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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Harris
Read between
January 14 - January 26, 2024
I initially wanted to call this book The Voice in My Head Is an Asshole.
It’s true, though. The voice in my head can be a total pill.
To be clear, it’s not a miracle cure. It won’t make you taller or better-looking, nor will it magically solve all of your problems. You should disregard the fancy books and the famous gurus promising immediate enlightenment. In my experience, meditation makes you 10% happier.
was utterly convinced that the continuation of any success I had achieved was contingent upon persistent hypervigilance.
I mean, even Tony Soprano had a therapist.
“War is a drug.”
Our entire lives, he argued, are governed by a voice in our heads. This voice is engaged in a ceaseless stream of thinking—most of it negative, repetitive, and self-referential. It squawks away at us from the minute we open our eyes in the morning until the minute we fall asleep at night, if it allows us to sleep at all. 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.
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.
It finally hit me that I’d been sleepwalking through much of my life—swept along on a tide of automatic, habitual behavior.
But it was in this moment, lying in bed late at night, that I first realized that the voice in my head—the running commentary that had dominated my field of consciousness since I could remember—was kind of an asshole.
“Make 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.”
Even Freud himself had conceded that the best therapy could do was bring us from “hysteric misery” to “common unhappiness.”
The Buddha embraced an often overlooked truism: nothing lasts—including us. We and everyone we love will die. Fame fizzles, beauty fades, continents shift. Pharaohs are swallowed by emperors, who fall to sultans, kings, kaisers, and presidents—and it all plays out against the backdrop of an infinite universe in which our bodies are made up of atoms from the very first exploding stars.
The route to true happiness, he argued, was to achieve a visceral understanding of impermanence, which would take you off the emotional roller coaster and allow you to see your dramas and desires through a wider lens.
The repeated attempt to bring the compulsive thought machine to heel was like holding a live fish in your hands.
The Buddhists had a helpful analogy here. Picture the mind like a waterfall, they said: the water is the torrent of thoughts and emotions; mindfulness is the space behind the waterfall.
What mindfulness does is create some space in your head so you can, as the Buddhists say, “respond” rather than simply “react.” In the Buddhist view, you can’t control what comes up in your head; it all arises out of a mysterious void. We spend a lot of time judging ourselves harshly for feelings that we had no role in summoning. The only thing you can control is how you handle it.
The brain, the organ of experience, through which our entire lives are led, can be trained. Happiness is a skill.
Marturano recommended something radical: do only one thing at a time. When you’re on the phone, be on the phone. When you’re in a meeting, be there. Set aside an hour to check your email, and then shut off your computer monitor and focus on the task at hand.
Overall, compassionate people tended to be healthier, happier, more popular, and more successful at work.
Striving is fine, as long as it’s tempered by the realization that, in an entropic universe, the final outcome is out of your control. If you don’t waste your energy on variables you cannot influence, you can focus much more effectively on those you can. When you are wisely ambitious, you do everything you can to succeed, but you are not attached to the outcome—so that if you fail, you will be maximally resilient, able to get up, dust yourself off, and get back in the fray. That, to use a loaded term, is enlightened self-interest.
The Way of the Worrier Don’t Be a Jerk (And/But …) When Necessary, Hide the Zen Meditate The Price of Security Is Insecurity—Until It’s Not Useful Equanimity Is Not the Enemy of Creativity Don’t Force It Humility Prevents Humiliation Go Easy with the Internal Cattle Prod Nonattachment to Results What Matters Most?
“Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling the way you feel.”
DATES CAN CHANGE, SO CAN YOU.
