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ca301ed
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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." --
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Dan Harris |
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The fact that you exist is a highly statistically improbable event, and if you are not perpetually surprised by the fact that you exist you don't deserve to be here.
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Dan Harris |
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1fc627a
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If you stay in the moment, you'll have what is called spontaneous right action, which is intuitive, which is creative, which is visionary, which eavesdrops on the mind of the universe.
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Dan Harris |
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418d579
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Picture the mind like a waterfall, they said: the water is the torrent of thoughts and emotions; mindfulness is the space behind the waterfall. Again, elegant theory - but, easier said than done.
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Dan Harris |
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Don't you ever get pissed off, annoyed, irritated, sad--anything negative?" "No, I accept what is. And that's why life has become so simple." "Well, what if somebody cuts you off in your car?" "It's fine. It's like a sudden gust of wind. I don't personalize a gust of wind, and so it's simply what is."
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Dan Harris |
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This, as Joseph had pointed out on retreat, is 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 as soon as we find ourselves in the airport gate area, having ingested 470 calories' worth of sugar and ..
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Dan Harris |
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0cdb650
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In a nutshell, mindfulness is the ability to recognize what is happening in your mind right now--anger, jealousy, sadness, the pain of a stubbed toe, whatever--without getting carried away by it. According to the Buddha, we have three habitual responses to everything we experience. We want it, reject it, or we zone out. Cookies: I want. Mosquitoes: I reject. The safety instructions the flight attendants read aloud on an airplane: I zone out..
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Dan Harris |
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ca77ef6
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the Buddha's main thesis was that in a world where everything is constantly changing, we suffer because we cling to things that won't last.
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Dan Harris |
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275fc50
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We all have an innate feeling of being separate from the world, peering out at life from behind our own little self, and vying against other isolated selves. But how can we truly be separate from the same world that created us? "Dust to dust" isn't just something they say at funerals, it's the truth. You can no more disconnect from the universe and its inhabitants than a wave can extricate itself from the ocean."
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Dan Harris |
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fc4ad60
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I'm thinking: Yes, right--there is a point to sitting around all day with your eyes closed: to gain some control over the mind, to see through the forces that drive us--and drive us nuts.
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Dan Harris |
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68d7d3f
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when you squelch something, you give it power. Ignorance is not bliss.
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Dan Harris |
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They had a term, too, for that thing I did where something would bother me and I would immediately project forward to an unpleasant future (e.g., Balding - Unemployment - Flophouse). The Buddhists called this prapanca (pronounced pra-PUN-cha), which roughly translates to "proliferation," or "the imperialistic tendency of mind." That captured it beautifully, I thought: something happens, I worry, and that concern instantaneously colonizes my..
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Dan Harris |
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retreat, with nothing to look forward to, nowhere to be, nothing to do, we are forced to confront the "wound of existence" head-on, to stare into the abyss and realize that so much of what we do in life--every shift in our seat, every bite of food, every pleasant daydream--is designed to avoid pain or seek pleasure. But if we can drop all that, we can, as Sam once said in his speech to the angry, befuddled atheists, learn how to be happy "b..
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Dan Harris |
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4017bde
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There's a reason why they call Buddhism "advanced common sense"; it's all about methodically confronting obvious-but-often-overlooked truths (everything changes, nothing fully satisfies) until something in you shifts."
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Dan Harris |
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b2fa786
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including salutary effects on the following: * major depression * drug addiction * binge eating * smoking cessation * stress among cancer patients * loneliness among senior citizens * ADHD * asthma * psoriasis * irritable bowel syndrome Studies also indicated that meditation reduced levels of stress hormones, boosted the immune system, made office workers more focused, and improved test scores on the GRE. Apparently mindfulness did everythi..
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Dan Harris |
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e04c54a
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write down this quote from Jon Kabat-Zinn and put it up on your wall: "Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It's about feeling the way you feel."
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Dan Harris |
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286d861
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in our seat, every bite of food, every pleasant daydream--is designed to avoid pain or seek pleasure. But if we can drop all that, we can, as Sam once said in his speech to the angry, befuddled atheists, learn how to be happy "before anything happens." This happiness is self-generated, not contingent on exogenous forces; it's the opposite of "suffering." What the Buddha recognized was a genuine game changer. After the final meditation of th..
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Dan Harris |
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753e81f
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Axelrod responded, "All we can do is everything we can do."
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Dan Harris |
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97a6479
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All I had to do was tell myself: if it doesn't work, I only need the grit to start again--just like when my mind wandered in meditation.
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Dan Harris |
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20bfe9f
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I do know one thing for sure: there's much more for me to do. Whether or not 100% happy is achievable, I can definitely be more than 10% happier--and I'm excited to
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Dan Harris |
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a79da67
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What he really meant was something like, "Everything in the world is ultimately unsatisfying and unreliable because it won't last." --
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Dan Harris |
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Our entire lives, he argued, are governed by a voice in our heads. This voice is engaged in a ceaseless stream of thinking--most of it negative, repetitive, and self-referential. It squawks away at us from the minute we open our eyes in the morning until the minute we fall asleep at night, if it allows us to sleep at all. Talk, talk, talk: the voice is constantly judging and labeling everything in its field of vision. Its targets aren't jus..
