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by
Dan Harris
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October 22 - November 3, 2024
If you can get past the cultural baggage, though, what you’ll find is that meditation is simply exercise for your brain. It’s a proven technique for preventing the voice in your head from leading you around by the nose.
don’t start a sentence with “but”; don’t say “like” when you can say “such as”; never, ever use the word “meanwhile.”
My modus operandi was inherited from my father, whose motto was: “The price of security is insecurity.”
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’re never looking up, I now realized, you’re always just looking around.
(Although I tried to always keep in mind something a friend had once told me: “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 discussing the unpredictability of my profession with my brother recently, he told me about scientific studies where lab rats were rewarded with food pellets at random, illogical times. Those rats went crazy.
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.
How do we do a better job of staying in the Now? Tolle’s answer: “Always say ‘yes’ to the present moment.” How do we achieve liberation from the voice in the head? His advice: simply be aware of it. “To become free of the ego is not really a big job but a very small one.”
Tolle repeatedly denigrated the habit of worrying, which he characterized as a useless process of projecting fearfully into an imaginary future. “There is no way that you can cope with such a situation, because it doesn’t exist. It’s a mental phantom,” he wrote.
“We are constantly murmuring, muttering, scheming, or wondering to ourselves under our breath,” wrote Epstein. “‘I like this. I don’t like that. She hurt me. How can I get that? More of this, no more of that.’ 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.”
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. A central theme of the Buddha’s “dharma” (which roughly translates to “teaching”) revolved around the very word that had been wafting through my consciousness when I used to lie on my office couch, pondering the unpredictability of television news: “impermanence.
They had a term, too, for that thing I did where something would bother me and I would immediately project forward to an unpleasant future (e.g., Balding → Unemployment → Flophouse). The Buddhists called this prapañca (pronounced pra-PUN-cha), which roughly translates to “proliferation,” or “the imperialistic tendency of mind.” That captured it beautifully, I thought: something happens, I worry, and that concern instantaneously colonizes my future.
My attitude was summed up nicely by Alec Baldwin’s character on 30 Rock, who said, “Meditation is a waste of time, like learning French or kissing after sex.”
Taxonomically, we are classified as Homo sapiens sapiens, “the man who thinks and knows he thinks.” Our minds have this other capability—a bonus level, to put it in gamerspeak—that no one ever tells us about in school. (Not here in the West, at least.) We can do more than just think; we also have the power simply to be aware of things—without judgment, without the ego. This is not to denigrate thinking, just to say that thinking without awareness can be a harsh master.
There’s a difference between the raw sensations we experience and the mental spinning we do in reaction to said stimuli.
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. Again, elegant theory—but, easier said than done.
The fact that my parents never let me have sugar when I was a kid produced a lifelong obsession. (The same thing happened with television, ironically.)
My desire for forward momentum—even when the lack thereof was illusory—roughly resembled that of Woody Allen in that classic scene from Annie Hall where he breaks up with Diane Keaton. “A relationship, I think, is like a shark,” he says. “It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.”
The idea of leaning into what bothered us struck me as radical, because our reflex is usually to flee, to go buy something, eat something, or get faded on polypharmacy. But, as the Buddhists say, “The only way out is through.” Another analogy: When a big wave is coming at you, the best way not to get pummeled is to dive right in.
She nailed the method for applying mindfulness in acute situations, albeit with a somewhat dopey acronym: RAIN. R: recognize A: allow I: investigate N: non-identification
The final step—“non-identification”—meant seeing that just because I was feeling angry or jealous or fearful, that did not render me a permanently angry or jealous person. These were just passing states of mind.
What mindfulness does is create some space in your head so you can, as the Buddhists say, “respond” rather than simply “react.
He’s talking about a verse where the Buddha calls everything we experience—sights, sounds, smells, etc.—the “terrible bait of the world.” “It’s … an amazing statement,” he says. “Moment after moment, experiences are arising, and it’s as if each one has a hook … and we’re the fish. Do we bite? Or do we not bite, and just swim freely in the ocean?”
I’m remembering that time when my friend Kaiama stumped me by asking how anyone can be in the present moment when it’s always slipping away. It’s so obvious to me now: the slipping away is the whole point. Once you’ve achieved choiceless awareness, you see so clearly how fleeting everything is. Impermanence is no longer theoretical.
When the Buddha coined his famous phrase, he wasn’t saying that all of life is like being chained to a rock and having crows peck out your innards. What he really meant was something like, “Everything in the world is ultimately unsatisfying and unreliable because it won’t last.”
We just live in anticipation of the next enjoyable thing that we’ll experience. I mean, we’ve been, most of us, incredibly blessed with the number of pleasant experiences we’ve had in our lives. Yet when we look back, where are they now?”
But if we can achieve a deeper understanding of “suffering,” of the unreliability of everything we experience, it will help us appreciate the inherent poignancy of everything in the world. “It’s like we’ve been enchanted,” he says. “We’ve been put under a spell—believing that this or that is going to be the source of our ultimate freedom or happiness. And to wake up from that, to wake up from that enchantment, to be more aligned with what is true, it brings us much greater happiness.”
every shift in our seat, every bite of food, every pleasant daydream—is designed to avoid pain or seek pleasure. But if we can drop all that, we can, as Sam once said in his speech to the angry, befuddled atheists, learn how to be happy “before anything happens.” This happiness is self-generated, not contingent on exogenous forces; it’s the opposite of “suffering.” What the Buddha recognized was a genuine game changer.
