YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Harris

lines on the record: 125
first: 2020-11-19
most recent: 2020-11-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I would say that the anger that flows out of the fear was creating a lack of collegiality for me and my work relationships and could sometimes be a really tough thing for my wife to deal with as well. And I want to be clear, it's not like I was a rage aholic or anything like that. It's more just like I could go inward. I could withdraw. And that was hard for people to, that is hard for people to read. But nonetheless, I could also lose my temper and that would be scary or annoying for people. And I think now, so back then it would say if I felt like I had too much stress in my life, too much confident in my life, I think I was complicit because I hadn't taken a look at the sources of my own fear and anger. And I would say now the answer would change to be more around the anxiety, which I worry.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I suspect it's funny, that's not a question. I mean, I've heard him ask that question, but it's not one we've worked on a lot, so I don't have a ready answer, so I'm going to have to process it a lot in real time. I suspect it all comes back to the fear and anxiety too, that in particular pre-2010 or whatever before I started getting really serious about meditation, but even after two, because it didn't, it doesn't solve all of your problems, hence the whole 10% shtick.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just love that. You know, like I know you're writing a book. I'm writing a book right now. And like, if I'm not hitting my cadence for completing a chapter, it's just there's just so much anger at myself. And so it's been really useful. I've worked with this coach who I know you know, Jerry Colonna. And I've been working with Jerry for years. He's an executive coach, but in many ways it's like very close to therapy. And so I've been working with him for years. And, you know, really, he definitely helped me attune to A, the fact that there was, notwithstanding my...”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anxiety. And so it can lead to as a knock on effect this anger at other people, but primarily there's not so much blowing up at other people going on in my life now, but a lot of anger at myself. I can get into whole loops around, I'm approaching 50 and the abs that I had in my mid-30s are now not visible in any way unless you have a high powered microscope. I can get into a whole thing around that. It's like this anger at myself for being sloppy or not being up to my old standards or whatever. And the same thing can happen around my productivity levels. There's a great phrase I heard from a podcaster named Jocelyn K. Gly. She has a phrase productivity shame, which...”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is often described as a secondary emotion. It's usually something that happens as a knock on effect of a more primary emotion. In my case, over time, I've just seen the emotion that seems to be at the root of so many of my problems is fear.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Perfect for me in some ways because those two emotions are just so prominent for me and particular anger. And it's a knot, man. It's just, you know, I will get angry because I'll get angry at somebody. I'm working with because if they're not doing a good enough job, it threatens my high standards for my work, which then threatens my safety, my, you know, it triggers my anxiety. And I will lash out and then I'll lash back at myself for being horrible, mean person. And that is really hard to untangle. And this is where the hugging the dragon becomes really useful to see at the root of that is fear, right? Anger.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A prominent inner player, and I'm still kind of working on this. So what I'll say is just maybe going to be not polished. Just as a joke to start, Chris Cuomo, who used to work at ABC News, and we became friends back then, but he's now a CNN primetime host. He wrote an article years ago for some men's health magazine or something like that. And he talked about his emotional landscape having two gears, anger and self-pity, which I thought was just so great.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My own impatience, my own self-laceration. If I can see that as like ancient, and you, I heard you talk about this recently on that incredibly brave podcast you did about the childhood abuse you suffered, if you can start to... View these storylines as their ancient storylines, their ancient inner characters who are trying to help you. But instead of slaying those dragons, which, by the way, will only make them stronger. If you hug them, if you give them a high five and a seat at the table and a party hat, they will quiet down and you can then make a better, smarter decision.