← 10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Happier with Dan Harris
Distraction, Vulnerability, and A Phrase To End Sh*t-Talking | Three Listener Questions
00:11:39
Dan’s best attempts to answer some listener questions from our Substack community. These questions came from our live Renegade Sangha session on April 8, and all of these sessions are open to paid subscribers. Check out how to join the party at .
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Dan Harris
Foreign this is the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody. How we doing? Happy Friday. Today we're bringing you three questions from our community over on Substack, along with my attempts to answer said questions. If you're not familiar, we have a burgeoning sangha, or community over on Dan Harris.com, which is powered by Substack. A couple of times a month I do a live session where I lead a short meditation and then take some questions. Sometimes we do these for free for everybody, but generally these are for paid subscribers who get these sessions twice a month. And if you're a paid subscriber, you also get to submit your questions in advance. Or you can send me questions live during the actual session. The next one is coming up on Tuesday, May 6th. Go to danharris.com for more information on that one. It's always a lot of fun. We'd love to have you join us. The questions you'll hear today are from a session I did on April 8, a sampler of what you'll get if you sign up. Enjoy. Imagine you're a business owner who has to rely on a dozen different software programs to run your company, none of which are connected, and each one is more expensive and more complicated than the last. It can be pretty stressful. Now imagine Odoo. Odoo has all the programs you'll ever need and they are all connected on one simple, easy to use platform, giving you peace of mind that your business is always being taken care of from every angle. Odoo has user friendly open source applications for everything. We're talking CRM, accounting, inventory, manufacturing, marketing, HR and everything in between. Basically, if your business needs it, Odoo's got it. Odoo sounds pretty amazing, right? 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They're the socks that you can wear with like low top Nikes and you don't see the socks, which I know is not the Gen Z thing these days, but I'm a man of a certain age and I like those kinds of socks and the underwear, the boxer briefs. One of the big problems with boxer briefs in my long history of being alive is that they can bunch up on the leg. But somebody over at Quint's figured out new technologies so that doesn't happen with the underwear I bought over there. Again, I know a little bit of extra information you don't need, but if you're in the market for underwear or if you're not a male and you've got a male in your life who needs some underwear, I highly recommend it. Anyway, they've got stuff for all genders at really low prices. As I mentioned before on this show, there are days when Quint is all I'm wearing head to toe. Quint has all the things you actually want to wear, like organic cotton silk polos, European linen beach shorts and comfortable pants that work for everything from backyard hangs to nice dinners. The best part, everything from Quint's is priced 50 to 80% less than what you'd find at similar brands. By working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middlemen, Quint's gives you luxury pieces without the crazy markups. And Quint's only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing processes and premium fabrics and finishes. Elevate your closet with quince. Go to quince.com happier for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U-N-C-E.com happier to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quits.com happier Malini asks. Oh, this is a really good question, Malini. Thank you. This question is about guided meditations. If meditation is about continually coming back to a point of focus, for example, the breath, then how does one reconcile our regular distractions of thought with the added interruptions of the guided meditation? It seems to me that the voice of guidance, while soothing to listen to, is actually just another form of distinction, distraction from focus. I find this confusing and a little bit like I'm cheating when I listen to a guided meditation. I love this question. It's a little technical, but first of all, let me just say nobody's cheating when you're listening to A guided meditation. And I get this question a lot. People say, you know, should I drop the training wheels and meditate on my own? No guided meditations. And I will come back to an expression that Joseph Goldstein uses all the time, is whatever works. Do what works. If guided meditations are helpful for you, and that's all you ever do for the rest of your contemplative career, God bless. Like, that's perfect. That's great. You're getting tons of benefit. If you want to start mixing in a little unguided, that's also cool. I mostly do unguided. But then when I do a guided meditation, especially if I'm on stage with a great meditation teacher like Jeff Warren or Joseph Goldstein, it's awesome because the voice is the voice of wisdom reminding you to wake up. That is very different in my mind than the voice of boredom or restlessness or randomness that comes up in my mind during meditation. That you might qualify as a distraction. When the voice of the teacher comes in, it's, yeah, technically pulling you away from your breath. But it's a skillful use of our discursive thinking mind to connect us to our direct experience, to help us be mindful. So I understand your confusion, and it's not unwarranted, and I wouldn't worry too much about it. Let me see what the question is for my friend Abby. Let's see. Abby Wendell, a subscriber and a really cool person. She's a friend of a friend, but also now a friend of mine because she's come to a bunch of our meditation party events that we do at the Omega Institute. One of the reasons I love your work is your willingness to be vulnerable and share your experiences and, dare I say, weaknesses. This is an important quality when shaping any culture, but I wonder if you could comment on where it can go too far. I think you've had experts on the POD to talk about this, but thought it might be a good topic to discuss live. That's great. Yeah. I guess we're talking here about the term du jour is vulnerability, popularized by somebody I really admire, Brene Brown. You know, growing up, I. Vulnerability had a negative used in the pejorative. You don't want to be vulnerable to attack. But now we use vulnerability to mean openness, unguardedness, honesty. And I think it can be very helpful for somebody who