Summary of "If You’re Freaking Out About Politics | Bonus Episode with Dan"

Podcast: 10% Happier with Dan Harris
Host: Dan Harris
Release Date: May 16, 2025

In this bonus episode of "10% Happier with Dan Harris," Dan addresses the overwhelming anxiety many feel in today’s politically charged and polarized environment. Drawing from ancient wisdom and modern mindfulness practices, he offers insightful strategies to maintain mental well-being during these challenging times.

1. Introduction: Navigating Uncharted Waters

Timestamp: [00:00]

Dan begins by acknowledging the intense political climate, emphasizing that while current events may seem unprecedented, the experience of societal upheaval is not new. He references teachings from the Buddha and other wise figures who have long recognized the inevitability of change. This foundational understanding sets the stage for his exploration of maintaining sanity amidst chaos.

“The Buddha and other smart people pointed out thousands of years ago that everything changes, and being in touch with that fundamental but often overlooked truth can be very helpful.”
— Dan Harris [00:00]

2. Upcoming Live Meditation Miniseries

Timestamp: [00:58]

Before delving deeper, Dan announces a live meditation miniseries scheduled for May 19-23. This series will focus on practices he refers to as the "Buddhist antidote to anxiety," including loving kindness meditation, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. He shares his personal journey of embracing these practices and highlights their scientifically proven benefits.

3. The Power of Therapy

Timestamp: [03:30]

Dan briefly discusses the importance of therapy, especially relevant during Mental Health Awareness Month. He shares a personal anecdote about overcoming claustrophobia with the help of his therapist, underscoring the value of professional support in managing anxiety and panic disorders.

4. Main Discussion: Joseph Goldstein's Poem

Timestamp: [07:00]

Returning to the core content, Dan introduces a poignant poem titled "Venus in the Western Sky" written by his mentor, Joseph Goldstein. The poem serves as a catalyst for discussing strategies to stay grounded amidst political turmoil.

Joseph Goldstein's Poem: "Venus in the Western Sky"

Venus in the western sky, my companion in its brightest month. A diamond cool radiance lingers above the horizon, reminding me, in the words of the poet, to care and not to care as all the earthbound madness engulfs our lives. Steady, faithful, a light in the darkness as the day morphs into night.
— Joseph Goldstein [07:30]

5. Three Practical Takeaways

a. The Power of Perspective

Timestamp: [09:00]

Dan emphasizes the importance of viewing current events through a broader lens to avoid being overwhelmed. He connects Joseph’s reference to Venus with Carl Sagan’s "Pale Blue Dot," illustrating the significance of perspective in reducing personal stress.

“Look at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us on it...”
— Carl Sagan [09:45]

This reflection fosters compassion and unity, helping individuals place their anxieties within the vastness of the universe.

b. Caring and Not Caring

Timestamp: [11:15]

Exploring the paradox of "caring and not caring," Dan references T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" and the Diamond Sutra. He discusses balancing engagement with detachment, allowing individuals to remain involved without becoming consumed by impermanence.

“Teach us to care and not to care.”
— T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday [11:30]

c. Action Absorbs Anxiety

Timestamp: [13:00]

Dan advocates for proactive behavior as a means to alleviate anxiety. Inspired by Ram Dass's words, he suggests that taking concrete actions to help others can transform personal distress into collective well-being.

“We're all just walking each other home.”
— Ram Dass [13:15]

Whether through volunteering, donating, or simple acts of kindness, engaging in positive activities can mitigate feelings of helplessness.

6. Becoming a Node of Sanity

Timestamp: [13:45]

Dan concludes by reinforcing the idea that adopting these practices allows individuals to serve as anchors of sanity in a chaotic world. He highlights the ripple effect of benevolence and the importance of personal responsibility in fostering societal harmony.

“It is possible to reduce your own anxiety and thereby to increase your helpfulness quotient to everybody around you.”
— Dan Harris [13:45]

7. Closing Remarks

Timestamp: [14:00]

Before wrapping up, Dan invites listeners to subscribe to his Substack for additional resources, including ad-free episodes, cheat sheets with key takeaways, and access to live video sessions and community interactions. He extends gratitude to his production team and collaborators, ensuring listeners know where to find more content and engage further.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

Dan Harris [00:00]: "The Buddha and other smart people pointed out thousands of years ago that everything changes..."
Joseph Goldstein [07:30]: Excerpt of "Venus in the Western Sky"
Carl Sagan [09:45]: "Look at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us on it..."
T.S. Eliot [11:30]: "Teach us to care and not to care."
Ram Dass [13:15]: "We're all just walking each other home."
Dan Harris [13:45]: "It is possible to reduce your own anxiety and thereby to increase your helpfulness quotient to everybody around you."

