Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

by Dan Harris

Notice that you got hijacked there for a sec. Notice what it’s like—snap—to wake up, to escape thinking’s weird gravity. If you are noting it—thinking—then you are not inside it. Appreciate this tiny moment of sanity, and then return to the breath. Aware you are breathing: In, out. In, out.

Jeff added that if you live your life refusing to feel certain things, you’re essentially closing a series of doors in your mind. “It’s like you live in a mansion, but now you’re just going to live underneath the stairs. You’re not even going into those other rooms, because that’s where I broke up with my ex,” he said, by way of example, or “That’s my feeling of besieged inadequacy around my parents, and—man, stay out of there!—that’s my embarrassingly low self-esteem!” This is not easy to do, of course, but Jeff said, “If you can just open up each door and face it, you may find out there is actually no monster in there. It’s manageable. Bit by bit, you start to get more and more free in your life, so you can just live bigger and bigger and more and more fearlessly and with more and more freedom.”

That reminds me of a famous Buddhist parable about “the second arrow.” A man is walking through the woods and he gets hit by an arrow. He immediately engages in a round of self-pitying thoughts: “Who shot me with an arrow? Why am I always the one who gets hit by an arrow? Is this going to totally ruin my dinner plans?” Those painful thoughts are the second arrow.

That said, both Jeff and I have suffered from mild bouts of depression and/or anxiety, and we have found meditation to be enormously useful, often in conjunction with traditional psychotherapy. In my own experience, when the fog of gloom descends, meditation helps me step off the hamster wheel of obsessive thought, so that I don’t get so caught up in the stories barfed up by the voice in my head. In fact, research appears to back this up, suggesting that meditation can be beneficial for depression and anxiety. The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study led by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine that found daily mindfulness-based meditation was roughly as effective as antidepressants in providing relief from some symptoms.

There is a popular acronym that many people, myself included, have found useful as a guide for leaning into emotions, RAIN: recognize, accept, investigate, non-identification.

The first step of RAIN—the “R”—is recognize. Can you recognize any emotions happening in your experience right now? Sadness, happiness, anger, frustration, curiosity, boredom, impatience, anxiety—any emotion. If so, note it: sadness, boredom, whatever.

Our next step is “A”—accept. That means, whatever the emotional sensation, you let it be there.

Acceptance may seem unassuming, but it is the most important move a human being can make. It has dozens of near synonyms, described in different ways in every culture and tradition: forgiveness, love, equanimity, maturity, being present. It is a radical act of coming into the world by letting go of what’s in the way and welcoming exactly what’s emerging.

Which brings us to the “I” of RAIN: investigation. Investigation is expanding and deepening the volume of what we are accepting. It’s getting interested in whatever we are feeling, and exploring it at a pace that works for us.

The fourth and final step of RAIN, the “N,” is non-identification. Non-identification is less an action than an attitude, the attitude of not taking your emotions personally.

Non-identification is actually implicit in RAIN’s previous two steps. It’s a deeper kind of allowing. If you want a “move,” try lightly noting each sensation as not me—or, even better, be free. We’re liberating the butterfly conservatory over here. Free all the little sensations! Not me! Be free! Let all experiences come and go. What’s happening now will be different soon enough, and what a privilege it is to be here at all. Sub specie aeternitatis: the view from eternity.

The genius of meditation is that it basically says: “Hey, relax, bud, all you need to worry about is this moment. Can you find some focus? Some friendliness? A bit of perspective?”