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Instead of like a cold, maybe you might say journalistic remove on the various machinations of my ego that I'm witnessing when I sit in meditation to bring a warmer friendlier, again, maybe even loving sense as I'm viewing all of my ugliness. That has been a revelation. And which brings me to the slogan, which is, you know, I think in our Western individualistic culture, we think of spiritual quests as like a slaying the dragon, which is pretty violent. And so I actually think it's more like hugging the dragon. And that... That is like a radical disarmament because I've just noticed as I see my own selfishness or my own jealousy or”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Man, to everything you just said, that was just all perfect and difficult for me too, and which is why, to me, the biggest revolution in my own practice, and this is just goes back to me being a hard case because this is recent for me. When great meditation teachers give the beginning instructions, they often say, you know, it's not a cold clinical detachment with which we're viewing the contents of our consciousness. It's actually a, they'll often use the word, which I've traditionally found quite overwrought, but like a loving awareness. And I completely ignored that part of the instruction. And over time, what I have found, this actually will bring me to the second slogan I was going to try to get to at the beginning of this conversation or earlier in this conversation. Over time, I've really started to add into the mix.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Species as Homo sapiens sapiens, the one who thinks and knows he or she thinks, and yet that capacity, this birthright of yours, is atrophying for many of us because in our culture, at least, nobody points out that we have this bonus level in our brain. And so that's what you're developing in meditation.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ability to focus. We're boosting yourself awareness. And that self awareness, that regular sort of systematized collision we're engineering in meditation with the voice in your head. That is revolutionary because as soon as you start to see how chaotic your mind is, and I know I'm banging on about this point, but it's just you can't say it too much. As soon as you start to see the chaos of your own mind, that's the first step toward not being owned by it. I just think that's you used a bunch of analogies earlier. Another analogy that John Cabotzin uses is You can think of the mind like a waterfall and the thoughts and urges and impulses. That's all the water flowing ceaselessly down the waterfall. Mindfulness, which is the self-awareness that we're generating through meditation, is like the crevice in the rock face behind the water that lets you, and now I'm mixing my metaphors, kind of step out of the traffic and to view the contents of your consciousness with some non-judgmental remove. And this is not New Age nonsense. We are classified as a”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that is the moment most people. Think they are failed meditators. But I'm here to tell you that is the moment when you notice you've become distracted, even if it's for the whole session, just noticing that you've become distracted is proof that you are meditating correctly. Because as I said before, the goal here is not to, actually I haven't said this yet. This is really important. The goal is not to clear your mind because clearing your mind is impossible unless you're enlightened or you have died. The goal here is instead to focus your mind for a nanosecond or two on something like the feeling of your breath or the feeling of your body sitting and then every time you get distracted you start again and again and again and that act of noticing the distraction and starting again is like a bicep curl for your brain. And this is what we see on the brain scans of meditators. This is the mechanism by which we are training your attention.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A really resonant in a difficult way phrase. So if the breath is hard for you, you can just focus on the feeling of your body sitting or lying down or standing or pick one spot on your body, like your hands, whatever they're touching, and just commit to that. And the third step is as soon as you try to do this thing, which is going to sound reasonably simple, you'll realize it's infernally difficult because your mind will go into mutiny mode. It's like trying to hold a live fish in your hands. It's just slipping away from you all the time. You know, it's like you're planting lunch or you're planning some, you know, expletive-filled speech. You're going to deliver to your boss or, you know, like random, what was Casper the Friendly Ghost before he died? Or just like your mind's all over the place?”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's step number two. Oh, by the way, I should say that some people find the breath to be anxiety producing, and that's actually not uncommon, especially now COVID has a pulmonary implication, obviously, and BLM has a lot of stuff about not being able to, you know, people, I can't breathe has become a really...”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“softly at a neutral spot Second step is bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. Pick one spot, like your belly or your chest or your nose, and just kind of commit to feeling that. And that's a key word here, feeling, because we spend most of our life trapped in thought, but actually we're in this practice kind of dropping below the level of thought and tuning into the raw data of the physical sensations of the belly rising and falling, the chest rising and falling, the air entering or exiting the nostrils.