Dan Harris is a retired American journalist for ABC News. He was an anchor for Nightline and co-anchor of the weekend edition of Good Morning America. He is the author of "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" and "Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-to Book", co-authored with Jeff Warren and Carlye Adler.
533: Mindfulness for Transformation, Steadiness, & Clarity 🎉10th Anniversary🎉
Dan Harris
Hunter talks to Dan Harris about the challenges of starting a meditation practice, and the profound impact mindfulness can have on relationships and personal growth. Learn practical steps for beginners and the transformative power of mindfulness and meditation, particularly in parenting. Find out strategies for integrating mindfulness into our busy lives!
Ep 533- Dan Harris
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*This is an auto-generated transcript*
[00:00:00] Dan Harris: Trying to stay focused, losing your focus, and starting again is training your capacity to focus, which is under direct assault by almost every aspect of modern culture.
[00:00:17] Hunter: You're listening to the Mindful Mama Podcast, episode #533. Today we're talking about mindfulness for transformation, steadiness, and clarity with Dan Harris. And this is our 10th anniversary! 10 years! Woo!
Welcome to the Mindful Mama podcast. Here, it's about becoming a less irritable, more joyful parent. At Mindful Mama, we know that you cannot give what you do not have, and when you have calm and peace within, then you can give it to your children. I'm your host, Hunter Clarke-Fields. I help smart, thoughtful parents stay calm so they can have strong, connected relationships with their children. I've been practicing mindfulness for over 25 years, I'm the creator of the Mindful Parenting course and teacher training, and I'm the author of the international bestseller “Raising Good Humans Every Day”, and the “Raising Good Humans Guided Journal”.
Welcome to the Mindful Nomad Podcast, our 10 year anniversary episode. We are Celebrating 10 years of the Mindful Mama podcast. with best selling author, host of the 10 percent Happier podcast, and former ABC News anchor Dan Harris. I had such a good time talking to him. Dan is a retired American journalist for ABC News. He was the anchor for Nightline and co anchor of the weekend edition Good Morning America, and he's the author of a book I love love, “10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced my Stress without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works-- A True Story”. So I loved talking to Dan. We talked about the challenges of starting a meditation practice, the profound impact mindfulness can have on relationships and personal growth. You're going to learn practical steps for beginners and the transformative power of mindfulness and meditation in parenting. And plus, you'll hear strategies for integrating mindfulness into our busy lives. So join me at the table as I talk to Dan Harris.
Did you know that over a third of listeners, just like you, are working full time? If you're in an office, we have something that can make life a whole lot easier, both at work and at home. We're bringing the Raising Good Humans course-Mindful Parenting- to workplaces. This powerful program helps parents lower stress, disarm triggers, and improve communication so they can navigate challenges with more ease. We're offering a special “Mindfulness for Stress Reduction” module, giving parents tools to manage stress, reduce reactivity, and strengthen relationships, all while increasing overall wellbeing. Want to bring this to your workplace? Let's talk. Email Support@MindfulMamaMentor.com to learn more.
So Dan, thank you so much. I'm so happy you're here. Your your books have been like a great inspiration to me and I love your writing style and I actually, for readers of Dan's books and Raising Good Humans, you'll recognize that sense of It's, this is incredibly hard and I sucked at this thing and here's how something that really helped. So I was very inspired also by your work, but I love your story and you're famously, a skeptic of meditation turned into this mindfulness champion. So can you try to tell the, audience for who doesn't know that story, how that change came about.
[00:03:52] Dan Harris: Yeah, sure. So the brief version is I was a network news anchor for many years and had a panic attack on television, which you can Google.
If you just type in panic attack on TV, I think it's the number one result, which is fantastic. And so this happened about 20 years ago, the panic attack. And after I had the panic attack, I went to a shrink who asked me a bunch of questions. And one of the questions was, do you do drugs? And I sheepishly said, yes.
And the backstory there is I had spent a lot of time as a ambitious young correspondent in war zones after nine 11, so Afghanistan, West Bank, Gaza, Iraq many times. And I came home in the middle of that period and got depressed and did something. toweringly stupid, which is I started to self medicate with recreational drugs.
And even though I was not high on the morning I had the panic attack on Good Morning America my shrink explained to me that my ambient use of drugs like cocaine made it more likely for me to have a panic attack. So this happened in 2004 and I This isn't like a neat and tidy story where I quit doing drugs and started meditating, and then it was everything was, rainbow barfing unicorns.