By intertwining ancient teachings with contemporary mindfulness practices, Dan Harris provides listeners with actionable strategies to navigate political anxiety. This episode serves as a reminder that maintaining personal well-being is not only beneficial for oneself but also enhances one’s ability to contribute positively to the broader community.

Transcript

Dan Harris (0:00)

Foreign it's the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody. How we doing? The regular listeners of this podcast know that we've been experimenting with our Friday episodes lately. Sometimes we drop a guided meditation from me or one of my friends. Sometimes we give you little snippets of our community Q and A sessions that we do over on substack. Danharris.com Sometimes we do a behind the scenes episode with producers from our team. Anyway, we're experimenting today. We're trying something completely new and different. I'm going to read to you a short essay that I wrote over on Substack with some ideas about how to work with with your mind in this fraught political moment. Full disclosure, I wrote this back in mid March, but things are still pretty fucking crazy. So the advice here is both relevant and evergreen. Regardless of who you voted for or what your particular political priors might be, it's pretty clear that we're in uncharted waters here and we're in a highly charged and polarized environment. But while the particulars of the situation may be unique, none of this is truly knew. The Buddha and other smart people pointed out thousands of years ago that everything changes, and being in touch with that fundamental but often overlooked truth can be very helpful. So we're going to talk about how to do that and several other ideas I have for staying sane in insane times coming up. Before we get started, I just want to let you know about something very cool that we're going to be doing in the second half of May. We are going to be doing a live meditation miniseries each weekday from Monday, May 19 to Friday, May 23 at 4pm Eastern. I will be leading a short guided meditation and then I'll be taking your questions. The whole miniseries is going to center around a set of practices that I often refer to as the Buddhist antidote to anxiety. And I'm not making this up. One of the key practices that I'll be teaching is loving kindness meditation, which the story goes was invented by the Buddha to help his monks who were dealing with a lot of fear. And loving kindness is part of a family of four related practices known as the Brahma Viharas or the Divine Abodes. I will admit when I first encountered these practices, which are designed around cultivating loving kindness, compassion, something called sympathetic joy, and also equanimity. When I first ran into these practices, I was, as you might imagine, a little reflexively judgmental and dismissive. But I have really come to embrace these practices in a huge way over time and they've had a massive impact on my life. And by the way, they've now been studied quite extensively in the labs and have been shown particularly loving kindness practice to have physiological, psychological and even behavioral benefits. Anyway, this is all happening over@danharris.com Like I said, Monday through Friday the week of May 19th. Like any good drug dealer, the first dose will be free. So Monday's session will be open to everybody and then for the rest of the week you have to be a paid subscriber. So head over to danharris.com and check it out. The show is sponsored by BetterHelp. As you may know because I've said it many, many times, I'm a huge fan of and advocate for therapy. Just the other day I had an experience with my exposure therapist, a great guy named Paul where we rode around Manhattan on subways and then went to my friend Zev's house where he's got a very very very very small coffin and we rode up and down in Zev's building on that elevator because I'm really trying to get over my claustrophobia and panic disorder and having a therapist help you is incredibly, incredibly valuable. And this issue of therapy is particularly salient during May Mental Health Awareness Month and I really just want to encourage you to take care of your well being and break the stigma if you are people in your life may have one around therapy. The world is better when you are happier. It's not self indulgent. You are more effective in the world if and when you take care of yourself. BetterHelp has over 10 years of experience matching people with the right therapists from their diverse network of more than 30,000 licensed therapists with a wide range of specialties. BetterHelp is fully online making therapy affordable and convenient, serving over 5 million people worldwide. Easily switch therapists anytime at no extra cost. We're all better with help. Visit betterhelp.com happier to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp H E-L-P.com happier this show is sponsored by Liquid IV. I'm a big worker outer and so hydration is very important to me. It should be very important to all of us. Really good for your gut health, really good for your mental health. Really good for your energy levels. And when I'm hydrating I really like to use Liquid iv. The product combines allulose and amino acids which can lead to more efficient absorption, helping your body retain more essential electrolytes for longer lasting hydration. Liquid IV's formula, which is powered by Live Hydra Science is sugar free, delicious and it's clinically studied to maintain hydration better than water for up to four hours. 