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in that sense, I'm a Buddhist, in the maybe in the same sense that I'm a journalist. It's like it is something that I do regularly, but I wouldn't sit here and pound the table on behalf of rebirth. But I do think that the Buddhist practices are just a revelation. And there's like just a vast treasury, really. So what is the practice look like? Beginning mindfulness meditation really is very simple. You just find a reasonably quiet place and sit with your spine reasonably straight. You don't have to be uptight about that. In fact, being uptight is not recommended in any aspect of this. If you don't want to sit, first of all, you don't have to be fold yourself into a pretzel. I don't. You can sit in a chair. You can also lie down. If you're feeling sleepy and are worried about falling asleep, you can stand up. By the way, falling asleep is not a problem, very common, and actually a good sign that maybe you need more sleep. So that's the first step. Find a reasonably quiet place, comfortable position, close your eyes. If you don't like to close your eyes, you can kind of just gaze.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And giving it a structure of an eight week teaching program, that is what allowed for science, scientists to come in and say, okay, well, this is replicable now. We can run this on a bunch of different populations and measure their cortisol levels and look at their brains, et cetera, et cetera. And that's what's given us this in large measure. That's what's given us this explosion of research into what meditation does to the brain. So that's the kind I was initially attracted to and the kind of meditation that I now evangelize for. I have over time, and this is totally optional, but for me, I've over time gotten more interested in the Buddhist antecedents. And so I would describe myself as a Buddhist. But in the sense that, as a great author named Stephen Bachelor, who wrote a book called Buddhism Without Beliefs, and he describes Buddhism not as something to believe in, but as something to do.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right, that there are many, many forms, and people can get pretty dogmatic about their support for whatever meditative team they've chosen. The kind of meditation that I generally talk about publicly and that we teach on my app and everything is called mindfulness meditation, which is derived from Buddhism. I talked about John Cabot-Zinn before. This was his innovation. He was this MIT whiz kid who discovered Zen and then was on a meditation retreat, a Buddhist meditation retreat, and had this insight that like, oh, if we stripped this of its religious lingo and metaphysical claims, we could teach it in secular contexts such as healthcare and people who otherwise would reject it might embrace it. And he invented an eight-week protocol for teaching what's called mindfulness-based stress reduction and secularizing it.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make a nasty comment, be impatient, beat myself up more, be more judgmental when I look in the mirror, et cetera, et cetera. I can just really see the venom quotient increase when I'm not doing this thing.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The visibility is the kryptonite. Seeing clearly the cacophony of your own inner landscape is how you are no longer owned by it. And over time, so you can have a whole week of quote-unquote bad sits where you're totally distracted or you're restless or you're sleepy, but over time the net effect of it is that you are more self-aware and therefore less yanked around by the malevolent puppeteer of your ego. And so for me, what I notice, and actually this is why falling off the wagon can be really helpful because it can increase your faith in the practice. What I notice is that if I miss a few days, my inner weather becomes much more stormy and I'm likelier to eat too much or to”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The goal instead is to feel whatever you are feeling clearly so that you build the muscle of not being owned by your feelings. Let me just say that again because it's a little hard to understand. When you sit to meditate, you really don't need to will yourself into a bulletproof bliss bubble. Instead, you should just be noticing whatever's coming up, you know, I'm planning lunch, I'm planning a homicide, I'm jealous of like I'm remembering primordial anger toward my younger brother, whatever is coming up. And that is correct meditation because”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was just really well articulated when you talked about your own practice because this is perhaps the hardest thing to understand about meditation because all of us making an assumption here, but I think it's safe for your audience. We're all types. So we go into meditation with expectations, which are the most noxious thing you can bring to the party. So in an individual sitting or walking meditation, in an individual session of meditation, the goal is not to feel any certain way. In fact, going into it if you're expecting or hoping to feel a certain way, it pretty much blocks you from getting there.