10% Happier with Dan Harris

Yeah, I found this book, What Happened To You, to be sort of a game changer in terms of how I think about what is wrong with me, which is really not the way one should look at it, as you'll explain.

What I got out of it was so much more because my thesis or at least my approach to my investigation was literally to ask the question, what is wrong with me and what are the origins of that? And I kept coming up against the shame.

So your book very much helped me to recenter and ask the question differently. And the rest I just found to be incredibly revealing in terms of the impact of trauma on the developing brain and on who we are as adults.

And I think it's very difficult as someone who's had some of both at any given time to not be sure how to validate any one of those things.

If I've been through a big trauma around divorce, my parents' divorce or my personal health or some kind of assault, well, it's not as bad as it is for other people.

So does that really count? And if I'm having more trouble with practices in daily life that should not be so difficult, but that trigger me in a way that those big things did, well, then I would judge myself as dysfunctional for that too.

So what your book did, which most other books that I've read on trauma and the brain and psychology and behavior don't do is actually normalize the experience of trauma in life.

I think you both highlight the very important special circumstances around PTSD and circumstances that nobody argues would be trauma, but also that we have experiences that are traumatic based on things that we don't fully understand.

I can imagine you're thinking asshole, I wrote a whole book about this. Can you ask me that question?

And for me, it was really that I had a bunch of questions, and I was struggling with something. And I wanted to share the perspectives and answers and information that I was getting as I was struggling.

So I learned a lot of things, I learned that, you know, kind of unsurprisingly, the American ideal of what success is, is a very isolating one.

And I think that part of it is, again, in the context of capitalism, we have to provide labor in order to earn this made up thing called money, so that we can get our basic needs met.

We don't know unless we try. And we've also done a lot of hard things.

This comes on the heels of a whole series of huge hit books, including The Perfect Storm, Fire, A Death in Belmont, War, Tribe and Freedom.

This comes on the heels of a whole series of huge hit books, including The Perfect Storm, Fire, A Death in Belmont, War, Tribe and Freedom.

This comes on the heels of a whole series of huge hit books, including The Perfect Storm, Fire, A Death in Belmont, War, Tribe and Freedom.

My last book was called Freedom, about how Freedom works and why it is so precious in the human experience.

This comes on the heels of a whole series of huge hit books, including The Perfect Storm, Fire, A Death in Belmont, War, Tribe and Freedom.

He's written a whole new book about it. It's called In My Time of Dying, How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife.

So the name of my book is In My Time of Dying. And the subtitle is How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife.

I'm now much older than he was that night, and I finally understand how much my father must have trusted me on that trip, how much he must have loved me. We're all on the side of a mountain shocked by how fast it's gotten dark. The only question is whether we're with the people we love or not. There is no other thing, no belief or religion or faith. There is just that, just the knowledge that when we finally close our eyes, someone will be there to watch over us as we head into that great soaring night.

I'm now much older than he was that night, and I finally understand how much my father must have trusted me on that trip, how much he must have loved me.

Elaine has a new book out called Unlearning Silence, which is about how and when to speak up, as well as how to stop silencing other people, which I have actually struggled with quite a bit.

To me, Unlearning Silence is not about always saying everything. The world is too noisy and complex for that.

The question is, how do we optimize for voice?

The book is Unlearning Silence, How to Speak Your Mind, Unleash Talent, and Live More Fully.

My example in the book is toilet gate with my husband.

It doesn't say well this is the cure, this is going to take care of everything, because sometimes it does, but often it takes continued work.

Partly what I write about in the autobiography is that it takes time because when I started teaching this work people expected that this would work in one or two sessions and sometimes it does, but sometimes it takes repetitive work, especially when we have a lot of early childhood trauma, but it's also possible to heal even though the deepest of traumas, but sometimes it's more, not just a miracle, but a hard work miracle.

I think you really should publish this as a book because it could help other people with their own traumas, with their own healing, and particularly you know with telling their own stories.

I'm standing by an open field and in my hand I have reams of paper and they're typewritten, so obviously it's some kind of a manuscript, but I don't know what to do with it in the dream and I look to the left, I look to the right, and then in my indecision this wind comes from behind me and takes the pages and scatters them into this meadow to land where they may.

I'm going to tell the story and let it land where I may.

He released his self-published children's book 'You Are Enough' in 2020 and 'Love Your Amazing Self' via Storey Publishing in 2022.

There's a wonderful book by Lama Sultrin Aliyoni, I don't know if I'm saying her last name right, but it's called 'Feeding Your Demons'.

There's this wonderful children's book called 'Tiger, Tiger, Is It True?' but it's one of those children's books that's like an everybody book. It's like when your mind is creating all of these scenarios, you can just ask yourself is that true and really methodically look at the way you're thinking about the thing and the reality of the thing or more specifically the way you're thinking about yourself and the reality of what's true for you in the moment.

I'll recommend a book here because it's this kind of help me get there it's a popular psychology book about acceptance and commitment therapy called The Happiness Trap by like an Australian writer acceptance and commitment therapy is basically like repurposed mindfulness but The Happiness Trap is if you think that when you're unhappy you shouldn't be unhappy because you need to be happy that's the trap you know you're now living in a world where there has to be the condition of happiness for things to be okay so just accepting that there are going to be you know hard times when you're not happy and then times when you are happy is part of the outlook but what's really interesting in that book that really helped me that I hadn't really thought about before was the commitment piece and the commitment piece is basically saying at any moment there's an opportunity to move towards your values or move away from your values and so in moments of extreme challenge where you're just getting run over by life what I found was in a lot I had a background narration of this shouldn't be happening this shouldn't be happening I want to be happy right this these things shouldn't be happening or this stuff with my kids shouldn't be happening but when instead I could say you know what this is happening and this challenge is building my resources to be with future challenges or there's a strength capacity training here that I can kind of feel or or I can kind of do this thing where I flip it around and right in this moment when everything's falling apart I can kind of see that this is actually moving me towards in the direction of just like gleeful flowing with it no matter what and dancing with it or whatever like so at any moment you have this opportunity to kind of just just say how can I experience this differently I can't get away from the fact that this is extremely challenging but is there a way I can make this so it's moving me towards my values or maybe your value is social justice like when I can see more clearly this privation or this hard thing happening in the world or this injustice and that's moving me towards being able to speak out more strongly about it towards the future do you see what I mean yeah and since I've been implementing this because I don't have the time to sort of lubricate my life with the formal practice I just do not have that what I'm doing is more like moment to moment applying this except that yep this is unhappiness that's okay how can I make this something that's moving me in a direction that I want to move in and that makes all the difference.