There was a few years of me being in therapy, and then eventually I started to hear about meditation. And this was one of the first times in my life where I've ever been ahead of a trend because I got interested in meditation before it started getting cool again. It had been cool in the 60s and 70s, and it fell out of control.
Out of fashion and then in the late aughts, there was this explosion of scientific research that showed that meditation can lower your blood pressure and boost your immune system and literally rewire key parts of your brain. And I started getting turned onto this and started trying it for myself and seeing that it was really helpful.
And then I wrote a book about it that came out in 2014 called 10 percent Happier and that swallowed my life.
[00:05:52] Hunter: I think that book did a great deal of good in the world because as somebody who looked at the meditation books from I don't know, I guess I started looking at them in 1995 because I was a teenager desperate for some help to like, whatever.
10 percent happier was so refreshing. It was such a refreshing change from be here now, which is an amazing bug, but not quite as helpful.
[00:06:19] Dan Harris: What I was trying to do was, because I read a lot of those same books too. When I first started getting interested in meditation, I read a lot of the books and they are, as you said, they are amazing.
And to many people, especially skeptics, they're pretty off putting. And so I thought, okay I'll write a book. That uses the F word a lot and that tells embarrassing stories like the one I just told about having a panic attack and my hope was that it would make the practice more accessible to a wider audience.
[00:06:50] Hunter: Yeah, I think it did that. Yeah, for me, it was the books by Thich Nhat Hanh that really made it accessible to me. Yes. And I think your book then made it even more and also for me, and for the listener who's been here a while, Karla Nonberg and the way she talks about meditation. You gotta love the way Karla talks about meditation too.
She's always been a great inspiration for me that, and you talked about, I was reading about that time in your life when you were going through all these different changes and reading about and learning about this. And I was reading an old CNN article on you site, like Eckhart Tolle's book as opening it, being a, some ways way too woo for you, but also opening you up to the problem of the voice in our heads.
And and I'm just wondering if you can remember back to that, what did you realize about your inner voice then? And what, maybe, what don't. Most of us realize about our inner voices that we maybe should know.
[00:07:49] Dan Harris: Yeah, I can remember it really clearly. I remember lying in bed, reading that book.
One of his books is called a new earth and had been recommended to me by one of my producers at ABC news because one of my little side gigs within the network was I covered faith and spirituality. Even though I had no interest in the subject, but my boss at the time, Peter Jennings, had forced me into covering this thing and and, I, I started to get more interested in it, even though I'm, I'm still, functionally an atheist or an agnostic and as part of the covering this beat I started occasionally looking at self help folks, mostly the fraudsters, we would like expose snake oil, Salesmen and women and one of my producers recommended I read Eckhart Tolle, but she was totally sincere about it because Eckhart Tolle is not a scandalous figure.
Although he is beloved by celebrities and so I thought, I'll read this book because Oprah loves him and Paris Hilton loves him and maybe there's a story in there. But I wasn't reading it from any personal value. I didn't think I was going to extract any value from it personally. And at first.
I was totally turned off by him and the way he talks and the way he writes and a lot of the grandiose sort of pseudoscientific language he uses and, but then he started, he said something in this book. That I had never heard before that struck me as the most accurate thing I'd ever heard about the human condition Which is that we have a voice in our heads, which is not I'm not talking about schizophrenia or hearing voices I'm talking about your inner narrator That chases you out of bed in the morning and is yammering at you all day long and has you constantly wanting stuff or not wanting stuff or judging people or comparing yourself to other people or criticizing yourself or Thinking about the past or thinking about the future to the detriment of whatever's happening right now.
And when you're unaware of this non stop conversation that you're having with yourself, and which, if we broadcast aloud, you would be locked up, it owns you. And that was a huge aha moment for me, because it made me realize, oh yeah, this, first of all, it's just intuitively true, and it explained the most embarrassing moment of my life, the panic attack on national television.
Why else did I go off to war zones without thinking about the consequences? Other than the voice in my head. Why else did I come home, get depressed and b And why was I so insufficiently self aware to even know that I was depressed? And then why did I blindly reach for Cocaine, because of the voice in my head, or what Eckhart Tolle calls the ego, and he doesn't just mean the ego in the sense of thinking you're great, he means the ego in terms of our discursive thinking the fact that we have all these, this cascade of thoughts all the time, but we have no distance from them, so every thought is taken to be the truth.