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we know that habit formation is really hard, diabolically hard. So setting the bar really low, I think, is very helpful. And then the other little slogan is daily-ish. You know, yes, would it be great if you were doing this every day? Sure, but if you grit your teeth and tell yourself you're going to do it every day, the first day you miss, which inevitably you will, the voice in your head will swoop in and tell you you're a failed meditator and then like deuces, you know, you're out. And so I think”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll get a long sit, you know, 30, 45, 60 minutes. But on many days, it's just like a succession of smaller sits, or I'll do a walking meditation. So, yeah, I'm pretty consistent, but I don't think that's necessary for beginners. I really think the access point here is really easy and user-friendly. And what I say for my two little mantras, little slogans here I go again for beginning meditators, One is one minute counts. I really think, and we can talk a little bit more about how to do the practice, but I really think that even in a minute, you can start to get a sense of, oh, yeah, I've got this inner cacophony and I don't need to be owned by it. So it's the visibility that is the kryptonite for the ego, that's seeing it really defangs it, which is kind of amazing. And that can happen in a minute. What I love to see you do five to ten? Sure.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Day because something has just gotten totally crazy or whatever. And I went through a period where I did two hours a day, which was way too much. Not in that it was nuts. It was just eating up too much of the rest of my life. So now I do about an hour a day, but I'm much more relaxed about it. And I kind of My rule has always been, and this was true even when I was doing two hours a day, is like I can do it whenever I want, wherever I want, and in whatever increment I want. So it may be five minutes here, ten minutes there, on a really good day.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to bifurcate the answer here because I'll answer for me and then I do want to say a few things about because I think the question that's probably coming up in the minds of some of your listeners is like, what's the least I can do to get all of the advertised benefits? So I'll say something about that too, but I don't want you to be discouraged by what I'm about to say, which is that for me, it's every day once in a blue moon, I will miss.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, he's very scary. Actually, the thing about Salmon, you know this, Tim, because you know him is like he can seem very intimidating, but if you interact with him, especially if his wife's around and his wife is an extraordinary person, Annika Harris has written a great book about consciousness. You know, she can reduce him to giggling, you know, red-faced ball, a puddle, which is amazing. And he's really warm and incredible. And he told me about Joseph Goldstein and got me into this meditation retreat. And that really cracked things open for me. And I would say since doing that retreat for the last decade, it is just a non-negotiable part of my life.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I could write a book that uses the word fuck a lot and tells embarrassing stories and maybe that would reach people who otherwise would never do this thing. And so I started after really looking at the science and kind of reviewing it with my wife who's a scientist, I was really convinced that there was something here. So I started doing like five to ten minutes a day. It really helped. And then after about a year of that, I met Sam Harris. I actually remet him. I had met Sam once years before and then I met him again. I was moderating a debate that he was in against Deepak Chopra and he actually dismantled him. You can see that on YouTube too. And Sam, I loved, and I still loved.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I am a tough case, as I referenced before. So I read about Buddhism was really interested in Buddhism, but the talk about meditation I found repellent. And so I was very, very resistant. And what finally... Brought me over to trying it was, so this is like 2009. As I started researching meditation, I came across some of the science that really strongly suggests that meditation can confer a long list of tantalizing health benefits. And at that time, that science was not well publicized. And so I had this. Inkling of, oh, this is a huge story that people don't know about. And I had this kind of entrepreneurial itch of meditation appears to be really helpful. And all of these books I'm reading were many of the books I was reading because I started reading a ton are really annoying.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still away. I'm on fire. Please continue. Yeah, well, as somebody who has a panic disorder, I can't have caffeine. It's the”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Books that night, the book I started reading was Going to Pieces with It's a great title. And it's a great book. I highly recommend it. And it was the first introduction to both Buddhism and meditation.