10% Happier with Dan Harris

I tagged in fun expert the journalist Catherine Price who has this great new book called The Power of Fun

Catherine talks about this idea that fun is playful connected flow

She's got a new book called Mindfulness of Race that I recommend

The newest one's called mindful Mindful of Race

This book is Mindful of Race transforming racism from the inside out

The first part of the book is really allowing people to really diagnose the issue to diagnose their racial conditioning and it's really sharing these for these two pairs first two pairs on the rubik of understanding yourself as an individual understanding yourself as a racial group member

even before the class I read one of the optional readings and kind of was hooked.

His latest book is "The Puzzler," which Booklist called "ridiculously entertaining," and The New York Times called "a romp, both fun and funny."

So his latest book is called The Puzzler. It's about his obsession with puzzles and the many mental health benefits that can come from engaging with puzzles.

The subtitle of the book is One Man's Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever from crosswords to jigsaws to the meaning of life

I mean bell hooks does is brilliant a job is any one it's speaking about love and seizing love back from just this kind of you know mushy very very narrow as you said place that is about like how I feel about other people and what I'm going to get out of that romantic relationship or you know even filial love you know parents and so on but yeah just that very very persistent and powerful and expansive capacity that we have as human beings to connect and to let that connection be real and felt and vibrant and alive and we can tone our nervous systems to actually even be able to feel love in a moment an experience and not have to take anything with us.

For example, there's a book called What Works that's really useful that gives you specific things like for example at interviews and I am so guilty of this.

I think particularly in men, there's a fascinating part in bell hooks, The Will to Change, which is her focus on masculinity, where she talks about the first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence against women, but violence against the emotional parts of the self to cut out the parts of ourselves that feel deeply.

All right so the gen exers in your audience will probably remember that in the 90s she published a real breakthrough book it was a big deal when I was in university came out when I was in second year university called The Beauty Myth and it was a book that argued that there was a kind of tax on women just at the moment that women were achieving higher levels of quality shattering the glass ceiling in a lot of workplaces.

He's the best selling author of many books including, The Algebra of Happiness, Post Corona, and his latest book, which is called Adrift: America in 100 Charts.

I was much more connected to meaningful work I wrote a book about addiction which is called Chasing the Scream then I wrote my other book lost connections and that it's not that my previous work wasn't meaningful to me it was.

He's a physician and a student of Buddhism who is just out with a new book called Young Forever.

And the book is called Young Forever.

So the title Young Forever is more of a poetic turn of phrase, a switching of forever young as opposed to some sort of advertising promise.

My guest today comes with a ton of practical strategies for integrating joy into your daily life. Ingrid Fattell Lee is the author of Joyful, the surprising power of ordinary things to create extraordinary happiness.

She's the former design director at IDO and the founder of the website The Aesthetics of Joy.

Dr. Doty has a new book, it's called Mind Magic, although as you will hear him admit, there's very little magic involved in this process.

And I think that's been a problem for a lot of people because that terminology has been used to promote, if you will, woo-woo and pseudoscience while denigrating actually the power of our minds to change our situations.

No, you're absolutely right.

And I did that sort of intentionally.

But also the other book is called Into the Magic Shop, right?

He has an app called Mindful Glimpses, and he's a very popular teacher over on the Waking Up app run by my close friend and mentor Sam Harris.

I use your app Glimpses, and I love it, and I've read your books as well.

One of the concepts that you have helped me with is so much of the writing and thinking about this non-dual path involves kind of the negative.

But I find there's a positiveness, not in the sense of, you know, sunny, happy optimism, but there's a presence of something you're finding, not just an absence in your writing.

Could you say more about that? What is it that we can be looking for that isn't merely the absence of something?

I don't know, those listening may not quite get it. But if you kind of just as Matt was saying, you let your eyes relax forward and then you start to open your peripheral vision as if you're unhooking from the looker, even though you can let attention as another kind of awareness continue.

And as your awareness feels like it opens, your peripheral vision will open and then you can somehow continue to feel as if this awake awareness can open to the sides in which sound is coming and going.

And then curiously feel around and open up behind you to find an awareness that's already awake.

So you can kind of feel as if you're aware of the spacious awareness and then feel as if you're aware as the spacious awareness, even while your eyes are just looking forward.

And then feel as if the spacious awareness is also pervasive.

So it's equally above you, below you, in front of you, to the left, to the right, behind you, and then like an ocean and wave within you.

You know, I don't know, those listening may not quite get it. But if you kind of just as Matt was saying, you let your eyes relax forward and then you start to open your peripheral vision as if you're unhooking from the looker, even though you can let attention as another kind of awareness continue.

Our guest is Reverend Benjamin Perry, author of Cry Baby, Why Our Tears Matter.

It starts with an experience I had when I was 21 years old, fresh out of college and just beginning seminary.

And so in that moment, I realized that I had been living inside this paralyzing numbness for a decade.

And I remember thinking it was going to be really easy because, you know, it's crying. Everybody cries.

And finally I pushed myself to the emotional brink. It really took me thinking about, you know, what would I say to my parents if they were dying?

This dates back to Dr. William Frey, who published a book in the 80s called Crying the Mystery of Tears, which was a pretty landmark book at the time. It was a big cultural moment.

In it, his big finding was that the chemical composition of emotional tears was different than the chemical composition of irritant tears.

So the tears that you cry cutting an onion or there's smoke in the air, that those are chemically distinct from tears that you cry out of deep feeling.

I have a friend, Dylan Marin, who has this brilliant podcast and book called Conversations with People Who Hate Me.

And he says one of the things he always tries to do, even if he doesn't think their tears are particularly laudable or even if they are in some ways being a little bit predatory in their vulnerability, he always uses that as an opportunity to connect, to treat them as a human being, to treat the reasons why they're crying as real and valid, even if he doesn't necessarily in his heart of hearts agree with them.

And there's a great scene in there where a, I think not coincidentally, a gay politician, an out gay man who had endured a lot of homophobia gets up and talks about the dangers of climate change and how one of the key preconditions for dealing with this is going to be that we drop our masks and relate to each other honestly.

She's written a pair of books, The How of Happiness and the Myths of Happiness.

my first book The How of Happiness that was one of its main themes is the theme of fit because a lot of books will kind of say it's gonna be about one thing like you need to do this to become happier so gratitude gratitude is amazing and i think it's very happiness inducing although it can backfire at sometimes i just had it in shrew with with someone about that uh about Thanksgiving and how it's not always good to sort of force people to be grateful