And so that, that was a huge aha moment for me. The problem with Eckhart Tolle, I went and interviewed him after is that he, in my opinion, did not have any actionable advice for dealing with your voice, the voice in your head. He, as a friend of mine, has joked, he's correct, but not useful. And after interviewing Eckhart Tolle was when I started to fish around and that's when I started hearing about meditation and seeing some of the evidence and I realized, okay, yeah, this is a way to start to manage your thoughts and urges and emotions with some skill and suppleness.
[00:11:25] Hunter: With practical action. It's very practical from my point of view. Yeah. Yeah. I actually I'd looked at a new earth recently because I remember liking it and I was like, let me look back at it and I realized like it's supposed to be like, as you go through the book itself, you're supposed to the book is supposed to be the practical application, the reading of the book which was interesting.
But yeah I feel the same way about, about Buddhism and that my husband and I, we were like we feel like we need something grounding and some kind of community thing. And so we were going to a Unitarian Universalist church and when I was at grad school in Boston, and then we discovered a Sangha meditation group and I was like, Oh, this is where we're not actually we're not talking about these things.
We're doing the thing. That is helping us do the thing. Okay. So then I love that you wrote that the first sign of that meditation was not a waste of time came within weeks when I started to overhear my wife, Bianca, at cocktail parties, telling friends that I had become less of a jerk. I love that.
[00:12:29] Dan Harris: Did I use the word jerk?
[00:12:30] Hunter: Yes, you use the word jerk.
[00:12:32] Dan Harris: Cause actually what she said was. The literal, the actual quote was, Dan started meditating and he's less of a sh bag.
[00:12:40] Hunter: Ah, that's great. Stay
tuned for more Mindful Mama podcasts right after this break.
How did that, I, and something we talk about here a lot is let's see if we can, how do we start? How can we get into those kind of beginning stages? So can you tell us what those beginning stages were like for you and what it was doing for you?
[00:15:24] Dan Harris: Yeah, I can tell you about my beginning stages and then I have a lot of thoughts about how to start.
I don't think there's anything unusual about what you described about reading about it for years before you get over the hump to do it. I didn't have that problem. I have lots of problems, but very curious very quickly and just did it. I remember the first time I did it. I was at a Summer house in that I was sharing my wife and I were sharing with a bunch of friends in the Hamptons and 2009 I think and that summer and I was reading a book about meditation furtively By the pool and I was like, you know what?
I'm just gonna go do this and I went into the room our room, the room I shared with my wife, and sat on the floor next to the bed not with crossed legs, because I've never been particularly nimble, but I just leaned up against the bed, set an alarm on my BlackBerry, because that's the one I was using at the time, for five minutes, and just did it.
And I noticed a couple things. One, it's really, It's, this is a cliche about meditation, it's simple, but not easy. It's really hard to try to stay focused on one thing, usually it's your breath, and then you're just you're immediately seeing how chaotic the mind is. I think I've described it as it's like trying to hold a live fish in your hands.
It's just wriggling away from you all the time. But I immediately saw the value in it. This is not some hippie BS pastime. This is not hacky sack. This is real training for your brain. Trying to stay focused. Losing your focus and starting again is training your capacity to focus, which is under direct assault by almost every aspect of modern culture.
Second, and I think more importantly, the waking up from distraction, which is the moment when a lot of people feel that they've failed, reframing that as success. Is really important and life changing because what's happening in those moments when you try to focus on your breath and then Several minutes go by where you're thinking about what's for lunch or you're planning a homicide or whatever it is And then you wake up that waking up is Proof that you're doing it, right?
Why because in that moment you're becoming familiar with the voice in your head and that's the antidote that is The peaceful disarmament for this obnoxious inner narrator. This, the brute fact of becoming aware of the machinations of your mind, so that it doesn't own you as much. And, so that was immediately clear to me.
And that's why I was able to quite quickly boot up a practice, a very short practice, five minutes most days, and then it built from there. I want to say though that I recognize I'm a bit of a mutant in this regard in that I have Unusual discipline in certain areas. I have zero discipline in other areas.
But some, I'm pretty good at if I decide I'm gonna meditate or exercise or whatever it is, I will do it. Most people are not good at this. And most people then suffer from this. unnecessary self flagellation of telling themselves I'm not disciplined, or I lack willpower. It is not personal.
You should not blame yourself. You should blame evolution. Evolution bequeathed us a mind that is really good at looking for threats, looking for food, and looking for mates. Short term rewards are what we are wired for. Therefore, creating habits or reaching long term goals requires a kind of hacking of the brain, hacking this ancient brain, so that we can get there.