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unimpressed, depressed, confused, didn't know what to do. And actually during this period of time, I came home one night to my then apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan and my then fiance and now baby mama Bianca gave me a gift as I walked into the apartment that evening. She said, I've been listening to you talk about Deepak Chopra and Ekhartoli and blah blah blah not making much sense as you do. But it vaguely reminded me this is her talking or vaguely reminded me of a book I read many years ago and here it is. And the book was by a guy I mentioned earlier on the show when we were talking about the Juboos named Dr. Mark Epstein. I liked him right away because he had actual credentials. He's, as I said, a shrink, lives and works in New York City and he's written all these incredible books about the overlap between Buddhism and psychology, modern psychology. And so I started reading one of his”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shamelessly leveraging all the privilege of my journalistic perch. I basically started with the aforementioned Felicia, we started doing lots of stories about self-help because I thought, you know, somebody in this ought to be able to tell me more about what to do about this. So I ended up doing all these stories about Deepak Chopra, who I think is on the far. I mean, I make fun of Deepak with Gusto in my book. But nonetheless, I think he's on the far benign end of the self-help spectrum. And then I did a lots of stuff on the folks who are way more questionable to sort of solve all of your problems through the power of positive thinking crew, you know, the secret. And I did a lot of stuff on James Arthur Ray, I believe his name is the guy who had that sweat lodge ceremony where people died. And basically, I was completely, completely”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally as correct but not useful. And so he woke me up to a thunderously obvious but regularly overlooked fact, which is that we all have minds and our thinking, but he didn't give me anything to do about it.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Take one conscious breath. And my voice in my head was saying, What the fuck does that mean? Like, what are you talking about? Give me something to do here. A friend of mine has described.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meditation. And the problem with Ecartoli was that he didn't offer any actionable advice. Felicia and I ended up flying to Toronto to meet Tolli. He lives in Vancouver, but he was giving a speech in Toronto and he gave us an audience in a beige hotel room. And I interviewed him and I asked him, you know, it was actually the first interview I did with anybody in the faith world where I felt like I had some skin in the game because I was really interested. And I tried to get him to answer like, what do you do about the voice in the head? And I remember at one point he said.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Essentially, just the human condition that was a gigantic waking up moment for me because, first of all, it was just like, oh, yeah, that is true. And it also really explained my panic attack because it was my ego. And again, not just the sort of stereotypical parts of the ego, the like self-aggrandizing part, but also like all of the fear and idealism and all this sort of unseen mental machinery that propelled me to cover combat without really thinking about the psychological ramifications. It was the ego, the sort of mindless interconversation that allowed me to come home, get depressed, not see it, and blindly reach for cocaine as medicine. And that all produced the panic attack. So it was reading Eckhart Tolli that was really the first step toward me getting interested in.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally means by the ego is the non stop conversation we are all having with ourselves, this inner narrator, this constant flow of thought, an urge urges and emotions coursing through our minds into which very few of us have any visibility. And so I started to read Tolly's book, and at first I thought it was complete nonsense because he layers in lots of like talk about vibrational fields and spiritual awakenings and all this other stuff. But what I got to the stuff about the ego, which again, he has a much more expansive definition of this sort of inner ghostly sense of you that is constantly spewing sort of self-centered thoughts hurling us into the future or ruminating about the past to the detriment of the here and now. When I read his diagnosis of the ego, which is”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the way, was true. And so it was very funny, but it wasn't what she meant. What she meant and what totally means by the ego I subsequently learned because I went out and ordered his book and read it, or one of his books and read it.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You interrupt me anytime because I like tangents. So, anyway, I'm out shooting the story. The story Pentecostalism has nothing to do with what is about to happen, which is that I was waiting when you're shooting a story, there's like lots of downtime. And so I was chit-chatting with the crew, the cameraman, the soundman, and our producer, Felicia Baberica, who is still a, actually, she's quite senior producer at World News Tonight. At that time, she was a field producer, so she and I were covering the story together. We had known each other for quite a while. And she started talking about a book, a self-help book she was reading by a guy named Eckhart Tolley, who I had never heard of. And Felicia said something like, Dan, you know, you should read this book. It's all about controlling your ego. And me and the crew started laughing because it was clear to us that she was saying, you have an out-of-control ego.