Joseph Goldstein + Mark Epstein On: How To Handle Unwanted Experiences, How Not To Waste Your Suffering & The Overlap Between Buddhism + Therapy

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Buddhist megastars in conversation. Today, we're dropping a recording of a live event we held earlier this year, during which Joseph Goldstein and Dr. Mark Epstein came on stage for a fascinating set of conversations. We did this event to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Dan's first book, also called 10% Happier. The night was structured like a late night show, so there was a monologue, and live music with the band Mates of State https://www.barsuk.com/artists/matesofstate. Dr. Mark Epstein http://markepsteinmd.com/ is a psychiatrist in private practice in New York City, and is the author of a number of books about the interface of Buddhism and psychotherapy, including Thoughts without a Thinker, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart, Going on Being, Open to Desire, Psychotherapy without the Self, The Trauma of Everyday Life and Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself, and The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard University. He has been a student of vipassana meditation since 1974. Joseph Goldstein https://www.dharma.org/teacher/joseph-goldstein/ is a cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, both in Barre, Massachusetts. He is the author of Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, A Heart Full of Peace, One Dharma: The Emerging Western Buddhism, Insight Meditation and The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation. Joseph has studied and practiced meditation since 1967 under the guidance of eminent teachers from India, Burma, and Tibet and he leads Insight Meditation retreats around the world. In this episode we talk about: The three month solo silent meditation retreat Joseph had just finished How to not suffer in the face of unwanted experiences Three exercises for slowing down Pragmatic applications of retreat practice for life in the real world How to see outside yourself How Mark came to Buddhism 50 years ago The relationship between Buddhism and psychotherapy The Buddhist concept of the two levels of reality And a guided meditation from a surprise guest Related Episodes: Nirvana | Joseph Goldstein https://www.happierapp.com/podcast/tph/joseph-goldstein-675 Dr. Mark Epstein On: How To Transform Your Neuroses Into "Little Shmoos" https://www.happierapp.com/podcast/tph/mark-epstein-10th I Just Did A 10-Day Silent Meditation Retreat With Joseph Goldstein. Here's What I Learned https://www.happierapp.com/podcast/tph/retreat-episode-829 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 Ten Percent Happier online bookstore https://bit.ly/46TZglY Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Our favorite playlists on: Anxiety https://spoti.fi/3Qa8kMT, Sleep https://spoti.fi/3MjtMxF, Relationships https://spoti.fi/3QvyA5J, Most Popular Episodes https://spoti.fi/3QxZASc Full Shownotes: https://happierapp.com/podcast/tph/joseph-mark-live Additional Resources: The New York Insight Meditation Center https://www.nyimc.org/ http://markepsteinmd.com/ Going to Pieces without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness https://www.amazon.com/Going-Pieces-without-Falling-Apart/dp/0767902351 The Trauma of Everyday Life https://www.amazon.com/Trauma-Everyday-Life-Mark-Epstein/dp/0143125745 Mates of State https://www.instagram.com/matesofstate/?hl=en Download the Happier app today: https://my.happierapp.com/link/download

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

• 0:05Dan Harris?

  It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:20Dan Harris?

  Hey, gang. Have you ever had an experience where simply reframing an issue or a problem puts the whole thing into an entirely different and much more helpful light? For example, reframing anxiety as excitement, or reframing failure as experimentation and opportunity to learn. Here's one of my favorites, and it comes from the great meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein. "Don't waste your suffering." We all suffer. We all have shitty things that happen to us. There's no getting around that. But can we use these moments to be mindful, to be curious, to wake up? I love this because it's reframing suffering as an opportunity

• 1:01Dan Harris?

  to practice. This is just one of many, many wisdom bombs that you're about to hear from Joseph in this very special episode of the 10% Happier Podcast. Today, we're dropping a recording of a live event that we held a few months back, during which Joseph and another huge teacher in my life, Dr. Mark Epstein, the Buddhist psychotherapist, came onstage for a fascinating set of conversations. We did this event to celebrate the 10th anniversary of my first book, also called 10% Happier, and we are bringing you the recording now. It was a great night. We structured it like a late-night show. I've always wanted to be a late-night host. So there was a monologue and a band, my old friends, mates of state,

• 1:45Dan Harris?

  with members Jason Hammel and Corey Gardner. You will hear participate in some of the banter with the guests, although we are not playing much of their music because we wanted to make sure that the episode really was about the conversation. There's also a surprise guest at the end who comes out and leads a little guided meditation. A little bit more about my guests before we dive in. Joseph Goldstein is a legendary meditation teacher who co-founded the Insight Meditation Society, or IMS, alongside Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield. He's the author of numerous books on meditation, and he's been my main teacher since I got started 15 years ago. Dr. Mark Epstein is a psychiatrist and the author of a number of books about

• 2:27Dan Harris?

  the intersection between Buddhism and psychotherapy. Those books include Thoughts Without a Thinker, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, Advice Not Given, and The Zen of Therapy. In these conversations, we talk about the three-month solo silent meditation retreat Joseph had just come out of right before the event, How Not to Suffer in the Face of Unwanted Experiences, Three Exercises for Slowing Down, Pragmatic Applications of Retreat Practice for Everyday Life, How to See Outside of Yourself, The Relationship Between Buddhism and Psychotherapy, and the Buddhist concept of the two levels of reality, which may sound esoteric, but is actually quite practical.

• 3:12Dan Harris?

  Keep in mind, of course, that this was a live event, so the audio quality is a little bit different than usual, but you can handle it. We'll get started with Joseph Goldstein and Dr. Mark Epstein right after this. Real progress starts with action. As the executive director of the Honold Foundation, Emily Kitesworth works to expand access to solar energy in communities around the world, supporting locally-led projects that bring reliable power, greater independence, and opportunity where it is needed most. On the podcast Planet Visionaries, professional climber and Honold Foundation founder Alex Honold goes beyond the headlines with Emily to explore practical solutions for a more equitable future.

• 3:56Dan Harris?

  In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 4:03Speaker 01

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• 4:34Speaker 02

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• 5:12Dan Harris?

  Thank you.

• 5:15Dan Harris?

  Bates of State, ladies and gentlemen.

• 5:22Dan Harris?

  I want to start by saying some thank yous. I am genuinely grateful to all of you for coming out tonight, especially on a rainy night in New York City, where the Bidens, Clintons, and Obamas are fucking up traffic.

• 5:34Dan Harris?

  I mean it. I'm really grateful to all of you for coming out. I also want to thank our sponsors from Audible. They've been huge supporters of the 10% Happier Podcast. Go listen to their books. And our nonprofit partner for the evening, the New York Insight Meditation Center. I'll have more to say about them. All right.

• 5:52Dan Harris?

  The people clapping for NYIMC are clearly not silent meditators.

• 5:59Dan Harris?

