10% Happier is a book about Dan Harris and his discovery of meditation. He takes us through his personal journey, starting with his addiction to the rush of adrenaline from covering live news events in dangerous locations to his subsequent breakdown on live TV as a news anchor.
This prompted him to seek out the convenient solutions that various self-help gurus promised. Among these was meditation, a practice he was initially skeptical about – not least for its association with other popular fads that originate from* The Secret.* But he came to appreciate the value of meditation by speaking to more sensible advocates of it like Sam Harris and Mark Epstein – who explained to him the benefits of the practice without the unnecessary jargon.
Meditation Pervasiveness
The pervasiveness of meditation can be seen in unlikely places like Silicon valley – where it is being viewed as a “software upgrade for the brain.” Wired magazine called meditation as the tech world’s “new caffeine.”
There’s a central reason why meditation has become so widely adopted: the science backs it up. Studies have shown that meditation contributes to lower levels of stress hormones, a boost in the immune system, improved focus, and better GRE test scores.
“Apparently mindfulness did everything short of making you able to talk to animals and bend spoons with your mind.”
Another study from Yale indicated that regions in our brain that are responsible for negative thought patterns such as ruminating about the past are deactivated while meditation was practiced (and afterwards).
Harris explains his personal experience with meditation.
“In other words, meditation created a new default mode. I could actually feel this happening with me. I noticed myself cultivating a sort of nostalgia for the present, developing the reflex to squelch pointless self-talk and simply notice whatever was going on around me: a blast of hot halitosis from a subway vent as I walked to work, the carpet of suburban lights seen from a landing airplane, rippling water reflecting sine waves of light onto the side of a boat while I was shooting a story in Virginia Beach. In moments where I was temporarily able to suspend my monkey mind and simply experience whatever was going on, I got just the smallest taste of the happiness I’d achieved while on retreat.”
While these studies are still in its early stages, the results have already debunked old neuroscientific dogma that insisted that the brain could not change. The new paradigm, “neuroplasticity”, holds that the brain is constantly changing due to experiences. Meditation is such an experience – thus making it possible to train yourself to become happier.
Mindfulness
“In a nutshell, mindfulness is the ability to recognize what is happening in your mind right now—anger, jealousy, sadness, the pain of a stubbed toe, whatever—without getting carried away by it. According to the Buddha, we have three habitual responses to everything we experience. We want it, reject it, or we zone out. Cookies: I want. Mosquitoes: I reject. The safety instructions the flight attendants read aloud on an airplane: I zone out. Mindfulness is a fourth option, a way to view the contents of our mind with nonjudgmental remove.”
The alternative is to be a victim of whatever is happening in your mind or “drifting unaware on a surge of habitual impulses.” Harris realized that this lack of awareness was not only responsible for his panic attack on live television, but for his drug addiction, overeating, and overreacting. To Harris, mindfulness was a reasonable alternative to a reactive life. And meditation is a birth right – we have the ability to be aware of thinking. Homo sapiens are classified as Homo sapiens sapiens taxonomically. “Our minds have this other capability – a bonus level – that no one ever tells us about in school.”
Mark Epstein, a psychologist, author, and one of the few people who renewed Dan Harris’ faith that meditation could be a solution to his problems said: “People come to me a lot feeling like they ought to be loving themselves, and I actually counsel against it.” Instead, we need to get in touch with our ugly side. Mindfulness gives us a way to examine our self-hatred without trying to make it go away, without trying to love it particularly. Just being mindful of it could be tremendously liberating.”
Far from leaving you with an edge – a concern shared by Harris’ friend (a comedian), mindfulness brought you “closer to your neuroses, acting as a sort of Doppler radar, mapping your mental microclimates, making you more insightful, not less. It was the complete opposite of the reckless hope preached by the self-helpers. *It was the power of negative thinking.” *
Being mindful in practice has benefits that can extend to other, less obvious areas in your life. Instead of stuffing your face until you’re sick, you learn to put your fork down and take your time between bites. You walk with more precision – your movements are more deliberate and less clumsy.
Skepticism
Harris’ early exposures to the meditation subculture included people like Eckhart Tolle, who was a favorite of Oprah. Tolle was the author of A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose and The Power of Now – he argued that our lives were governed by a voice in our heads. That this voice was engaged “in a ceaseless stream of thinking – most of it negative, repetitive, and self-referential. It squawks away at us from the minute we open our eyes in the morning until the minute we fall asleep at night, if it allows us to sleep at all. Talk, talk, talk: the voice is constantly judging and labeling everything in its field of vision. Its targets aren’t just external; it often viciously taunts us, too.”
Tolle’s thesis centered around his concept of the ego. Colloquially, we refer to “ego” as something akin to pride or conceit. Freud described it as the psychological mechanism that mediates between your id (animalistic desires) and ego (moral compass). But to Tolle, our ego represented our inner narrator, our sense of “I.” Even though that voice is the foundation of our interior lives, we take it for granted. And that the failure to recognize thoughts for “quantum bursts of psychic energy that exist solely in your head—is the primordial human error.” Harris related Tolle’s words to his own experiences and found them to be (mostly) true. He agreed that the ego is never satisfied – no matter how much stuff you buy or arguments you win. That it was constantly comparing itself to others and that it thrives on drama (on keeping old resentments alive). Most importantly, that it was obsessed with the past and the future – at the expense of the present.
While Harris describes his first intimations of Tolle’s work positively, he is eventually disillusioned.
“Just as I was coming to the conclusion that Tolle was a sage who perhaps held the key to all of my problems, he started saying some ludicrous shit. It was no longer his rococo writing style that was throwing me; I was getting used to that. No, now what was sticking in my craw was his penchant for making wild, pseudoscientific claims. He argued that living in the present moment slowed down the aging process and made the “molecular structure” of the body “less dense.” He asserted that “thoughts have their own range of frequencies, with negative thoughts at the lower end of the scale and positive thoughts at the higher.” Sometimes in the course of a single sentence, he would say something lucid and compelling, and then veer straight into crazy town. I honestly could not figure out if he was a genius or a lunatic.”
Wisdom of Insecurity
One of the main protagonists in Harris’ story is Mark Epstein, a psychologist who was able to explain meditation clearly and simply. He thinks meditation holds the key for a true route to happiness because through meditation, you develop an understanding of impermanence. This, he argued, would remove you off the emotional roller coaster and give you a better perspective of the dramas and desire