Ultimately, I had to go back in for four facial slices before the tumor was fully removed. They came within a millimeter, but the lower part of my eyelid was spared. Before they sewed me up, the doctor showed me the wound in a mirror and I nearly fainted. I could see well into the side of my cheek—blood, fat, and all. Bianca took out her phone and snapped a picture.

Tolle was forcing me to confront the fact that the thing I’d always thought was my greatest asset—my internal cattle prod—was also perhaps my greatest liability.

Laughing again, he continued. “The most powerful change comes actually out of that different state of consciousness. This is why people so admire what Gandhi did, because he was bringing about change from a state of consciousness that was already at peace. And people sometimes believe that if you’re already at peace you’re never going to do anything. But that’s not the case. Very powerful actions come out of that.”

the present moment your friend rather than your enemy. Because many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment. And imagine living your whole life like that, where always this moment is never quite right, not good enough because you need to get to the next one. That is continuous stress.”

The story aired a few weeks later on both Sunday World News and Nightline. The reactions from my colleagues were interesting. A few of them wrote Tolle off as a whack-job. Several others said they found him oddly compelling. My friend Jeanmarie, for example, described him as being like a Yule log—initially boring, but ultimately mesmerizing.

As he spoke, I began to suspect that there must be more to my boss’s interest than he was letting on. Here was a man with a supremely stressful job, managing both the outsized personalities within the news division and the demands of his corporate overlords. Once, over lunch, he’d admitted to me that his real personality was at times significantly less sunny than his persona.

Deepak climbed to the rank of the Maharishi’s top lieutenant. But he and the Maharishi grew apart. Deepak started feeling like the group had become too cultish; the Maharishi thought Deepak too ambitious. So Deepak left.

So was he full of shit? I couldn’t tell. As with Tolle, I found him to be a baffling mixtape of the interesting and the incomprehensible—like a DJ toggling between the Rolling Stones and Rick Astley, the Band and Dokken.

His memorable assertions to me included “The universe is a nanotechnology workshop in the mind of god,” and “Don’t call it God, call it a-causal, non-local, quantum-mechanical inter-religiousness.”

One of the leading players in this questionable game was Joe Vitale, who had risen to prominence after landing a cameo in what would become a monster cultural phenomenon called The Secret. This was a high-gloss book and DVD that came out in 2006 and featured a whole crew of self-help gurus expounding on the “Law of Attraction,” which offered the prospect of getting anything you wanted—health, wealth, love—simply by thinking about it in the right way. It was essentially a slick repackaging of an old idea that had been sent up the flagpole by such pioneering turkeys as Napoleon Hill, who produced the 1930s bestseller Think and Grow Rich, and Norman Vincent Peale, author of the canonical turd, The Power of Positive Thinking.

The more worrisome message of The Secret phenomenon was not the preposterousness of its primary sales pitch, but instead its destructive undercurrent. “The inverse of your logic,” I argued to Vitale, “seems to blame the victim. Because if you aren’t getting what you want, it must be your fault.”

The other star of The Secret I covered managed to push the absurdity level directly into the truly dangerous range. James Arthur Ray was a fit, fifty-something, divorced junior college dropout who oozed smarmy overconfidence. An oily character, he looked like he always had a thin sheen of sweat covering his face. He promised his followers that he could help them achieve “harmonic wealth” in all areas of their life. He claimed that, using his own techniques, he’d not only gotten rich, but that he also no longer so much as caught a cold.

After investigating for four months, police in Arizona charged Ray with manslaughter. The man who once told viewers of The Secret that they should treat the universe as if it were Aladdin’s lamp was perp-walked in front of news cameras, wearing handcuffs and leg irons, looking mortified. Even though he’d authored a book called Harmonic Wealth, he said he didn’t have enough money to make bail. In another delicious twist, investigators released documents that seemed to explain how Ray maintained his robust physical appearance. It wasn’t the Law of Attraction. After the sweat lodge, police found a suitcase in Ray’s room, filled with diet supplements and prescribed steroids.

His basic message was that the best self-help program was developed 2,500 years ago—a worldview that, oddly enough, held that there is actually no “self” to “help.”

After months of swimming against the riptide of bathos and bullshit peddled by the self-help subculture, it was phenomenally refreshing to see the ego depicted with wry wit.

Much of our inner dialogue is this constant reaction to experience by a selfish, childish protagonist. None of us has moved very far from the seven-year-old who vigilantly watches to see who got more.”

Epstein totally nailed my habit of hunting around my plate for the next bite before I’d tasted what was in my mouth. As he described it, “I do not want to experience the fading of the flavor—the colorless, cottony pulp that succeeds that spectacular burst over my taste buds.”

With Buddhists comprising only about 1/300 of the U.S. population and not being in the habit of taking strident political stands, they didn’t attract much coverage.

The Buddha himself didn’t claim to be a god or a prophet. He specifically told people not to adopt any of his teachings until they’d test-driven the material themselves. He wasn’t even trying to start a religion, per se. The word Buddhism was actually an invention of the nineteenth-century Western scholars who discovered and translated the original texts.

According to Epstein, the Buddha may well have been the “original psychoanalyst.” To my surprise, Epstein seemed to be arguing that Buddhism was better than seeing a shrink. Therapy, he said, often leads to “understanding without relief.”

As best I could understand it, the Buddha’s main thesis was that in a world where everything is constantly changing, we suffer because we cling to things that won’t last.