Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris Think You Suck at Meditation? This Conversation Could Help. | Ofosu Jones-Quartey About this episode How to (constructively) lower the bar on your meditation practice.
Ofosu Jones-Quartey https://bornimusic.com/ is a meditation teacher, hip-hop artist, and author based in the DC area. He's a certified teacher with over 20 years of experience bringing mindfulness, self-compassion, and creativity to people of all ages. His stage name is "Born I,", and his new book is called Lyrical Dharma: Hip-Hop as Mindfulness https://bornimusic.com/read/.
In this episode we talk about:
The definition of open-awareness meditation How it differs from classical concentration practices (such as focusing on your breath, or loving kindness phrases) Why Ofosu chose open-awareness meditation (in direct response to his struggles with OCD) How you can practice open-awareness meditation The benefits of a technique called "mental noting" The "practice self-assessment tapes" that we run in our mind Self-compassion and "lowering the bar" in your meditation practice The relationship between neurodiversity and meditation in general How to depersonalize the experience of suffering And we hear some of Ofosu's music and the life experiences that inspired it
Related Episodes:
How to Become a Regular Meditator (and More) | Alexis Santos https://www.danharris.com/p/how-to-become-a-regular-meditator-514?utm_source=publication-search A More Relaxed Way to Meditate | Alexis Santos https://www.danharris.com/p/a-more-relaxed-way-to-meditate-alexis-0e2?utm_source=publication-search
Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com/
Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD
Additional Resources:
Lyrical Dharma Music Playlist https://bornimusic.com/lyricaldharma/
Get ready for another Meditation Party at Omega Institute! This in-person workshop brings together Dan with his friends and meditation teachers, Sebene Selassie, Jeff Warren, and for the first time, Ofosu Jones-Quartey. The event runs October 24th-26th. Sign up and learn more here https://www.eomega.org/workshops/meditation-party-2025.
To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris
Sponsors:
Narwal Vacuum
If you want to treat your home to spotless, fresh floors, visit us.narwal.com/podcast http://us.narwal.com/podcast to get the early bird price!
Function Health
Learn more and join using our link. The first 1,000 get a $100 credit toward their membership. Visit www.functionhealth.com/HAPPIER http://www.functionhealth.com/HAPPIER or use gift code HAPPIER 100 at sign-up to own your health.
Transcript 11,428 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Dan Harris? This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:19 Dan Harris? Hey, gang. How we doing? One of the most common refrains I hear from people who come up to me on the street or at the airport is, "I suck at meditation." This is what people say to me all the time. "I suck at it. I've tried it, but I can't do it." Or, "I do it once in a while, but I'm no good." If that's you, this episode is for you. My guest today is a prominent meditation teacher who also suffers with obsessive-compulsive disorder. In other words, his brain is not necessarily the most hospitable place for meditation. And yet, he's been able to find a style of practice and a general attitude about practice that have genuinely helped him and that I strongly suspect will help you. To be clear, this conversation will be helpful, even if you feel like your meditation practice is singing.
1:03 Dan Harris? We're going to get a little bit technical about a form of practice known as open awareness, which is something I do myself pretty much every day. My guest is Afosu Jones-Cortez. He's a meditation teacher, hip-hop artist, and author and friend of mine. He's based in the DC area. He's the male voice on the Balance Meditation app and a certified teacher with over 20 years of experience, bringing mindfulness and self-compassion and creativity to people of all ages. Afosu is also, as I mentioned a moment ago, a hip-hop artist. His stage name is Born Eye. His music has been streamed millions of times. In fact, he's got a new book of his Buddhist-inflected lyrics called "Lyrical Dharma: Hip-Hop as Mindfulness." In this conversation, we talk about the definition of open awareness, how it differs from a
1:48 Dan Harris? classical concentration practice, like focusing on your breath or loving-kindness phrases, why Afosu chose open awareness meditation in direct response to his struggles with OCD, how you can practice open awareness meditation, the benefits of a technique called mental noting, self-compassion and lowering the bar in your meditation practice, the relationship between neurodiversity and meditation in general, how to depersonalize the experience of your suffering so you're not taking it so personally. We hear some of Afosu's music, and we'll talk about the life experiences that inspired it. Just to say, before we dive in here, we've got a guided meditation. bespoke to this episode. It's customized to help you take what you learn is in this
2:31 Dan Harris? episode and put it to work in your own mind. This meditation comes from Kyra Jewell Lingo, who's our teacher of the month. She's producing guided meditations to go with all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes this month. This is a new feature of the 10% cinematic universe guided meditations to go with our full-length episodes. It's something I've wanted to do for a long time. You may have heard me say, we kind of think about this as the lecture lab model. The podcast is the lecture and the guided meditations are the lab. And so today Kyra Jewell, in her meditation, is going to teach you open awareness, or what is sometimes called "choiceless attention", and you'll be learning from an ace. If you want to access these meditations, you gotta sign up
3:13 Dan Harris? at danharris.com, become a paying subscriber. When you sign up, you also get live guided meditation sessions on video with me, where I guide a meditation and then take your questions. We've got one coming up tomorrow, in fact, Thursday, August 14th at 4:00 Eastern. Okay, one last thing. I promise this is the last thing I want to say. It relates to Afosu, my guest today. He is actually going to be part of an IRL in-person meditation retreat that I'm doing with my pals, Sebene Selassie and Jeff Warren, coming up on October 24th through the 26th at the Omega Institute, which is about an hour and a half north of New York City. We call it meditation party, and we do a bunch of meditation, and then we also, you
3:56 Dan Harris? know, hang out, eat good food. It's not like a hardcore retreat. It's more like a party, but with a ton of meditation. So Afosu will be there, Jeff Warren, Sebene Selassie, I'll be there, October 24th through 26th, and I'll put a link in the show notes. Okay, enough out of me. We'll get started with Afosu Jones-Cortez right after this. If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity and an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening
4:41 Dan Harris? or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission. And I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for.
5:24 Dan Harris? One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission. And I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show.
6:07 Dan Harris? Fossey Jones-Cortez, welcome to the show.
6:10 Speaker 01 Thank you so much, Dan. Good to be back with you, hot sauce.
6:13 Dan Harris? I should have said, welcome back to the show. Can you remind everybody why you're calling me hot sauce?
6:19 Speaker 01 Well, the last time I was on, Cara and I were talking and then Sam, one of the folks you work with, we were just talking about like, what I, I think we were testing the mic, like, what did I have for breakfast? And I had like eggs with hot sauce. And then it just went into this direction of hot sauce. Then you popped on the screen and I was like, you know what? I really think an amazing nickname for you, Dan, would be hot sauce. And so it's remained in my heart and it's resurfaced today.
6:47 Dan Harris? I hope it's not giving you heartburn as hot sauce can do.
6:50 Speaker 01 Oh, no, not at all. It's very heartwarming.