  I will admit, right from the jump here, that generally speaking, to my knowledge, people don't celebrate the 10th anniversaries of books. I am just using this as an excuse to throw a party. The backstory here is that my wife Bianca and I were out to dinner with our old friends Cory and Jason a few months ago, and somebody had the idea of us doing a show together. Cory, you were saying you think it's Bianca who had the idea?

• 6:21Speaker 03

  It was either Bianca or myself, so it was the women, just saying.

• 6:25Dan Harris?

  Right. Although, that could be your attempt at plausible deniability if this thing goes down the tubes. Right, she's covering her bases. So the idea was that we do it like a late-night show. I would be the host. This would be the band. I've always wanted to host a late-night show, although tonight might drive a stake through the heart of that dream. It is totally an experiment. I have no idea how it's gonna go, but I appreciate you buckling up and taking the ride with us. You can think of it as a late-night show with a little bit of a deeper mission. I think most of us, if we do any personal growth, self-development, spiritual work, we do it by ourselves. You know, we meditate in silence, alone. We go to the shrink alone and talk about ourselves. And actually, I think all of that is great,

• 7:08Dan Harris?

  but it is to overlook a key part of the Buddhist platform. And this is also a key part of many spiritual traditions, which is that all of this work can be supercharged by doing it with other people. And so we wanted to put together an event that was a little noisier and more communal than your average meditation sesh. As I said before, I know that this whole 10th anniversary thing is a concoction, a confection. But now that I'm in it, it has caused me to reflect a little bit on the last 10 years, what a weird trip this has been. If you had told me 15, 20 years ago that I was gonna become what I am now, which is a traveling evangelist for meditation, I would have coughed my beer up through my nose. This was not in the plan. I was a very hard-charging, super ambitious, super skeptical network newsman.

• 7:53Dan Harris?

  I was raised in the People's Republic of Massachusetts by two atheist scientists. The only entry on my spiritual resume was bar mitzvah, but I did that for the money, so...

• 8:05Dan Harris?

  Two things came along and changed my attitude, and really changed my life. The first insight was that we all have a voice in our heads, by which I'm not referring to schizophrenia or hearing voices. I'm talking about your inner narrator that chases you out of bed in the morning and is yammering at you all day long and has you constantly wanting stuff, not wanting stuff, judging people, comparing yourself to other people, thinking about the past or thinking about the future to the detriment of whatever's happening right now. And when you're unaware of this nonstop conversation that you are having with yourself, and which, by the way, if we broadcast aloud, you would be locked up. When you're unaware of this nonstop nattering, it owns you. There's a reason, the first line of my book,

• 8:49Dan Harris?

  there's a reason why it is the voice in my head is an asshole, because the results are often not pretty. The second insight, though, is that there is good news, that this situation, the human situation, is workable. It's tractable. It's manageable. Meditation is an ancient, time-tested, and now scientifically validated way to create a new relationship with the voice in your head, so that you're not owned by every neurotic obsession that flits through your head, and so that you can respond wisely to stuff instead of reacting blindly. I am definitely not a meditation fundamentalist. I mean, on the 10% Happier Podcast, we talk about all kinds of modalities: therapy, medication, vacation, napping, exercise. There are many ways to go at this,

• 9:34Dan Harris?

  but the punchline is that happiness is not an unalterable factory setting. It's actually a skill. To be clear, perfection is not on offer. If my wife were here, she would... Well, she is here, but she doesn't have the mic. But if she did have the mic, she would give you her 90% still-a-moron speech.

• 9:57Dan Harris?

  My little brother has argued that the real title of my book should be "From Deeply Flawed to Merely Flawed."

• 10:06Dan Harris?

  So perfection is not on offer, but change is doable, and it is more fun when you do it with other people. So that is our thesis tonight. We have a great show for you tonight. We've got great guests for you. Dr. Mark Epstein, the Buddhist psychiatrist, is here. Yes.

• 10:27Dan Harris?

  A guy named Joseph Goldstein is here.

• 10:32Dan Harris?

  We also have a very special surprise guest coming at the end, and of course, my old friends, mates of state.

• 10:43Dan Harris?

  Time for our first guest. Let me get up and bring that screen back down, because I want to show you a little video to tee up our first guest, who is Joseph Goldstein. Joseph Goldstein, for those of you who are unfamiliar with him, he is the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, which is in Barre, Massachusetts, which was founded by Joseph and two other hippies in the 1970s, and has become this legendary place where many, if not most, of the great meditation teachers operating today, at least in the Theravada tradition, were trained. Joseph has also written many books, including a book called One Dharma and another book called Mindfulness. He is a huge figure in my own life. He's been a great friend and teacher, and we have made a lot of content together over on the 10% Happier app

• 11:28Dan Harris?

  and also on the 10% Happier podcast. And one of the things we have in common is if we like somebody, we like to make fun of them a lot. In that spirit, I have a clip here of a little moment that was captured while Joseph and I were filming a course. Let's take a look.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  Okay. I just have one professional question. Just from your perspective, from my perception, when Dan talks, you sit a lot stiller than I do. I feel like I'm kind of moving around a lot. Do you either notice it, or it doesn't matter?

• 12:04Dan Harris?

  Story you're telling yourself.

• 12:06Speaker 04

  Why?

• 12:10Dan Harris?

  I call that moment when the student becomes the master. Ladies and gentlemen, Joseph Goldstein.

• 12:23Dan Harris?

  Walk around.

• 12:35Dan Harris?

  I know you're coming up on your 80th birthday, so I did bring you earplugs for the band. If you want them, they're right here for you, buddy. So you just finished a three-month solo silent meditation retreat.

• 12:51Speaker 04

  I want to go back.

• 12:54Dan Harris?

  Is there something about this moment that is making you want to go back? What, I mean, because I think a lot of people would hear that and think that sounds like torture. I mean, literally solitary confinement is torture. So why is it something that you do every year? And that even as we sit here now, it's something you want to go back to?

• 13:11Speaker 04

  You know, these, these retreats, these silent retreats for whatever length, it's like being in the laboratory of your mind. You know, and it's just a chance to explore and see every part of yourself. I think it was a Japanese poet, a woman named Izumi. Don't remember the whole poem, but the last line, "I knew myself completely, no part left out." And that's what happens on a retreat. You know, especially in solitude or in a group, you know, but in silence, you get to see every part of your mind, you know, the great parts and the difficult parts.