And so there's a bunch of signs to show what are the right hacks you can use in order to get started. And I'll just share one, and we can talk about others if you want. But one of them is to start super small. So I often say one minute counts. Just do one minute while you're putting your kid to bed.
For example, and I think that's a great moment because a lot of us are putting our kid to bed, they won't fall asleep we're stewing, we're annoyed, we're scrolling, we're whatever, but actually just lying down, tuning into the sensation of your breath coming in and going out. And then every time you get distracted, start again and again, just do a little bit of that and then you can do the stewing and the scrolling and all that or all that other stuff.
But starting really small is a great way to give your brain what it wants, which is short term rewards. So you start to feel like you've got some wins on the board. And that can build into something much more sustainable over time.
[00:20:28] Hunter: Yeah. I couldn't agree more. I love the pre bedtime, because yeah, your kid is desperate for you to stay anyway.
So just sit there at the end of the bed for, and set a little silent timer and and see if you can practice that for a little. I want to go back to what you were saying about the practice itself. It's and I just want to underscore for the listener this idea that you know, that it is such a win to interrupt and to notice and become aware of the thoughts.
And I, for me, I think of it as I'm sure I've got this metaphor from somebody else, but the idea of before that, you're just like in a waterfall of thoughts and you're just under the water and you're just wet and you don't even, it's just, that's what life is. And then it's this like brief moment of Oh, you step out in front of the waterfall and you're like, Oh, there it is.
And you're separate. It's so freeing. It's really, I just want to underline that for the listener that it, that's that is this like space, right? That between stimulus and response. But yeah. And then that starting small. Yes. And it's cause, cause it's I was thinking about this the other day, actually My daughter, who's 14, we were walking by the monkey bars, and she's yeah, she did the monkey bars again.
She's oh, I could never do a pull up. And I was like, yeah, there was a time I could do a pull up. And I realized like meditation in kind of some ways is like a pull up, right? Like to, it's so hard in some ways, like you said, it's simple, but not easy. It's so hard. But if you actually just do, if you get there and you put your arms on the bars, And you give yourself, maybe you step on something little and then you engage the muscle, that muscle, even if you don't feel like you get your chin up over the bar, whatever that is for you, like you're still building that muscle and you're going to get the chin over the bar.
Eventually, it's still like building that strength, even though it feels like, at least I did, it did for me in the beginning. And I wonder if it did for you. It feels like in the beginning, it does feel like what I just sat here thinking the whole time. That's what I thought. I was like two and a half months in.
I was like, I just sit here thinking the whole time. And I was like, what's happening? But then I saw other benefits. Did you have that same feeling? Or were you immediately tuned into, oh, it is a success when I've recognized the thought?
[00:22:35] Dan Harris: I've had plenty of self doubt. Plenty of self doubt. And this is a huge thing in practice.
You're, And on, on meditation retreat, we, you hear teachers talking about the fact that people are running what they call the practice assessment tapes, just constantly trying to figure out, am I doing this right? Am I doing it right? Am I doing it right? I've definitely been through all of that, but that's just another thing to be mindful of.
It's just another thing to notice just like anything that's going through the mind. You can drop out of it and see it for what it is, a thought or an urge or emotion it's all about continuously waking up. Waking up, and you can have a whole meditation where you only wake up once or twice and most of the time you're either sleepy or enraged or anxious.
It's still a good meditation. It's still a good meditation. You're just starting from where you are and Developing your capacity for concentration, which will, I think, for most of us, develop quite slowly. Developing your capacity for mindfulness, which is, again, to be able to step out of the waterfall and to see it all without reacting blindly to it.
Developing your capacity for equanimity, which is, which comes over time as you are able to sit with emotions and thoughts that you never thought you could bear. This the benefits just talk about a waterfall. They just, there's a cascade of benefits and you just have to get started on your own time.
Start small, give yourself a break, make sure you get as much support as possible by listening to good podcasts or finding people to do it with. That's another, there's a lot of data around the impact of social support of having a friend or a group of friends who are doing this thing with you.
And don't worry if you fall off the wagon, if you miss a day, or you miss a two two days, or you miss a year, it can always start again.
[00:24:37] Hunter: Let's talk about the benefits. Bianca thought you were less of a jerk, I'll say. What, when you started this practice, did it, how did it affect your outer life?
[00:24:50] Dan Harris: I think that is in some ways that little comment from Bianca is so important because it is so easy to sit. We're type A people, so we do something and we expect to win. And so you sit in meditation, you expect to Stay with the breath, you're militaristically gritting your teeth and trying to stay as focused as possible, which is really just not going to work.