6:55 Dan Harris? My wife would resist my being dubbed hot sauce, given that she's always protecting the size of my ego.
7:03 Speaker 01 Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna hype you up every time, so.
7:06 Dan Harris? All right, I appreciate that.
7:07 Speaker 01 For sure.
7:08 Dan Harris? I like being gassed up. So, the last time you were on the show, actually, the first time you were on the show, the guy who was producing the episode, DJ Cashmere, asked you, what do you want to talk about? And you said self compassion. And then this time, the woman who's producing the show is Eleanor, asked you, what do you want to talk about? And you said, still self compassion, but also open awareness meditation.
7:30 Speaker 01 Yes.
7:31 Dan Harris? So, we will definitely talk about self compassion, because I think it's the type of thing that is actually inexhaustibly interesting and useful.
7:38 Speaker 01 Totally agree.
7:39 Dan Harris? But let's start with open awareness meditation, because I actually don't think we've talked about it that much on this show, and it is a core practice for me, too.
7:47 Speaker 01 Nice.
7:48 Dan Harris? So, maybe let's start with a description of what it is, and then we'll get into why it's so important to you.
7:54 Speaker 01 Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. And shout out to Eleanor, I had a great time just going back and forth and figuring out the best way to have this chat, so.
8:02 Dan Harris? Look, I don't want Eleanor to get big ego either, so, yeah.
8:05 Speaker 01 I'm down to hype up the whole squad. Shout out to the whole unit that works with Dan, because everyone's awesome. So, open awareness has been described in a pithy way as like the meditation of no meditation, or choiceless awareness. What it is for me is bringing the meditative quality that we bring to the present moment, but not tying ourselves to an anchor. So, in, I would say, more traditional mindfulness or vipassana practices or techniques, a lot of the guidance is to pick an anchor, whether it's the breath, or sensations in the body,
8:51 Speaker 01 or the coming and going of sounds. And to have that be your home base, if it's more of a mindfulness practice, then there's an accommodation that the mind will wander, but we come back again and again to our same home base, the breath, the body, sounds, or maybe if it's loving kindness, you know, a quality of the heart. With open awareness practice.
9:15 Speaker 01 We are not choosing an anchor, but really allowing the flow of experience, thoughts, sensations, emotions, sounds, everything to be a part of what we are aware of. We're not choosing. It is exactly kind of like what it sounds like. If we think about taking a picture with concentration practices. Oh, I think open awareness can be a concentration practice, but with certain concentration practices, it's almost as if we are focusing the lens and making the scope a lot more narrow. Open awareness is like taking a wide angle photo or having a long lens, or even using soft focus,
10:00 Speaker 01 where you're just not picking one particular thing. So yeah, that's, that's my, my little answer there.
10:08 Dan Harris? This is a question I've had from people before. How do you define a concentration practice? What does that mean? And how is that different from an open awareness practice, which, as you said, can be a concentration practice, but sometimes really isn't?
10:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. So I think that when it comes to these techniques, we do end up getting in a bit of a semantics game. Because I, I feel that we can arrive at the same place and we're just kind of going through different doorways. So in my experience with traditional concentration practices, there was even less space allotted to the mind to wander off. It's like we pick an anchor, usually the breath. I'm going to say usually for me, because I was initially trained in the Burmese Vipassana system that was developed by Mahasi Sayadha and Sayadha Upandita. My teacher, Banti Buddha Rakita,
11:09 Speaker 01 taught me this method of just watching the rise and settling of the breath at the abdomen. So when we're just doing a lighter mindfulness practice, yes, the mind will wander. We come back to the breath. When it's a deeper concentration practice, we really, really try to stay with the object of our attention. In my case, the breath. And when we notice the mind drifting, we gently but swiftly bring it back. And the goal is to stay with the object until there's really a quality of non-distraction. There's nothing else but your attention and the object of attention. Even to the point where the two begin to feel as though they're inseparable.
11:53 Speaker 01 The mind becomes very quiet, very still. Yeah, and it's a cool place to hang out for, for some time. With open awareness, that quality of stillness is still available, but we don't. Or I should say, I don't pick one thing to sort of drill down into. I just allow the flow to be the flow until there's really no resistance to the flow. And I can feel the quality of stillness in my awareness that is different than the flow of sensations, thoughts, sounds, et cetera. And then that quality of stillness, I can rest in that more and more.
12:35 Speaker 01 So it feels like we get to the same place with a deep concentration practice and an open awareness practice, but just vastly different approaches.
12:44 Dan Harris? Let me see if I can just restate some of this, because I think for many people, first of all, the word concentration can be off-putting because we think of being told to pay attention and grit our teeth and furrow our brow in class or something like that. But concentration, another word for it is like one-pointedness. And it can come with a lot of feeling of tranquility, where you get focused on your breath or loving-kindness phrases, and the mind really settles down.
13:17 Dan Harris? I do want to make clear to anybody who's listening to this and thinking, my mind never fucking settles down, that that's okay too.
13:24 Speaker 01 Yes.
13:25 Dan Harris? There's an enormous amount of benefit to be had from just trying to focus on one thing for a nanosecond or two, and then every time your mind wanders, you start again. And in the moment of waking up from distraction, you're learning something incredibly important, which is you're getting a sense of how the mind, how wild the mind is, and that familiarity, otherwise known as mindfulness, allows you not to be yanked around by all of your thoughts and urges and emotions. And so concentration practices are different from like an open awareness or choiceless awareness, where there is no anchor, we're not focusing on the breath, we're not focusing on loving kindness practices, we're just trying to be mindful of whatever comes up. How's that for a summary?
14:10 Speaker 01 I think that's a great summary.
14:12 Dan Harris? Okay.
14:13 Speaker 01 I think it's, oh, I really don't like the word radical. I think I've said that every time I've been on your show, but I've,
14:23 Speaker 01 I find that it creeps in when I, when I'm trying to explain something, so what's another word? I think it's maybe special or interesting. Ah, anyway. I think that it's an approach to life that is very different than how we normally approach life, which is, oh, well, again, let me use I statements. It's different than how I normally approach life, which I kind of automatically am judging or bracing or anticipating or fixating or just having some sort of mental relationship with whatever I'm experiencing. In my open awareness practice, I'm working on allowing
15:07 Speaker 01 whatever it is to be what it is without. clinging to it or rejecting it or ruminating about it. Just giving reality the gift of freedom and giving myself the gift of freedom as well. It's like taking a break from, from the constant getting yanked around. So it might be a good time to segue into why I chose this. Why I've been sticking with this practice because I have OCD. And choosing one particular object of meditation was just absolute hell.
15:50 Speaker 01 And I was not having a good time in my practice and I stuck with it for so long. But there was so much anxiety around having a bad thought while trying to stick with a particular meditation object, feeling like a bad meditator when I couldn't stay with the object. Or, you know, the compulsion to think the worst possible thought. When you're trying to do the best possible thing, which is a symptom of this condition. Oh, it just made my meditation practice really horrific. So before I knew that this was a valid way of practicing, I still just wanted to have a practice.
