10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works--A True Story

by Harris, Dan

  I said I was up for it, but made it clear that my first choice was still Nightline. I was now in the tricky position of arguing for both jobs simultaneously—and neither was a lock. I kept picturing the worst possible outcomes. Prapañca, in full effect: No promotion → Eventually lose my hair and, as a consequence, all future job prospects → Flophouse in Duluth.

  I was granted an audience with David Westin, where I would be given a chance to plead my case. At the appointed hour, I walked one flight up from my office to the Fifth Floor. After the requisite wait on the couch outside his office, I was whisked inside by his secretary, and greeted by David’s wide grin and firm handshake.

  He listened politely as I made my case, first for Nightline, then for GMA. He asked some smart questions, which I answered to the best of my ability. I thought I did okay, but it was hard to tell; like all skilled managers, David was a master at uttering a lot of words without actually committing himself to a position. I knew not to push too hard, to minimize the displays of plumage. Anyone’s affability can turn brittle under too much pressure.

  Our business concluded, the rest of the meeting moved on to nonwork issues. Here things became very relaxed. There was banter and badinage, and I left feeling deceptively buoyant. This lasted about ninety seconds. By the time I’d made it downstairs to my office, I had thoroughly soured. Given a moment to reflect, I realized that David had said absolutely nothing concrete or reassuring. In fact, I came away with the vague sense that he was going to pass me over. Worse, I knew it was possible that he wouldn’t make his decision for quite a while.

  If ever there was a good time to see if I could summon some mindfulness, this seemed like it. I tried meditating on the couch in my office, but it didn’t work. I just couldn’t clamber up behind the waterfall. Every time I tried to watch my thoughts, to nonjudgmentally observe my frustration over this professional limbo, I didn’t know what to look for—or how to look at it. Wasn’t “noting” just another form of thinking? What the hell am I supposed to be seeing here?

  And wait a minute—wasn’t there a practical value to disquiet? Just because my thoughts didn’t have any inherent reality didn’t preclude them from being connected to real-world problems that need to be dealt with.

  Here I was back at square one, pondering the same questions I’d been pondering since first reading Eckhart Tolle. I was still unshakably certain that looking at a problem from all angles and searching for the right move gave me an edge. And yet I was also still concerned that too much worrying was driving me nuts.

  I spent the ensuing weeks in a bit of a funk. I tried to “note” it, but I didn’t know if I was being mindful or just indulging it. I decided it was time to follow a piece of advice from my new friend Mark Epstein.

  The event was held in a huge, nondescript function hall at the Sheraton Towers in midtown Manhattan, and as soon as I got there I regretted it. The place had all the charm of an offtrack betting parlor. It was packed with mostly middle-aged women wearing dangly earrings and intricately arranged scarves. Any one of them could have been the yoga teacher who made me strip down to my underwear as a child.

  I’d seen worse, of course, in the self-help trenches, but this was different. I was here at this three-day Buddhist conference not as a journalistic observer, but as a paying customer who’d come for his own personal purposes, a thought that propelled just the tiniest bit of vomit into my mouth.

  Making matters worse, this was proving to be very embarrassing in front of a new friend of mine, who I’d roped into coming along. His name was Jason. He was the drummer for one of my favorite bands, Mates of State. They were a husband-and-wife indie act who wrote infectious pop songs about suburban angst. I had done a feature story on them for Sunday World News, focusing on how they took their two young children on tour and wrote a blog about it, called Band on the Diaper Run. After the story aired, Bianca and I struck up a friendship with Jason and his wife, Kori. Jason was one of the few people to whom I had successfully evangelized about Buddhism. Interestingly, he voiced a concern about meditation that seemed to be a corollary to my ongoing security/insecurity conundrum. He worried that if he became too happy, it would defang his angst and disable his ability to write music. A comedy writer friend of mine had said something similar—that he was worried meditation would make him less “judgmental,” and therefore less funny.