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So these are the folks that speak in tongues. I mean, there's a, I don't want to describe Pentecostalism as a monolith because there are flavors within the flavor, but there are non-Pentecostals who speak in tongues too, but they're sort of charismatic in, and that's actually a term of art, the charismatic Christianity where some of them will handle snakes during services or speak in tongues, which is a kind of like you're speaking in tongues is like you're speaking a non-sense language that is in some way divine, that you're being taken over by the Holy Spirit. So it's a really dramatic, and again, I think I'll use the word charismatic form of Christianity.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm a hard case, so it took me a while. But the first exposure was I was shooting a story. It went right after Sarah Palin was nominated to by John McCain as his vice presidential candidate. And she's The American publisher, did you have something you wanted to say there?”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time on a Friday afternoon, if you're a Muslim or a Saturday for the Jews, they were getting together and talking about the universe. And that really hit me as somebody who I had a sense of my own selfishness and how that was making me unhappy. I didn't know what to do. Based on what I was encountering from these folks of faith, because I found so many of their beliefs to be really hard to swallow, but I had this kind of, now I'm going to use a word that I don't know how to pronounce. I think it's in Kohit, this kind of... Beginning, say the words. You know that word, right? You see it in like fancy books, and I never know how to pronounce it. But I had this kind of beginning inkling that, yeah, there's something here that I should pay attention to.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, the metaphor about the chopped salad is awesome. The thing that really landed with me about religion, the religions that I spent time marinating in, I spent a lot of time with the evangelicals, Mormons, Muslims. I, as the child of atheist scientists, constitutionally, I just can't get myself to believe in things for which there's no evidence. So I had a bit of an allergy, maybe understating it, to the dogma and to the faith claims, the metaphysical claims and all of that stuff. But what struck me was that these folks were with regularity contemplating their place in the cosmos, which I was not doing. I was utterly unreflective in many, many important ways. And these guys on 11 o'clock on a Sunday morning or whatever.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Left field, man. I wasn't high in the air. I hadn't been, I don't think, I don't remember, I definitely hadn't been partying the night before or anything like that, maybe in the week before. But I had no reason to foresee what was about to happen. And it sucked uncontrollably.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I kind of said sheepishly, yeah. And he gave me, I like to make this joke. He gave me this look, one of these shrinky looks. I'm sure you've gotten this look before Tim from the shrinks with whom you've worked. He gave me a look that communicated the sentiment of, okay, asshole, mystery solved. And he pointed out that even though my drug use was pretty intermittent and short-lived, I wasn't like, you know, I wasn't like one of the people from the Wolf of Wall Street or anything like that, but it was enough to change my brain chemistry and make a panic attack more likely. So that's the story.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had a panic attack, and she hooked me up with a shrink, and the shrink asked me a bunch of questions to try to figure out what was going wrong. And one of the questions was, do you do drugs?”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reading and then my lungs basically seize up, and my heart starts raising, my palms are sweating, my mouth dries up, and I can't talk, which is a prerequisite for angering the news. And it was horrifying. And so if you watch the tape, it actually looks like I definitely looks flustered, but a lot of people will say, you know, it didn't look that bad. And that's because I had the luxury of being able to squeak out back to you, Charlie and Diane, and they took it back. But I had to cut the whole thing short. I mean, I think I had read like two and a half stories by the time the freakout hit. And it was awful and really scary, not only because a panic attack is horrifying, but because I just thought, well, this is the end of my career. And my mom was watching that morning and she called me backstage and said, oh, you just had a panic attack, dude. And, well, she didn't say, dude, but anyway, she said.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Diane Sawyer tossed it over to me to do my little spiel. I just lost it. And you can see this if you type panic attack on live television, it's the first result. So go for it. You can see it has millions and millions.”
2020-11-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, Self-Help for Skeptics, Training the Mind, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT