10% Happier with Dan Harris

Life is already complicated enough. Meditation doesn’t have to be, if we learn to be simple and easy.

About Joseph Goldstein :

Joseph is one of the most respected meditation teachers in the world -- a key architect of the rise of mindfulness in our modern society -- with a sense of humor to boot. In the 1970's, he co-founded the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) alongside Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield. Since its founding, thousands of people from around the world have come to IMS to learn mindfulness from leaders in the field. Joseph has been a teacher there since its founding and continues as the resident guiding teacher.

To find this meditation in the Ten Percent Happier app, you can search for “Be Simple and Easy.” 

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New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers.

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In today's episode, Dr. Donn Posner proposes a whole new way of thinking about sleep. First, he normalizes the sleep problems many of us experience. If you're sleeping poorly right now, he says, don't freak out; it's natural and normal. Second, he has a bunch of tips for how to deal with insomnia, some of which you may have never heard before.

Dr. Donn Posner is one of the leaders in the field of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for insomnia. Dr. Posner is the Founder and President of Sleepwell Consultants, and Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine.

In this episode we talk about:

• The difference between chronic and acute insomnia
• How we can adapt to things that can mess up our sleep, like remote work
• Sub-chronic sleep conditions
• What to do if we're experiencing acute insomnia so that it doesn't become chronic insomnia
• The importance of structure when it comes to good sleep
• What social jet lag is
• Dr. Posner's take on napping
• Why wake time is so important when it comes to good sleep
• Why we shouldn't try to compensate for a bad night's sleep

Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/donn-posner-268-rerun

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers.

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If you're not sleeping well, it's harder to do anything you care about. It's harder to get healthier, to be more focused and productive, to be happier, to be more successful, to have good relationships—all of it.

Sleep may be the apex predator of healthy habits, and yet so many of us are getting terrible sleep because we don't prioritize it or because we've told ourselves a whole story about how we're just not people who sleep well, and so we just live with it.

In this episode, you're going to meet somebody who decided she was not going to live with it any longer, and she launched an extremely detailed personal investigation in order to fix it. And luckily for us, she is a journalist, so she documented the whole thing and gathered extremely useful, heavily vetted information and insights we can all use.

Diane Macedo the author of the book, The Sleep Fix: Practical, Proven and Surprising Solutions for Insomnia, Snoring, Shift Work, and More. She is an ABC News anchor and correspondent and she appears on Good Morning America World News Tonight with David Muir and Nightline. Diane is also the daytime anchor for ABC News Live, the streaming service.

In this episode we talk about:

• Key signs that you're not getting enough sleep
• Do sleeping pills really work?
• When and how to find a sleep specialist
• How to deal with performance anxiety around sleep
• The difference between sleep deprivation and insomnia
• Mindfulness and sleep
• The biggest sleep myths

Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/diane-macedo-444-rerun

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers.

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Every year, Joseph Goldstein does a three month silent meditation retreat by himself at his home in Massachusetts. In this conversation you're about to hear, Joseph had just emerged from one such retreat with a bunch of thoughts on what are called the three proliferating tendencies or three papañca to use the ancient Pali term.

These are three ways in which we perpetuate an unhealthy sense of self. Joseph has explained that you can think about the process of going deeper in meditation as a process of lightening up or getting less self-centered. You're about to get a masterclass in doing just that.

For the uninitiated, Joseph is one of the co-founders of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. His co-founders are two other meditation titans, Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield. Joseph has been a teacher at IMS since it was founded in the seventies and he continues to be the resident guiding teacher there.

In this episode we talk about:

• The framework for understanding the three proliferating tendencies; the basic building blocks of our experience in the world
• Six things that make up what the Buddha called "the all"
• What non-self means and why it's essential to the Buddhist teaching of liberation
• The two levels of truth: conventional and ultimate
• Why language is so important in conditioning how we experience things
• How the three proliferating tendencies provide a very practical guide to understanding how we manufacture our own suffering

Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/joseph-goldstein-364-rerun

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers.

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These days, the word mindfulness has become a buzz phrase but very often people don't know what the word actually means, much less how to practice it. One simple definition of mindfulness is the ability to see what's happening in your mind without getting carried away by it. The benefits of doing so are vast and profound— from decreased emotional reactivity to being more awake to what's actually happening in your life.

Today's guest Joseph Goldstein talks about a classic Buddhist list called the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, which lays out various techniques for developing mindfulness within your practice.

Goldstein is one of the premier western proponents of Mindfulness. He co-founded the legendary Insight Meditation Society alongside Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield. He also wrote a book called Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening.

In this episode we talk about:

• The historical context for the four foundations of mindfulness
• Why he thinks the Buddha loved lists
• Why the Buddha placed mindfulness of the body first on the list
• The steps to mastering mindfulness of the body
• The meaning of the word embodied and how that's different from our usual mode of being in the world
• How and why to do walking meditations
• What are feeling tones and why are they important
• Practices for cultivating mindfulness of mind
• The mantras that Joseph uses when teaching

Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/joseph-goldstein-483-rerun

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers.

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This is a fun, weird, extremely interesting and inspiring episode.

It's about lucid dreaming, something that people might perceive as hippie nonsense, but is actually deeply woven into ancient and time-tested Buddhist traditions.

Our guest today has been studying and practicing Buddhism and what he calls nocturnal meditations for more than four decades. And he has remarkably simple and down to earth tips for doing this in your own life. He argues anybody can do this. And the proposition is pretty compelling. We're asleep for a huge percentage of our life, and from a perspective of contemplative development, or training your mind, that's a huge stretch of land that is lying fallow.