And that's actually the harder you try in that way the harder it is to quote unquote, get there. So if you can drop the focus or turn down the volume to the best of your ability on the focus on how am I doing? Am I doing it right? And let other people tell you, Oh, I'm seeing some change.
That's I think a better gauge because as Sharon Salzberg says, we're not meditating to become better meditators. We're meditating to come to get better at life. So one feedback is, does your spouse think you're less annoying? Another feedback is, and then this to me is the magic moment where you have a desire to do something.
To say something that's going to ruin the next 48 hours of your marriage or to eat something that's going to interrupt your sleep or to flip somebody the bird or whatever you have this powerful urge and you watch it come and you watch it go and you don't act on it. That, to me, is when you can go from extrinsic motivation, which is, I'm listening to some schmo on a podcast telling me I should meditate, so that's an external motivation, to intrinsic motivation, which is, oh, now I see the value of this thing.
This thing that I've been sitting here beating myself up over not being so good at. I just had this moment where I was about to, have a moment of road rage in front of my kids. But instead I sat with the anger. I watched it mindfully. I saw it rise and fall away. That is an enormously empowering moment.
But it takes a little faith to get there. You actually have to have the faith that I'm going to do this practice for a couple of weeks before, for many of us, before we have a moment like that.
[00:27:10] Hunter: Yeah. Yeah. It takes a little while. Yeah. For me, it was yelling. And my anger was, that was my big motivator to really practice was that.
And to see that bit by bit slowly get less and less was like, Oh, hallelujah.
[00:27:28] Dan Harris: Yeah.
[00:27:31] Hunter: Yeah. I'm not going to be ruining this most precious thing in my life. Yeah. Okay. All right. So start small. I'd love to hear some more tips for getting started. That'd be great.
[00:27:42] Dan Harris: So actually I've been reading up recently on the science of behavior change.
And so starting small is really important. There's a Another precept, which is to make it easy, make it as easy as possible. So starting small as part of that, but, creating an environment where the practice that is conducive to the practice. So maybe having a little space for a little room where, that's my meditation space.
If that's available to you, depending on your living conditions. Another way to make it easy is a technique called piggybacking. So if you've already gotten an existing habit, like I get up in the morning, first thing I do is pee. Okay. After that. I'm going to do a minute of meditation, or right after I brush my teeth, or right after I exercise, I stretch, and then I do a minute of meditation.
Whatever it is, if you can identify the habits that are already deeply ingrained and piggyback on top of them. Another way to make it easy is to harness what's called the fresh start effect. Any temporal landmark, like a birthday, a new year, a Monday so these temporal landmarks are coming all the time, you don't have to wait for something big.
You can, there's a lot of data to show that you can harness this sense of a new beginning to start again, and again. Social support, as we discussed before, is another thing that's really helpful. It normalizes. the practice for you any practice that you're trying to adopt, whether it's exercise or meditation it makes you accountable to other people, which is another great way to, to get the habit going.
If you really are willing to Punish yourself a little bit. There are ways to make it hurt if you don't do a thing. So there are apps like stick is one app that will give money to a cause that you disagree with unless you meditate or whatever it is. I'm not a huge fan of this tactic, but that is, there is some data behind it.
What else can I say that is useful? Tracking has been shown to really help. So if you, and this, there are tracking apps out there, habit trackers, you can search in the app store if you want to do that, but you can also just do it in a plain old journal. Just noting what are the, what are the days that I'm doing it?
What are the days that I'm not? And then if you go back and review it, you can start to see some trends of oh does this time of day. Am I more likely to do it if I do it at this time of day? Did I was I less sleepy if I did it at this time of day? Really getting a sense of what's working.
And then also the other benefit of tracking is that it gives you a sense of momentum and a moment to celebrate these small wins. So it's really about, although let me say one other thing, making it meaningful is really helpful. understanding, and this is a way to tap back into your intrinsic motivation.
If you can, if you said before, like you, you wanted to not yell as much. That's a great, that's a very meaningful aspiration. And if you can really do your best to tie your meditation practice to your purpose, there's some evidence to suggest that you're more likely to do it. So I'm just throwing a bunch of ideas at you.
This is not a to do list. It's more like a menu that you can choose from. So the bad news is that habit formation is hard for most of us because we have these ancient brains. The good news is there's a lot of. There are a lot of techniques that have a lot of data behind them that show that there are ways to hack the brain to make these habits doable over time.