• 13:53Speaker 04

  And to use a Dan phrase, in that process, you get to be behind the waterfall. So instead of the water coming down on top of your head, you know, you have enough perspective and enough space to really see what's going on and to see what patterns cause suffering in our lives and what patterns bring about happiness. And on retreat, you see everything. You know, so often people come up and ask me, "Well, how was your retreat?" Every year, the answer is the same. It's everything. You know, because you just get to see no part left out. And that's what's so fascinating. As you said, I've been doing this for so many years.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  And equally fascinated now as I was in the beginning, you know, of just watching my mind and seeing where I get caught and seeing how to unhook. You know, a lot of the practice, there are kind of a few tracks to it. So one track is just developing some basic stillness, some basic concentration, which you need to not simply caught up all the time. And then you can get into the flow of things changing very rapidly, you know, and that helps the mind really let go. But in some way, and I find this on retreat a lot, the aspect that for me, in a way, is the most interesting

• 15:23Speaker 04

  is when, on retreat and off, you know, but on retreat it's very vivid, is when there is some kind of suffering in the mind. Something's going on either just internally or because of some thing that's happening in my life outside. There's some kind of suffering or heaviness or being caught. And I actually love that. There's a phrase that I've been using in teaching lately, "Don't waste your suffering." You know, because we all, I'll share with you, most of you probably know, you know, somewhat familiar with the Buddhist teachings and the first noble truth is the truth, the Pali word is dukkha,

• 16:08Speaker 04

  and it's usually translated as suffering, but it can be any difficulty or challenge. So I came across, this was, I was actually online. I read someplace, and I can't remember who said it, but it was a definition of dukkha, which I completely resonated with and I think each one of you will resonate with this because it seems to me universally true, the inevitability of unwanted experiences. I mean, is there anybody that goes through life free of unwanted experiences? I don't think so. So these come up, you know,

• 16:50Speaker 04

  on retreat it becomes very vivid. So for me, when unwanted experiences are coming up, I get so interested in understanding what's going on in my own mind that's creating suffering around it. You know, so that investigation...

• 17:12Speaker 04

  It's tremendous. It's tremendously interesting. And in a very practical way, we learn how to free ourselves from that difficulty in the mind.

• 17:23Dan Harris?

  So "Don't waste your suffering" means these are moments where you can learn about what your habitual patterns are and start to untangle them.

• 17:31Speaker 04

  Absolutely, yeah. Because often, you know, when we're suffering in one way or another, often we either feel sorry for ourselves or kind of drowning in it, obsessing about it, or blaming others for it, or the situation for it. But it takes a special kind of interest to realize that we're responsible. We're 100% responsible for whether our mind is suffering in the face of unwanted experiences. So unwanted experiences are gonna happen. The body gets old, it gets sick. There's all kinds of situations in our lives, relationships, and in the world.

• 18:15Speaker 04

  So these unwanted experiences are gonna happen. But whether we suffer as that's happening, that's totally up to us.

• 18:23Dan Harris?

  So on a very basic level, for those of us who are not gonna do three-month retreats...

• 18:28Speaker 04

  Why not?

• 18:32Speaker 04

  Then?

• 18:35Dan Harris?

  I have brought this up before, and it was not warmly received.

• 18:44Dan Harris?

  For those of us who are not yet going to do three-month retreats, how does one not suffer in the face of unwanted experience?

• 18:53Speaker 04

  Okay, so I'll give you an example just from this last retreat. At the beginning of the retreat, I was dealing with a complicated health issue, which is all fine now. So it's all resolved. But at that time, it was very confusing. You know, I didn't quite know what the way forward was, and I was thinking about the consequences and how it was gonna affect my life. So it really was beginning to weigh my mind down. You know, it was heavy. And then, it was almost miraculous, but quite spontaneously.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  At a certain point of feeling really down and heavy with it all, my mind just changed, switched channels. So instead of kind of obsessing about what was going on in my body and what I need to do about it, it switched to the gratitude channel. And I just thought, I said, "Joseph, you have so many great things happening in your life. There are so many blessings in your life." And so I started focusing on all of that. And it was amazing, just in that simple switch,

• 20:12Speaker 04

  you know, from fear and distress and confusion

• 20:18Speaker 04

  to just gratitude.

• 20:21Speaker 04

  And sometimes I wonder in sharing that or talking about it with people, because it's something I think we've all heard and it can almost sound like a hallmark card, you know, be grateful for what you have. But

• 20:36Speaker 04

  the real feeling of it is really profound because it takes us out of a self-obsession and... So as you know, and probably many of you also, when we do the loving-kindness meditation, the cause or the condition for loving-kindness to arise is when we emphasize the good qualities in other people rather than focus on their faults, which makes a lot of sense. You know, when we think of the good qualities, we have loving feelings. Well, this is kind of having metaphor oneself. Instead of focusing on what was wrong or difficult, to all of a sudden focus on what was good,

• 21:21Speaker 04

  it just enlarged the perspective. It's like my mind got bigger and more expansive and then it extended so naturally.

• 21:31Speaker 04

  To metta and compassion for other people. You know, when I started thinking about other people in similar situations. So it just led to these wonderfully beautiful and wholesome and expansive mind states. So that's what's possible, like when we're really investigating and interested. Okay, what's going on in my mind and how am I caught and what? How can I open?

• 21:58Dan Harris?

  Is that a move you think the rest of us in our non-retreat lives can make?

• 22:02Speaker 04

  Perhaps, without any doubt at all. Why not? So I'll just share with you, I mean, something that comes up for me a lot, just in my ordinary life, and sometimes just spontaneously. I'll just express. It may sound a little strange, but I'll just express to the universe, thank you for the blessings of my life. That's all something so simple, you know, but it's meaningful. You know, and we can appreciate the many blessings in our lives, and it's uplifting.

• 22:43Speaker 04

  And then it gets, that uplifting feeling gets transferred to how we're relating to other people. So it's all good, and you don't have to be on retreat to do that. It's just remembering to do it.

• 22:55Dan Harris?

  Yes, remembering is the hardest part.

• 22:57Speaker 04

  Yep, yeah.

• 22:59Dan Harris?

  That's the purpose of evenings like this.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  Yes, and also the purpose of retreat because... He's always trying to get out of this.

• 23:12Dan Harris?

  I have 10 days coming up with you. I'm already dreading it, yeah. But then, you know, you go, for me, I have so much resistance to the slowing down. The analogy I use is like it's a plane that has lost its landing gear, hitting a foamed runway. It's just like I'm going fast, fast, fast, fast, and just, whoo. And it's three or four days of completely being befogged. But then amazing things can happen.

• 23:42Speaker 04

  Okay, I have a solution for the first few days. I have a solution for almost anything. They don't always work.

• 23:54Speaker 04

  And this kind of relates to being on retreat, off-retreat also. And those of you who have been on retreat, I think, will recognize this. Generally, we put our, you know, there's sitting meditation, there's walking meditation, and then there's paying attention to everything else. And generally, people put a hierarchy on that. You know, the sitting's the real deal. Yeah, walking is good, but it's kind of a recess between cities. And then, everything else, we try to do as best we can. What I found, I found the walking to be almost more insightful than the sitting. And generally on retreat, as you know, you know, we, in the past particularly,

• 24:38Speaker 04

  have emphasized this really slow walking. So that can be jarring. I mean, if you're coming from a fast-paced life, and then, lift, move, place, you know, it's the zombie walk. That's challenging. But I was playing with a few different ways of walking in this retreat. That's really fun.

