10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works--A True Story

by Harris, Dan

  Day Five

  I wake up desperate.

  I’m drowning in doubt, genuinely considering quitting and going home. I seriously don’t know if I can make it another day. I need to talk to someone. I need help. But I don’t have an interview scheduled with Goldstein today. The only lifeline available to me is Dreaded Spring.

  Since she is still technically an apprentice teacher, Spring is not assigned to directly oversee any of the yogis throughout the retreat. She has, however, posted a sign-up sheet on the message board for anyone who wants to come see her for an interview. With no small amount of hesitation, I sign up.

  When my time comes, I enter the little office where she’s receiving people. She’s seated, smiling, with her shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She looks impossibly smug to me. I’m not even sure we are equipped to communicate with each other. We’re two different species. This is going to be like a lizard trying to talk to a goat.

  But whatever—I dive right in to my cri de coeur. “I’m giving this everything I have,” I tell her, “but I’m not getting anywhere. I don’t know if I can hack this. I’m really struggling here.”

  When she answers, she’s no longer using her funny voice. She’s talking like a normal person. “You’re trying too hard,” she tells me. The diagnosis is delivered frankly and firmly. This is a classic problem on the first retreat, she explains. She advises me to just do my best, expect nothing, and “be with” whatever comes up in my mind. “It’s the total opposite of daily life,” she says, “where we do something and expect a result. Here, it’s just sitting with whatever is there.”

  She goes on to say that she’s received a whole series of distraught retreatants, many of them in tears. This produces a very un-metta-like feeling in me: a satisfying rush of Schadenfreude. Well, well: some of these zombies aren’t as blissed-out as they seem, after all.

  I look back at Spring, sitting there with her curly locks spread out over her shawl, and I realize this nice woman was a victim of another one of my rushes to judgment. Spring is actually very cool; I’m the dumbass. She’s right: it’s not complicated; I’m just trying too hard. I feel so grateful I could cry.

  For the next sitting, I decide to take a chair from my bedroom and put it out on the balcony at the end of the hallway in my dorm. I tell myself I’m going to lower the volume, to stop straining so much. I’ll just sit here and “be with” whatever happens.

  I can hear the others in the distance, walking back into the meditation hall for the start of the session. Then it gets really quiet. I sit, casually feeling my breath. No big deal. Whatever, man.

  A few minutes in, something clicks. There’s no string music, no white light. It’s more like, after days of trying to tune into a specific radio frequency, I finally find the right setting. I just start letting my focus fall on whatever is the most prominent thing in my field of consciousness.

  Neck pain.

  Knee pain.

  Airplane overhead.

  Birdsong.

  Sizzle of rustling leaves.

  Breeze on my forearm.

  I’m really enjoying putting cashews and raisins in my oatmeal at breakfast.

  Neck. Knee. Neck. Neck. Knee, knee, knee.

  Hunger pang. Neck. Knee. Hands numb. Bird. Knee. Bird, bird, bird.

  I think I know what’s going on here. This is something called “choiceless awareness.” I’d heard the teachers talk about it. It’s some serious behind-the-waterfall action. Once you’ve built up enough concentration, they say, you can drop your obsessive focus on the breath and just “open up” to whatever is there. And that’s what’s happening right now. Each “object” that “arises” in my mind, I focus on with what feels like total ease and clarity until it’s replaced by something else. I’m not trying; it’s just happening. It’s so easy it feels like I’m cheating. Everything’s coming at me and I’m playing it all like jazz. And I don’t even like jazz.

  Back pain.

  Funny lights you see behind your eyes when they’re closed real tight.

  Murderous itch on my calf.

  Knee. Knee, knee, knee.

  Itch, knee, back, itch, itch, itch, knee, airplane, tree rustling, breeze on skin, knee, knee, itch, knee, lights, back.

  Then I hear a loud rumble approaching. It’s getting closer.

  Now it’s super loud, like the fleet of choppers coming over the horizon in that scene from Apocalypse Now.

  Now it’s right in front of me.

  I open my eyes. There’s a hummingbird hovering just a few feet away.

  No shit.

  The next sitting is even more exhilarating. I’m back in the meditation hall now, and I’m really doing it. Whatever comes up in my mind, it feels like I’m right there with it. At times, I still find myself looking forward to the session ending. But when those thoughts come up, I just note them and move on.

  It’s like a curtain has been lifted. It’s not that anything in the passing show is so amazing in itself; it’s the sheer rapidity of it all, the objects arising and passing, ricocheting off one another with such speed. And there’s something about the act of being present and awake in this way that produces a gigantic blast of serotonin.

  Hands feel stiff.

  Bird.

  Feet numb.

  Images of all those creepy baby faces in Renaissance art.