[00:31:26] Hunter: I love that. Yes. We haven't gone over these. This is so wonderful. So I love the thinking about all these ways to track habits and to build this. You got it here from Dan, dear listener. So what about. There's so many people who say it's not for me. And that's why I love the title of your book, “Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics”; you're too anxious. I'm too fidgety. And we've talked about things like walking meditation, but is meditation for everybody? Can't, I think if you can breathe, you can practice, but what do you think? What do you say for people who say, I'm, I feel too anxious for this?
[00:32:04] Dan Harris: I'm pretty. dogmatic about being non dogmatic. I I learned really early when I got, about 15 years ago when I got interested in meditation, I was super annoying to my wife because I was pushing it on her. And I learned, I saw very clearly how stupid that was. And so now I don't, if people ask me to come on a podcast or invite me to give a speech, I'll talk about it.
I love talking about it. But I don't bring it up. unsolicited, and I don't use the word should. I do think it is doable for anyone. I would add one asterisk which is if you have serious mental health issues or serious It's probably good to do this under the supervision of a mental health professional.
But for the vast majority of people, I think meditation can be very helpful. Having said that, I'm not a meditation fundamentalist. There are lots of ways to take responsibility for your mental health. Meditation is just one of them. Getting enough sleep, exercising, eating healthy. Here's another asterisk though.
You don't want to be. overly obsessive about eating healthy because that can lead to some unhealthy stuff. Think access to nature and beauty is really important and a really good way to, to boost your happiness. And then I think And the data support this. The most effective way to boost your happiness is the quality of your relationships.
As the great couples counselor, Esther Perel says, the quality of your relationships dictates the quality of your life.
[00:33:53] Hunter: Stay tuned for more Mindful Mama podcasts right after this break.
[00:34:46] Dan Harris: We're social animals. This we got to the top of the food chain because we have this ability to collaborate and cooperate. And we live in a culture that militates against social connection, which is why I believe we're seeing epidemic levels of anxiety, depression, suicide, addiction, and loneliness.
especially among young people. And so that's a whole set of skills working on your relationships, which I think is, that's actually the subject of my next book, which is, I'm not even close to finishing, but that's a whole art that nobody teaches us. It's so weird. We are these social animals. But nobody teaches us how to actually interact with other people, we don't get that, we get home economics, phys ed, history, math, but basic interpersonal hygiene is not what most of us are taught, and long way of saying, I think meditation is great I think it would be good for you, the listener, and if you don't want to do it, I'm not here to try to force you, there are lots of other ways to work on your mental health.
[00:35:46] Hunter: I think that's a great way to answer that question. And yeah, I think mindfulness though would help, it helps enormously with our relationships. That's the whole driver for me, right? Is that whole idea of, can I be more skillful in my relationships, when I, yeah. When I was trying to be more skillful as my daughter, I would say, I would learn all these great things, just ways to respond to my kid and then not be able to implement it.
So I needed that, that ability to regulate my brain and tap into my prefrontal cortex rather than be hijacked by it. Yeah, that's so essential. So you became less of a jerk. We can become more. Have more equanimity or I like to say would become less reactive or more, we can become more thoughtful and less less like in that fight, flight or freeze zone and less anxious, all of those things.
So if you have just for thinking about this idea of mindfulness and meditation with parenting, you're the parent of an almost 10 year old. Do you, how do you think your meditation practice has affected your family and your relationships and your parenting?
[00:36:58] Dan Harris: I think it's very similar to what you were describing, which is I have moments where I might want to say something.
Or use a tone of voice that wouldn't be super skillful. And some percentage of the time, I can let the anger come and go. Take saner action on the other side of it. Doesn't, perfection is not on offer here. Yeah. I think, I often talk about the fact that what is on offer is messy marginal improvement over time.
But I do think. With my son it's pretty rare that I lose my temper with him. It has happened, of course, but the old me would have been losing his temper way more frequently. So it, in that regard, is extremely helpful.
[00:37:45] Hunter: Yeah, I bet you feel lucky that you found the practice before you had your son.
[00:37:50] Dan Harris: I do. And another benefit that's coming to mind is, I think you said earlier that when you have a new child, a new baby, older parents or parents of older children are always saying, it goes by so fast. It's like this hic, this hiccup or this tick that like they have to say it to you. And it's an, it can scan is annoying, but it's super true.