• 25:05Dan Harris?

  You see what I'm dealing with.

• 25:09Speaker 04

  So first, it's not necessarily slow walking. It's just walking at a normal speed. And so the first frame, instead of focusing, you know, on the feet or the legs moving, the frame becomes just being aware of walking through space. And so one's mind actually becomes the space. You know, and so you're just walking in space. And that's very opening and relaxing and easeful. You know, there's no trying. You're just walking at a more or less normal pace, but with that frame.

• 25:52Speaker 04

  So that's the first of three exercises. The second one actually came from my very unsuccessful attempts to learn about lucid dreaming, which always interested me, but no success. However, I read a few books. And one of the exercises was to go through the day and just ask, "Am I dreaming?"

• 26:20Speaker 04

  So I started doing that in the walking. So first it's walking through space, and then you're walking back and forth, walking in a dream. It's really interesting what happens. It changes the perspective because it takes us out of being so identified with the body and trying to narrow our focus on the body. It's, no, the focus becomes the dream that the body is walking through. So it's, it's a really interesting space. And then the third one follows on that is just walking back and forth

• 27:05Speaker 04

  and to have the frame, I'm walking through the mind. You know, and so the mind or awareness becomes the main focus in a way. And it's just the body walking through the field of awareness. It really kind of gives a sense or a doorway to understanding selflessness because we're no longer so contracted in the identification with the body. And these are really simple things. We could, you don't have to be on retreat to do this. So just one last. Everything becomes an hour dormitory. But there's more to the program, so.

• 27:48Dan Harris?

  Get it in now.

• 27:51Speaker 04

  One of the reasons that I've been practicing formal walking meditation, in whatever way one does it, and I've just seen this so clearly in my own life, just from doing it so much, being aware of the body in movement, you know, in walking, just becomes the default. It's, it becomes the habit of mind from having done the formal walking meditation practice. So even now, being in New York, you know, busy, lots of things going on, we can be walking down the street. Being aware, being open to all the sounds and sights, whatever, but being grounded in the movement of the body naturally, not with any particular effort,

• 28:36Speaker 04

  which comes from having done the walking practice. So I think there are lots of very pragmatic applications of retreat practice to life in the world.

• 28:46Dan Harris?

  Yes. Just to clear up the...

• 28:49Speaker 04

  Mistake in statement?

• 28:51Dan Harris?

  The "behind the waterfall" thing is actually John Kabat-Zinn's. But the idea is that, say, if you're walking through the streets of Manhattan, or you're just doing formal walking meditation, where you're trying to bring your full attention to some sensation in the body, and then every time you get distracted, you start again and again and again. The seeing of the distraction, which a lot of people think is the moment of failure, actually the moment of success because you get familiar with the way the mind works. And that familiarity where you're dropping out of the stories and seeing them with some nonjudgmental remove, that is to watch a waterfall from the rock face, from the crevice in the rock face behind all of the water. So you're not so caught up in it.

• 29:36Dan Harris?

  And what you're saying is, we could do that walking down the street in Manhattan, tuning into the sensations of our body, no three-month retreat required. And then every time we get distracted...

• 29:46Speaker 04

  Suggested, but not required.

• 29:48Dan Harris?

  Yeah, exactly. Suggested more strongly to some people. Every time we get distracted, pat ourselves on the back, "Oh, wow, I'm noticing the distraction." And gradually over time, the swirling stories have less power over us.

• 30:04Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 30:05Dan Harris?

  Okay, so let me ask you a very practical question before I move on to the next segment here, which is, after nearly 60 years of meditation, how worked up do you get by things like, I'm thinking specifically of politics tonight. We have four, one current president and three ex-presidents in town, three Democrats doing a fundraiser for Biden, and then Trump dealing with some criminal lawsuit or something like that out on Long Island. We're heading into, or in the midst of, what is going to be an increasingly difficult year with all this stuff. How does all of this scan for you, given your years of practice? Can you, are you unbothered, unruffled?

• 30:46Speaker 04

  No.

• 30:49Speaker 04

  But I have playing with different ways of coming back to a place of ease with it. One is easier and one is harder. The easier way really is not so much from the meditation, except in terms of a kind of reflection in the mind. So I like to read a lot of history. So I read a lot of whole different kinds. And I just find that putting a historical perspective, that this stuff has been going on for thousands of years. You know, worse, and it's still going on.

• 31:33Speaker 04

  And just having a larger perspective really helps me not get so caught up into thinking, oh, this particular moment is disaster. Because it's just, it's just the waves of historical cycles. And it just helps. And in the same vein, I don't know if you're familiar with Carl Sagan, his famous Blue Dot essay, you know, where he talks about seeing the earth from space just as this tiny blue dot. And he describes it just beautifully. And everything that we're so worked up about, from that perspective, it doesn't mean much.

• 32:18Speaker 04

  So it's enlarging perspective. In the same way that I was talking about gratitude, it enlarges the perspective. The thing that's more difficult, but I remind myself to do it with certain of the candidates. I can really go to a place of compassion at times. You know, and I think of the suffering that's in his mind and the consequences, the karmic consequences of all the unskillful things that he does, out of ignorance. I mean, it's total delusion and ignorance behind everything that's being done.

• 33:01Speaker 04

  So when I focus on what he's doing, I can get really upset. This is a being in a lot of suffering, creating a lot of suffering future for himself, and he's completely unaware. And so when I get that frame, I can actually feel some compassion, you know, for him because it's like walking blindly over a cliff. So I think there are ways of dealing with it, and you know, we will all find our own ways, but those are some of the things that have helped me.

• 33:33Dan Harris?

  Mine is all caps Twitter rants.

• 33:42Dan Harris?

  Corey, you're listening to this and are you thinking, I'm gonna go on a three-month retreat? What's your take?

• 33:47Speaker 03

  No, but I was wondering if you could spend a weekend with my 19-year-old daughter?

• 33:52Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  I mean, I don't know if I could do even a 10-day retreat, but I totally resonate with the, I mean, really, the first thing you were talking about is gratitude, right? I feel like as a mom, I feel like that's one of the lessons I like wanna teach my kids throughout their life, but I don't think they hear me, so maybe they just need to meditate and go on a three-month retreat and they'll get it too.

• 34:18Speaker 04

  Well, first, I have a feeling it's less about what you say and more about how you are.

• 34:27Speaker 03

  I need to have more gratitude, probably.

• 34:29Speaker 04

  No, or appreciate that you do.

• 34:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:32Speaker 04

  Because our kids pick up how we are.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 34:36Speaker 05

  We often miss their moments of gratitude too, because we're looking to correct, you know? We're always like, oh, you know, you should be gratitude here, and sometimes they are, and we're just missing it because we're looking for the correction.

