Book Summary: 10% Happier by Dan Harris

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My Book Review

Dan Harris describes his journey from a stressed out News Anchor to active meditation practicioner. His overly critic standpoint resonates extremely well if you are skeptical about meditation. It's a light entrance into the world of meditation and will give you some generic instructions on how to get started and a story to identify with. You can get it here on Amazon.com*.

Rating: 8/10

My Summary of '10% Happier' by Dan Harris

Meditation can help make you calmer, more focused, and less emotionally reactive (proven by Science). The common assumption that you are born as the person you are destined to be (hot-tempered, shy, etc.) loses it's ground to science.

💡 Your personality is not set in stone and you can influence it and train character traits just like skills

Harris pursued a career in Television as a journalist and news anchor. In this highly competitive field he put himself under fierce pressure to climb up the ranks and get more air time. Slowly crumbling under this self-imposed pressure he starts showing dysfunctional behavior.

Harris resorts to substance abuse to cope with the pressure. He describes himself as not physically addicted, but 'psychologically hooked'. He visited a therapist to get rid of the addiction and terminated all contact with former party friends to reduced triggers. While continuously having returning thoughts about drugs, he is able to sober up and stay clean.

The Ego and the Present

He then discovers books by Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now*, A New Earth*) , devours them and has multiple epiphanies about the ego (His inner self speaking to himself).

The ego is never satisfied. No matter how much stuff we buy, no matter how many arguments we win or delicious meals we consume, the ego never feels complete.

Perhaps the most powerful Tollean insight into the ego was that it is obsessed with the past and the future, at the expense of the present. [...] The present moment is all we’ve got. We experienced everything in our past through the present moment, and we will experience everything in the future the same way.

💡 Your inner ego has great influence on you - tame it.

Harris realizes that his ego is pushing him to excel, but is also making him partly unhappy and putting him under pressure.

Harris has another key epiphany: He was never present - except for when usign drugs or being in the warzone (his pre-drug addiction). He connects this feeling and being present with his addictions. They made him feel present, therefore leading him to abuse them as gateways to present-ness.

💡 Focus on the present. It's the only time you can influence

Harris transitions to cover religious and spiritual news throughout the USA and therefore gets to meet a vast amount of spritual leaders throughout the process. Upon meeting his momentary guru Eckhart Tolle he asks questions Harris himself cares most about. "How do you stop thinking?", but is disappointed by Tolles esoteric answers - he tells himself there has to be more and embarks on the quest on finding answers for himself.

Harris was afraid that meditation and being happy would impede his drive to be successful. Tolle was the first guru to dismantle this idea by saying that you act from a different state of consciousness but would still do what you have to do.

Harris encounters other spiritual gurus leading him to discover Buddhism and buddhist meditation.

💡 Buddhist truism: Nothing lasts, including us.

The route to true happiness [...] was to achieve a visceral understanding of impermanence, which would take you off the emotional roller coaster and allow you to see your dramas and desires through a wider lens. Waking up to the reality of our situation allows you to, as the Buddhists say, “let go,” to drop your “attachments.” As one Buddhist writer put it, the key is to recognize the “wisdom of insecurity.”

The buddhists mapped the mind, introducing concepts like the wanting mind and monkey mind. The only way to tame the monkey mind is meditation.

Meditation Instructions

1. Sit comfortably. Chair, floor, cushion will do. Spine is reasonably straight.
2. Feel the sensations of your breath as it goes in and out. Pick a spot: nostrils, chest, or gut. Focus your attention there and really try to feel the breath. If it helps to direct your attention, you can use a soft mental note, like “in” and “out.”
3. Whenever your attention wanders, just forgive yourself and gently come back to the breath. The whole game is to catch your mind wandering and then come back to the breath, over and over again.
4. Don't scratch/shift - witness the discomfort by applying a label.

💡 Mindfulness is the ability to recognize what's happening in your mind right now - without getting carried away

Method to Apply Mindfulness in acute Situations - RAIN

R - Recognize: Acknowledge your feelings

A - Allow: Lean into it and let the feeling be

I - Investigate: Figure out how your body is affected (warm face, etc.)

N - Non-Identification: Your feeling does not define you as a person - it will pass

Mindfulness creates the space to deliberately respond instead of simply react.