  Heart pounding.

  Back. Bird. Hands. Feet. Heart. Back, back, bird, feet, bird, bird, bird. Feet, hands, feet, feet, feet.

  Hands. Hands. Back, back, back. Heart, bird, feet. Feet. Bird.

  Feetbirdfeetbirdbackfeetfeetfeetheart.

  Bird.

  Bird.

  Bird.

  Old lady in the front row produces an epic burp.

  It’s like I’d spent the past five days being dragged by my head behind a motorboat and now, all of a sudden, I’m up on water skis. This is an experience of my own mind I’ve never had before—a front-row seat to watch the machinery of consciousness. It’s thrilling, but it also produces some very practical insights. I get a real sense of how a few slippery little thoughts I might have in, say, the morning before I go to work—maybe after a quarrel with Bianca, a story I read in the paper, or an imagined dialogue with my boss—can weasel their way into the stream of my mind and pool in unseen eddies, from which they hector and haunt me throughout the day. Thoughts calcify into opinions, little seeds of discontent blossom into bad moods, unnoticed back pain makes me inexplicably irritable with anyone who happens to cross my path.

  I’m remembering that time when my friend Kaiama stumped me by asking how anyone can be in the present moment when it’s always slipping away. It’s so obvious to me now: the slipping away is the whole point. Once you’ve achieved choiceless awareness, you see so clearly how fleeting everything is. Impermanence is no longer theoretical. Tempus fugit isn’t just something you inscribe in books and clocks. And that, I realize, is what this retreat is designed to do.

  Having been dragged kicking and screaming into the present, I’m finally awake enough to see what I could never see in my regular life. Apparently there’s no other way to get here than to engage in the tedious work of watching your breath for days. In a way, it makes sense. How do you learn a sport? You do drills. A language? Conjugate endless verbs. A musical instrument? Scales. All the misery of repetition, the horror of sitting here in this hall with these zombies suddenly seems totally worth it.

  Walking meditation is starting to click for me as well. I’m out on the patio in front of the retreat hall, deconstructing every step. Lift, move, place. My feet feel nice on the warm stones. Midway through one of the endless round-trips to nowhere, even though it’s technically a violation of Goldstein’s rule against using walking meditation as “recess,” I stop and stare at three baby birds perched on the ledge overlooking the courtyard, screeching their heads off as their mom zips to and fro, popping food into their mouths. I’m transfixed. A few other people have joined me, gaping at this little show. I feel inc
redibly happy—and I keep telling myself not to cling to it.

  When I walk back into the hall for the next sit, I see Spring up at the altar. Right, it’s metta time. I lie down, and we start in, directing the four phrases at ourselves.

  May you be happy. May you be safe. Etc.

  Then Spring tells us to pick our benefactor. I pick my mother. I summon a mental picture of her from a few weeks ago, when she and I were taking care of my two-year-old niece, Campbell. We had just given Campbell a bath, and all three of us were lying on the bed. My mom started singing Campbell’s favorite song, M. Ward’s “For Beginners,” which Campbell referred to as “the uh-huh song,” because the chorus includes a lot of “uh-huhs.” I’m able to generate a real felt-sense of my mom. I’m enjoying the sweet absurdity of a grandmother having memorized the words to an indie rock song. As I picture her, with her neatly coiffed, short gray hair, and her smart, casual clothing, something entirely unexpected overcomes me: a silent sob wells up in my chest—with all the inevitability of a sneeze.

  There’s no stopping this. Tears rush down the sides of my recumbent face, streaming down my temples in hot streams that get thicker with each successive wave of emotion. The water is pooling behind my ears.

  “Now pick a dear friend,” says Spring. She’s back to using her funny voice but it’s not bothering me at all.

  I go with Campbell. It couldn’t be more convenient; she’s already right here in this scene I’m conjuring in such vivid detail. She’s propped up against the pillow on the bed. I have one of her little feet in my hand and am looking at her sweet face with her mischievous eyes, which are eagerly lapping up all the attention my mom and I are giving her.

  I’m crying even harder now. It’s not an out-loud sobbing, but there’s no way the people around me aren’t noticing this, because I’m sniffling and breathing choppily.

  The blubbering lasts right up until when the bell rings. As I walk out of the hall, I’m grateful for the rule against eye contact; otherwise, this would be very embarrassing. I emerge into the daylight, walk down the hill a ways, and stand in the scrub grass under the warm afternoon sun. Amid the crashing waves of bliss, I feel a gentle undertow of doubt. Is this bullshit, or the real deal? Maybe it’s just the result of five days of unbroken agony finally relieved? Like that joke where the guy is banging his head against the wall—when asked why he’s doing it, he says, “Because it feels so good when I stop.”