16:33 Speaker 01 So I would just sit, I, I, I used to say, I just sit and watch things change. And then I was practicing with Dawn Scott and Celeste Young. And one day on the retreat, they offered an open awareness practice. And I was like, oh, this is a thing. Oh, this is amazing.
16:50 Speaker 01 And it just made me feel a little bit more confident in the approach that I was kind of intuitively finding for myself.
16:57 Dan Harris? I do want to hear more about your personal story and why this practice appeals to you. And you, you describe it as a kind of helpful lowering of, of the bar. But before we get to that, from the perspective of a beginning or intermediate meditator, I can imagine people thinking, I have a hard enough time being with the breath or staying focused on loving kindness phrases or something basic.
17:22 Dan Harris? And you're saying, no, just sit there and be aware of whatever's happening? Well, that's just gonna be distraction fest, you know, to the max.
17:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. I think what's beautiful about this point in history for us practitioners at whatever level is that we do have quite a banquet of options at our disposal that we can practice with that will suit our mental disposition. So I wouldn't say that open awareness is one size fits all, but I would recommend that it's folks take some time to perhaps experiment with it
18:10 Speaker 01 and see if it's something they can add to their meditation toolkit, so to speak. For me, it's become my go-to. And in the Zen, Soto Zen tradition, which I've been practicing in for about a year and some change now, the practice of shikantaza, just sitting, is essentially parallel to an open awareness practice where there's no, we're not choosing anything, just letting the flow of life happen. And there's actually a real freedom in just in not choosing. Because in my experience, we don't really have that much choice in the first place.
18:55 Speaker 01 You know, internally, externally, so much is happening that's out of our control that when you have a, an open awareness practice allows us to sort of make peace with the vastness of our everyday experience. It helps us, well, helps me widen my capacity to be with.
19:20 Speaker 01 If I have a deadline and my kid has a particular need and there's a fire truck happening in the background and my OCD is acting up. I don't have control over the timing of those things. They are happening. So what's my response? Maybe it is to take a breath and be with one thing that can help anchor me through it. Or it is to have a kind of inner spaciousness that I've been cultivating through this practice. That reminds me that all of this is coming and going. It's all coming and going. I don't have to get too hung up on any of it. I can just kind of give myself and the whole situation more space.
19:58 Dan Harris? Yeah, I relate to that, this sense of not being at war with reality. Which can be really peaceful. I do want to just keep pressing you on this. How to do it, even if you aren't, you know, a super experienced meditator. So I'll, I'll just say a little bit about how I do open awareness practice.
20:21 Speaker 01 Yes.
20:22 Dan Harris? As somebody who doesn't have an extraordinary degree of concentration. In other words, as somebody who is fidgety and distractible. One thing I, I do that's really helpful is I start my meditation session with a concentration practice. Like a body scan where you're moving from the top of the head down to the forehead, eye sockets, jaws, neck, throat, et cetera, et cetera, all the way down to the feet. And then maybe sweeping through one or two, three times in a very slow systematic way. That does focus the mind. Loving kindness practice really focuses the mind. For me, not to the point where there's no distraction, but fewer distractions.
21:05 Dan Harris? And then I can open up into a choiceless awareness. And then once I'm in that choiceless awareness, I actually use thought.
21:15 Dan Harris? To help me stay in the game via something called mental noting, which I know you're familiar with.
21:20 Speaker 01 Yep.
21:20 Dan Harris? Where instead of just sitting here and seeing if I can just stay in the present moment in an unbroken way. I use just a little, as Joseph Goldstein says, little whisper in the mind, oh, hearing, thinking, seeing, tingling, unpleasant, pleasant. And so I say all of that to see what your reaction is as a teacher and what else you would recommend.
21:46 Speaker 01 Sure. So that is beautiful. And following that formula, I think, can get anybody into the flavor and practice of open awareness. I love that you begin with an anchoring or concentration practice. For me, because the breath has been like the number one thing for me for 20 years now. It's just my default. I do begin by just noticing my breathing at the abdomen. But it's held very lightly. And I think holding it lightly has also been helpful for me because I used to hold everything very tightly. Um, I really have to, you know, drill down, concentrate, you know?
22:31 Speaker 01 I think that word concentration, as you mentioned earlier, didn't denote or connote any sense of tranquility for me. It really was about like forcing the mind to stay in one place. So I really try to hold any so-called concentration practice lightly. But I do allow the breath normally to be my entryway. And after being with the breath for a little bit, generally just dropping into a more choiceless place. I've tried to experiment. There's a teacher, Ashin Utejania, who suggested in one of his books, I think it's called,
23:15 Speaker 01 Don't Look Down at the Defilements, They'll Laugh at You. That noting is great and that we can also practice with just being aware. So almost like a silent noting, if that's, if that makes any sense. I've been trying to experiment with both. The noting practice is very, very helpful. It allows me to stay in the moment and just say, okay, yes, like you said, that little whisper, hearing, feeling, breath.
23:43 Speaker 01 Pleasant, unpleasant, and no judgment around any of it.
23:48 Dan Harris? Actually, you can make a note of judgment.
23:50 Speaker 01 Right, yeah.
23:52 Speaker 01 It's very true. And then sometimes I'll just try to see if I can even make some space in between the noting and just really just feel and notice what's there. But I love the approach that you mentioned, going through the body, maybe a few times, to really get grounded and to really let the mind settle before we open up the window.
24:17 Dan Harris? Just to say a little bit about Sayadah Utejania, who you referenced. He is a Burmese master. I've never met him or interviewed him, but he has many students who teach in the West. One of them is Alexis Santos, who's been on this show a bunch of times. I'll drop some links to Alexis's prior appearances on the show in the show notes. I actually just spent the weekend with Alexis.
24:38 Speaker 01 Oh, amazing.
24:40 Dan Harris? And Sayadah Utejania's teachings via Alexis have been massively helpful to me. And he has this sequence of three phrases he asks his students to drop into the mind. The first is, "Are you aware or am I aware?" And that just kind of reminds you to wake up. Of course, the present moment awareness will disappear or the mind will wander off. And then you can come back gently, "Am I aware?" The second phrase is, and I love this, "What's the attitude in the mind right now?" Which is just a way to kind of turn the lights on for subterranean defilements.
25:25 Dan Harris? You use that phrase.
25:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
25:27 Dan Harris? In Buddhism, the three poisons or defilements are greed, hatred, and delusion. Wanting, not wanting, or not being aware at all.
25:39 Dan Harris? And when you ask, what's the attitude in the mind right now? It can reveal, it's like turning on a black light in a hotel room.
25:47 Speaker 01 Yikes.
25:47 Dan Harris? When you see all sorts of disgusting shit on the sheets.