• 34:48Dan Harris?

  Jase, when you, you and I have been meditating for roughly the same period of time, when you hear about a three-month retreat, is any part of you like thinking, that sounds baller, I wanna do it?

• 34:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, it does, actually, yeah.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  He's outgoing.

• 35:04Dan Harris?

  I feel like you're also speaking for another blonde backstage right now. She's back there like, "I got you."

• 35:10Speaker 05

  She's like, "Don't let them convince us."

• 35:13Speaker 03

  Can I say one more thing too? I want to say, I really liked what you're talking about, the walking part of it. Because one conversation we've been having a lot about meditation is that I don't really have a meditation practice, but I feel I meditate when I'm making art, making, like, playing music. And for you to say the walking thing, I feel like that's how I feel about, you know, when I'm lost in this, you know, I'm just with my thoughts, not really thinking about what I'm playing sometimes, you know. How do you feel, is that meditation?

• 35:48Speaker 04

  Meditation is a word that covers a wide range of practices. So, I would say it's meditative. But it can be a very meditative space. So, in recent years, I've started writing poetry, just in the last few years. And I love it. The space out of which that comes feels very meditative. Well, I don't, this may motivate you to do a retreat.

• 36:21Speaker 04

  What I've found is that the deepest, in my experience, the deepest creative expression comes out of the silence of mind, not out of the thinking mind.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  And so, the quieter the mind is. So, sometimes, for example, I will do a writing retreat, where I'll sit and then write, and sit and write.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  I would like that.

• 36:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's beautiful. It's a beautiful, so that could be a way.

• 36:52Speaker 03

  So, you can write, you can write on the silent retreat?

• 36:55Speaker 04

  Well, I'm the boss.

• 37:03Speaker 04

  If that's the intention, I mean, generally in the retreats that we teach, we discourage people from writing because that's not what that retreat is about. But one could set up a writing retreat like that, and it's a lot of... So there are lots of ways of entering into this.

• 37:25Speaker 03

  I would like that.

• 37:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. Okay, let's do a writing retreat together.

• 37:37Dan Harris?

  Coming up, we welcome Dr. Mark Epstein to the stage. We talk about how he came to Buddhism 50 years ago, the relationship between Buddhism and psychotherapy, and we talk about the two levels of reality.

• 38:25Dan Harris?

  All right, time for our next guest. Let me say a few words about him before I bring him out here. His name is Dr. Mark Epstein. He is a psychiatrist who lives and works in the New York City area and sometimes works from slightly north of here. He has written a whole series of beautiful books about the overlap between psychotherapy and Buddhism. And one of the books is called "The Trauma of Everyday Life", another is called "Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart", and that second book was given to me in 2008 by my wife Bianca, who had heard me yammer on, often with very low levels of cogency, about stuff I was hearing in the self-help world. I was frustrated by it, but also interested in it. And she said it reminded me...

• 39:10Dan Harris?

  This reminds me of a book I read many years ago. Here's the book. And when I read that book, it was really my first exposure to Buddhism. And I was fascinated. And I called Mark and basically begged him to be my friend. And for some reason, he agreed. And we are still very close to this day. So ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Mark Epstein.

• 39:36Dan Harris?

  Why not?

• 39:50Dan Harris?

  Hi.

• 39:51Speaker 06

  Hi, Dan.

• 39:52Dan Harris?

  So you've written these beautiful books that wrestle with these two great traditions, psychotherapy and Buddhism. Just from a very basic level, for those who might be new to your work, why do you think these two modalities work so well together?

• 40:09Speaker 06

  Well, they were the only two modalities that were available to me.

• 40:14Dan Harris?

  That's not a ringing endorsement.

• 40:16Speaker 06

  Well, we once had a conference, early, like 20 years ago or so, Buddhism and Psychotherapy Conference, that R.D. Lang came to and so on. And my friend was there and he said, "What's the similarity between Buddhism and psychoanalysis? Two things that don't work."

• 40:37Speaker 06

  So, but for me, they both have really helped me. I found Buddhism first. This might be the 10-year anniversary of your book, but it's the 50-year anniversary of when I first met Joseph. And...

• 40:57Speaker 06

  So whenever he sees me, he thinks I'm still 20 years old. And he was like an old guy, you know?

• 41:06Speaker 06

  So I found Buddhism first, after, you know, some sort of aborted attempts to get some psychotherapy help at the health services at the college and so on, that I remember the guy said, "Oh, you're suffering from an Oedipus complex." But I didn't really, I knew, I didn't really know what that meant. So, okay, my condition had a name, but then I met Joseph, and Jack, and Sharon, and Ram Dass, all in one sort of lump. And they gave me an experience, you know, like an experience of my uncomfortable self, which made me slightly less uncomfortable. I have always felt very grateful that I got the Buddhism first, because then, when I,

• 41:50Speaker 06

  some years later, when I was trying to figure out what to do with myself, and decided to become a therapist, a psychiatrist, everything I learned Western, I was processing through the Buddhist lens, you know? And they're both, to try to really answer your question, they're both about working with the untrained mind, you know, with the shame, with the aversion, with the embarrassment, you know, what you call the monkey mind, and, you know, the neurotic mind. They're both attempts to work with the neurotic mind. And they both have something to offer. So, and they've never really been in contact before, you know, before our time.

• 42:30Speaker 06

  So I was just lucky enough to come up at this moment, and to try to make sense of it for myself. All those books came out of me trying to figure out, you know, is the ego good or bad? Is emptiness the right thing or the wrong thing? You know, I needed to puzzle it all out for myself.

• 42:50Dan Harris?

  What is the, on a very basic level, what would you say the mechanism is by which these two modalities supercharge one another? Maybe that's overstating it, but I'm just guessing here in my amateurish language, but meditation helps us generate mindfulness, which is a kind of self-awareness, so we're not so caught up in our thoughts. In therapy, we're actually dealing with the substance of the stories. But the self-awareness might help us see more clearly what the stories are and not take them more seriously, so seriously.

• 43:21Speaker 06

  I don't think about it so much as the like process versus story. I think about it as meditation is something is intrapersonal, something that you're doing with your own mind, as Joseph was talking earlier, I was listening in. And psychotherapy is interpersonal. So it's, I think it's much more about the relationship than it is about processing whatever it is that we're doing in psychotherapy. I think it's more the relationship than the content of the individual story. And I think it's a, it's an opportunity to apply in a relational way what we learn intrapsychically in meditation.

• 44:03Speaker 06

  So how to apply that same kind of awareness to, to a conversation. You know, that involves emotional material. So I think the emotional is more, maybe more in the forefront in the psychotherapy world, although there's a lot of emotion in, in a three-month retreat.

• 44:23Dan Harris?

  Or in a three-minute sit.

• 44:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:29Dan Harris?