  Here in the hall, Jason—who was six-foot-three, had fashionably long bangs, and could pull off wearing skinny jeans—stood out like a sore thumb. I was having a mild freak-out. I had been talking up Mark Epstein to Jason for months, and now Mark was up on the stage, seated alongside two other Buddhist teachers, presiding over this horror show.

  The opening speaker was a woman in her fifties named Tara Brach. She had long brown hair and pleasant Semitic features. She was holding forth in a creamy, cloying tone. The style was astonishingly affected—artificially soft and slow, as if she were trying to give you a Reiki massage with her voice. She exhorted us to love ourselves, “invited” us to close our eyes and “trust in the ocean-ness, in the vastness, in the mystery, in the awareness, in the love—so that you could really sense, ‘Nothing is wrong with me.’ ” I couldn’t bear to look over at Jason, who I imagined must be silently cursing my name. Brach closed with a poem, then a dramatic pause and, finally, a self-serious, sotto voce “Thank you.”

  Then Mark jumped in and saved the night. “Well, I’m gonna give you a slightly different perspective,” he said, with a mischievous glint in his eye, “which is that, actually, there’s plenty still wrong with me.” People started laughing, and a tight smile came over Tara’s face. Jason, who’d seemed oddly detached—but not in a Buddhist way—sat up in his seat.

  “People come to me a lot feeling like they ought to be loving themselves, and I actually counsel against it,” he said. His delivery was off-the-cuff and shtick-free. In stark contrast to Brach, he argued that we needed to actively get in touch with our ugly side. “Mindfulness gives us a way to examine our self-hatred without trying to make it go away, without trying to love it particularly.” Just being mindful of it, he said, could be “tremendously liberating.”

  The idea of leaning into what bothered us struck me as radical, because our reflex is usually to flee, to go buy something, eat something, or get faded on polypharmacy. But, as the Buddhists say, “The only way out is through.” Another analogy: When a big wave is coming at you, the best way not to get pummeled is to dive right in. This jibed with what I had learned through my own painful, public experience after returning from Iraq, using drugs, and losing my mind on television; when you squelch something, you give it power. Ignorance is not bliss.

  Mark’s thesis was a direct response to the fears Jason and my comedy writer friend had about meditation leaving them without an edge. If anything, mindfulness brought you closer to your neuroses, acting as a sort of Doppler radar, mapping your mental microclimates, making you more insightful, not less. It was the complete opposite of the reckless hope preached by the self-helpers. It was the power of negative thinking.

  As I sat there in the audience, I was feeling proud of Mark, increasingly enthralled with the theory of mindfulness—and hopelessly frustrated by my inability to put it to work.

  To my profound surprise, the person who unlocked this mystery for me was Tara Brach.

  Driven by some unfathomable masochistic urge, and even though I knew Mark wouldn’t be speaking, I had dragged myself back to the ballroom for the second day of the conference. At first, Brach was driving me nuts with all of her ostentatious head-bowing, bell-ringing, and Namaste-saying. But then she redeemed herself.

  She nailed the method for applying mindfulness in acute situations, albeit with a somewhat dopey acronym: RAIN.

  R: recognize

  A: allow

  I: investigate

  N: non-identification

  “Recognize” was self-explanatory. Using my David Westin example, in those moments after our—even in the best light—quite
ambivalent meeting, job number one was simply to acknowledge my feelings. “It’s like agreeing to pause in the face of what’s here, and just acknowledge the actuality,” said Brach. The first step is admitting it.

  “Allow” is where you lean into it. The Buddhists were always talking about how you have to “let go,” but what they really meant is “let it be.” Or, as Brach put it in her inimitable way, “offer the inner whisper of ‘yes.’ ”

  The third step—“investigate”—is where things got truly practical. Sticking with the Westin example—after I’ve acknowledged my feelings and let them be, the next move would be to check out how they’re affecting my body. Is it making my face hot, my chest buzzy, my head throb? This strategy sounded intuitively correct to me, especially given that I was a guy whose undiagnosed postwar depression had manifest itself in flulike symptoms.

