Distraction, Vulnerability, and A Phrase To End Sh*t-Talking | Three Listener Questions

Dan's best attempts to answer some listener questions from our Substack community. These questions came from our live Renegade Sangha session on April 8, and all of these sessions are open to paid subscribers. Check out how to join the party at DanHarris.com http://danharris.com.

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

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:19Dan Harris?

  Hello, everybody. How we doing? Happy Friday. Today, we're bringing you three questions from our community over on Substack, along with my attempts to answer said questions. If you're not familiar, we have a burgeoning Sangha or community over on danharris.com, which is powered by Substack. A couple of times a month, I do a live session where I lead a short meditation and then take some questions. Sometimes, we do these for free for everybody, but generally, these are for paid subscribers who get these sessions twice a month. And if you're a paid subscriber, you also get to submit your questions in advance, or you can send me questions live during the actual session. The next one is coming up on Tuesday, May 6th. Go to danharris.com for more information on that one. It's always a lot of fun. We'd love to have you join us.

• 1:02Dan Harris?

  The questions you'll hear today are from a session I did on April 8th, a sampler of what you'll get if you sign up. Enjoy.

• 1:10Speaker 01

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• 2:11Dan Harris?

  Malini asks, oh, this is a really good question. Malini, thank you. This question is about guided meditations. If meditation is about continually coming back to a point of focus, for example, the breath, then how does one reconcile our regular distractions of thought with the added interruptions of the guided meditation? It seems to me that the voice of guidance, while soothing to listen to, is actually just another form of distraction from focus. I find this confusing and a little bit like I'm cheating when I listen to a guided meditation. I love this question. It's a little technical, but first of all, let me just say, nobody's cheating when you're listening to a guided meditation. And I get this question a lot. People say, you know, should I drop the training wheels

• 2:54Dan Harris?

  and meditate on my own, no guided meditations? And I will come back to an expression that Joseph Goldstein uses all the time is, whatever works, do what works. If guided meditations are helpful for you and that's all you ever do for the rest of your contemplative career, God bless. Like, that's perfect. That's great. You're getting tons of benefit. If you want to start mixing in a little unguided, that's also cool. I mostly do unguided, but then when I do a guided meditation, especially if I'm onstage with a great meditation teacher like Jeff Warren or Joseph Goldstein, it's awesome because the voice is the voice of wisdom reminding you to wake up. That is very different in my mind

• 3:37Dan Harris?

  than the voice of boredom or restlessness or randomness that comes up in my mind during meditation that you might qualify as a distraction. When the voice of the teacher comes in, it's, yeah, technically pulling you away from your breath, but it's a skillful use of our discursive thinking mind to connect us to our direct experience, to help us be mindful. So I understand your confusion and it's not unwarranted. And I wouldn't worry too much about it. Let me see what the question is from my friend Abby. Let's see. Abby Wendell, a subscriber and a really cool person. She's a friend of a friend, but also now a friend of mine because she's come to a bunch

• 4:22Dan Harris?

  of our meditation party events that we do at the Omega Institute. "One of the reasons I love your work is your willingness to be vulnerable and share your experiences and dare I say weaknesses. This is an important quality when shaping any culture, but I wonder if you could comment on where it can go too far. I think you've had experts on the pod to talk about this, but thought it might be a good topic to discuss live." That's great. Yeah, I guess we're talking here about the term du jour is vulnerability, popularized by somebody I really admire, Brene Brown. You know, growing up, vulnerability had a negative used in the pejorative. You don't want to be vulnerable to attack. But now we use vulnerability to mean openness, unguardedness, honesty.

• 5:05Dan Harris?

  And I think it can be very helpful for somebody who has a position in the culture to be really open and honest about what's going on for them because it normalizes mental health, interpersonal struggles that we all deal with. I was very nervous before I wrote my first book, 10% Happier, in which I talked about, you know, having a coke fueled panic attack on Good Morning America. My mother begged me not to do it, but I am every day ever more convinced that it was the right thing to do because it's bringing stuff that for too long in our culture was kept in the shadows and was the source of shame, bringing it out into the open where we can talk about it and deal with it more effectively.

• 5:47Dan Harris?

