ON MEDITATION… With Kirsty Young and Yuval Noah Harari

It’s claimed that meditation can fix everything. If you speak to anyone on the topic, they claim it will reduce your anxiety, make you slimmer, result in you earning more and mean your relationships are all perfect. It might be popular, but it’s notoriously hard to keep up. Broadcasting legend Kirsty Young admits she feels she’s ‘really bad at meditation’ BUT it doesn’t stop her having a go at it every day, even if it’s just for a few minutes. At the other end of the spectrum, we have Israeli historian and writer, Yuval Noah Harari, who claims he has failed at meditation, despite meditating for two HOURS every day. But he makes the point that in meditation, you constantly fail – but that’s a good thing. I hope these two brilliant minds inspire you as much as they did me. First up, it’s Kirsty Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Elizabeth Day?

  One of the things I hear a lot from listeners is how tiring it can be when your mind just doesn't settle. And I can only imagine this feels even heavier with intrusive thoughts. It's that quiet sense of being worn down by something you never asked for and never wanted, but just can't seem to switch off. If you struggle with this, I want to tell you about NoCD, because it's a resource that genuinely helps people. NoCD provides specialised treatment for OCD. And what I appreciate about their approach is how human it feels. You're matched with a licensed therapist trained in ERP therapy. That's exposure and response prevention. And over time, you learn skills that help your OCD symptoms become manageable, so you can live more of the life you want to live.

• 0:45Elizabeth Day?

  If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NoCD can help. Book a free 15-minute call to get started at learn.nocd.com/fail. Confession time. I have a tendency to postpone certain decisions for far longer than is sensible. Not the big life decisions, oddly enough, those I can usually handle. It's the smaller ones that somehow become disproportionately complicated. For me, rugs fall squarely into that category. I've known for a long time that a rug can completely change how a room feels, but I've always found sizing for a space tricky. That's why Ernesta appealed to me.

• 1:26Elizabeth Day?

  Ernesta makes designer-quality rugs, custom-cut to the exact dimensions of your space. So instead of making do with something that's close enough, you're choosing something made specifically for your home. I also love the fact that you can order five oversized 12 by 12 samples for just $10 before committing. And Ernesta's design team will help with sizing completely free of charge. Visit ernestacom and order five samples for only $10 and you'll get $50 towards any rug of your choice. That's ernestacom.

• 2:09Elizabeth Day?

  Now, it's sometimes claimed that meditation can fix just about anything. If you speak to any advocate on the topic, they'll claim it reduces your anxiety, it makes you healthier, it might even result in you earning more and mean your relationships are more successful. Now, it's a very popular thing, meditation, but I know personally, it's notoriously hard to keep up. I have tried and I have failed, and so has broadcasting legend Kirsty Young, who admits she feels she's really bad at meditation, but it doesn't stop her having a go at it every day, even if it's just for a few minutes. At the other end of the spectrum, we have the historian and writer Yuval Noah Harari,

• 2:49Elizabeth Day?

  who claims he still fails at meditation, despite being able to do it for two hours every day. But he makes the valid point that in meditation, you constantly fail, but that that's actually a good thing. I hope that these two brilliant minds inspire you to meditate as much as they did me. First up, it's Kirsty Young.

• 3:15Elizabeth Day?

  Final failure?

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 3:16Elizabeth Day?

  Is your failure to meditate?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  I try every day. I remember when I was first sort of suggested that yoga might be a good thing to do along with a huge amount of medication, to try yoga to help to calm down my, you know, my cortisol, my nervous system and all the things that don't help, rheumatological complaints which I have. And I was taught, I find a yoga therapist and I was talking to her, the incredible Jane, who's now like part of my life and I've been with for five years and practising yoga, which I'm obviously incredibly average at, and part of it is meditation.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  And there was a wonderful moment when Jane said to me... Well, everybody finds it hard. Nobody can really do it. She said the only people who can really do it are the yogis at the foot of the Himalayas who spend seven hours a day, and it's their life's devotion is to do this. And for the rest of us, it's a daily practice to try and get us to come back to it. And as soon as she gave me that wonderful golden key, I thought, well, just keep trying. So every day I try and sometimes it's a little bit successful. Sometimes it's a total washout. I'm always glad I've had a go at it. Sometimes, rarely, it's a magical thing. And it's also made me,

• 4:36Speaker 01

  I think, probably a wee bit of a nicer person and better. But I understand that failure is part of it. It's the practice is the thing. It's like, I don't know. I mean, I'm never, I'm never going to be a runner, ever. But is it, is it being in it? Is it simply doing it? Is it, and I think it is that with, and now I'm fine with the fact that I'm really bad at meditation, but it doesn't, it doesn't stop me having a crack at it.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  And when I do it each day, I don't do it every day, but I try. I really try to have a few minutes, depending on the amount of time I've got in my day. Could be five minutes, could be twenty five minutes. It just depends. And I'm bad at it. And that's fine, because that's sort of the deal.

