10% Happier with Dan Harris

It's like when i wrote the book faith of all things you know and like even my friends were saying what are you on about you know like why do that because for so many people the word meant being silenced and not being able to ask questions and being sort of reduced

I remember meeting you for the first time and we had just gotten back from IKEA and we were unloading Billy Bookshelves and you got out of the cab in your suit and that was our first half hour together with you helping us move Bookshelves.

He's got one in Lower Manhattan, one of the Upper East Side of Manhattan and another in Brooklyn. This is a really interesting trend of meditation studios are opening up all over the country. I think that's actually a really positive trend. And Lodro has also written a bunch of books including The Buddha walked into a bar which is a funny book designed to make Buddhism relevant to young people.

So you really kind of burst onto the scene with this book The Buddha Walks Into A Bar which I have to admit I'm really embarrassed to admit I've known you for a while and hadn't read but just actually downloaded and been listening to in the gym.

How to Love Yourself and sometimes other people which is obviously completely different but it is this notion we are just talking about sort of the befriending yourself as you are just learning to meditation as a practice to actually learn to be kind to yourself to actually learn to love yourself.

I know what I'm doing and other lies I tell myself just came out in paperback so they can get that at all there amazon indiebound.org where everything want to go

The Generosity Network is a book that we Jennifer McCray and myself co-wrote and we have as a class at Kennedy School at Harvard now it's about this transformational experience between donors and doers when you do something together your life is transformed.

And also author of such books as Super Rich's Success Through Stillness and a Happy Vegan.

I read in your book, I think success through stillness that you initially got into yoga because there were girls there.

My book Super Rich is in some ways a prosperity book but Super Rich is that state of needing nothing and a state of yoga.

And also author of such books as Super Rich's Success Through Stillness and a Happy Vegan.

I say happy vegans a simple book but you know I give away the money for these books.

David is a friend and he is unusual for us in that the major thrust of his work is definitely not meditation nor is he an active and ongoing meditator right now although he's dabbled with it and aspires to do more of it. But he does fit on the show because he's written a really funny memoir about of all things living with mental illness.

And so he's written this new book called Notes on a Banana in which he talks about dealing with this situation and the plot of the book is intertwined with lots of funny stories from his life and lots of stuff about food.

Notes on a Banana comes from Mama Leet, my mother, who ever since I was very young she would have a banana with something written on it every morning at my breakfast spot at the table.

It was when I was a kid, I would have these real sort of, I had a lot of anxiety, I had panic attacks starting at 11 years old.

To me writing this book was like crawling on my belly across broken glass. It was so good. Yeah, it felt great.

It was a major shift although many economists including Nobel laureates have been making that shift such as Amartius in where he looked at people's capabilities in their quality of life and the major shift in the paradigm goes from what's human nature.

She gave me Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer.

And I read those books and cried through every page.

I want to mention Parker Palmer's book as well.

It was one of the first times I read something in which someone talked openly about their experience of being depressed.

When things fall apart by Pemma Children and Faith, the Sharon Salisberg.

And it was that experience plus chemist, plus Sharon's work and the combination of those two.

He's very fashionable because he has a book called Healing the Heart of Democracy.

invented by this towering figure I think an American life John Cabinzen molecular biologist who really came up with a version of meditation that stripped out the metaphysical claims and the religious practices and just gave you the mindfulness.

And then about three years ago I began reading John Kabatzen and taking a look at the brain research of the possibilities of mindfulness.

we call it technically bunga b-h-a-n-g-a which means dissolution and it's known in other traditions for example d s-eleot got the Nobel Prize in literature in 1944 for writing a poem called the Four Quartets which is amazing to me considering that i sincerely doubt that any of the judges that gave him that prize understood what that poem was actually about

the wounded surgeon applies the steel that questions the distempered part beneath the bleeding hands we feel the sharp compassion of the healer's art resolving the enigma of the fever chart

I think it was in Joseph's book Heartful of Peace where he said something to the effect of a feeling is being known so not identifying with that as you being the one who generated

there's a wonderful wonderful book called I'm not sick I don't need help and the issue with someone's reality is that when you look at someone and say hey you know what the sky is blue and if you can't start going along with the fact that the sky is blue this is causing some real issues you're gonna terrify that person because that's their reality that's really real to them

after I published Ten Percent Happier a couple years ago, I started getting all these tweets, like a massive amount of tweets about the fact that some guy named Elvis Durran was talking about my book on his radio show.

Buddhism is the truth and I think it's a small it's not a capitalized tea you know it's more like yeah this thing is true

But I did find a young teacher named Daniel Ingram. I found an ebook that was floating around and I actually met one of his ex-Rumates, College Rumates, while I was at NC State.

It is about totally shifting your sense of identity and the experience of a reference point like of who you think you are and that it was possible to have a full experience of that changing and even dissolving totally.

He wrote a book about how to do it, kind of a cookbook as he describes it.