25:52 Dan Harris? You can reveal, oh, I'm sitting here wanting to be concentrated. Or I'm wanting this meditation to be over or whatever. And so just asking that question, you know, reveals that desire is in sexual congress with your leg like a untrained dog or whatever. And, and that's really helpful. And then the third phrase is not a question, it's just a phrase. Uh, this is nature, which is a reminder that all these things you're seeing in your mind, including your distraction, including your moments of radiant clarity. It's not personal. It's inextricably into any, any seemingly idiosyncratic and bespoke little thought
26:36 Dan Harris? you're having is of course, just another little expression of the universe.
26:41 Speaker 01 Exactly. And to me, a practice that lends itself to openness reveals just that, that this is really just nature. In my practice, I see so much of my automatic responses that are so fast that I couldn't, I, I at least don't have the presence of mind to prevent them from arising. So whether it's judgment or aversion or distraction or bliss, you know, they arise. They hang out for a moment and they go on their way.
27:25 Speaker 01 The insight that can come from an open awareness practice is seeing how deeply this pattern is true for literally everything. For your thoughts, for your sensations, for the dog that's passing by your window right now, for the emotion that you're feeling, for the. The question your kid is asking you or whatever it might be, it's all coming and going. It's all coming and going. It's all coming and going. And the way that we brace or the way that we grab for and against, or the way that we try to be aloof towards reality,
28:03 Speaker 01 begins to soften a little bit because we are just so intimately aware of the experience of impermanence, vast impermanence, and that this is nature, exactly as you said, as Sayadah Bhuta Janaya suggests.
28:24 Dan Harris? Coming up, Afosu talks about the three marks of existence. This is Buddhist speak for the three non-negotiable aspects of being alive: impermanence, suffering, and not-self, or emptiness. We also talk about self-compassion and lowering the bar in your meditation practice generally.
28:47 Speaker 02 Your joints help you keep doing what you love. Give them daily support with Ancient Nutrition Multi-Collagen Protein. Two scoops deliver 20 grams of collagen from 10 types, including clinically studied eggshell membrane, plus vitamin C and probiotics to support skin, hair, nails, and joint health. Visit ancientnutrition.com/protein and use code PROTEIN for $15 off. That's ancientnutrition.com code PROTEIN.
29:14 Speaker 03 We work with veterans every day. Caring about people isn't the same as knowing how to help. Safeguard Veterans gave our team free online on-demand training to better understand military culture, recognize when someone may be struggling, and connect veterans to support and resources. It's practical, flexible, and our staff actually use what they learned.
29:34 Speaker 04 Get started at safeguardveterans.net. Click on "Community Organizations." Safeguard Veterans is a 2026 pilot research program funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
29:47 Dan Harris? It's funny, there are three poisons or three defilements in the classical Buddhist language, greed, hatred, and delusion. There are also these three marks of existence in the classical Buddhist parlance, meaning there are these three non-negotiable aspects of reality that you can see quite clearly in a practice like this. One is impermanence. Everything changes all the time. You were referencing that. And that can be terrifying, but also liberating, because all of the stuff that's dogging you is just coming and going. The second is suffering, which is, it sounds a little bit more dire or dour than it is.
30:29 Dan Harris? It's just that if you're clinging to things in a universe characterized by impermanence, you're gonna suffer.
30:36 Speaker 01 Yep.
30:36 Dan Harris? And so you can see how a pleasant state arises, and you're clinging to it, and it goes away, and you suffer. And so you can watch that in an open awareness meditation, or really, honestly, almost any kind of meditation. You're watching the mind, you can see this. And the third, which is directly pointed at through the phrase "this is nature," is what is often called "not-self" or emptiness, which essentially just means there's nothing in your mind that you can claim as yours. It feels like it's yours, but as you examine it, you realize that claiming it as yours is, in the words of one great monk, "a misappropriation of public property."
31:18 Dan Harris? There is all just nature. It's all just the universe playing itself out. And that sounds trippy or weird, but it's actually really comforting, that once you see your emotions as passing meteorological phenomena, then you can work with them and not be so caught up in them.
31:38 Speaker 01 Yes. Things stop being so life or death. And the feeling that the way life is is somehow a personal attack or affront on...
31:53 Speaker 01 Me or you, that begins to dissipate. The five remembrances that the Buddha talks about, that we are all of the nature to be impermanent, the nature to grow old, the nature to experience illness, the nature to die, and the inheritors of our actions. Pieces of that, or all of that, can be seen in an open practice. And it's not about taking anything on or believing anything, but kind of making peace with how things are. And that peacefulness is something that we can carry into our relationships.
32:36 Speaker 01 For instance, like yesterday, I was feeling really good, which is not always the case. And I found myself like starting to worry like, oh, man, you know, how long is this good feeling gonna last? And resting back in the openness that I've been working to make a relationship with, you know, I kind of was able to say, you know, it's here right now, and that's enough. And I really have no idea what's gonna happen next. And then giving myself that space of like, I don't have to cling to this good feeling. I don't know what's gonna happen next, but I know it'll change.
33:18 Speaker 01 I feel like it gave my sense of well-being a little bit longer lifespan, because I wasn't trying to hold on to it or push it away or worry about it, just like kind of letting it be and letting the mystery of life just be a mystery, you know? Yeah.
33:38 Dan Harris? In my experience, being mindful of something, being mindfully aware, meaning seeing it clearly, I'm not trying to cling to it, I'm not trying to push it away, I have a sense of warm curiosity about it. There's no suffering in those moments. You can be mindfully aware of something deeply unpleasant. I'm not saying I can always do it. If I'm in a panic attack, that's very hard for me to muster mindfulness. But when I'm mindful,
34:11 Dan Harris? Or actually, one of the things I often say to myself when I'm on retreat is if I'm suffering in any way, it just means there's something I'm not being mindful of.
34:23 Dan Harris? And to me, that's one of the benefits and beauties of open awareness practices. Every time you wake up and start being mindful again, it's like you're, the suffering goes away.
34:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, you realize that the edges that you have are imaginary. The resistance that you have, you can go right up to the edge of that resistance and just rest there. And then, in my experience, it fades. And my capacity to be with reality as it is, not how I want it to be, not how it just was, but just as it is, it opens, the horizon extends. And it's not this kind of like, super blissful experience. It really just feels more open and more peaceful.
35:14 Speaker 01 I think a part of maybe how greed, hatred, and delusion manifest in our experience is in trying to forecast how things are going to be or plan. And obviously, this is built into our evolution, you know, all of that. But life really is, when you think of like impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, non-self, I mean, to me, that says that life is a fucking mystery.
35:44 Dan Harris? Yeah.
35:45 Speaker 01 And to the extent that we can be at peace with the mystery is the extent that we are going to have a better time in it. And I feel like this practice gives us an opportunity to witness the mystery unfold in real time and to learn how to make peace with it.
36:04 Dan Harris? I believe the word that Buddhists use to describe what you are describing, or to capture what you're describing, is equanimity. It's like, can you have a generalized okayness with whatever's happening?
36:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
36:19 Speaker 01 And I think there's a misinterpretation that we have to be even keeled in an otherwise topsy-turvy world. And I don't think that's what equanimity is asking us.
36:33 Dan Harris? No, yes, I agree.
36:34 Speaker 01 It is to allow our peace to match the dynamism of life. It's like, okay, now the okay. Well, this is, this is really great. Okay, it can be great. I just know that greatness isn't forever, but I can embrace the greatness for as long as it is. I've been reading Everyday Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck, and she's been talking about two ways that we can suffer, either like skillfully or unskillfully. And in the skillful model, we actually just embrace and become fully aware and fully enmeshed with the experience of suffering so that
37:14 Speaker 01 there's an intimate relationship with it. And then it passes, then it changes. And we haven't, we haven't made anybody else suffer more because of it. We haven't infiltrated it with our own ideas. We just say, okay, this sucks and I'm with it. And then, then it changes. And then it's like, oh, okay. Yeah, that's right. It always changes. And, you know, unpleasant experiences are just a part of the game, but we can make them so much more unpleasant when we start adding all of our stuff.
37:48 Dan Harris? So let me see if I can tie a bow around at least this part of the conversation. Open awareness practice or choiceless awareness practice is where you sit and just try to be as mindful as you can with whatever's happening. Of course, you're going to get distracted and that's cool. You can just, when you wake up, start again. And if you wake up with a big blast of self-directed judgment, you can just make a little mental note of judgment. And speaking of notes, like that's a little mental noting is a way to keep yourself in the game. You could also start with what's often referred to as classical concentration practices, like loving kindness or focusing on the breath and then open up to open awareness. The use case here is if you've got a solid meditation practice,
38:33 Dan Harris? this is a one way to diversify it.
38:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
38:36 Dan Harris? Or if like a fosu, you find that you've been actually really struggling with trying to grit your teeth, bear down and do. Breath-based or loving kindness meditation, because you know, it's quite restrictive on the mind. Well, then this is an option that might be a useful lowering of the bar.
38:57 Speaker 01 Exactly. I love Buddhism. I love the practice of meditation. I so wanted to continue my practice, but my practice was so uncomfortable. When I say my practice was hell, I really do mean it. Like sitting and just the entire session, I would still learn. I'd learn a lot, you know, but I would just have the worst time. I didn't want to give up on my practice. And so for me, this approach was really a lifeline to staying in the game. It's made me love meditating, how I'll say that. Cause I, I walk past the cushion and be like, okay, here we go.
39:41 Speaker 01 It's time, it's time to go back into, you know, the depths. But now it's just, it's like, it's time to just sit and be open and just have a relationship with the mystery. Something that I am kind of intuiting in this practice is that there actually isn't that much to do. This reflection that this is nature. In my approach to this practice, I'm coming to terms with that more and more. And just allowing nature to be nature instead of, yeah, filling it with my own ideas and then chasing after those ideas, et cetera. So there is a sense that, you know, the Mahayana tradition talks about
40:25 Speaker 01 that, you know, we're, we are already perfect. And we're just not seeing it or relating to ourselves and the universe and reality in a skillful or, yeah, in the proper way, so to speak. This approach to practice has made me realize that I don't have to put some massive goal of achieving deep states of concentration or becoming like a superheroic meditator. I can sit and just let everything be and that's enough. And there's actually something miraculous and beautiful in bearing witness to all of that.
41:06 Dan Harris? A couple of phrases that came to mind as you were talking. These are phrases that I've heard elsewhere and I don't remember who I heard them from, but occasionally I will remember to say them to myself in open awareness practice. One is, nothing to do, nowhere to go, it's already here. Meaning that your awareness is already here. The point of practice is already here. Often it's papered over by, you know, planning a homicide or wondering about what's for lunch or whatever, but this ability to just be aware in a raw, bare way of whatever's happening in the mind, in the body, in the space around you, it's already here. There's, there's nothing you have to go do.
41:51 Dan Harris? You've just got to let go. And then the other phrase is, you don't have to chase the Dharma, the Dharma's chasing you.
41:58 Speaker 01 Hmm, hmm. Absolutely love that. I have not heard that second one. Yeah, I mean, I was so rabidly chasing the Dharma. And there's just no need to do that. It is this very moment. There's so much beauty, so much mystery, so much truth. Maybe beauty and mystery aren't always available to our perception, but the truth, the raw truth, which can give way to beauty and mystery is always right here. Yeah, that, that phrase, nowhere to go, nothing to do, we're, this is it. Yeah.
42:39 Dan Harris? Going back to the beginning of the conversation, I was saying how when Eleanor, who's producing this episode, asked you what you wanted to talk about, you said self-compassion and open awareness. And to me, and you just tell me if you think I have got this right. There is a self compassion in this lowering of the bar for meditation. It's baked right into this entire approach.
43:07 Speaker 01 Absolutely, absolutely. I think there's so much in the culture of meditation and mindfulness, both the ancient culture and the modern culture, that suggests that we have to be overachievers. It's another thing for us to become experts at, to become masters at, to get straight A's, to get a PhD in, you know, whether it is the stories of great masters who have accomplished these incredible feats of of mind and heart, or whether it's maintaining your streak on a meditation app. There's still this, I think, a pervasive,
43:53 Speaker 01 maybe misinterpretation of what we're actually up to here. And that, you know, if I do 100 days, which is great, I'm not, please, do 100, do 1,000 days. But the attitude that comes with it, I think, can end up being another stick that we end up whacking ourselves with, or another measuring tool that we feel that we're falling short. I hear it all the time. I, I don't do it enough, or I can't do it, or I just don't think that my mind is capable, or all that. And with a practice like this, it's like, no, you know, just have a seat and let yourself be. You know, we can just take a few breaths,
44:37 Speaker 01 or just notice how the body's feeling, notice what sounds are there. You know, give yourself some space to settle. And then you actually don't have to do anything at all, but be present for your life in this moment. So I'm navigating this neurodivergent mental health condition that I have, that not necessarily everybody else has, but I I have heard anecdotally that folks deal with the same thing that I'm about to mention. I set up my meditation session to last fifteen, thirty minutes, whatever. And then the goal is just to have the best fifteen, thirty minutes I could possibly have, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, whatever. Like, let's just carve out this perfect thirty.
45:22 Speaker 01 And God forbid, I have a negative thought, or in my case, I have a barrage of, you know, really crazy, unpleasant, intrusive thoughts. Oh, and what if you have a bad thought right before the bell? Oh, then the whole thing is just, it's a failure. And in this practice, I've been seeing that every moment is complete. Whether it was great, whether it sucked, you know, it came and went. I don't have to judge my life by, did I accomplish a great slice of time? Or was I the most optimal for this window of time? Every moment is complete, it's all coming and going. So then the pressure lowers and, counterintuitively,
46:05 Speaker 01 the length of time I spend just feeling a little bit more chill, you know, extends. So, yeah, I do think that in lowering the bar, we do ourselves a great kindness. And there's a lot of wisdom that's available to us there when we're not pressing ourselves so hard.