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Get 20% off your first order of Liquid IV and when you go to LiquidIV.com and use code HAPPIER at checkout, that's 20% off your first order with code HAPPIER@LiquIDIV.com all right, we're back. Every year, usually January, February, and March, the great Buddhist teacher and my longtime friend and mentor Joseph Goldstein does a three month solo silent meditation retreat at his home in rural Massachusetts. And occasionally, even though he's on retreat, he will send me an email or a text. Technically, you're not supposed to be using technology on retreat, but when you're Joseph and you've been practicing for nearly 60 years, you get to bend the rules. Anyway, in the middle of Joseph's most recent retreat, I got an email from him with a poem he had just written. A little context here. About five or six years ago, when he was 75 years old, Joseph started to write poetry seemingly out of nowhere. As he describes it, the words started coming to him out of a void, like a channel had opened up for him. By the way, I recently had a whole podcast conversation with Joseph about his adventures in poetry. I'll drop a link to that in the show notes, but back to the poem he recently sent me. In my opinion, it may be his most powerful poem yet, and I found it incredibly helpful for dealing with all of the political tumult we've been experiencing so I'm going to read it to you. And then on the other side, I'm going to talk about three practical takeaways that I've found very helpful in my own life. So I'm going to start by reading it. And it's called Venus in the Western Sky. Venus in the western sky, my companion in its brightest month. A diamond cool radiance lingers above the horizon, reminding me, in the words of the poet, to care and not to care as all the earthbound madness engulfs our lives. Steady, faithful, a light in the darkness as the day morphs into night. All right, so that's the poem. It's a quickie to me. There are three practical and actionable takeaways here when it comes to surviving the earthbound madness that Joseph references. The first is the power of perspective. Personally, I find it genuinely helpful to view current events through the lens of Venus. Joseph, who's definitely not a theist, also sometimes talks about viewing the ups and downs of our lives through the God perspective. It can pull you out of your ruts and broaden your view. In fact, Joseph's reference to Venus reminded me of another of his common riffs. In many of Joseph's dharma talks. He talks about a famous picture called the Pale Blue Dot. It's a picture of planet Earth that was taken from Voyager 1 back in 1990. Carl Sagan wrote some excellent lines about the pale blue Dot. I'm going to read those lines because I think they're relevant to this takeaway about the power of perspective. Here we go. Look at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us on it. Everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering. Thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines. Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived here on a moat of dust suspended in a sunbeam. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There's perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot. The only home that we've ever known I love those lines from Carl Sagan. And again, it goes right back to the power of perspective that we get from Joseph's most recent poem. But as I mentioned, there are three takeaways that I think would be reasonably easy to operationalize here. And the second is this notion of caring and not caring, or to care and not to care. Those lines, which really are, in my opinion, at the heart of Joseph's poem, come from another poet, an only slightly better known poet named T.S. eliot. In one of his most famous poems called Ash Wednesday, Eliot uses the line, teach us to care and not to care. And in my opinion, this paradox is at the heart of living a sane life. On the one hand, it is true that we live on a mode of dust and that our lives are fleeting and impermanent. As it says in the Diamond Sutra, this existence is like a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom and a dream. So, yeah, that's true. But on the other hand, what we do here still matters. As the Buddha said, our only true possessions are our actions. While we're here, we have endless opportunities to be helpful, which in turn will help us to be happier in our own lives. I know I'm doing a lot of quoting here, but one last quote. This one comes from the great meditation teacher and writer Ram Dass, who once said, we're all just walking each other home. And that leads me to takeaway number three. Action absorbs anxiety. If the news is damaging your mental health, perhaps the best way to manage it is to find opportunities to help. Can you be, in the words of Joseph's poem, a light in the darkness as day morphs into night? This stance is empowering and ennobling. And to be clear, you don't need to engage in acts of heroism or ruinous altruism. As Joseph often says, there's no hierarchy of compassionate action. So volunteer, donate, call your mom, hold the door open. For people, yes, for many of us, these are dark and scary and confusing times. Neither Joseph nor the Buddha is trying to sugarcoat anything here and slash. But it is possible to reduce your own anxiety and thereby to increase your helpfulness quotient to everybody around you. To be a node of sanity in an insane world, to create unpredictable ripple effects of benevolence. As I often semi joke, there really is a geopolitical case for you to get your shit together. So thank you to Joseph for this elegant reminder and thank you for listening. Peace. And just to say, before I let you go here. I do hope you'll consider joining us over on Substack. Paid subscribers get access to to ad free versions of this show. If you sign up, you also get a cheat sheet for every episode which includes key takeaways, time coded highlights and a transcript, the ability to comment on my posts, to access my subscriber chats, and access to my twice monthly live video sessions where I guide a meditation and take your questions. So join the party. Danharris.com thank you to everybody who worked so hard on the 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 of the awesome indie rock band Islands wrote our theme.