It really is. It really is true. It's the cliches become cliches for a reason. Mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness meditation. Which is a training in waking up, for me, has allowed me to savor moments much more than I otherwise would. I'll just give you an example. Last night, my son asked me to play catch, which he does not infrequently, and I didn't really feel like it.
Or I was in a rush or I was tired. I can't remember what it was, but I did it and I was awake and aware for it and recognizing that the 80 year old version of me will give any amount of money to be back in this moment. There will be a last time he asks me to play catch and it's not in the distant future.
And so that kind of. That kind of savoring of this fleeting experience, even when it's terrible, because parenting often is terrible is incredibly valuable, I think.
[00:39:14] Hunter: Yeah. Yeah, we can't just be in a brain of getting all the things done all the time, going and doing and going and doing and going and doing, and then expect ourselves to be able to be present.
When we get on vacation or whatever and we're like then I'll be really be with my kids because you've been trained your brain to do Not do that right to always be in the future and you can't then you find you can't be present So I mean to me that's the most yeah, that's the most salient motivator There could be, right?
I want to be here for my life.
[00:39:50] Dan Harris: Exactly. It may not, there's a meditation teacher named Shinzen Young who says nothing's going to make you live forever. But this will, this practice will extend your life. If only because it, you're going to be awake for more of it. You'll be not sleepwalking through the thing, so you will have more life.
No matter how long you live, you will have more life. If you're awake,
[00:40:14] Hunter: I think that's a lovely way. Okay. So just thinking about this for the parent who says, yes, I want that. I want that to be more awake. I want to be here for my kid's life. Yeah. Any suggestions for parents in particular who are living lives where they're going and doing and they've got little ones or they've got soccer practice and they've got.
school board meeting and they've got all the different things that we're doing. Any suggestions for that kind of like really full parental lifestyle for bringing this practice into their lives?
[00:40:54] Dan Harris: First of all, just a ton of sympathy and empathy. I get it. I know what that feels like to be time starved.
And I think it's possible that you can Justifiably tell yourself a story that you don't have the space to start a new habit right now. No shame or blame here. And, there are little pockets of space that may not be fully optimized in your life. Little moments when your reflex is to scroll or to binge where you could actually take a minute.
A minute. To do a little bit of meditation, like we discussed earlier, as you're putting your kid to bed, instead of thrashing around in frustration, use that moment, right before you go to bed. Right when you wake up, right after lunch in that five minute period of time when you get your daily dose of FOMO via Instagram, can you shave one minute off of that unhappiness producing moment and do a little bit of meditation?
There are In the interstices of your day, in the little pockets of your day, there are times when you can sneak this in, and it doesn't have to be daily. We were talking before about ways to hack the brain in order to adopt a habit. Another is to be flexible. So a little expression that I like is daily ish.
Because if you tell yourself, I'm going to do this every day, I'm going to grit my teeth and do it every day, you will inevitably miss a day, most of us. And then the voice in your head is likely to swoop in and tell you're a failure and then you're done. But if you've got this elasticity built into the system So if you, so for a super busy parent, I would say in summation, one, if you want to give yourself a break and tell yourself you're going to meditate later, I'm cool with that.
The other is if you want to start now, you can start super small with one minute counts. and daily ish as your little slogans, and I suspect you will be able to do it in fits and starts, and it will help.
[00:43:00] Hunter: One minute counts and daily ish. I think those are really good takeaways. That really tracks for, the most of the meditation I've done and the most of the learning that I've done has been in the Plum Village tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh.
And what they do is that every week they have a lazy day, like it's built in, that it's like not every day that you meditate. You have lazy day where you sleep in and you don't meditate and you futz around and you garden and you do whatever, there at the monastery. I think daily ish is a really smart way to make this.
Very flexible for people.
[00:43:38] Dan Harris: We did a whole episode of my podcast about Lazy Day with a monk from the Plum Village tradition, and I think it's great. You need to give, you need to have some steam release valves. You need to have some flexibility. Built into your life. We all need rest.
We all need relaxation. We all need room to breathe. So I think it's useful as a habit formation strategy. And I also think it's just useful as a survival tactic in a hectic world.
[00:44:08] Hunter: Yeah. Yeah. Have an unscheduled day. Might be another thing, right? To just give us some breathing space.
Another good idea. This has been so wonderful talking to you. I, I love your books. I love the 10 percent happier podcast. It's such a great podcast. If you haven't listened to your listener, you have to listen. You'll hear some great, wonderful teachers that I really enjoy there. And and yeah is there anything that.
We missed that you like to share with the listener and then also tell people about your Substack.
