10% Happier with Dan Harris

We'll see you right back here on Monday for a brand new episode with Susan Kane, perhaps best known for her book about introverts called Quiet

She's also the author of a book called Outsmart Your Pain.

Let's just start with a title, Outsmarting Pain. What do you mean by that?

Thanks for asking that in a way like you could say like we don't really want to outsmart the pain but what we want to do is we want to see how our mind influences the way that we experience pain and so the book is focused on chronic physical pain but I mean pretty much everything in the book is also about emotional pain right because it's like how the mind tries to make sense of what is happening in our experience and how we relate to that and how we can reduce the suffering.

The book is called Outsmart Your Pain and I've resources on my website and also classes where I teach about pain and a lot of guided meditations and retreats that I'm teaching.

She has a new book called Heart Medicine, How to Stop Painful Patterns and Find Peace and Freedom at Last.

It's called Heart Medicine how to stop painful patterns and find peace and freedom at last

she is the author of a recent and fantastic book called You Belong, A Call for Connection.

the first one was Buddhism without Beliefs by Stephen bachelor which is a great book if you're dealing with someone very cynical I just remember reading that book saying I feel like my head is being exploded like the entire experience of reading that book I remember so vividly like my entire worldview was exploded by that book

and then the second one was When Things Fall Apart by Pema children and it was an amazing one to punch like as someone's introduction to Buddhism

He's a social justice educator and yoga teacher who identifies as trans, and he's the author of a new book called A Queer Dharma, Yoga, and Meditations for Liberation.

I was very intrigued and I found it very relatable that one of the big topics you tackle in your book is anger.

And I remember thinking about the title of a novel by Julian Barnes that I'd recently read called Nothing to Be Frightened Of and there's a double meaning in that title which I think is exactly what I experienced or didn't experience during general anesthesia.

Shaila Catherine is a Dharma teacher whose latest book is called *Beyond Distraction: Five Practical Ways to Focus the Mind*.

So this current book, *Beyond Distraction*, is really about that. It's about focusing on distraction so that we can move beyond it, like really looking at the forces that continue to distract us and to develop practical strategies for overcoming restless thinking, rumination, chronic worry, you know, anxious thoughts, those sorts of things.

So I would recommend if anybody wanted to read my work, start with the third one, then go to the first one.

Now that's slightly different than my first book, which is *Focused and Fearless*, and that introduces the practices of concentration, how to stabilize the mind, how to develop conditions that are conducive for concentration.

The first book, *Focused and Fearless*, not only introduces concentration and provides exercises for anyone to develop and strengthen their capacity to focus, but it also introduces the four absorption states called jhana, where the mind gets deeply concentrated and unified in meditation.

I ended up stumbling upon a book by Stephen Pinker called The Language Instinct and I opened it up and I just started reading a couple pages and was just completely an awe of this organ, of the human brain and what it's capable of.

I ended up sending a cold email to Cass Sunstein who was co-author of the book Nudge and had worked for Obama for four years and asked if he'd be willing to make an introduction to Obama leadership for me

It's really interesting just to say that we had Cass Sunstein's co-author Richard Thaler on the show a couple months ago to talk about their book Nudge

you know Dan Gilbert showed this in his book stumbling upon happiness we're really bad at predicting what things will make us happier unhappy in the future

I just finished a book with my friend and and I think you know I'm too Richard Davidson the neuroscientist at Wisconsin where we looked at all the most recent best studies of meditation and we found that beginners become more calm and they're more able to focus and interestingly from a brain point of view both of those things use the same neural circuitry so self-awareness is a fundamental ability of the brain that book called Altered Traits great book and we had Danny and Richie on the show after the book came out so we'll post a link to that

The antidote to the amygdala hijack is what's called cognitive control basically the definition this comes from I think Victor Frankl and his wonderful book man's search for meaning

You spent a lot of time with the Dalai Lama and you've written a book about him just to name check another book that you wrote it's called a Force for Good so if people are interested in your work with the Dalai Lama that's worth checking out.

The dilemma when I wrote the book force for good it was about his vision for the world and he talks about a muscular compassion he says many regimes in the world are corrupt and we found this out with the Panama papers you know they're 140 or something people in government roles who are using that role they enrich themselves and stashing the money in secret bank accounts so it's a huge problem worldwide and he said we need accountability and transparency he sees that as a form of compassion he puts all of that under compassion

my friend Danny Goldman, author of the iconic bestseller Emotional Intelligence.

Close listeners will recall that we talked to Brunei Brown about this very subject recently. Brunei gives a lot of credit in her work to Susan David.