has a position in the culture to be really open and honest about what's going on for them because it normalizes mental health, interpersonal struggles that we all deal with. I was very nervous before I wrote my first book, ten percent Happier, in which I talked about, you know, having a Coke fueled panic attack on Good Morning America. My mother begged me not to do it, but I am every day, ever more convinced that it was the right thing to do because it's bringing stuff that for too long in our culture was kept in the shadows and was the source of shame. Bringing it out into the open where we can talk about it and deal with it more effectively. And I agree with you, Abby, that vulnerability can go too far. There's such a thing as like bleeding all over the place and over sharing. And so you really want to pick your spots. One little rule that I follow that comes from my friend 7A Selassie, and she got this from somebody else whose name I've forgotten, is that it's best to teach from scars instead of wounds. So it's rare that I will talk about a live issue that I have not metabolized. May sometimes I'll do it a little bit, but I'm much more comfortable talking about the stuff that I've really worked through. In part, this is why my book on my 360 review, which was due in 2020, is probably not going to come out until 2026 or 2027, because my 360 review, which some of you heard me talk about before, this is like an anonymous survey I did with the people in my life to get a sense of what my strengths and weaknesses were. I did this back in 2018. The results were so devastating and embarrassing. Funny now, but not funn. First of all, I'm a slow writer, but second, I really wanna. I want it to be a scar instead of a wound when I talk about it publicly in a very detailed way. And I've given a TED Talk on it. But the book will be much deeper. Another rule about vulnerability that I've heard comes from Carol and David. I'm screwing them up. The names they were on my podcast. They used to teach a course at Stanford Business School called Touchy Feely. The students called it Touchy Feely, but I think it was called Interpersonal Dynamics. And it was about just how to talk to other people and how to deal with other human beings, which very few of us are ever taught how to do. And vulnerability can be very important in a performative age where many of us have carefully curated Personas on Instagram that prevents real connection. And so if you can take a risk sometime and share something vulnerable with somebody, that's a great way to create, create A deeper relationship. But you really want to know when is the right time to do that. So they talk about, I think they call it the 15% rule. It's like there's some people you know are unsafe. You're never going to take that risk with them. And then there are people who are totally safe. So you're not really pushing your boundary by doing anything. But there's some 15% where you don't know, but you have a suspicion it's it might be okay, take a risk in that range and share something that you might not otherwise share. And I want to draw a distinction between me as a public figure talking about stuff and you as a human being. I think it's totally fine to talk to the people you trust in your life about active, separating, bleeding wounds. I do that with my wife, for example, but I'm less likely to do that in public. But again, you want to pick your spots, pick the right moment, not overshare, not take up all the oxygen in the room. It's a bit of an art. Sadly, you're probably going to have to make some mistakes as you learn this art or skill. Sarah, what are some suggestions of phrases to drop into your mind when you notice you're about to engage in what might be harmful speech, like venting to a coworker about another coworker or complaining about something that really could be let go of? I'm noticing thoughts arising to engage in this kind of behavior and speech. However, I'm working on doing the next right thing of refraining. You have so many helpful phrases. I wonder if you've got one or two for this. Thank you. So, yeah, I've got two. Look, first of all, just to say the Buddha was pretty clear about useless speech and gossiping and backbiting and all that stuff. No bueno. And it's going to happen once in a while. And there is actually an evolutionary case for gossip. I won't go into all of it now. I did a whole episode on it. There's a reason why the human animal gossips as a way to share information and gather information. But if you're watching your mind while you're gossiping, if you're mindful, you'll notice it doesn't feel good. Many things in life the Buddha talked about. Many of the things that we call pleasurable are like licking honey from the edge of a razor. That's the analogy. He used the metaphor simile, whatever, and I like that it can be tasty, but it's also dangerous. The word in Ancient Pali, the language of Pali in which the Buddhist teachings were written down. The word for useless talk is sampapalapa. Joseph Goldstein loves to talk about this word sampapalapa. It's just a hilarious word. And so maybe the next time you're noticing that you're about to engage in useless or harmful backbiting speech, you can just remember some papalapa. Do I need to do this? What's really going on here? As Joseph likes to say, if you can wake up in this moment, you can dig deeper and sense, like, what need am I trying to serve here? What itch am I trying to scratch? And often, as Joseph said, it's really as simple as, here I am, look at me. And you don't need to do that. You're fine just as you are. So sampalapa is a good little phrase to remember. And then the other phrase is, this one comes from Thich Nhat Hanh, great Zen master who passed a couple years ago. I think these are the words he uses. And I might be off, but it's the same sentiment. The words are, is this true? Am I sure? Something to that effect. And so, yeah, you're gonna go talk smack. Is it really true? Did they really do that? Is that really what they intended? Oh, here's another phrase. This One comes from Dr. Becky Kennedy, the child psychologist who I love. Am I engaging right now in LGI or mgi? Least generous interpretation or most generous interpretation? And, you know, not everybody deserves mgi, but, you know, try it on for size because it might cut against your habit patterns in a useful way. Thanks again to our community members Malini, Abby and Sarah for those great questions. Don't forget, you can join us for our next live session on Tuesday, May 6th. Go to danharris.com to find out how. Thank you to everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn from the band Islands wrote our theme. Foreign.
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Dan Harris
Com.