  The final step—“non-identification”—meant seeing that just because I was feeling angry or jealous or fearful, that did not render me a permanently angry or jealous person. These were just passing states of mind.

  The Brach Plan seemed eminently workable to me. And as grating as she’d seemed at first, I now found something comforting about her manner. She was, after all, a trained professional—in both Buddhism and psychotherapy—who had spent her life helping people. I realized, with a hot blast of self-directed opprobrium that, yet again, I had been unfair.

  Just a few weeks later, I put her advice to work, and got behind the waterfall.

  I was having a bad day. I was worrying again about whether I’d get the promotion—and then beating myself up for said worrying. I hit the couch in my office again, but this time I tried Brach’s RAIN technique, especially the bit about investigating how my inner turmoil was playing out physically.

  Noting: chest buzzing.

  Head pounding.

  Flophouse in Duluth in six months, guaranteed.

  Noting: worrying.

  Chest buzzing, pounding.

  Earlobes hot.

  I didn’t try to stop it; I just felt it. I was “allowing,” “letting be,” and “investigating.”

  Buzzing. Tension. Buzzing.

  I’m doing it! I’m being mindful of my angst!

  Noting: self-congratulation.

  The effect was something like the picture-in-picture feature on a television. Normally, my mental clatter dominated the whole screen. When I pressed the mindfulness button, though, I had some perspective. My thoughts were playing out in a larger space, and while they still burned, they burned a little less. The process felt, in a sense, journalistic. (Or at least it conformed to what we reporters tell ourselves we are: objective, dispassionate—fair and balanced, if you will.)

  It was a revelation: the voice in my head, which I’d always taken so seriously, suddenly lost much of its authority. It was like peering behind the curtain and seeing that the Wizard of Oz was a frightened, frail old man. Not only did it ease my agita in the moment, but it suddenly imbued me with a sense of hope about better handling whatever garbage my ego coughed up going forward.

  A success, yes—but I still had questions. While mindfulness was clearly very powerful, it nonetheless did not erase my real-world problems. So what had really changed? I added a new entry into a file I had created on my BlackBerry, labeled “Questions for Mark.”

  We were back at the Tribeca Grand, where I had talked Mark into meeting me for another beer summit. As he kicked off his man-clogs and folded his legs up under his butt on his chair, I was reminded of what an odd pair we made. Before I could even get to my questions, I noticed that he had an eager look on his face that clearly signaled he had something he wanted to tell me.

  He then mentioned with a conspiratorial grin that he’d just come from a prescheduled phone meeting with Tara Brach. She’d requested they talk; she was not happy with his contradicting her onstage. Mark managed to relate this juicy little nugget without seeming mean-spirited. I argued strenuously that his obligation was not to her but to the audience. He seemed appreciative. In any event, he and Brach had apparently smoothed it all out in the end.

  When I launched into my question about whether mindfulness left you flaccid in the face of life’s thorny problems, he circled right back to the Brach incident.

  “That’s the same thing,” he said.

  Up on that stage in the Hilton ballroom, Mark had disliked what Brach was saying. Instead of mindlessly criticizing her, though, he calmly and tactfully disagreed. Seeing a problem clearly does not prevent you from taking action, he explained. Acceptance is not passivity. Sometimes we are justifiably displeased. What mindfulness does is create some space in your head so you can, as the Buddhists say, “respond” rather than simply “react.” In the Buddhist view, you can’t control what comes up in your head; it all arises out of a mysterious void. We spend a lot of time judging ourselves harshly for feelings that we had no role in summoning. The only thing you can control is how you handle it.

  Bingo: respond not react. This, it struck me, was the whole ball of wax. This was why, as I’d recently learned, so many surprising people had become meditators. Basketball coach Phil Jackson, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Ford CEO Bill Ford, Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo. Even the rapper 50 Cent. Even Tom Bergeron. A successful dotcom friend of mine said that once he started meditating he noticed he was always the calmest person in the room during heated meetings. He called it a “superpower.”