  And I agree with you, Abby, that vulnerability can go too far. There's such a thing as like bleeding all over the place and oversharing. And so you really want to pick your spots. One little rule that I follow that comes from my friend Sabine Selassie, and she got this from somebody else whose name I've forgotten, is that it's best to teach from scars instead of wounds. So it's rare that I will talk about a live issue that I have not metabolized. Sometimes I'll do it a little bit, but I'm much more comfortable talking about the stuff that... I've really worked through. In part, this is why my book on my 360 review, which was due in 2020, is probably not going to come out until 2026 or 2027, because my 360 review,

• 6:32Dan Harris?

  which some of you have heard me talk about before, this is like an anonymous survey I did with the people in my life to get a sense of what my strengths and weaknesses were. I did this back in 2018. The results were so devastating and embarrassing. Funny now, but not funny at the time. First of all, I'm a slow writer. But second, I really want to, I want it to be a scar instead of a wound when I talk about it publicly in a very detailed way. And I've given a TED Talk on it, but the book will be much deeper. Another rule about vulnerability that I've heard comes from Carol and David. I'm screwing them up, the names. They were on my podcast. They used to teach a course at Stanford Business School called Touchy Feely. The students called it Touchy Feely, but I think it was called Interpersonal Dynamics.

• 7:15Dan Harris?

  And it was about just how to talk to other people and how to deal with other human beings, which very few of us are ever taught how to do. And vulnerability can be very important in a performative age where many of us have carefully curated personas on Instagram. That prevents real connection. And so if you can take a risk sometime and share something vulnerable with somebody, that's a great way to create a deeper relationship. But you really want to know when is the right time to do that. So they talk about, I think they call it the 15% rule. It's like, there are some people you know are unsafe. You're never going to take that risk with them. And then there are people who are totally safe. So you're not really pushing your boundary by doing anything.

• 8:00Dan Harris?

  But there's some 15% where you don't know, but you have a suspicion it's, it might be okay. Take a risk in that range and share something that you might not otherwise share. And I want to draw a distinction between me as a public figure talking about stuff and you as a human being. I think it's totally fine to talk to the people you trust in your life about active, separating, bleeding wounds. I do that with my wife, for example, but I'm less likely to do that in public. But again, you want to pick your spots, pick the right moment, not overshare, not take up all the oxygen in the room. It's a bit of an art. Sadly, you're probably going to have to make some mistakes as you learn this art or skill.

• 8:46Dan Harris?

  Sarah, what are some suggestions of phrases to drop into your mind when you notice you're about to engage in what might be harmful speech? Like venting to a coworker about another coworker? Or complaining about something that really could be let go of? I'm noticing thoughts arising to engage in this kind of behavior and speech. However, I'm working on doing the next right thing of refraining. You have so many helpful phrases, I wonder if you've got one or two for this. Thank you. So yeah, I've got two. Look, first of all, just to say, the Buddha was pretty clear about useless speech and gossiping and backbiting and all that stuff. No bueno. And it's gonna happen once in a while. And there is actually an evolutionary case for gossip. I won't go into all of it now.

• 9:31Dan Harris?

  I did a whole episode on it. There's a reason why the human animal gossips as a way to share information and gather information. But if you're watching your mind while you're gossiping, if you're mindful, you'll notice it doesn't feel good. You know, many things in life, the Buddha talked about, many of the things that we call pleasurable are like licking honey from the edge of a razor. That's the analogy he used, the metaphor, simile, whatever. And I like that. It can be tasty, but it's also dangerous. The word in ancient Pali, the language of Pali, in which the Buddhist teachings were written down, the word for useless talk is samppalapa.

• 10:16Dan Harris?

  Joseph Goldstein loves to talk about this word, samppalapa. It's just a hilarious word. And so maybe the next time you're noticing that you're about to engage in useless or harmful backbiting speech, you can just remember samppalapa. Do I need to do this? What's really going on here? As Joseph likes to say, if you can wake up in this moment, you can dig deeper and sense like, what need am I trying to serve here? What itch am I trying to scratch? And often, as Joseph said, it's really as simple as, here I am, look at me. And you don't need to do that. You're fine just as you are. So samppalapa is a good little phrase to remember.

• 11:01Dan Harris?

  And then the other phrase is, this one comes from Thich Nhat Hanh, great Zen master who passed a couple of years ago. I think these are the words he uses, and I might be off, but it's the same sentiment.

• 11:14Dan Harris?

  The words are, is this true? Am I sure? Something to that effect. And so, yeah, you're going to go talk smack. Is it really true? Did they really do that? Is that really what they intended? Oh, here's another phrase. This one comes from Dr. Becky Kennedy, the child psychologist who I love. Am I engaging right now in LGI or MGI? Least generous interpretation or most generous interpretation? And, you know, not everybody deserves MGI, but, you know, try it on for size because it might cut against your habit patterns in a useful way.

• 11:58Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to our community members, Malini, Abby, and Sarah for those great questions. Don't forget, you can join us for our next live session on Tuesday, May 6th. Go to danharris.com to find out how. Thank you, everybody who worked 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 from the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 12:39Speaker 02

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