by Harris, Dan
One afternoon, I was out by the pool, after having just finished reading yet another book about Buddhist meditation. The thought popped into my head: Should I try this? I was in a weakened state. Tenderized by the scientific evidence, and with my reference points for normalcy scrambled by months of marinating in Buddhism, I decided: Damn it, let’s give it a shot. Carpe diem, and whatnot.
While my housemates clearly had a high tolerance for kitsch—given their willingness to live in a house named “Barn Again”—I was not at all sure they were open-minded about meditation, and I had no desire to find out. I sneaked off to our bedroom to give it a try.
The instructions were reassuringly simple:
1. Sit comfortably. You don’t have to be cross-legged. Plop yourself in a chair, on a cushion, on the floor—wherever. Just make sure your spine is reasonably straight.
2. Feel the sensations of your breath as it goes in and out. Pick a spot: nostrils, chest, or gut. Focus your attention there and really try to feel the breath. If it helps to direct your attention, you can use a soft mental note, like “in” and “out.”
3. This one, according to all of the books I’d read, was the biggie. Whenever your attention wanders, just forgive yourself and gently come back to the breath. You don’t need to clear the mind of all thinking; that’s pretty much impossible. (True, when you are focused on the feeling of the breath, the chatter will momentarily cease, but this won’t last too long.) The whole game is to catch your mind wandering and then come back to the breath, over and over again.
I sat on the floor with my back up against the bed and my legs sprawled straight out in front of me. I set the alarm on my BlackBerry to go off in five minutes and let rip.
In.
Out.
In.
Shrubbery. I like that word.
Why, from an evolutionary perspective, do we like the smell of our own filth?
Get in the game, dude.
In.
Out.
My butt hurts. Let me just shift a little bit here.
In.
Idea for old-school hip-hop show: Rap Van Winkle.
Now I have an itch on the ball of my left foot.
Where do gerbils run wild? Would I describe myself as more of a baller or a shot caller? What was the best thing before sliced bread?
And so it went until the alarm went off. By which point it felt like an eternity had passed.
When I opened my eyes, I had an entirely different attitude about meditation. I didn’t like it, per se, but I now respected it. This was not just some hippie time-passing technique, like Ultimate Frisbee or making God’s Eyes. It was a rigorous brain exercise: rep after rep of trying to tame the runaway train of the mind. The repeated attempt to bring the compulsive thought machine to heel was like holding a live fish in your hands. Wrestling your mind to the ground, repeatedly hauling your attention back to the breath in the face of the inner onslaught required genuine grit. This was a badass endeavor.
I resolved to do it every day. I started getting up a little early each morning and banging out ten minutes, sitting on the floor of our living room with my back up against the couch. When I was on the road, I meditated on the floor of hotel rooms.
It didn’t get any easier. Almost immediately upon sitting down, I’d be beset by itches. Then there was the fatigue: a thick ooze, a sludgelike torpor sliding down my forehead. Even when the itches and fatigue lifted, I was left contending with the unstoppable fire hose of thoughts. Focusing on the breath as a way to temporarily stop the thinking was like using a broom to sweep a floor crawling with cockroaches. You could clear the space briefly, but then the bugs came marauding back in. I knew I was supposed to just forgive myself, but I found that to be extremely difficult. Every time I got lost in thought, I went into a mini shame spiral. My wanderings were so tawdry and banal. Is this really what I was thinking about all the time? Lunch? Whether I needed a haircut? My unresolved anger at the Academy for awarding Best Picture to Dances with Wolves instead of Goodfellas?
When I wasn’t lost in random musings, I was obsessing about how much time was left, dying for the ordeal to be over. It was like that Simpsons episode where they showed the world-record holder for longest consecutive case of the hiccups. In between hiccups, she would say, “Kill me.” By the end of ten minutes my jaw was often gritted from the effort. It reminded me of how one of our cats, Steve, who had a serious gum disease, would sometimes literally try to run away from himself when he was in pain. Similarly, when the alarm would go off at the end of a meditation session, I often would bolt out of my seated position, as if I could somehow physically escape the commotion of my own mind.
