The former news anchor at the center of the mindfulness movement

Transcript

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Scott Detrow, and I am joined yet again by my buddy Rachel Martin for another conversation from her series Enlighten Me. Hey, Rachel.

RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: Hey, Scott. So you remember last week we talked about mindfulness, right? And I wanted to get to the religious roots of that particular faith tradition, so I went to a monastery in New Jersey.

DETROW: I loved hearing about it. That seemed like a really interesting visit.

MARTIN: It was very cool. You happen to have made a joke about whether or not, in this whole mindfulness exploration, did I download a meditation app.

DETROW: Yeah. Yeah. And the answer was no. You went to a monastery instead.

MARTIN: That's right, because I'm hardcore like that. But the whole thing about the app - like, this is the way a lot of people access the idea of mindfulness and start to get into this practice.

DETROW: Yeah.

MARTIN: So have you tried one? Moment of truth.

DETROW: Many times. Many times.

MARTIN: Oh, many times.

DETROW: And it is always short lived, to be fully honest. I have big goals, and I give it a try. And then I find it very hard, or I honestly sometimes fall asleep when I'm trying...

MARTIN: You fall asleep?

DETROW: I either fall asleep or I fidget too much is usually - and then I think, I would like this to work, but it's hard.

MARTIN: So the reason that I ask is because one of the most popular apps out there for meditation was actually started by a guy I know, a former colleague of mine named Dan Harris. He used to be this big anchor at ABC News, and he was the guy who would read the intros to my stories when I worked there covering the White House.

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DAN HARRIS: The major developments tonight - the U.S. has shut down its embassy in Yemen indefinitely after threat of an attack. We start with Rachel Martin, who is in Washington. Rachel, good evening.

MARTIN: Good evening, Dan. Administration officials say Yemen is actually...

This is TV Rachel right there, a little smidge.

DETROW: I do not hear Dan there and think, this is a guy who I would think of as a Buddhist spiritual mindfulness leader. I mean...

MARTIN: Right. So he has gone through this whole metamorphosis. In 2014, Dan wrote this book called "Ten Percent Happier," and it became a New York Times bestseller. And he, as a result, made a huge change in his life. He left news altogether, started this mindfulness company. He's got podcasts and he has a meditation app. And I wanted to understand what that shift looked like for him and also how he manages what I think are probably the responsibilities of being a kind of spiritual leader, a kind of person who says he can make us all 10% happier.

DETROW: Which is a big promise to make.

MARTIN: Right.

DETROW: All right. So let's listen to that conversation between you and Dan Harris.

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MARTIN: Part of your origin story is this moment that you had. You know I've talked about it before, but can you tell me about that day on set when things started to go haywire in your brain?

HARRIS: Yeah. I've been dining out on this freakout for a while. But yes, on the set of "Good Morning America" in 2004, on a warm June morning, I was filling in for Robin Roberts, who, at that point, had a job that was described as - I think the title was newsreader. And so Robin would come on at the top of each hour of the show - the 7 a.m. hour and the 8 a.m. hour - and read some headlines. Robin was on assignment somewhere, and I was filling in for her, which I had done many times before. So I didn't have any reason to foresee what was about to happen, which was a few seconds into my spiel, I was supposed to read some headlines off of the teleprompter. I - my lungs seized up. My heart started to race. My palms, got sweaty. My mouth got dry. It became basically impossible for me to speak, which is inconvenient if you're a news anchor. And I had to bail out and toss it back to the main hosts of the show, and it was just terrifying and humiliating.

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MARTIN: So what changes did that provoke?

HARRIS: It's not - as I often say, it's not, like, a neat and tidy story where I had a panic attack and then became a Buddhist and my life has been, you know, all rainbow-barfing unicorns since then. That's not what happened.

MARTIN: That's not what happened?

