If You're Freaking Out About Politics | Bonus Episode with Dan

A few ideas for staying sane in insane times, regardless of your political leanings or who you voted for. Related episode: Joseph Goldstein On: Impermanence, Impersonality, And How To Use Mindfulness To Be More Creative https://www.danharris.com/p/joseph-goldstein-on-impermanence-bd7?r=4o5o&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false Joseph Goldstein's book of poetry: Dreamscapes of the Mind https://www.dharma.org/dreamscapesjg/ Sign up for Dan's newsletter here http://www.danharris.com Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. How we doing? The regular listeners of this podcast know that we've been experimenting with our Friday episodes lately. Sometimes we drop a guided meditation from me or one of my friends. Sometimes we give you little snippets of our community Q and A sessions that we do over on Substack, danharris.com. Sometimes we do a behind the scenes episode with producers from our team. Anyway, we're experimenting. Today, we're trying something completely new and different.

• 0:48Dan Harris?

  I'm gonna read to you a short essay that I wrote over on Substack with some ideas about how to work with your mind in this fraught political moment. Full disclosure, I wrote this back in mid-March, but things are still pretty fucking crazy. So the advice here is both relevant and evergreen. Regardless of who you voted for or what your particular political priors might be, it's pretty clear that we're in uncharted waters here and we're in a highly charged and polarized environment. But while the particulars of the situation may be unique, none of this is truly new. The Buddha and other smart people pointed out thousands of years ago that everything changes.

• 1:28Dan Harris?

  And being in touch with that fundamental but often overlooked truth can be very helpful. So we're gonna talk about how to do that and several other ideas I have for staying sane in insane times coming up. Before we get started, I just want to let you know about something very cool that we're gonna be doing in the second half of May. We are gonna be doing a live meditation mini-series each weekday from Monday, May 19th to Friday, May 23rd at 4:00 PM Eastern. I will be leading a short guided meditation and then I'll be taking your questions. The whole mini-series is gonna center around a set of practices that I often refer to as the Buddhist antidote to anxiety. And I'm not making this up.

• 2:10Dan Harris?

  One of the key practices that I'll be teaching is loving kindness meditation, which the story goes, was invented by the Buddha to help his monks who were dealing with a lot of fear. And loving kindness is part of a family of four related practices known as the Brahma Viharas. Or the divine abodes, I will admit, when I first encountered these practices, which are designed around cultivating loving kindness, compassion, something called sympathetic joy, and also equanimity. When I first ran into these practices, I was, as you might imagine, a little reflexively judgmental and dismissive, but I have really come to embrace these practices in a huge way over time, and they've had a massive impact on my life. And, by the way, they've now been studied quite extensively in the labs and

• 2:55Dan Harris?

  have been shown particularly loving kindness practice to have physiological, psychological, and even behavioral benefits. Anyway, this is all happening over at danharris.com. Like I said, Monday through Friday, the week of May 19th. Like any good drug dealer, the first dose will be free, so Monday's session will be open to everybody. And then, for the rest of the week, you have to be a paid subscriber. So head on over to danharris.com and check it out.

• 3:23Speaker 01

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• 4:07Speaker 01

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• 4:55Dan Harris?

  All right, we're back. Every year, usually January, February, and March, the great Buddhist teacher and my longtime friend and mentor, Joseph Goldstein, does a three-month solo silent meditation retreat at his home in rural Massachusetts. And occasionally, even though he's on retreat, he will send me an email or a text. Technically, you're not supposed to be using technology on retreat, but when you're Joseph and you've been practicing for nearly 60 years, you get to bend the rules. Anyway, in the middle of Joseph's most recent retreat, I got an email from him with a poem he had just written. A little context here, about five or six years ago, when he was 75 years old, Joseph started to write poetry seemingly out of nowhere. As he describes it, the words started coming to him out of a void, like a channel had

• 5:40Dan Harris?