  Are you saying, and I apologize if I'm being obtuse here, but are you saying that the, the value of therapy isn't so much what you might come to understand about your emotions or stories, but in the relationship you develop with the therapist?

• 44:42Speaker 06

  I think that must be what I'm saying. I, I think the, it's like a playground, the way Joseph was talking about the playground of the mind, you know, in meditation. Psychotherapy is really a playground of the relationship. Because it's such a weird thing that it even exists in our culture, that two people would sit together with no idea of what's going to happen between them, or what they're going to talk about. But that what comes up and what gets enacted in the relationship is informational. So you get to see your own patterns in action. And if the therapist is decent, then he or she can point out stuff that you might not

• 45:25Speaker 06

  be aware of even while you're doing it. So there's a little, there's another, it's not just your own knowing mind watching yourself, there's another knowing mind watching yourself. One of my two main therapists. Used to pay very, very close attention to the language that his patients would use. So me in particular, if I would say something like, talking about a friend or whatever, "I really like her," you know, he would say, "What don't you like about her?" Or he would say, "Say that again, but drop the word 'really.'" Putting in that qualifier, that I wasn't really aware that I was using,

• 46:05Speaker 06

  was signaling to him some ambivalence in my presumed story. And I would do that "really" thing a lot. In the book you read, I told that story, I think of, in talking with him, I would sometimes stare at him to sort of drive home the contact that I so value, that I think I had learned from being with Ram Dass, who, Ram Dass would do this thing when you came in to see him, where he would just sit meditatively and stare at you, and wouldn't say anything until you couldn't stand it anymore. So I think I was doing some sort of pseudo-spiritual staring at this,

• 46:48Speaker 06

  at my therapist who's smoking a little cigar, you know, and finally he would say, "Blink."

• 46:56Speaker 06

  And in doing that, he was making me aware of a kind of clinging that I could do to the closeness that I so, you know, value, but I was overdoing it, and thereby, you know, if you stare at someone, you actually lose contact with them. Real intimacy involves being together and then coming apart, you know, and I would be more uncomfortable with the coming apart part. Just a different laboratory, the therapy one.

• 47:23Dan Harris?

  It seems like the common denominator is, in meditation, in those brief moments where you can see whatever's happening in your head or your body without clinging to it, that is a, it's a very healing posture. And what you're saying is you can summon that for yourself, and it can be summoned externally by your therapist, and both can help you live with a little bit more suppleness.

• 47:48Speaker 06

  Well, I think what I'm saying is... The main thing that we're looking for in meditation is the clinging. It's only by finding the clinging that you can release the clinging. Otherwise, it's happening unconsciously.

• 48:02Dan Harris?

  This is don't waste your suffering.

• 48:03Speaker 06

  Or, yeah. And in therapy, the main thing I'm looking for is where's the clinging in whoever it is I'm talking to. Because we don't, once we're made aware of the clinging, it feels better to release it, even if it's only for an instant. And you can make that palpable in therapy for somebody, sometimes, you know. The other way to talk about it is not just that we're looking for the clinging, but we're looking for the self. Because you can't really understand selflessness until you've found the self as it actually appears in your own experience. So people in therapy make very clear who they think their self is.

• 48:45Speaker 06

  You know, the she hurt my feelings, he hurt my feelings, you know, I'm hurt, there's the self, okay, show me that, show me that self.

• 48:56Dan Harris?

  Joseph used the term selflessness earlier, and I gave him a pass on it. And now you're using it. And so I suspect some people here are like, what does that mean?

• 49:07Speaker 06

  I only use the term self.

• 49:08Dan Harris?

  No, you said selflessness.

• 49:09Speaker 06

  You look for the self in order to understand selflessness.

• 49:12Dan Harris?

  There you go again.

• 49:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. The self doesn't exist in the way we imagine it. That's selflessness. Or, like, Ram Dass used to say, you're not who you think you are, which I always found very helpful.

• 49:29Dan Harris?

  Yes. Another quote you like to use a lot is something that an elderly Mongolian monk said to Robert Thurman, another great local Buddhist guy. You think you're real, you are real, you're just not really real.

• 49:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's not that you're not real. Of course, you're real, but you think you're really real. It's in the really real, that's what we're trying to catch.

• 49:57Dan Harris?

  Joseph, what's your view on therapy?

• 49:59Speaker 04

  Well, as Mark was describing it, I really, it's very similar to what we do in meditation interviews.

• 50:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 50:08Speaker 04

  You know, and people, it's just a shorter session.

• 50:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, like five minutes.

• 50:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, but remuneration is prorated.

• 50:20Speaker 04

  But it is, is people come in and really what I'm trying to tune into, okay, where is the clinging, is it exactly? So I think of these meditation interviews on retreats, and this suits me perfectly, as 10-minute marriages. So it's perfect.

• 50:41Speaker 04

  10 minutes, really intimate, getting right to the essence, so long.

• 50:48Speaker 04

  But it sounded very similar to me in what you said.

• 50:51Speaker 06

  You're who I learned from.

• 50:54Dan Harris?

  Joseph's referencing meditation interviews. So if you go on a retreat, you get a tiny sliver of time with the teacher to complain about your practice, and they're supposed to help you with it. And I remember one time where I was complaining about something to Joseph, and you very compassionately said, "That's just you being stupid."

• 51:16Dan Harris?

  And if you deny it, I actually have audio tapes of it.

• 51:20Speaker 04

  I think that was one of my final moments.

• 51:25Dan Harris?

  What about therapy for yourself? Is this something you've gone and done?

• 51:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. Okay. I have. I spent, in my 40s, I did a few years of Jungian therapy. It was a lot of dream work. It was really interesting. And I ended it, not that everything was resolved, but I came to the place in my mind where I really came to an acceptance of all my neuroses. And as soon as I stopped fighting with it. And then I felt done. I didn't know what I was really done.

• 51:59Dan Harris?

  If he was your patient, would you have considered him done?

• 52:03Speaker 06

  I have a great deal of trouble letting people go, but...

• 52:07Dan Harris?

  Wait, I'm finding the clinging.

• 52:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, the link.

• 52:13Speaker 06

  So I would have wanted to keep him coming, just because I'm more into marriage than you.

• 52:20Dan Harris?

  But so is there a view in Buddhist circles that do some folks in deep in the Dharma look down on therapy? Because it is really engaging often with the stories of the mind rather than looking at the process of how the mind works.

• 52:38Speaker 04

  I'll go out on a limb here a bit. I think it all depends on the therapist. You know, if it's a really skilled therapist, I think they're really in alignment. But not every therapist is a good therapist, you know, and not necessarily disentangling from the perspective Mark was talking about. So it just really depends. But as a modality, I think it has kind of tremendous usefulness.

• 53:07Speaker 06

  In the early years of my practice, a few sort of prominent Dharma teachers came to me for therapy, sort of secretly, because I think there was a kind of feeling, in their communities anyway, that the Dharma was supposed to cure everything. And they knew, they had, you know, either childhood stuff or depression or, you know, they just knew they needed a different angle on it. And that was very moving for me, you know, and also affirming of what I was trying to do.