HARRIS: No. Life is pretty messy usually. And so for me, what happened was I made some immediate changes, which - one of which was I stopped doing drugs. Part of the panic attack was fueled by the fact that after having spent many years in war zones, I very stupidly started to self-medicate with recreational drugs, including cocaine. And I learned after I had the panic attack - I went to a psychiatrist who explained that even though I hadn't been doing drugs that often and I wasn't high on the air, it was enough to change my brain chemistry and make it more likely for somebody who had a preexisting proclivity for anxiety and panic to have a panic attack. So I quit doing drugs. I started seeing a psychiatrist very regularly for many, many years. And then eventually, through a combination of psychotherapy and my beat as a religion reporter, I stumbled upon meditation. And that made a really big difference for me.

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MARTIN: You've spent many years, at this point, thinking about mindfulness, and - I don't know - it's changed in America. I mean, it's a huge industry now, I think, is fair to use that word.

HARRIS: Yes.

MARTIN: As someone at the center of the American mindfulness movement - and I think you are - is mindfulness the same as Buddhism?

HARRIS: No.

MARTIN: Are you a Buddhist?

HARRIS: Yes.

MARTIN: You are.

HARRIS: Yes. I'm a Buddhist, and mindfulness is not the same as Buddhism. Mindfulness, as it's currently practiced in the West, is, in my opinion, a great thing. There are critiques of the modern mindfulness movement that I actually think have validity, and yet I still think it's a great development, a positive development for the species, frankly. One of the critiques is that in the West, we've taken one of the active ingredients of Buddhism - mindfulness - and pulled it out of its original context, and that that can lead to some misunderstandings. I think that's actually true, as far as it goes. I don't think it should doom the entire enterprise, but it's true. Mindfulness was one of the qualities of mind that the Buddha, a genius who lived 2,600 years ago, talked about to his followers. And you can just kind of understand mindfulness as a quality of self-awareness that allows you to see how chaotic your mind is, how cacophonous the mind is without getting carried away by it.

We have this river, this rushing river of thoughts and urges and emotions, but we don't have any visibility into this nonstop cacophony in our minds. And because we don't see it clearly, it just owns us most of the time. And mindfulness is a way to kind of step out of the matrix and to see how wild the mind is, to see the contents of your consciousness so that you don't get carried away by it. And that's an incredibly useful thing that the Buddha talked about. And I'm glad that we're practicing it increasingly in the West and there's all of this evidence to show that meditation or mindfulness - meditation techniques have all of these benefits for the brain and the rest of the body and even for our behavior. But that's not the whole Buddhist story.

MARTIN: Right. So these things are separate. You can practice mindfulness and not necessarily ascribe or define yourself as an adherent to Buddhism.

HARRIS: Absolutely.

MARTIN: But what is the difference, then? Is mindfulness Buddhism without the sacrifices that the religion mandates?

HARRIS: Buddhism is such an interesting thing or not a thing to consider. Is Buddhism a religion? Yeah. Is it a philosophy? Yeah. Is it a science of mind? Yeah. It's so many things. And I think what is true is that you can practice parts of it. So I'm a Buddhist, but I won't sit here and pound the table and say that enlightenment and rebirth are real because I don't have any evidence. And the Buddha was very clear - this is why I think Buddhism appeals to skeptics like me. He was very clear that, look, I'm going to talk about a lot of things. You should not take anything I say at face value. You should come see for yourself, is actually - there - that was the phrase he used. In the language of Pali, which is an ancient Indian language, (speaking Pali) - come see for yourself. Test it out in the lab of your own mind.

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MARTIN: First of all, it's just - as someone who's known you from afar for a long time, I mean, you're the anchor guy who read my intros to my weekend "Good Morning America" stories and nightly news stories. It's a big evolution for you, Dan (laughter).

HARRIS: Yeah. Yes.

MARTIN: It's a big change, but I guess I'm interested in the process by which you arrived at this point because - when you were first introduced to meditation, did it take you a while to start to identify as a Buddhist?

HARRIS: Oh, yeah.

MARTIN: Yeah - to make that change from just, like, hey, I'm a secular skeptic/agnostic to, no, I'm a Buddhist.