Lessons from a Meditation retreat

We can enjoy the good stuff in life and strive for success, but we may not be carried away by desire. We need to manage it.

part of the goal of a retreat is to systematically strip away all of the things we use—sex, work, email, food, TV—to avoid a confrontation with what’s been called “the wound of existence.” The only way to make it through this thing is to reach some sort of armistice with the present moment, to drop our habit of constantly leaning forward into the next thing on our agenda.

dukkha - Everything in the world is ultimately unsatisfying and unreliable because it won’t last

“How often are we waiting for the next pleasant hit of . . . whatever? The next meal or the next relationship or the next latte or the next vacation, I don’t know. We just live in anticipation of the next enjoyable thing that we’ll experience. I mean, we’ve been, most of us, incredibly blessed with the number of pleasant experiences we’ve had in our lives. Yet when we look back, where are they now?”

💡 Hedonic Adaptation is taking newly acquired good things for granted quickly

💡 Meditation allows you to learn how to be happy before anything happens because it strips away everything we do to experience pleasure or avoid pain

Mediation wasn’t to magically solve all of your problems, only to handle them better, by creating space between stimulus and response.

The lie we tell ourselves our whole lives: as soon as we get the next meal, party, vacation, sexual encounter, as soon as we get married, get a promotion, get to the airport check-in, get through security and consume a bouquet of Auntie Anne’s Cinnamon Sugar Stix, we’ll feel really good. But when we find ourselves in the airport gate area, having ingested 470 calories’ worth of sugar and fat before dinner, we don’t bother to examine the lie that fuels our lives. We tell ourselves we’ll sleep it off, take a run, eat a healthy breakfast, and then, finally, everything will be complete. We live so much of our lives pushed forward by these “if only” thoughts, and yet the itch remains. The pursuit of happiness becomes the source of our unhappiness.

Benefits of Meditation

Science suggests it can help with loads of conditions like depression, drug addiction, ADHD, irretable bowel syndrome.

Multitasking doesn't work and stresses you out - focus on one thing.

Throw in some purposeful pauses and watch your breath for a few minutes.

💡 Be compassionate for yourself, because it will be beneficial for you

However, once you unburden yourself from the delusion that people are deliberately trying to screw you, it’s easier to stop getting carried away. As the Buddhists liked to point out, everyone wants the same thing—happiness—but we all go about it with varying levels of skill. 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.

The great blessing—and, frankly, the great inconvenience—of becoming more mindful and compassionate was that I was infinitely more sensitive to the mental ramifications of even the smallest transgressions, from killing a bug to dropping trash on the street.

Zen and striving for Excellence

You can still strive but must detach from getting carried away by the results - it might happen differently than you imagine. The final outcome is outside of your control. By leaving non-influincable variables on the table, you can put much greater focus to those which you can influence.

“It’s like, you write a book, you want it to be well received, you want it to be at the top of the bestsellers list, but you have limited control over what happens. You can hire a publicist, you can do every interview, you can be prepared, but you have very little control over the marketplace. So you put it out there without attachment, so it has its own life. Everything is like that.”

When you are wisely ambitious, you do everything you can to succeed, but you are not attached to the outcome—so that if you fail, you will be maximally resilient, able to get up, dust yourself off, and get back in the fray.

The Way of the Worrier

1. Don’t Be a Jerk: Being a jerk clouds your mind and is not necessary to win in competitive fields.

2. (And/But . . .) When Necessary, Hide the Zen: Be nice, but also be able to stand your groudn and be aggressive, just don't get personal.

3. Meditate: It's a superpower with many benefits and allows you to respond instead of just react.

4. The Price of Security Is Insecurity—Until It’s Not Useful: Junger, perfectionisms and comparing can be useful! Use it for constructive anguish.

5. Equanimity Is Not the Enemy of Creativity: Being happier does not impede your creativity or drive. It clears your mind and invites new ways of thinking.

6. Don’t Force It: Forcing anything often doesn't work (see love, sleep, fun) - relax a little and try again.

7. Humility Prevents Humiliation: Letting the ego go, allows you to to navigate tricky situations in a more agile way. Don't overdo it though (see #2).

8. Go Easy with the Internal Cattle Prod: Don't kill yourself over a mistake. Create an inner environment where mistakes are forgiven and flaws are candidly confronted and your resilience will expand vastly.

9. Nonattachment to Results: "Push hard, play to win, but don"t break down if things won't work out"

10. What Matters Most?: Ask yourself "What matters most?" (read: "What do I really want?") to ground yourself and consider the really important things.