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Dan Harris |
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In moments where I was temporarily able to suspend my monkey mind and simply experience whatever was going on, I got just the smallest taste of the happiness I'd achieved while on retreat.
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Dan Harris |
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967ca60
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As best I could understand it, the Buddha's main thesis was that in a world where everything is constantly changing, we suffer because we cling to things that won't last. A central theme of the Buddha's "dharma" (which roughly translates to "teaching") revolved around the very word that had been wafting through my consciousness when I used to lie on my office couch, pondering the unpredictability of television news: "impermanence."
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Dan Harris |
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e9a7906
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In his books, Tolle repeatedly denigrated the habit of worrying, which he characterized as a useless process of projecting fearfully into an imaginary future. "There is no way that you can cope with such a situation, because it doesn't exist."
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Dan Harris |
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94c9cf8
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Marturano recommended something radical: do only one thing at a time. When you're on the phone, be on the phone. When you're in a meeting, be there. Set aside an hour to check your email, and then shut off your computer monitor and focus on the task
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Dan Harris |
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3a73b0d
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There's actually a term for this--"hedonic adaptation." When good things happen, we bake them very quickly into our baseline expectations,"
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Dan Harris |
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You have a quote that I love. You say, 'Most of one's own troubles, worries, and sadness come from self-cherishing, self-centeredness.' But don't we need to be somewhat self-centered in order to succeed in life?" "Self-cherishing, that's by nature," he said (by which I assumed he meant it's "natural"). "Without that, we human beings become like robots, no feeling. But now, practice for development of concern for well-being of others, that a..
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Dan Harris |
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f07d812
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often it's not the unknown that scares us, it's that we think we know what's going to happen--and that it's going to be bad. But the truth is, we really don't know." The smart play, she said, was to turn the situation to my internal advantage. "Fear of annihilation," she said, "can lead to great insight, because it reminds us of impermanence and the fact that we are not in control."
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Dan Harris |
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Striving is fine, as long as it's tempered by the realization that, in an entropic universe, the final outcome is out of your control. If you don't waste your energy on variables you cannot influence, you can focus much more effectively on those you can. 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 your..
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Dan Harris |
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0720682
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The price of security is insecurity." Dr. Jay Harris,"
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Dan Harris |
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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.
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Dan Harris |
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901efb1
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It was the longest, most exquisite high of my life, but the hangover came first.
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Dan Harris |
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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. We "live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation," he wrote. We wax nostalgic for prior events during which we were doubtless ruminating or projecting. We cast forward to future events during which we will certainly be fantasizing. But as Tolle pointed out, it is, quite literally, always Now...
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Dan Harris |
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Focusing on the breath as a way to temporarily stop the thinking was like using a broom to sweep a floor crawling with cockroaches. You could clear the space briefly, but then the bugs came marauding back in.
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Dan Harris |
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7f8c0c7
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The Self-Interested Case for Not Being a Dick
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Dan Harris |
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a4f152b
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Mark had helped me see that 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.
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Dan Harris |
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1ddb318
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It's not me telling you," she said. "It's neuroscience that would say that our capacity to multitask is virtually nonexistent. Multitasking is a computer-derived term. We have one processor. We can't do it." "I think that when I'm sitting at my desk feverishly doing seventeen things at once that I'm being clever and efficient, but you're saying I'm actually wasting my time?" "Yes, because when you're moving from this project to this project..
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Dan Harris |
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1b9ca39
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What's with you and the whole meditation thing?" Trying to avoid another long, unsuccessful answer, I blurted out, "I do it because it makes me 10% happier." The look on her face instantly changed. What had been a tiny glimmer of scorn was suddenly transformed into an expression of genuine interest. "Really?" she said. "That sounds pretty good, actually."
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Dan Harris |
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ff44c9b
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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."
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Dan Harris |
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16b089a
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We "live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation," he wrote. We wax nostalgic for prior events during which we were doubtless ruminating or projecting. We cast forward to future events during which we will certainly be fantasizing."
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Dan Harris |
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ce66268
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meditation is simply exercise for your brain. It's a proven technique for preventing the voice in your head from leading you around by the nose.
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Dan Harris |
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195adae
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Make the present moment your friend rather than your enemy. Because many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment. And imagine living your whole life like that, where always this moment is never quite right, not good enough because you need to get to the next one. That
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Dan Harris |
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98d0968
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Self-cherishing, that's by nature," he said (by which I assumed he meant it's "natural"). "Without that, we human beings become like robots, no feeling. But now, practice for development of concern for well-being of others, that actually is immense benefit to oneself." 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 ultimate..
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Dan Harris |