[00:44:43] Dan Harris: one thing that people ask me about a lot, and I'm sure this comes up for you is how do you get your kid to meditate? And I'll just say that for me, I have decided not to try. I know that he.
We'll get it in school, and I think this is a really positive thing. Many schools are really introducing it. A big believer in the osmotic benefits of modeling positive behavior. And so with my parents growing up they I do nothing they told me to do. They told me I couldn't eat candy.
They told me I couldn't watch TV. I love candy and I work in television. But I do everything that I saw them do. They were really serious about their careers. They were both physicians. They were really serious about their relationship. They were really serious. About exercise. I do all that stuff naturally just because I saw it modeled.
So my son knows I meditate. He also, he travels with me every time I go give a speech. I pull him out of school, which they're going to, the teachers are going to stop letting me do this. But for now, I, we've been all over the country and all over the world together. And so he hears me. lecture on the subject and watches me sign books and talk to people and most of the time he's looking at his iPad, but I know it gets in there with him and so rather than turn him off by lecturing him, I try to just model the behavior and that's what I recommend to parents is You know, if you want to have mindful kids you need to be a mindful parent.
And that's, I think the most powerful way to, to get this to the kids. In terms of the other question you're asking me, yeah, I do have a podcast. I also started a a little community at DanHarris.com, which is part it's on Substack, but if you go to DanHarris.com, you'll find it. And there's like a free level where you just get a bunch of emails from me a couple of times a week with little pithy practices that you can orient bring into your life. Read it first thing in the morning and let it color your day. And then there's a paid level where you get access to me and you can chat with me and do live, ask me anything sessions and all sorts of fun stuff. And if you can't afford it, you can just email me at free@DanHarris.com and I'll give it to you for free.
[00:46:51] Hunter: I love that policy. It's so generous and and wonderful. This has been such a pleasure. I got to talk to you for free and ask all the questions I wanted to ask you. Boy, I'm like a paid subscriber.
This is great. Ah, yeah, this has been so great. I, yeah, I really want to thank you for the work that you do. I think that you the way you've written with such humor and so many cuss words has made this thing that has, is that can feel so inaccessible, very accessible for a lot of people, and that has done a world of good, and I think the ripple effects go far for that work, and so I, I thank you for that, and it's made an effect for me.
And other people I know so thank you for doing the work that you're doing and for leaving TV They didn't deserve you and coming to the meditators and thank you so much for coming and joining me here today
[00:47:44] Dan Harris: Yeah, thank you for everything. You just said and thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
[00:47:52] Hunter: Thank you so much for listening Can you believe this is the 10 year anniversary of the Mindful Mama Podcast? Oh my goodness. So I wanted to celebrate 10 years with someone special and I loved talking to Dan. I hope you enjoyed it. I feel like he's such a great example for all of us who are just regular people to practice mindfulness and to make it a power in our lives.
Please help the podcast grow. We need to grow our numbers a little bit more to be a little more sustainable in this new world. So please help the podcast grow by texting or telling a friend about the show today. Text it to somebody who could use it, someone who's curious about mindfulness. It really helps. And if you want to learn, find more podcasts about mindfulness or more episodes about mindfulness, go to MindfulMamaMentor.com: under the Podcast tab, there's an “All Podcasts” link and you can search “mindfulness” in the search tab and you can find episodes there. We also have a link for you to leave a Q&A for a Q& A episode. If you have any questions about mindfulness, I'm happy to answer them. That is a great way to do it. So you just go to the podcast tab there. There's a link to leave a voicemail or you can go to MindfulMamaMentor.com. We made a short link VM. So that's MindfulMamaMentor.com. You'll see a thing to just send a voicemail to the Mindful Mama Podcast and you just start recording. It's really easy. So leave your mindfulness question. I would love to hear it. I'd love to answer it on the air. Yeah, and I hope this podcast made your life, your day, a little bit more clear and present and joyful and a little less stressful. That's my hope. And if it did I won today.
Yay! I did it! I did it! Yay! So yeah. I hope all is well in your life. I, last week I got a little emotional talking about Maggie being 18 and yeah we're doing the, we'll have to see where she goes to college, oh my god I can't wait to find out. It's killing me. Ugh, big changes. I can't believe she's gonna leave, it's so crazy.
So I hope whatever. Phase and developmental stuff you are going through with your kids. You are just, putting one foot in front of the other, finding moments of steadiness, tending to your heart. And I'll be doing all that too. Wishing you an amazing week. Thank you so much for listening. Namaste.
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