46:24 Dan Harris? Yeah, it's this strange paradox of meditation, which is, I often describe it as a fucked up video game where you can't move forward if you want to move forward. So it's something about like the necessity of surrender or dropping your expectations. Or another thing I often say is meditation is where perfectionism comes to die.
46:49 Speaker 01 Oh, man, yeah.
46:51 Dan Harris? Or another little saying that's on the wall at the Insight Meditation Society, where you and I have both done retreats and you've taught retreats. Stop expecting, and then the whole practice will unfurl for you.
47:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, yes, yes, yes. I think the whole of the Buddha's diagnosis and prescription for life is so counterintuitive. And the fact that it appears so deeply counterintuitive to us, or to me, is evidence of the condition that many of us find ourselves in, the unenlightened condition, that we can't immediately see that what we habitually go to for happiness ends up disappointing us.
47:38 Dan Harris? Yes.
47:38 Speaker 01 That chasing after things, or harshly rejecting things, or just trying to pretend like something's not happening, doesn't give us a joyful relationship with reality. I love that video game analogy. It's like, if you want to move forward, you have to stop. Hmm. Yeah.
47:58 Dan Harris? And I know that can sound frustrating to people, but it just means like, can you be okay with whatever's happening right now? Instead of leaning into the next moment, or trying to achieve something, or expecting a certain outcome? The point is not to feel a certain way, it's to feel whatever you're feeling, clearly, so that your feelings generally don't own you as much. I mean, simple but not easy.
48:24 Speaker 01 Simple but not easy. Something that I think I'm noticing is how much I have believed that my thoughts and feelings are my only reality.
48:37 Dan Harris? Yeah.
48:38 Speaker 01 But as I engage with this practice more, the quality of awareness, which is, in my experience, peaceful, vast, stable, underlies the tumult of my joys and sorrows.
48:57 Dan Harris? Yes.
48:58 Speaker 01 And it's another quality that is a part of me. You know, me in air quotes. So it's not just my thoughts and feelings, but I can actually have, there's actually a deep source of peace and stability underneath all of it. And that quality of awareness comes to the fore, you know, more and more in my life as I engage with this practice.
49:28 Dan Harris? Yeah. I mean, just to put, see if I can, again, I'm always trying to. Identify or get myself into the minds of anybody listening who might be struggling in some way to understand this. But yeah, we all know we have thoughts and that we have sensations. We hear stuff, we see stuff, we taste stuff. We all know we have emotions. But we're so caught up in all of the thoughts and urges and emotions and sensations that we rarely turn around to look at like, what is knowing all of this? Mm hmm. And there's a vast reservoir of equanimity and peace to be had and just realizing that there's something mysterious that is aware of the sound of my voice right now, of whatever
50:12 Dan Harris? sensations are happening in your body right now. And just check that out. Yeah. As the Buddhists often say, the not finding, because you won't find anything, the not finding is the finding. That's the point. Yes. Yeah, bingo. Coming up, Afosu talks about the relationship between neurodiversity and meditation, how to not take your suffering so seriously or personally, the practice self-assessment tapes that we all run in our mind about our meditation practice, and we also hear some of Afosu's music and talk about the life experiences that inspired it.
50:53 Speaker 03 We work with veterans every day. Caring about people isn't the same as knowing how to help. Safeguard Veterans gave our team free online on-demand training to better understand military culture, recognize when someone may be struggling, and connect veterans to support and resources. It's practical, flexible, and our staff actually use what they learned.
51:13 Speaker 04 Get started at safeguardveterans.net. Click on Community Organizations. Safeguard Veterans is a 2026 pilot research program funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
51:24 Speaker 05 Share comfort and joy this holiday season at Tacovus. Our boots are handcrafted in over 200 meticulous steps and have a broken-in feel right out of the box with styles for everyone in the family. Our expert staff can help you pick the perfect gifts, and we have free in-store gift wrapping to help make the holiday season truly special. See you soon at your local Tacovus store or shop with us anytime at tacovus.com.
51:49 Dan Harris? So you have a new book, which I mentioned in the intro, Lyrical Dharma, which is a collection of your lyrics and your poetry interspersed with, you know, commentary about your own life experiences and which are quite rich.
52:02 Speaker 01 Thank you.
52:03 Dan Harris? Your life experiences and complex. So I want to play a clip from one of your tunes, The Hundreds.
52:09 Speaker 01 Yep.
52:10 Dan Harris? And then get you to kind of unpack it on the other side.
52:14 Speaker 06 Rolled a hundred rounds like a hundred times. Blew a hundred knives like a hundred times. Listen for the sniff, I ain't hard to find. Walking in the dark, I was colorblind. I lived a hundred lives like a hundred times. For every pot of gold, I found a way to undermine. Almost lost my wife like a hundred times. What do you see in me? She told me love is blind. Hundred hours of meditation like a hundred times. I must have cried at least a hundred thousand times. Attempted suicide a couple times. Saved by the power of understanding and love combined. All the shit I did to numb my mind. So many bottles, vampires said my blood was wine. Or rather, Tito, shout out to my illegals who tucked the nine for coming in the clutch like a hundred times. Call my therapist, discussion time. Turns out the pain that I was holding really wasn't mine. Still, I had to heal from it for the hundreds time.
52:57 Speaker 06 Underlying fear turned to thoughts and become the mind. From Noah's Ark to Napoleon Bonaparte, I was blown apart. A hero in disguise, like I'm Joan of Arc. I know the feeling when it's cold and dark. Spiritual surgery prefer me with an open heart.
53:18 Dan Harris? Afoso, I mean, that's, first of all, I wouldn't call myself an expert in rap history, but I've listened to no, no small amount of hip hop in my life, dating back to when I was a young boy. And I don't think it's super common for rappers to be as open as you are and, you know, numbing your mind.
53:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
53:40 Dan Harris? So if you're comfortable, hold, you know, saying more about your life experiences in this regard, I'd be interested in hearing it.
53:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, I appreciate you playing the song. I was really, what's the word? I was proud of myself when I put that verse together because I think it really captured.
54:03 Speaker 01 A lot of what my life had been like up to that point. So that song's about, it's about a year or so, a year, maybe two years old now. I referenced that song in the opening of the book because it is kind of like a thesis statement for how things had been going for me in my life. Going for 20 plus years with a really difficult, undiagnosed mental health condition, thinking that it meant that I was a bad meditator, that I was a bad person, you know, having terrible intrusive thoughts, terrible anxiety and, and being confused about what all of that meant and having a lot of self hatred around that and trying to meditate my way
54:48 Speaker 01 out of it only and not seeking some additional help for it. Well, seeking additional help from unreliable sources like, you know, drug dealers and liquor stores and the implications that, that had on my relationship, on my relationships, on, you know, in deteriorating my mental health, et cetera. I, I fell into being a Dharma teacher really by accident, but it's been many years now that I've occasionally held the teacher's seat and I wanted my lives to not be so separate, my music life, my practice life, my artist life, my teaching life.