HARRIS: Yeah, I'd still say I'm a secular skeptic, in some ways. In fact, one of my favorite descriptions of Buddhism is it's not a thing to believe in; it's a thing to do. And so I see Buddhism as a set of practices that help you understand fundamental truths in your bones. And what changed my mind about Buddhism was recognizing that this practice that I was doing - this practice of meditation - was rooted in this ancient tradition that had this incredible intellectual infrastructure around it that took my secular mindfulness and made it just way more interesting.

MARTIN: Do you think Buddhism works in American culture?

HARRIS: One of the hallmarks of Buddhism is that it adapts to any culture it enters. I think that's largely beautiful, and I think we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that this is, in its origin, an Asian tradition. And I think - one of the mistakes I think I've made is to get overly focused on the scientists and the Western teachers and to de-emphasize the Asian roots of this practice. And that's a mistake I - increasingly, as I - as my career progresses, that I'm trying to rectify because I think it's quite easy for white people in white-dominated Buddhist communities to lose sight of the roots of the practice, and I would just say that that's a blind spot that should be looked at.

MARTIN: What do you think about the corporatization of Buddhism in America?

HARRIS: I think I lean toward a both-and here. Like, this is a cliche, but you've got to speak to people where they are. I'm interested in what works to make people happier or less miserable, however you want to frame that. And I also think the critiques of the corporatization and what's often called McMindfulness (ph) have validity. So it's kind of like they're all - they can all be true at the same time. I can agree with some of the critiques and also feel that - look, at the end of the day, more mindfulness is better than less mindfulness. And I'd rather see this stuff get out there, even if it's not the way I personally would do it.

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HARRIS: Are you meditating?

MARTIN: So it's interesting you should ask. I - so I tried - right? - after "Ten Percent Happier." And then, like most people, I think you try it, and then life happens and you don't anymore. And, you know, my excuse forever was that I had this job that I had to get up super early in the morning for, and if you don't carve out that time in the morning, then the day takes on - you know, can't do it, can't find the time. And then there have been different periods - you know, a bad thing will happen to a family member or something, and I've tried to get back into it. Oh, and it's just - there's a lot of dark stuff sometimes in your head, and it takes real skill, I think. I mean, that's the work - right? - is like sitting with it and then being able to let it go and bring your mind back. It's hard, Dan. I find it very hard. And I'm someone who's really inclined to - I'm very spiritually inclined. I really want it to work. I'm good at taking time out for myself to exercise. I do that every day, but I've had a really hard time sitting with myself and - I don't know, it feels like I'm supposed to, but it's hard.

HARRIS: You know - I mean, look, I didn't ask that to be - to get you to beat yourself up. I hear two things in there that I think are really legit. One is it's hard to find the time. That's just super true. And the second is that it's hard to do the practice. Even on a good day, it's hard to do meditation because the mind is all over the place. But if you've got something upsetting that's going on in your life, well, it's quite possible you're going to, you know, get a front row seat at the Imax movie of that if you meditate.

MARTIN: (Laughter) Right.

HARRIS: So all of that is true. All of that is true. I guess I would just say, while validating that - two things. One - as to the time, you know, everything we know about the science of habit formation and human behavior change is that one of the most successful things - one of the most successful strategies is to start very small. So just to aim to do one minute most days or two minutes most days - daily-ish (ph). That can be a really good way to start. And as to the hardness of the practice - on two levels, one is, you know, just, like, how distractible we are and how hard it is to stay on the breath or whatever it is you're meditating on.

Well, the thing to know is that people, when they get distracted, they often tell themselves a whole story about how they're bad meditators. But it is the waking up from distraction and starting over - that is success. The whole point is to get distracted and start again and again and again because, when you wake up from distraction, you're seeing how wild your mind is. And then when you see - when you get familiar with the chaos of the mind, well, then it doesn't own you as much. That's mindfulness.

MARTIN: Thank you. Dan, it's so nice to talk to you.

HARRIS: It's great to talk to you.

MARTIN: Dan Harris - he's host of the podcast "Ten Percent Happier," author of the book of the same name and former ABC News anchor.

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DETROW: And you can hear more of Rachel's Enlighten Me series this time next week. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.