• 5:17Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, and I think especially for a high achieving former good girl, as you have described yourself, it is really a learning to sit in mediocrity.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 5:29Elizabeth Day?

  Because you don't get that anywhere else in your life, potentially. Yeah.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  You're a very high achiever, though. I mean, you've.

• 5:34Elizabeth Day?

  Thank you. Can I quote that as well?

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Yes, but aren't you? I mean, like, your education, everything, you've sort of done every, I mean, I'm not one of those people.

• 5:41Elizabeth Day?

  Relentless quest to be loved. Yeah.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Is it that?

• 5:44Elizabeth Day?

  Probably, yes, yes. And, but I also fail to meditate every day. So, yeah, and it's a relatively recent thing, but it just keep, people keep telling you to do it. And you're like, okay, I, I understand I should try this. So I try every morning for ten minutes now.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. And do you feel a bit better for even trying?

• 6:02Elizabeth Day?

  I actually do.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:04Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  I always do.

• 6:05Elizabeth Day?

  I, I think what it helps me with.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  And also you can do it anywhere. So the whole kind of nonsense about you could be sitting, your legs crossed, cobblers. You can do it. I've done it in a makeup chair before I've gone on air in front of twenty million people. You can just, you can do it.

• 6:17Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Anywhere.

• 6:19Elizabeth Day?

  Was that before Queen Elizabeth the Second's funeral?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  No, that was before the Platinum Jubilee. And I hadn't been on air for four years. I hadn't done anything. So the BBC asked me to to anchor and it was three days of coverage. It was a very big deal, obviously, platinum jubilee, very big deal. BBC for television this was. And I said to my husband, I said, it's like, I haven't even done the school run in a Fiat Punto for four years. And somebody said, you want to go around Brands Hatch in a McLaren. And I've said, I'm the woman for the job. So I needed to just remind myself. And I, yeah, so when I was in the makeup chair, I just did a little bit of, just shut myself down, did that. And it was very helpful.

• 6:59Elizabeth Day?

  You mentioned that you hadn't worked for a while.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:03Elizabeth Day?

  And you mentioned that this meditation is linked to your health stuff.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:07Elizabeth Day?

  Um, and I wonder if I can just ask how you're doing. How are you?

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm doing fine. I have, so I have rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia, and those are things that don't go away. So they're sort of things that you, I mean, so many people have got um, uh, immune conditions. And I'm one of those people. And I think the thing is,

• 7:31Speaker 01

  well, I'm very fortunate because I am able, I was able to completely reshape my life to make sure that I could take time out, to take care of myself, to find the right medication, to find the right lifestyle, to, to just, to support my wellness. And so I did that, and I'm very fortunate. So that's so lucky me. It has at times been very difficult and painful and excruciating and frustrating and all those things. And right now, I'm, I'm pretty good. I mean, it has little flares and I have to be mindful of that's the sort of pain stuff. But I do things that are important to keep me on an even keel. And the, the thing is with sort of immunosuppressed or rheumatological complaints, kind of if you do the same thing

• 8:13Speaker 01

  all the time, it's good for your body. So if you stick to very, so, so sometimes that's compatible with work and not compatible. And sometimes you can't control the stress factors in your life and all that. So and it can flare up. But generally, I would say I'm pretty good and sometimes less good. And that's also fine. There are so many other parts of your life that open up if you allow it to and so many different, and I live very differently and have a very different attitude and definitely made friends with what I would have perceived previously, I think, as failure. That's a failure of my body to do. Well, it's not. It's just, you're just human and something's happened and.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Find, find a way, not around it, but with it. Find a way with it. It's my sort of view of it in my head and my practical view of it.

• 9:06Elizabeth Day?

  Okay, your final failure, meditation. Now, you say it's a failure, but you meditate for two hours a day.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:13Elizabeth Day?

  One, one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  Usually, yes.

• 9:16Elizabeth Day?