“Is this useful?” It’s a simple, elegant corrective to my “price of security” motto. It’s okay to worry, plot, and plan, he’s saying—but only until it’s not useful anymore.
“I saw that there’s actually a systematic way of becoming aware of one’s own mind,” he said. “It just seemed so extraordinary to me. Before one is clued in, we’re living our lives just basically acting out our conditioning, and acting out our habit patterns, you know?”
Mark had helped me see that the point of getting behind the waterfall wasn’t to magically solve all of your problems, only to handle them better, by creating space between stimulus and response. It was about mitigation, not alleviation.
We live so much of our lives pushed forward by these “if only” thoughts, and yet the itch remains. The pursuit of happiness becomes the source of our unhappiness.
I noticed myself cultivating a sort of nostalgia for the present, developing the reflex to squelch pointless self-talk and simply notice whatever was going on around me:
This orthodoxy was now replaced with a new paradigm, called neuroplasticity. The brain, it turns out, is constantly changing in response to experience. It’s possible to sculpt your brain through meditation just as you build and tone your body through exercise—to grow your gray matter the way doing curls grows your bicep.
“Yes, because when you’re moving from this project to this project, your mind flits back to the original project, and it can’t pick it up where it left off. So it has to take a few steps back and then ramp up again, and that’s where the productivity loss is.”
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.
Another tip: take short mindfulness breaks throughout the day. She called them “purposeful pauses.” So, for example, instead of fidgeting or tapping your fingers while your computer boots up, try to watch your breath for a few minutes. When driving, turn off the radio and feel your hands on the wheel. Or when walking between meetings, leave your phone in your pocket and just notice the sensations of your legs moving.
When you lurch from one thing to the next, constantly scheming, or reacting to incoming fire, the mind gets exhausted. You get sloppy and make bad decisions. I could see how the counterintuitive act of stopping, even for a few seconds, could be a source of strength, not weakness. This was a practical complement to Joseph’s “is this useful?” mantra. It was the opposite of zoning out, it was zoning in.
Studies showed that the best way to engineer an epiphany was to work hard, focus, research, and think about a problem—and then let go. Do something else. That didn’t necessarily mean meditate, but do something that relaxes and distracts you; let your unconscious mind go to work, making connections from disparate parts of the brain.
But the best solutions often come when you allow yourself to get comfortable with ambiguity. This is why people have aha moments in the shower. It was why Kabat-Zinn had a vision while on retreat. It was why Don Draper from Mad Men, when asked how he comes up with his great slogans, said he spends all day thinking and then goes to the movies.
We all have an innate feeling of being separate from the world, peering out at life from behind our own little self, and vying against other isolated selves. But how can we truly be separate from the same world that created us? “Dust to dust” isn’t just something they say at funerals, it’s the truth. You can no more disconnect from the universe and its inhabitants than a wave can extricate itself from the ocean.
Whatever the cause, in the months after I started adding compassion into my meditation practice, things started to change. It’s not that I was suddenly a saint or that I began to exhibit extra-virgin extroversion, just that being nice—always important to me in the abstract, at least—now became a conscious, daily priority.
The Buddha captured it well when he said that anger, which can be so seductive at first, has “a honeyed tip” but a “poisoned root.”
Rather, it was simply that actions have immediate consequences in your mind—which cannot be fooled. Behave poorly, and whether you’re fully conscious of it or not, your mind contracts. The great blessing—and, frankly, the great inconvenience—of becoming more mindful and compassionate was that I was infinitely more sensitive to the mental ramifications of even the smallest transgressions, from killing a bug to dropping trash on the street.
Not letting my mind get locked in negativity made space for something else to emerge. I experienced a phenomenon I had heard Joseph once describe: a virtuous cycle, in which lower levels of anger and paranoia helped you make better decisions which, in turn, meant more happiness, and so on.
had gone so far down the path of resignation and passivity that I had compromised the career I had worked for decades to build. It was just as my dad had feared; I had become ineffective. What I should have done when faced with this adversity was buckle down and work harder. Instead, I had confused “letting go” with going soft.
“People will take advantage of you if they’re reading you as too Zen,” he said. “There’s a certain kind of aggression in organizational behavior that doesn’t value that—that will see it as weak. If you present yourself too much like that, people won’t take you seriously. So I think it important to hide the Zen, and let them think that you’re really someone they have to contend with.”
Another pitfall was detachment. I thought I was being mindful of my distress when I was left out of the big stories, but really I was just building a wall to keep out the things that made me angry or fearful. The final pitfall to which I’d succumbed was nihilism: an occasional sense of, “Whatever, man, everything’s impermanent.”
The Sufi Muslims say, “Praise Allah, but also tie your camel to the post.” In other words, it’s good to take a transcendent view of the world, but don’t be a chump.