55:28 Speaker 01 So I've been working on just making everything a part of the flow of one expression. And as a, as a teacher, I don't want to sit in front of people and pretend that I am, you know, some super realized person or that my life is this super clean story. I'd rather speak from a place of someone who's suffered quite deeply in ways that were out of my control and in ways that I exacerbated through my own actions. And, and if my practice and my art are going to be the same, then I, then I have to do the same in my art and speak from what's real. I think hip hop
56:12 Speaker 01 tends to speak to a lot of pain. And I think more and more people are speaking to the pain that they personally experience. But I think hip hop also, the type of hip hop that is championed or that is mainstream is usually talking about the ways in which people are trying to hide from their pain. Through sex, through drugs, through materialism, through violence. And I'm interested in what's the root? What's the root of our suffering? And can we talk about that? So that we can become more liberated from it. You mentioned on a TikTok that your mom was like, hey, why do you have to mention this unpleasant part of your own history? You know, wouldn't you want to keep that private?
56:57 Speaker 01 And you said that, you know, you can't make connections with people if you're hiding parts of yourself. People will make a connection with you if you can be real with them. And when I saw that, I was like, okay, that actually gave me a lot of confidence while I was writing this book. Cause there were some chapters, I was like, oh my God, my mother is going to read this.
57:16 Speaker 01 My kids are going to read this eventually. And like, ah, should I do this? Should I say this? But I'm like, man, there are so many people who could either relate or who I know for a fact, you know, have had similar experiences that perhaps this could be helpful. And for me, it's my way of saying that these stories don't have control over me anymore. You know, they are now the mud from which a lot of this is beginning to arise, you know? So, so I'll pause there.
57:47 Dan Harris? Well, I think it's awesome you're doing it. I think your kids will thank you for it eventually.
57:51 Speaker 01 Thank you.
57:52 Dan Harris? There's a line in here that might be worth dwelling on just because it definitely rhymes with what we were talking about earlier about not self or impersonality. Call my therapist, discussion time, turns out the pain I was holding really wasn't mine.
58:07 Speaker 01 Yes. Okay. Yeah. And that was a line I was like, oh man, you wrote something cool.
58:13 Speaker 01 I was talking with a monk named Brother Phap Lin at Plum Village Monastery when I was there about a year ago. And I had asked him, do people who have mental health conditions or mental illness or neurodiversity, you know, can they achieve enlightenment? And I loved his answer, you know, he said, I don't know, which is always a great answer. He said, I don't know, but I think the question you're asking is too small. He said, I think you have to go big or go home. Consider the type of suffering that you're experiencing and consider all the beings who have experienced a similar type of suffering from the beginning of time, or at least the
58:55 Speaker 01 beginning of humanity up until now. Now, consider all of the people who are dealing with that type of suffering around the world right now. And now, consider everyone who might experience or who definitely will experience some form of this type of suffering in the future. How does that make you feel? And I said, well, it makes this experience that I'm having feel less personal. And he was like, yeah, you know, suffering sort of moves through each of us in this kind of like, it's kind of like a wave that moves through the human condition that we each can do something about, but we don't, we don't own it. We didn't, we didn't curse
59:39 Speaker 01 ourselves, you know, it's not ours. It's not personal. It's a part of the relationship that we have with reality. It's also deeply a part of our conditioning, who our parents were, who their parents were, where we grew up, what gender we were born in, what gender we identify with, what our skin color, all these different factors. None of it really belongs to us. And so if we can depersonalize our experience of suffering, we can start to be liberated from it. So the line says, coma therapist discussion time. Turns out the pain that I was holding really wasn't mine. Still, I had to heal from it for the
1:00:20 Speaker 01 hundredth time, because underlying fears turn to thoughts and become the mind. So even though it's impersonal, we still have a responsibility to take care of ourselves and make even a small pivot towards something more liberated, if we can.
1:00:35 Dan Harris? There's a quote you use that really lands for me. I don't know who said it. You'll tell me. But here it is. If we don't transform pain, we will transmit it.
1:00:45 Speaker 01 Yes. Yeah. And the name of this teacher escapes me also. Maybe I'll find it and we can maybe put it in the show notes if it's if it feels good to do that. But I know I referenced it in the book and it's just one of those things. It's like, no, you're the trauma you experienced was not your fault, but it is your responsibility to do your best not to re-traumatize yourself or other people around you, especially if you can remember how much it sucked to experience that trauma. Do your best to not wreak havoc on others. And it's so hard to
1:01:27 Speaker 01 it's hard to do that no matter what, whether you have a practice or not. But if you don't have a practice that puts you in touch with the felt sense of your own experience, it's hard not to transmit your trauma to somebody else. Yeah.
1:01:42 Dan Harris? It's that quote is often attributed to Richard Rohr.
1:01:45 Speaker 01 That's right. Yes.
1:01:49 Dan Harris? Yeah, I mean, it's a kind of a cousin of the cliche that hurt people, hurt people.
1:01:53 Speaker 01 Hurt people. Yeah. I know from my own experience that I, you know, I've been the hurt person hurting others. And I've been on the receiving end of a hurt person's hurtful actions. I can see in the arc of my life, I was reading something. Frank Ocean, the artist, the singer Frank Ocean, had written a letter to himself to his five years younger self. And he was writing about all the experiences that he had just been through over the last five years, but telling his younger self not to give up because he's on a plane right now to go into the studio with some major artists and everything is going to work out.
1:02:36 Speaker 01 I was talking with a nun, a Tibetan nun at the Hospital for Sick Children in Canada. And she was talking about, you know, you don't really know how much you've changed until you look back at the last five years. Like, we might be judging ourselves like. Okay, I'm not as good as I was yesterday or last month, but like if you really wanna see if your life is bending towards something, just think about where you were five years ago. So thinking about where I was five years ago, wow.
1:03:07 Speaker 01 Very different trajectory and even 10 years ago, et cetera. So I do feel like my practice is bending the arc of my life in, in the direction that feels, that feels healthy and that feels good and more healed, but it takes time. So I'm just trying to write about that and just, I don't think I could write about it if I wasn't in a better place. And so that's another part of the celebration of this book and the accompanying album coming into the world.
1:03:35 Dan Harris? I mean, you're, you're pointing at something I think that will resonate with a lot of people, which is we, I think Joseph, the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein refers to them as the practice self-assessment tapes that we run in our mind, like, how am I doing? Am I, am I good? Am I, am I, am I doing this right? How, am I doing it better than I was doing six months ago? Is any of this making any fucking difference? Et cetera, et cetera. When actually you wanna take the long view, the Dalai Lama has talked about this too. Are you losing your temper? Did you used to lose your temper 10 times a day and is it now three or even seven?