There were always happy, round-faced statues of the Buddha out front at airport spas and Chinese restaurants. (Although, I had come to learn that the “laughing Buddha” is actually a medieval Chinese monk who somehow became conflated in the Western imagination with the historical Buddha, who only ate one meal a day and was most likely a bag of skin and bones.) His image was bedazzled onto T-shirts sold in the gift shop at my gym. The word Zen had become synonymous with “mellow.” But this was all false advertising. Buddhist meditation was diabolically hard. Despite its difficulties, though, meditation did offer something huge: an actual method for shutting down the monkey mind, if only for a moment. It was like tricking the furry little gibbon, distracting it with something shiny so it would sit still. Unlike Tolle, who offered very little by way of actionable advice, meditation presented a real remedy, a temporary escape route from the clammy embrace of self-obsession. It may have been miserable, but it was the best—and only—solution I’d heard yet.
Pretty quickly, my efforts began to bear fruit “off the cushion,” to use a Buddhist term of art. I started to be able to use the breath to jolt myself back to the present moment—in airport security lines, waiting for elevators, you name it. I found it to be a surprisingly satisfying exercise. Life became a little bit like walking into a familiar room where all the furniture had been rearranged. And I was much better at forgiving myself out in the real world than while actually meditating. Every moment was an opportunity for a do-over. A million mulligans.
Meditation was radically altering my relationship to boredom, something I’d spent my whole life scrambling to avoid. The only advice I ever got from my college adviser, a novelist of minor renown named James Boylan (who later had a sex change operation, changed his name to Jenny, wrote a bestselling book, and appeared on Oprah) was to never go anywhere without something to read. I diligently heeded that guidance, taking elaborate precautions to make sure every spare moment was filled with distraction. I scanned my BlackBerry at stoplights, brought reams of work research to read in the doctor’s waiting room, and watched videos on my iPhone while riding in taxicabs.
Now I started to see life’s in-between moments—sitting at a red light, waiting for my crew to get set up for an interview—as a chance to focus on my breath, or just take in my surroundings. As soon as I began playing this game, I really noticed how much sleepwalking I did, how powerfully my mind propelled me forward or backward. Mostly, I saw the world through a scrim of skittering thoughts, which created a kind of buffer between me and reality. As one Buddhist author put it, the “craving to be otherwise, to be elsewhere” permeated my whole life.
The net effect of meditation, plus trying to stay present during my daily life, was striking. It was like anchoring myself to an underground aquifer of calm. It became a way to steel myself as I moved through the world. On Sunday nights, in the seconds right before the start of World News, I would take a few deep breaths and look around the room—out at the milling stage crew, up at the ceiling rigged with lights—grounding myself in reality before launching into the unreality of bellowing into a camera with unseen millions behind it.
All of this was great, of course, but as it turns out, it wasn’t actually the main point.
Buddhism’s secret sauce went by a hopelessly anodyne name: “mindfulness.” In a nutshell,
mindfulness is the ability to recognize what is happening in your mind right now—anger, jealousy, sadness, the pain of a stubbed toe, whatever—without getting carried away by it. According to the Buddha, we have three habitual responses to everything we experience. We want it, reject it, or we zone out. Cookies: I want. Mosquitoes: I reject. The safety instructions the flight attendants read aloud on an airplane: I zone out. Mindfulness is a fourth option, a way to view the contents of our mind with nonjudgmental remove. I found this theory elegant, but utterly unfeasible.
On the cushion, the best opportunities to learn mindfulness are when you experience itches or pain. Instead of scratching or shifting position, you’re supposed to just sit there and impartially witness the discomfort. The instruction is simply to employ what the teachers call “noting,” applying a soft mental label: itching, itching or throbbing, throbbing. For me, this was infernally difficult. A daggerlike tingle would appear under my thigh, a little pinprick portal to Hades, and I would grit my teeth and question the choices I was making in life. I couldn’t suspend judgment; I hated it.