  Mark said this had a direct bearing on my ongoing work situation. “Sitting with your feelings won’t always solve your problems or make your feelings go away,” he said, “but it can make you stop acting blindly. Maybe you won’t be sullen with your boss, for example.”

  As I sipped my beer in the swank hotel bar with the shrink who I’d forced into doing bespoke guru work for me, I realized that the smart play in my current professional circumstances was to just sit tight. I had made my case; the only thing I could do now was put my head down, work hard, and hope for the best. In other words: respond—don’t react.

  Mark also pointed out that mindfulness was a skill—one that would improve as I got more meditation hours under my belt. In that spirit, he said I should consider going on a retreat. The type of thing Mark was talking about was much more demanding than the Buddhist seminar with Tara Brach. He was recommending a silent, ten-day slog, where I would be cloistered at a Buddhist retreat center with dozens of other meditators. No talking, no television, no beer—just meditation, all day. When I indicated that I would rather lie down in traffic, he reassured me, saying it would be hard but worth it. Specifically, he recommended that I sign up for a retreat led by someone named Joseph Goldstein, who Mark referred to as “his” meditation teacher. He spoke about this Goldstein character in the most glowing of terms, which intrigued me. I figured if a guy I revered revered another guy, I should probably check that other guy out.

  As we were paying the bill, I said, “If you’re up for it, I’d love to get together every month or two.”

  “Sure,” he said, looking up from the remains of his drink and meeting my gaze. With uncontrived sincerity he said, “I want to know you.” That was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to me. After we’d finished, as we said good-bye, he gave me a hug. It was touching, and I appreciated his willingness to be my friend, but there was no way in hell I was going on a retreat.

  Then Deepak reentered the scene. Via an aggressive email and text campaign, he had convinced me and the executives at Nightline to produce another Face-Off. This time, the debate would be between Chopra and his longtime nemesis, Michael Shermer, a former fundamentalist Christian turned militant atheist and professional debunker of pseudoscience. Shermer was the one who, as the head of the Skeptics Society, had decided to plaster Deepak on the cover of Skeptic magazine several years prior, with the headline “Doctor Woo Woo.”

  The subject of the debate was whether God and science were compatible, which would be an interesting twist on the usual is-there-a-God debate, since Deepak didn�
�t believe in what he called the “dead white man” God of the Bible, but rather in an indescribable intelligence at the heart of the universe, a view he believed science could support. In true Nightline fashion, we gave the event an understated title: “Does God Have a Future?”

  One of the first people I ran into when I got to the debate site—an auditorium at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena—was Sam Harris, who’d published a pair of acerbic, bestselling anti-religion books, making him one of the heroes of a budding atheist movement. We had actually met back in 2007, when I was shooting a story at the American Atheists convention in Washington, D.C. His writings were so controversial that he lived in an undisclosed location and often traveled with security. I had a visual memory of interviewing him amid vendors of bumper stickers with slogans like JESUS, SAVE ME FROM YOUR FOLLOWERS. I recalled liking the guy; he was much more pleasant than his prose would have suggested.

  He was here now, backstage in this auditorium, because Michael Shermer had chosen Sam as his debating partner. (Deepak had chosen a religious scholar named Jean Houston, perhaps best known for helping then first lady Hillary Clinton commune with the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt.) My positive impression from that first encounter was quickly reaffirmed. Sam and I had the immediate rapport that two semi-Semites with the same last name are bound to have. With his close-cropped Jewfro and a face with just a touch of the shtetl, he reminded me a little bit of my brother. His affect was crisp and serious, but affable. He was dressed in a dark suit and nicely pressed blue shirt. His elegant and clearly very bright wife, Annaka, was with him. As the three of us chatted in Sam’s narrow little dressing room, it somehow came up that I was interested in meditation. They both perked up, then admitted that they were, too.