1:04:10 Speaker 01 Right.
1:04:11 Dan Harris? That's improvement.
1:04:12 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:04:13 Dan Harris? And it's meaningful improvement. It's, it's not nothing.
1:04:17 Speaker 01 It's not nothing. Yes, that incremental self-assessment tape, it's, it's a part of it, but it shouldn't drive us, it shouldn't make us suffer. I think the incremental self-assessment tape can, can be repackaged or re-approached as a simple mindfulness practice, like, how's my state of mind right now? How, how are my actions right now? And then say you make a mistake, say you do get angry, or you do have an outburst, or you do have a relapse, or you do have, you know, whatever. Say, say you stumble really hard. How many times have you stumbled in the last five years? Are you one perpetual stumble? Or is this kind of more of an anomaly?
1:05:01 Speaker 01 Is this the exception and no longer the rule? And I'm finding that for me, more and more, certain things that, just even my relationship with my kids, you know, stuff that I didn't have patience for, I've got a little bit more patience and that little bit more patience makes a big deal.
1:05:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, so it's it's those small victories and and taking the long view can be another, you know, important self compassion practice.
1:05:28 Dan Harris? Yes, yes. Do you think your improvements are from your practice alone or from your practice plus having finally been diagnosed with OCD and getting treated for it?
1:05:40 Speaker 01 Oh, I think that it's all practice. What I did, what I what I used to have a much more narrow view of practice, which which was like, practice means meditation and reading Dharma books and having Dharma conversations and doing walking meditation and, you know, going on retreat, that's practice. But, you know, practice is really taking care of your life, being aware. In my children's book, I say that mindfulness is a way to be aware and to care. And it's knowing what's happening in your life and then and then doing the skillful, having a skillful response to it. So knowing that I was suffering deeply, the skillful compassionate response, which is born out of practice, is to get some extra
1:06:22 Speaker 01 help. So I think that having expanded my view of what practice is, made it okay for me to get additional mental health support. And all of that has made my life a lot more manageable. Yeah, I'm just feeling, I'm feeling happier. Definitely. I'm definitely feeling better. And, you know, there is like trepidation, like, am I allowed to say that? I think, I think it's A, much cooler to be like, I'm fucking suffering. And and and B, you know, I don't want someone to, I don't want to invite disaster, you know, by saying I'm
1:07:05 Speaker 01 but I have no idea what the future is going to hold. In this moment, I'm I'm feeling grateful for being alive and for having a practice. And that's enough. Yeah.
1:07:15 Dan Harris? I love to hear it.
1:07:17 Dan Harris? Two questions I ask at the end of interviews. One is, is there something you were hoping we would get to that we didn't?
1:07:25 Speaker 01 Oh, this was such a great conversation. Only that, I guess, one thing that I'd like to let folks know is that my, I guess, my book Lyrical Dharma is out. And I also released an album right next to the book. It's called Como Rebi. And I am very proud of that album. And there are songs from that album that are in the book and, and songs from my previous two albums that are in the book. So if you go to bornimusic.com/lyricaldharma, all of the songs that are in the book, in the order that they appear in the book, will be in that playlist. So enjoy.
1:07:59 Dan Harris? It's funny, you answered the second question when I asked the first. Cause the second question was going to be, can you just remind us of the name of your book and other stuff? But it sounds like the answer is the new book, which I will have mentioned early, early, early on is Lyrical Dharma. And there's an album that comes with it. And if you want more information, bornimusic.com.
1:08:20 Speaker 01 Yes, perfect.
1:08:22 Dan Harris? If you, dear listener, do not have a pen in your hand, all that information will be in the show notes. So come back to it at your leisure.
1:08:30 Speaker 01 Oh, one last thing. Tying a bow on what I'm always wanting to share is that, you know, life is strange and mysterious. You didn't make it strange and mysterious, and you didn't make it challenging. Now, we can all make it more challenging, but it's not your fault that life is weird and difficult. And as far as I can remember, nobody really signed up for this. We all just sort of emerged in the space and we gotta deal with it. And that's not your fault. So be nice to yourself. Just, just cool it down. We're all gonna die. So while we're here, let's just try to keep it chill, be aware, take care of your life, be kind to yourself.
1:09:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's the main thing I always want to leave people with is just that.
1:09:22 Dan Harris? A big, big plus one to that. I like that. It's also really helpful to just hear you say it. On the promotional tip, I do want to say, one other thing that Afosu is doing is with me.
1:09:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:09:36 Dan Harris? He's going to be part of the meditation party retreat that I will be co-hosting with Sebene Selassie and Jeff Warren in October at the Omega Institute in upstate New York. You can get more information by checking out eomega.com or eomega.org, I think. Anyway, I'll put a link to that in the show notes. And Afosu is going to be there. And so come say hi.
1:10:03 Speaker 01 It's gonna be awesome. Yeah, I can't wait. I'll play some songs, share some thoughts about the book, and I'm happy to be a part of the retreat.
1:10:12 Dan Harris? Thank you for doing this, but great to see you, as always.
1:10:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, always, always. Thank you, Dan.
1:10:25 Dan Harris? Just want to remind you a couple of things before I let you go. First, Afosu is going to be part of the meditation party retreat that we're doing at the end of October, October 24th through 26th, at Omega Institute, which is in Reinbeck, New York. And we'll be doing that with Jeff Warren, Sebene Selassie. It's gonna be great. You should come. We call it meditation party because we do a lot of meditating, but we also hang out, socialize, eat good food, et cetera, et cetera. I'll put a link in the show notes. Also, as I mentioned, we've got a guided meditation that comes with this episode. Kyra Jule Lingo is going to teach you how to do open awareness or choiceless awareness meditation. If you want to access that guided meditation, you got to sign up at danharris.com. When you sign up, you'll get all of our past and future guided meditations. We are now,
1:11:09 Dan Harris? as part of our workflow here, going to be releasing guided meditations for all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes, so that you can pound the wisdom from the show into your neurons. As I like to say, and if you sign up, you'll also get live guided meditation sessions with me on video several times a month. I do these live video sessions where I guide a meditation and then I take your questions. The next one's coming up tomorrow at 4 Eastern, as a matter of fact. So sign up at danharris.com. Finally, thank you very much to 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 managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer.
1:11:54 Dan Harris? And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
1:12:15 Speaker 03 We work with veterans every day. Caring about people isn't the same as knowing how to help. Safeguard Veterans gave our team free online on-demand training to better understand military culture, recognize when someone may be struggling, and connect veterans to support and resources. It's practical, flexible, and our staff actually use what they learned.
1:12:35 Speaker 04 Get started at safeguardveterans.net. Click on Community Organizations. Safeguard Veterans is a 2026 pilot research program funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Previous Let's Normalize Failure (The Right Kind) | Manu Kapur Next How To Repair the Damage After An Argument | Dr. Becky Kennedy Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