  So why do you categorize it as a failure?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Again, it's, it's not exactly a failure, but in meditation, you constantly fail. But this is a good thing. This is part of, of the meditation. The meditation often is a process of observing your failure and coming to terms with it. Because, you know, like the most basic, at least in, in the type of meditation that I practice, vipassana, which I, I've learned here in the UK when I was doing my PhD in Oxford. So I went to a centre near Hereford and learned from a teacher called Essengoenka, vipassana meditation. And the first and most basic instruction sounds incredibly easy. You just focus your entire attention on your own breath around the nostrils and around the nose.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  You just feel when the breath is coming in and when it's going out. That's it. You don't need to control the breath. It's not a breathing exercise. You just need to observe, to feel, is it coming in or is it going out? That's it. And the amazing thing is, it's so difficult. Like you do it for five seconds, 10 seconds, 20 seconds, and then your mind wanders away. Some memory comes, some thought comes, some fantasy comes, and you start rolling in the memory for like five minutes before you remember, hey, I actually supposed to be feeling my breath. And you come back to it and you do it for 30 seconds and then again it runs away. And when, when I went to my first course, this was such a shock.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  That again, I have no control over my mind. I don't know what's happening there. Like, I thought I was a very intelligent and then a person. And by then, I was also out as a gay man. And I thought, okay, I know my deep secrets now. And here I am, sitting with closed eyes, trying to do this simple thing of just feeling the breath coming in and out. I can't do it for more than like 20 seconds. What's happening? And it's been like 24 years since then. I've been practicing two hours every day. Every year, I go to a long retreat of 30 days or 60 days of meditation. And still, you know, I do it for a few minutes and the mind wanders somewhere.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  So it's a failure in this sense. But this is how I get to know my mind. And this is how I get to know reality. This is the inner reality of what's happening in my mind. And noticing this and also noticing where the mind wanders away and what happens to the body and to the mind when a particular thought comes up. This is a process of getting to know yourself, not by reading books about psychology or about biology or whatever. You're actually in a laboratory observing yourself second by second. And really, there is nothing like that in the world.

• 12:16Elizabeth Day?

  It's so interesting to hear you describe it as a laboratory where you're observing your mind. Because a lot of people would describe it as a spiritual practice.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  Hmm, I'm a scientist.

• 12:25Elizabeth Day?

  I know. So are you uneasy with the idea that it's a spiritual practice?

• 12:28Speaker 02

  I don't think there is any contradiction between these two. I mean, for me, spirituality is about big questions. What is the meaning of life? Who am I? And the willingness to follow these questions wherever they lead you.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  And this stands in contrast, I think, to established religions, which require you to believe in a certain dogma. So the answer is at the centre, not the question. Whereas science is, in this sense, much more spiritual. Science also is about raising these big questions and following them, of course, with different tools. Like scientists also, one of the biggest questions in science is what is consciousness? How does electrical activity between billions of neurons? How does this create the sensation of pain? We have no idea. But we investigate.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  So in the scientific laboratory, we investigate it with tools like microscopes. In meditation, we investigate the same question, basically. What is pain? Where is it coming from? But by directly observing the pain. Not with the help of any microscope, but just feeling the pain.

• 13:44Elizabeth Day?

  God, that's so well explained. My final question, it's a slightly odd one, but I'm interested, so that's why I'm gonna ask it.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Odd questions are the best.

• 13:52Elizabeth Day?

  Good. So if someone were to ask you, where do you want to go for dinner tonight? Or what hotel would you like to stay in? Or what time would you like to fly? Or what do you want to wear today? Do you answer from your feeling or your intellect?

• 14:08Speaker 02

  I often let my husband decide.

• 14:10Elizabeth Day?

  So interesting. Do you think you're a people pleaser?

• 14:14Speaker 02

  In some ways, yes. But in other ways, completely no. I mean, I please them in the areas which are less important to me. Why fight about it? Let them do what they want. But when something is really important, then no. Like, again, like with these meditation retreats, I disappear. Every year for like 30 days or 60 days. If you ask my husband or my mother or the people in my company about it, I'm not sure they're happy about it. But it's just like, deal with it.

• 14:45Elizabeth Day?

  I imagine it's also because your intellect is so overworked a lot of the time and you're constantly having to make decisions about what to write and what to think. So sometimes if someone asks you where to go for dinner, you're like, I don't, that's just too much.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 14:59Elizabeth Day?

  But if I forced you, and if I said, okay, you're in London tonight and you can eat one kind of cuisine, does that response come from feeling or thought?

• 15:09Speaker 02

  I think from feeling, but I would probably pick a place I've already been to. I'll go for the safe choice.

• 15:17Elizabeth Day?

  Ever the scientist, but as we now know, that's also being a bit spiritual. Follow the questions. I want that on a t-shirt. Yuval, it has been such an illuminating and invigorating conversation. I cannot thank you enough for the work that you do and for giving up your valuable time to be here today. Thank you so, so much.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Thank you.