The idea is that, once you’ve mastered things like itches, eventually you’ll be able to apply mindfulness to thoughts and emotions. This nonjudgmental noting—Oh, that’s a blast of self-pity . . . Oh, that’s me ruminating about work—is supposed to sap much of the power, the emotional charge, out of the contents of consciousness.
It was easy to see how scalable mindfulness could be. For instance, it’d be late in the day, and I’d get a call from the World News rim telling me the story I’d spent hours scrambling to produce was no longer going to air in tonight’s show. My usual response was to think to myself, I’m angry. Reflexively, I would then fully inhabit that thought—and actually become angry. I would then give the person on the other end of the line some unnecessary chin music, even though I knew intellectually that they usually had a very good reason for killing the piece. In the end, I was left feeling bad about having expended energy on a story that didn’t air, and also feeling guilty for having been needlessly salty. The point of mindfulness was to short-circuit what had always been a habitual, mindless chain reaction.
Once I started thinking about how this whole system of seemingly spontaneous psychological combustion worked, I realized how blindly impelled—impaled, even—I was by my ego. I spent so much time, as one Buddhist writer put it, “drifting unaware on a surge of habitual impulses.” This is what led me on the misadventures of war, drugs, and panic. It’s what propelled me to eat when I wasn’t hungry or get snippy with Bianca because I was stewing about something that happened in the office. Mindfulness represented an alternative to living reactively.
This was not some mental parlor trick. Mindfulness is an inborn trait, a birthright. It is, one could argue, what makes us human. Taxonomically, we are classified as Homo sapiens sapiens, “the man who thinks and knows he thinks.” Our minds have this other capability—a bonus level, to put it in gamerspeak—that no one ever tells us about in school. (Not here in the West, at least.) We can do more than just think; we also have the power simply to be aware of things—without judgment, without the ego. This is not to denigrate thinking, just to say that thinking without awareness can be a harsh master.
By way of example: you can be mindful of hunger pangs, but you think about where to get your next meal and whether it will involve pork products. You can be mindful of the pressure in your bladder telling you it’s time to pee, but you think about whether the frequency of your urination means you’re getting old and need a prostate exam. There’s a difference between the raw sensations we experience and the mental spinning we do in reaction to said stimuli.
The Buddhists had a helpful analogy here. Picture the mind like a waterfall, they said: the water is the torrent of thoughts and emotions; mindfulness is the space behind the waterfall. Again, elegant theory—but, easier said than done.
There were many areas of my life in which I badly needed this mindfulness thing. Eating, for example. After quitting drugs, food became my replacement dopamine rush. Once I met Bianca, the situation got worse, because I was also happy and homebound. She would cook large meals of pasta followed by fresh-baked cookies. For a bantamweight, I could crush plate after plate. I would tell myself I would be moderate, but once the frenzy started, I couldn’t stop. I was feeding the pleasure centers of my brain rather than my stomach, and I was particularly bad with dessert. The fact that my parents never let me have sugar when I was a kid produced a lifelong obsession. (The same thing happened with television, ironically.) I could eat piles of cookies, my teeth scything through the chewy goodness. Airports were particularly dangerous. Auntie Anne, that seductress, would lure me in with a bouquet of Cinnamon Sugar Stix. As my paunch grew, it became the source of nearly as much angst as the recession of my hairline. Neither vanity nor mindfulness helped, though. It wasn’t uncommon for me to get directly up from meditating and stuff my face, enter into a postprandial remorse jag, and take a nap.
But where I really could have used a nice dose of mindfulness was in dealing with the events set in motion after I received a call from Amy Entelis, the senior vice president for talent development. Amy was in charge of recruiting and managing all the anchors and correspondents. She reached me when I was on my way to the airport for a story. This was in early September of 2009, about a month after I’d started meditating. She had big news. Later in the day, she told me, management would announce that Charlie Gibson had decided to step down as the anchor of World News. They would simultaneously announce that Diane Sawyer would be leaving Good Morning America to take over the evenings. This was huge. I was happy for Diane. She’d initially agreed to host GMA a full decade ago on a temporary basis, but she’d performed so well that the bosses repeatedly cajoled her into sticking around. Now the brightest star in our news division would be ascending to the Big Chair, a promotion many of us felt she richly deserved.
It didn’t take long, though, for me to shift into what-does-it-all-mean-for-me mode. This announcement would surely set off an avalanche of a magnitude akin to what happened after Peter Jennings died. Many dominoes were about to fall. Diane’s departure from the mornings meant the brass would probably have to remake the anchor team on GMA, which would have ripple effects throughout the on-air ranks. What was coming was a radical reshuffling of the dramatis personae. I had been anchoring World News on Sundays for about four years now and still loved it, but if new jobs were going to be opening up, I wanted in. My desire for forward momentum—even when the lack thereof was illusory—roughly resembled that of Woody Allen in that classic scene from Annie Hall where he breaks up with Diane Keaton. “A relationship, I think, is like a shark,” he says. “It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.”
Not long after the Gibson-Sawyer news, the situation intensified. We got word of two other departures: John Stossel, the co-anchor of 20/20, and Martin Bashir, one of the three anchors of Nightline. The latter development was of especial interest to me. After years of working as a correspondent on Nightline, I had begun making it known that I would love to join the staff as an anchor. It seemed like the perfect job for me, the type of gig I could ride all the way to retirement. I genuinely enjoyed the rush of “crashing” short pieces for GMA and World News—especially in breaking news situations—but these stories were basically haikus: 90- to 120-second-long recitations of the day’s events. On Nightline, the pieces ran anywhere from four to eight minutes. If the story was really good, they might give you the entire half hour.
It wasn’t just the length of the stories that I liked, but also the variety. The show matched my catholic interests. On any given night, they were as likely to do a hard-hitting investigation as they were a profile of a movie star or a story about doggy fat camps. In recent months, Nightline had given me even more chances to slake my thirst for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. I’d gone off searching for endangered tree kangaroos in Papua New Guinea,
hunting down American sex tourists in Cambodia, and confronting pastors in the Congo who made money by convincing parents to submit their children to painful exorcisms.
Problem was, there was another contender. Bill Weir, the weekend GMA anchor. Bill had joined ABC News in 2004 from the local affiliate in Los Angeles, where he was the sports guy. He exuded an old-school and sometimes brooding cool. Notwithstanding his lack of hard-news pedigree, Bill very quickly established himself as an excellent journalist, covering major breaking news as well as producing amazingly inventive feature stories.
My favorite example of the latter was Bill’s profile of Don LaFontaine, the guy who did all the voice-overs for movie trailers. LaFontaine’s voice was so deep that when he delivered his classic lines (“In a world . . .”), it sounded like he had a third testicle. Instead of just doing a traditional sit-down interview, Bill had LaFontaine follow him around L.A., narrating his life through a handheld microphone. The best scene took place at an outdoor café, where Bill was nonchalantly eyeballing the menu.
LaFontaine: “He’s the world’s deadliest assassin. His identity is a secret—even from himself. This summer, love . . . gets lethal.”
Weir: “I’m thinking about getting an omelet.”
LaFontaine: “I’m thinking about getting a salad.”
Weir: “Is it too early for a salad?”
[cut to a close-up of LaFontaine] “It’s never too early . . . for a salad.”
It was gingerly suggested to me by the bosses that perhaps I should also consider the possibility of moving into Bill’s spot on weekend GMA if he got the nod for Nightline. Initially, I dismissed this as a lateral move, but was ultimately convinced to reconsider. This assignment, I came to realize, would not only quadruple my airtime (from a half hour on Sundays to two full hours on Saturdays and Sundays) but it would also provide me with a chance to try a different type of broadcasting, to break out of the mold of the staid, Jennings-esque anchorman. Morning television wasn’t just one guy and a teleprompter; it was live, loose, and largely unscripted. Moreover, mornings were where the action was in network news. GMA had the younger viewers that advertisers wanted to reach, which made the show the profit center for the entire news division.