Andrew Holecek is an expert on lucid dreaming and the Tibetan yogas of sleep and dream. He is a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, and the author of scientific papers on lucid dreaming. He has also written many books on the subject, including: Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep.

In this episode we talk about:

• The Five Nocturnal Meditations, which include: liminal dreaming, lucid dreaming, dream yoga, sleep yoga, and bardo yoga
• Why bother with these nocturnal practices in the first place?
• How these nocturnal practices might be the next phase of human evolution
• The problem of wake-centricity
• Practical tips for trying this stuff yourself
• And if lucid dreaming is meant for everyone – including those of us with sleep issues

For tickets to TPH's live event in Boston on September 7:

https://thewilbur.com/armory/artist/dan-harris/

Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/andrew-holecek-620

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers.

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There seems to be one clear bug in the human operating system — most of us do not like talking about death. Yet when we do talk about it, it can genuinely upgrade the quality of our lives.

Our guest today is Alua Arthur, a former attorney who is now what's called a death doula, which is someone who helps guide people through the end of their lives. Through this work, she has learned some extraordinary stuff about how to live life right now.

Alua is also the founder of Going with Grace, a death doula training and end-of-life planning organization. She is working on her debut memoir, which will be coming out next year called, Briefly Perfectly Human.

This conversation took place at the 2023 TED Conference in Vancouver, immediately after Alua delivered her triumphant talk, which is out now. Special thanks to the TED Audio Collective. You can listen to Alua's talk and other TED talks on the TED Talks Daily podcast.

In this episode we talk about:

• How death can be a powerful motivator
• How consistently being aware that you're going to die can be a "stress reliever"
• The utility of imagining your ideal death
• Her view on reincarnation
• How the concept of "healing" can sometimes be used as a weapon against ourselves
• The importance of not leaving things unsaid
• How "hope" at the end of life can sometimes be unhelpful
• What surprises her about death
• How her work helped her out of her depression
• The five steps that you should take when confronting your own death
• The harm that can sometimes result from too much medical intervention toward the end of life
• The often fraught relationship that vulnerable and marginalized people can have with the medical community
• The benefits of thinking about what version of yourself you want to meet on your deathbed
• The death meditation that she uses when working with people
• What to say and do when you are with somebody who is grieving
• And a practice she calls, "The dying things exercise"

For tickets to TPH's live event in Boston on September 7:

https://thewilbur.com/armory/artist/dan-harris/

Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/Alua-Arthur-619

Check out our friends at How to Be a Better Human podcast, as we take a look within and beyond ourselves.

How to Be a Better Human isn't your average self-improvement podcast. It's a show that understands that being a human is hard -- because no one tells you how to do it well! Join comedian Chris Duffy as he has conversations with the kind of brilliant experts you see giving TED Talks. Listen as they share how anyone can put big ideas into practice in their own lives, and make them a little less terrible. Because although we do our best to figure out life on our own, we can always use some help. Find How to Be a Better Human wherever you get your podcasts.

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers.

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Our relationships are the most important variable in our health and happiness, but they may also be the most difficult. This is especially true when those closest to us turn out to be emotionally immature people.

Lindsay C. Gibson is a clinical psychologist and bestselling author who specializes in helping people identify and deal with emotionally immature people, or EIP's. Her first appearance on our show was one of our most popular episodes of 2022. Now she's back to offer concrete strategies for handling the EIP's in your life, wherever you may find them. Her new book is called Disentangling from Emotionally Immature People.

In this episode we talk about:

• A primer on the cardinal characteristics of emotionally immature people (EIP's), how to spot them, and why you might want to
• What Lindsay means by "disentangling" from EIP's, and how to do it
• What often happens to your own sense of self when you're in relationship (or even just in conversation) with an EIP
• How to interact with an EIP
• How to prevent brain scramble when you're talking with someone who isn't making any attempt to understand what you're saying
• How she reacts when she comes across EIP's in her everyday life
• Whether it's possible to have some immature characteristics without being an EIP
• Handling your own emotionally immature tendencies
• Whether or not EIP's can change
• The limits of estrangement
• Why she encourages "alternatives to forgiveness"

For tickets to TPH's live event in Boston on September 7:

https://thewilbur.com/armory/artist/dan-harris/

Full Shownotes:

https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/lindsay-c-gibson-617

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers.

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"Mindfulness" has become a buzz phrase. There are books on mindful parenting, mindful lawyering, even mindful sex. But what does the word even mean? And how do you actually do it? In one of his most famous and foundational discourses, the Buddha was said to have laid out, in great detail, four ways to establish mindfulness. In today's episode we're going to walk through these four "foundations" of mindfulness with Sally Armstrong, who started practicing in 1981, began teaching 15 years later, and now leads retreats all over the world.

We posted this episode a few years ago, but thought it might be a good time to drop a good, old-fashioned, meat and potatoes, stick to your ribs dharma episode to help us get back to basics. Because, like Sally says, Guru Google can only get us so far…

In this episode we talk about:

• How Sally got started in meditation – including sitting and in person retreat with SN Goenka and living near the Dalai Lama
• Using our meditation to align on intentions and values and seeing that we have a choice once we wake up.
• Where she encounters challenges in her practice today
• The importance of Beginner's mind
• Sally's clear breakdown of the Buddha's Four Foundations of Mindfulness (the first time we've really gone into detail on the show)

For tickets to TPH's live event in Boston on September 7:

https://thewilbur.com/armory/artist/dan-harris/

Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/sally-armstrong-232-rerun