Dan Harris

#1 New York Times Bestseller and winner of the 2014 Living Now Book Award for Inspirational Memoir. 'An enormously smart, clear-eyed, brave-hearted, and quite a personal look at the benefits of meditation' - Elizabeth Gilbert 10% Happier is a spiritual book written for - and by - someone who would otherwise never read a spiritual book. It is both a deadly serious and seriously funny look at mindfulness and meditation as the next big public health revolution. Dan Harris always believed the restless, relentless, impossible-to-satisfy voice in his head was one of his greatest assets. How else can you climb the ladder in an ultra-competitive field like TV news except through nonstop hand-wringing and hyper vigilance? For a while, his strategy worked. Harris anchored national broadcasts and he covered wars. Then he hit the brakes, and had a full-blown panic attack live on the air. What happened next was completely unforeseen. Through a bizarre series of events - involving a disgraced evangelical pastor, a mysterious self-help guru and a fateful gift from his wife - Harris stumbled upon something that helped him tame the voice in his head: meditation. At first, he was deeply suspicious. He had long associated meditation with bearded swamis and unwashed hippies. But when confronted with mounting scientific evidence that just a few minutes a day can literally rewire the brain for focus,happiness, and reduced reactivity, Harris took a deep dive. He spent years mingling with scientists,executives and marines on the front lines of a quiet revolution that has the potential to reshape society. He became a daily meditator, and even found himself on a ten-day, silent meditation retreat, which was simultaneously the best and worst experience he'd ever had. Harris's life was not transformed into a parade of rainbows and unicorns, but he did gain a passion for daily meditation. While the book itself is a narrative account of Dan's conversion amid the harried and decidedly non-Zen world of the newsroom, it concludes with a section for the novice on how to get started.

How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works - A True Story

10% Happier

I like the idea of meditation as a tool that allows you to step back and acknowledge a situation, and through that process “it takes some of the fangs out of it.” It doesn’t make it go away, but maybe it helps it go away a little quicker.

Caroline Clutterbuck Kapulkin

… The point of getting behind the waterfall wasn't to magically solve all of your problems, only to handle them better, by creating space between stimulus and response. It was about mitigation, not alleviation.

Eroding the edges of ego, I like that. I was surprised that this chapter (titled “The Self-Interested Case for Not Being a Dick”) literally featured an interview with the Dalai Lama! A quick but compelling scene.

A light went off in my head. "It seems like you're saying that there is a self-interested, or selfish, case for being compassionate?"

“Yes. Practice of compassion is ultimately beneft to you. So I usually describe: we are selish, but be wise selfsh rather than foolish selfish."

This was an entirely new spin for me. Don't be nice for the sake of it, he was saying. Do it because it would redound to your own benefit, that it would make you feel good by eroding the edges of ego.

Really liked this quote from the Buddha about anger. This chapter has been my favorite by far! Lots of good stuff in here that I both resonate with and want to practice more.

The Buddha captured it well when he said that anger, which can be so seductive at first, has "a honeyed tip" but a "poisoned root.”

's not that I never got annoyed anymore. In fact, when you're mindful, you actually feel irritation more keenly. However, once you unburden yourself from the delusion that people are deliberately trying to screw you, it’s easier to stop getting carried away … If you spend a half hour on the cushion every day contending with your own ego, it’s hard not to be more tolerant of others.

He added that there's something more "authentic" about people like Tolle, who have accounts of breakthroughs that come out of the blue without any formal training — "because they're not getting it from anywhere else." This was a bitter pill to swallow. Mockery of Tolle had been my one true north on this journey. Now, as the Buddhists say, maybe I had to let it go.

… When I first read A New Earth, I had rolled my eyes when Tolle rather immodestly promised that his book would “initiate the awakening process” in the reader. Now I had to admit that, in my case, the weird little German man was, in a sense, right.

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