• 53:48Dan Harris?

  Let me see if I can say a few, hopefully cogent words about the selflessness thing, and you guys just correct me if I'm wrong. I don't want people to leave here too confused, although maybe I'm just gonna make it worse. In Buddhism, there's a lot of talk of two levels of reality. So there's relative reality, or the relative truth, and the ultimate truth. So on a relative level, we're all here at Symphony Space. This desk is a desk, you're you, I'm me. We all have to like put our pants on in the morning, make dentist appointments, et cetera, et cetera. On an ultimate level, if you were to take a high-powered microscope to this desk, you would see it's mostly spinning subatomic particles in empty space. And so on, both of these truths are true at the same time.

• 54:33Dan Harris?

  And so they can, seeing ultimately that if you close your eyes and look for Dan or Joseph, you won't find it, can help you not take all of your thoughts and urges and emotions so personally. My hunting and the red, he's hunting, but you're looking at.

• 54:48Speaker 06

  He always agrees with that when you say that.

• 54:52Speaker 06

  I think that the thing about, Joseph knows better than I do about it, but I think the thing about Buddhism is that it, it holds out the possibility that you can have both of those relative and ultimate views at once. It doesn't have to be one or the other.

• 55:07Speaker 04

  No.

• 55:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 55:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:09Speaker 06

  Right?

• 55:09Speaker 04

  I think that's what Dan was saying.

• 55:14Dan Harris?

  My attorney Goldstein, if it wasn't what I was saying, it's what I'm saying now.

• 55:21Dan Harris?

  This is so fun. Corey, when you listen to this, what comes up for you?

• 55:27Speaker 03

  I need to get to work. That's what I was just thinking.

• 55:31Speaker 06

  Get to work.

• 55:32Speaker 03

  Myself, yeah.

• 55:33Dan Harris?

  Have you not done much therapy?

• 55:35Speaker 03

  I haven't done much. I have done some, and I, I also deemed myself fine to go. I got what I needed, but you know, I'm, I'm sure there's more work to be done.

• 55:44Dan Harris?

  So interesting, your process was do no work, declare yourself done.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  I went to therapy for a little while, like ten years ago, and then I was like, I don't need this anymore. I figured it out. I'm good.

• 55:55Dan Harris?

  She went once?

• 55:55Speaker 05

  She went once.

• 55:56Speaker 03

  No, I did not go once. It was one phase.

• 56:01Speaker 05

  Like, I'm good, I'm better.

• 56:03Speaker 03

  I did feel like I didn't need it. I don't know. I mean, I guess someone begs a different

• 56:09Speaker 03

  thing. I'm saying now, maybe I need to get to work.

• 56:12Speaker 06

  Can I tell you one thing, Dan? When I went to therapy, the second, I had one long therapy, and then my therapist supervisor, he sent me to his teacher, you know? And I went again. But the most, the thing that stayed with me from that second therapy was that he saw me until he died. While I was seeing him, he got bladder cancer, but he let me still come, and he told me everything that was happening. And I saw him right up until, I think the summer came, and we, we were up in, in the country, and I was working on one of the early books, and he died. But that, him trusting me enough, or letting

• 56:54Speaker 06

  me into that very intimate, personal process, and talking about it openly, what was really special. I'm eternally grateful to him for that.

• 57:08Dan Harris?

  And so that goes back to what you were saying before about the relationship aspect of this, rather than just hunting for the key to unlock all of your neuroses.

• 57:15Speaker 06

  Well, and it also goes back to how it's hard for me to let go. So he had to die.

• 57:22Speaker 04

  I think there's just one other point about the relationship of the two. So I remember when I first started practicing, you know, I was in India, I was young, I was, you know, 23 years old. And at first, especially, at first, although continue, you just see all the negativities in the mind and all the garbage in the mind. And I'd be running to my teacher. I didn't, I don't think I'd use these words, but basically expressing, "I'm such a terrible person because I'm seeing all this stuff." And of course, he just smiled and said, "Just continue." But it was that quality of the teacher not judging

• 58:06Dan Harris?

  Yeah, yes.

• 58:06Speaker 04

  what was going on in my mind as I was judging it. And I think a therapist serves that same purpose. We just pour out whatever

• 58:13Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 58:13Speaker 04

  and somebody's holding it without judgment. So that's very healing.

• 58:17Dan Harris?

  Yes. Notwithstanding the fact that you have called me stupid, I think is one of the greatest aspects of getting to have a relationship with you is that I will tell you all of this embarrassing stuff and you, I never feel judged. I remember calling you once, you asked me a question about something that was difficult. I said, "I don't want to talk about it, I'm just going to get angry." You said, "No, I like it. Just anger away. Bring it on." And yeah, that is a very healing posture, whether you summon it internally or it's given to you externally.

• 58:54Dan Harris?

  Coming up, a very special guest who comes on and does a guided meditation.

• 59:09Speaker 07

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• 59:40Dan Harris?

  We have one final guest tonight, a surprise guest. He's gonna come on and do a very brief meditation. I mentioned earlier that every guest tonight appeared in the book 10% Happier, with one exception, because he wasn't born yet. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage, Alexander Robert Harris.

• 1:00:07Dan Harris?

  You good?

• 1:00:21Dan Harris?

  Son, how we doing? Good. One-word answer is perfect. Good, decent. Decent. Okay, so we're gonna do loving-kindness meditation. I gotta say, one of the coolest surprises of my life was that I have made the decision, Bianca and I made the decision jointly, not to press meditation too hard on Alexander. Although, we did have a moment, you and I, a couple of weeks ago, where you came to me and said, Daddy, I'm bored. And I said, how does that feel in your body? And you said, is this a meditation thing? Because if it is, I don't wanna hear it.

• 1:00:56Dan Harris?

  Like, last year. Okay, that was last year.

• 1:01:01Dan Harris?

  So, we made the decision not to be annoying parents pushing the meditation thing. You're still annoying parents.

• 1:01:09Dan Harris?

  I don't know if you heard what he said, "We're still annoying parents."

• 1:01:13Dan Harris?

  So, we travel a lot together, Alexandra and I. I'm his emotional support animal. He's my emotional support animal on planes. And when I'm giving speeches, he travels with me, and it's great. I said to some of the folks here earlier that it's a little bit like that movie, "There Will Be Blood," where the guy travels around with his little kid doing business deals. This is like a benign version of that.

• 1:01:36Dan Harris?

  And he must have picked up somewhere along the way how to teach meditation, because I heard from the principal at his school that he was teaching other kids how to do this. And then the high school heard about it and asked him to come teach it at the high school. And I went, and it was awesome.

• 1:01:59Dan Harris?

  So, loving-kindness meditation, I have to be honest, when I first heard about it, I was not a fan. I have joked that it-- Me neither. Yeah, well, a lot of skeptical people don't respond well to it, because it feels a little bit like Valentine's Day with a gun to your head. However, there is a ton of science that shows that this practice can have many physiological, psychological, and even behavioral benefits. In fact, our mutual friend, Richard Davidson, who's a neuroscientist from the University of Wisconsin, has done work to show that this practice can make preschoolers more likely to give their stickers away to kids they do not like.

• 1:02:38Dan Harris?

  So, am I gonna teach it, or are you gonna teach it, sweetie? Um, I'll do it. You wanna do it? Okay. All right, so let me start us out by having you sit comfortably. Maybe, you don't have to get uptight about your posture, but you can have your spine reasonably straight. Close your eyes. If you're uncomfortable closing your eyes,

• 1:03:01Dan Harris?

  you can just kinda gaze softly at a neutral spot on the ground in front of you.

• 1:03:07Dan Harris?

  And the way this practice works is that we envision a series of beings. People are animals, and we send them a series of phrases.

• 1:03:16Dan Harris?

  So, who's the first being here, buddy? Um, someone--

• 1:03:20Dan Harris?

  That's easy to love. Okay, so this can be a kid. Be one of your pets if you have them. And so, see if you can summon the visual image or a felt sense in your body of somebody easy to love.

• 1:03:35Dan Harris?

  And what are the, let's do slowly the four phrases. What's the first one? May you be happy? May you be happy? See if you can make a connection between the words and the image or the felt sense in your body. Crucially, you do not have to feel any certain way. Just do the exercise and see what happens. What's the second phrase? May you be healthy? May you be healthy? Um, may you be safe?

• 1:04:06Dan Harris?

  Oh, and may you live with these? You're doing great, buddy. Okay, so the next category. Bring to mind an image of yourself, maybe as a little kid, or you can just feel yourself sitting in the chair.

• 1:04:21Dan Harris?

  Okay, what's that first phrase, buddy? May you be happy? May you be happy?

• 1:04:28Dan Harris?

  Let it connect, the phrase and the image. What's the next one? Um, may you be healthy?

• 1:04:37Dan Harris?

  May you be safe? And may you live with...

• 1:04:42Dan Harris?

  May be safe? And what's the next one? May you live with these? Okay, I'll make a few more categories. The next one is a mentor, a benefactor. Somebody's helped you out in your life. So it can be a teacher, a parent. If you don't have somebody that you know like this, you can think of somebody on the world stage you admire. So like the Dalai Lama. For you it would be Joseph. For me it would be Joseph and Mark. Okay, so let's do the phrases. What's the first one? May you be happy?

• 1:05:13Dan Harris?

  May you be healthy?

• 1:05:16Dan Harris?

  May you be safe.

• 1:05:19Dan Harris?

  And may you live with ease. Good job, buddy. Okay, only three more categories. The next one is a neutral person. So this is somebody you probably overlook in your daily life. Could be a barista, somebody at the office, about whom you don't have any particular feelings.

• 1:05:37Dan Harris?

  Let's bring the image to mind. Sometimes it can be hard with a neutral person, so just do your best.

• 1:05:44Dan Harris?

  What's the first phrase? May you be happy.

• 1:05:48Dan Harris?

  May you be healthy.

• 1:05:51Dan Harris?

  May you be safe. And may you live with ease. Okay, two more characters here.

• 1:05:59Dan Harris?

  The next one is... A mildly annoying person? Mildly annoying person. I chose you for the... Oh my god. I chose you for two. It's one that's easy to love and this one. Oh, okay. That's very sweet. I don't know exactly how to feel about it.

• 1:06:19Dan Harris?

  It's a compliment. It's a compliment.

• 1:06:22Dan Harris?

  So we have an image in our minds now of somebody who's a little bit tricky for us. What's the first phrase? May you be happy. And I just want to point out here that happy people tend not to be super annoying. So you're not condoning their behavior. Just hoping that they'll be happy. May you be healthy. May you be safe.

• 1:06:45Dan Harris?

  And may you live with ease. Final category is all beings everywhere. So this, you can have a mental image of the pale blue dot that Joseph talked about earlier from Carl Sagan. Can you just picture some big, blue marble? Yep, floating in space. You can, or just feel it in your body, a sense of omnidirectionality. So, once you've got that feeling, let's go with, one more time with the phrases. May you be happy? May we all be happy. May we all be safe? May we all be healthy?

• 1:07:22Dan Harris?

  And maybe we all live with these.

• 1:07:26Dan Harris?

  All right, when you're ready, you can open your eyes and blink back into the room.

• 1:07:31Dan Harris?

  Ladies and gentlemen, Alexander Harris.

• 1:07:36Dan Harris?

  Okay, just a few things to say I want to say in closing here. Humor me, because I want to say a few thank yous. First of all, Jason and Corey, proud to know you.

• 1:07:49Dan Harris?

  In fact, I just want to say of all of you guys on the stage tonight, this isn't really the language I would normally use, but just to hearken back to what Joseph said earlier, I consider you all to be great blessings from the universe. So, thank you.

• 1:08:08Dan Harris?

  I'm gonna put earmuffs on you for one minute because I'm gonna say a bad word. Inner peace, motherfuckers. Night.

• 1:08:16Dan Harris?

  Night.

• 1:08:23Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Joseph and Mark. Thank you as well to my friends Jason and Corey from the band Mates of State. I should say they just put out a new song called "Somewhere", available wherever you get your music. And of course, thanks to my little man, Alexander. Oh, and I should also thank the long list of people who worked so hard to make this live show a reality. Caroline Keenan and Tony Magyar, most especially. Those guys worked incredibly hard on this thing. Also Liz Levin, my wife Bianca, Amy Breckenridge, the folks at Symphony Space, the New York Insight Meditation Center, and our sponsors at Audible. We love those guys. As always, we'll be doing a cheat sheet for subscribers over at danharris.com where we sum up the key takeaways

• 1:09:07Dan Harris?

  and give a full transcript. So if you're a subscriber, you'll be getting that or you will have already received that in your inbox. Also at danharris.com, you get the chance to chat with me in the text and also many of our guests pop into the chats as well, which is super cool. And I'm doing monthly live AMA sessions and much, much more. I personally would love your support and feedback if you care to take the time to sign up. Final thing to say, I want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make 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

• 1:09:49Dan Harris?

  Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:10:02Speaker 07

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• 1:10:32Speaker 06

  This is the moment, baby. This is the moment we separate the dogs from the boys. And if you ask me, I only got one question. Do you got that dog in you? Because it's never about the winners or the losers, but it is about the difference between those brave enough to put some action on the game and those who just want to watch from the sidelines, eating off-brand pizza rolls. So sit down, lock in those pics, and trust that dog in you. Underdog. Unleash your dog.