  opened up for him. By the way, I recently had a whole podcast conversation with Joseph about his adventures in poetry. I'll drop a link to that in the show notes. But back to the poem he recently sent me. In my opinion, it may be his most powerful poem yet. And I've found it incredibly helpful for dealing with all of the political tumult we've been experiencing. So I'm going to read it to you, and then on the other side, I'm going to talk about three practical takeaways that I've found very helpful in my own life. So I'm going to start by reading it, and it's called Venus in the Western Sky. Venus in the Western Sky, my companion in its brightest month, a diamond cool radiance

• 6:21Dan Harris?

  lingers above the horizon, reminding me, in the words of the poet, to care and not to care, as all the earthbound madness engulfs our lives. Steady, faithful, a light in the darkness as the day morphs into night. All right, so that's the poem. It's a quickie. To me, there are three practical and actionable takeaways here when it comes to surviving the earthbound madness that Joseph references. The first is the power of perspective. Personally, I find it genuinely helpful to view current events through the lens of Venus.

• 7:01Dan Harris?

  Joseph, who's definitely not a theist, also sometimes talks about viewing the ups and downs of our lives through the God perspective. It can pull you out of your ruts and broaden your view. In fact, Joseph's reference to Venus reminded me of another of his common riffs. In many of Joseph's Dharma talks, he talks about a famous picture called the pale blue dot. It's a picture of planet Earth that was taken from Voyager 1 back in 1990. Carl Sagan wrote some excellent lines about the pale blue dot. I'm going to read those lines because I think they're relevant to this takeaway about the power of perspective. Here we go. "Look at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.

• 7:44Dan Harris?

  On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner, in the history of our species, lived here on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

• 8:27Dan Harris?

  It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There's perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." I love those lines from Carl Sagan. And again, it goes right back to the power of perspective that we get from Joseph's most recent poem. But as I mentioned, there are three takeaways that I think would be reasonably

• 9:07Dan Harris?

  easy to operationalize here. And the second is this notion of caring and not caring, or to care and not to care. Those lines, which really are, in my opinion, at the heart of Joseph's poem, come from another poet, a only slightly better-known poet named T. S. Eliot. In one of his most famous poems, called Ash Wednesday, Eliot uses the line, "Teach us to care and not to care." And in my opinion, this paradox is at the heart of living a sane life. On the one hand, it is true that we live on a mode of dust and that our lives are fleeting and impermanent. As it says in the Diamond Sutra, "This existence is like a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a

• 9:49Dan Harris?

  flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream." So yeah, that's true. But on the other hand, what we do here still matters. As the Buddha said, "Our only true possessions are our actions." While we're here, we have endless opportunities to be helpful, which in turn will help us to be happier in our own lives. I know I'm doing a lot of quoting here, but one last quote. This one comes from the great meditation teacher and writer Ram Dass, who once said, "We're all just walking each other home." And that leads me to takeaway number three. Action absorbs anxiety. If the news is damaging your mental health, perhaps the best way to manage it is to find

• 10:32Dan Harris?

  opportunities to help. Can you be, in the words of Joseph's poem, "A light in the darkness as day morphs into night"? This stance is empowering and ennobling. And to be clear, you don't need to engage in acts of heroism or ruinous altruism. As Joseph often says, there's no hierarchy of compassionate action. So volunteer, donate, call your mom, hold the door open for people. Yes, for many of us, these are dark and scary and confusing times. Neither Joseph nor the Buddha is trying to sugarcoat anything here. And slash but...

• 11:13Dan Harris?

  It is possible to reduce your own anxiety and thereby to increase your helpfulness quotient to everybody around you, to be a node of sanity in an insane world, to create unpredictable ripple effects of benevolence. As I often semi-joke, there really is a geopolitical case for you to get your shit together. So, thank you to Joseph for this elegant reminder, and thank you for listening. Peace. And just to say before I let you go here, I do hope you'll consider joining us over on Substack. Paid subscribers get access to ad-free versions of this show.

• 11:58Dan Harris?

  If you sign up, you also get a cheat sheet for every episode, which includes key takeaways, time-coded highlights, and a transcript, the ability to comment on my posts, to access my subscriber chats, and access to my twice-monthly live video sessions where I guide a meditation and take your questions. So, join the party, danharris.com. Thank you to everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the awesome indie rock band Islands wrote our theme.

• 12:48Speaker 02

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