#481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More

Just noticing that you've become distracted is proof that you are meditating correctly ... The goal is not to clear your mind because clearing your mind is impossible unless you're enlightened or you have died. The goal here is, instead, to focus your mind for a nanosecond or two on something like the feeling of your breath or the feeling of your body sitting, and then every time you get distracted, you start again and again ... That act of noticing the distraction and starting again is like a bicep curl for your brain.

I still believe it is true that a certain amount of stressing, plotting, planning, and careful thinking is necessary if you want to be great at whatever it is you set your mind to—your work, parenting volunteer work, relationships. Except what I've now started to see very clearly... is that we take the worrying too far. We take the insecurity too far, and we cross the line between constructive anguish and useless rumination.

We go into meditation with expectations, which are the most noxious thing you can bring to the party. So, in an individual sitting or walking meditation, in an individual session of meditation, the goal is not to feel any certain way. In fact, going into it, if you're expecting or hoping to feel a certain way, it pretty much blocks you from getting there. The goal, instead, is to feel whatever you are feeling clearly so that you build the muscle of not being owned by your feelings.

Seeing clearly the cacophony of your own inner landscape is how you are no longer owned by it.

As soon as you start to see the chaos of your own mind, that's the first step toward not being owned by it.

The most exciting idea is that the mind is trainable—that we are not stuck with all of the things we don't like about ourselves ... You can, through various modalities, including meditation, therapy, psychedelics, walks in nature, working on your relationships—there are so many ways that you can train your mind.

Anger is often described as a secondary emotion. It's usually something that happens as a knock-on effect of a more primary emotion. In my case... the emotion that seems to be at the root of so many of my problems is fear.

I think being deliberate about cultivating interpersonal relationships will pay unbelievable dividends.

For me, in my own personal experience, the value of meditation—which I can find tremendous benefit in 10-20 minutes a day, done consistently... The value is not always obvious when I am doing it, but it becomes more obvious if I suddenly stop for a period of time.

This actually speaks to a huge issue in our culture, which is the lack of prioritization of social connection, which has led to a pandemic that predated the current pandemic, which was the pandemic of loneliness, which is a major contributing factor... to depression, anxiety, drug abuse, [and] suicide.