10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works--A True Story

by Dan Harris

meditation is simply exercise for your brain.

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

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.

“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.”

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. Waking up to the reality of our situation allows you to, as the Buddhists say, “let go,” to drop your “attachments.” As one Buddhist writer put it, the key is to recognize the “wisdom of insecurity.”

In a nutshell, mindfulness is the ability to recognize what is happening in your mind right now—anger, jealousy, sadness, the pain of a stubbed toe, whatever—without getting carried away by it.

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.

Acceptance is not passivity. Sometimes we are justifiably displeased. 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 key is not to get carried away by desire; we need to manage it with wisdom and mindfulness.

“In one discourse, he captured the whole game in just a few words. These lines, if you heard these lines in the right way, you could get enlightened,” he says, chuckling again. “So here’s your chance . . .” 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?”

What he really meant was something like, “Everything in the world is ultimately unsatisfying and unreliable because it won’t last.”

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.

When you lurch from one thing to the next, constantly scheming, or reacting to incoming fire, the mind gets exhausted.

“Yes. Practice of compassion is ultimately benefit to you. So I usually describe: we are selfish, but be wise selfish rather than foolish selfish.”

This was an entirely new spin for me. Don’t be nice for the sake of it, he was saying. Do it because it would redound to your own benefit, that it would make you feel good by eroding the edges of the ego.

Apparently nature rewarded both the fittest—and the kindest.

I instituted a make-eye-contact-and-smile policy that turned out to be genuinely enjoyable.

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.

be simple, not a simpleton.”

A few months later, at our next meeting over eggs at Morandi, I broached the subject again. I said, “When we last spoke, you said it’s okay to be ambitious, but don’t be attached to the results. I cut you off, as I usually do—but what does that mean?” “It’s like, you write a book, you want it to be well received, you want it to be at the top of the bestsellers list, but you have limited control over what happens. You can hire a publicist, you can do every interview, you can be prepared, but you have very little control over the marketplace. So you put it out there without attachment, so it has its own life. Everything is like that.”

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.

There’s a reason why they call Buddhism “advanced common sense”;

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?

“There’s no point in being unhappy about things you can’t change, and no point being unhappy about things you can.”

All successful people fail. If you can create an inner environment where your mistakes are forgiven and flaws are candidly confronted, your resilience expands exponentially.

Nonattachment to results + self compassion = a supple relentlessness that is hard to match. Push hard, play to win, but don’t assume the fetal position if things don’t go your way.

When worrying about the future, I learned to ask myself: What do I really want? While I still loved the idea of success, I realized there was only so much suffering I was willing to endure.

If you give your brain enough of a taste of mindfulness, it will eventually create a self-reinforcing spiral—a retreat from greed and hatred

“Beginning again and again is the actual practice, not a problem to overcome so that one day we can come to the ‘real’ meditation.”