  But no, the waves of happiness just keep coming. Everything is so bright, so crisp. I feel great. Not just great—unprecedentedly great. I’m aware of the urge to cling to this feeling, to wring out every last bit of flavor, like with a tangy piece of gum, or a tab of ecstasy. But this is not the synthetic, always-just-about-to-end buzz of drugs. This is roughly a thousand times better. It’s the best high of my life.

  My nose is running savagely. I don’t have anything to wipe it with. I blow it into my hand and walk, dripping snot, to the nearest bathroom, laughing goofily.

  I take a run. I’ve been doing this most afternoons. I’ve found a little route that goes through an adjacent horse farm and out into the local neighborhood of upper-middle-class homes. I’m still high. As my feet pound, I’m crying, then laughing at myself crying, and then crying some more. I’m wondering whether this is the start of a different way of being in the world for me, one where—as Brilliant Genius Spring has described—you train yourself to have compassion rather than aversion as your “default setting.”

  I’d be loath to call what I’m feeling spiritual or mystical. Those terms connote—to me, at least—otherworldliness or unreality. By contrast, what’s happening right now feels hyperreal, as if I’ve been pulled out of a dream rather than thrust into one.

  After dinner, it’s Goldstein giving the dharma talk. He’s making an intriguing point. The Buddha’s signature pronouncement—“Life is suffering”—is the source of a major misunderstanding, and by extension, a major PR problem. It makes Buddhism seem supremely dour. Turns out, though, it’s all the result of a translation error. The Pali word dukkha doesn’t actually mean “suffering.” There’s no perfect word in English, but it’s closer to “unsatisfying” or “stressful.” When the Buddha coined his famous phrase, he wasn’t saying that all of life is like being chained to a rock and having crows peck out your innards. What he really meant was something like, “Everything in the world is ultimately unsatisfying and unreliable because it won’t last.”

  As Goldstein points out, we don’t live our lives as if we recognize the basic facts. “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?”

  It’s so strange for me to be sitting and listening to what is essentially a sermon, complete with quotes from a sacred text, and to be genuinely moved. After all those years of being the only nonbeliever in a room filled with rapt devotees, here I am sitting and taking notes, totally engrossed, nodding my head.

  I mean, he’s so right. In cartoons, when the characters slurp down some delicious food or drink, they smack their lips and seem totally sated. But in the real world, it doesn’t work that way. Even if we were handed everything we wanted, would it really make us sustainably happy? How many times have we heard from people who got rich or famous and it wasn’t enough? Rock stars with drug problems. Lottery winners who kill themselves. There’s actually a term for this—“hedonic adaptation.” When good things happen, we bake them very quickly into our baseline expectations, and yet the primordial void goes unfilled.

  Goldstein makes clear, as he did the other night, that he’s not saying we can’t enjoy pleasant things in life. But if we can achieve a deeper understanding of “suffering,” of the unreliability of everything we experience, it will help us appreciate the inherent poignancy of everything in the world. “It’s like we’ve been enchanted,” he says. “We’ve been put under a spell—believing that this or that is going to be the source of our ultimate freedom or happiness. And to wake up from that, to wake up from that enchantment, to be more aligned with what is true, it brings us much greater happiness.”

  On 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 “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 the night, as I leave the hall, I turn around toward the Buddha, and—I can’t believe I’m doing this—I bow.

  Day Six

  I wake up, and the world is still magical.

  I’m becoming almost frighteningly alert. My senses are heightened, like in the movies when a mortal starts turning into a vampire. After breakfast, as I walk back up the hill, I can hear the mice scurrying underneath the brush alongside the path. I have a freakish attunement to the communications within the hidden society of birds in the trees.

  Meditation is still easy. I start by doing a round of breath-focus, which is like filling a hot-air balloon; once the mind is fully inflated with concentration, I just let it fly into choiceless awareness.

  Urge to scratch.

  Image of a row of baboons sitting on bales of hay.

  Thought of the illicit apple I’m hiding in my room.

  Even “bad” stuff doesn’t seem to really get to me. I can feel myself playing with the cape of pain draped over my back. I’m in
vestigating it, without letting it truly bother me.

  At lunch, I realize that I’ve now become one of these people who chews with his eyes shut. Eating mindfully, I actually put the fork down between bites rather than hunting around the plate while I’m still swallowing. As a result, I stop eating when I’m full, as opposed to stuffing my face until I’m nearly sick, as I usually do.

  I spot a guy on the other side of the room who seems to be enjoying his meal immensely. I experience a sudden upsurge of what the Buddhists call mudita, “sympathetic joy.” It’s so strong I almost start blubbering again. It happens once more when I look up and see three women helping one another get the remaining chai out of the big metal pot in which it’s served. This tableau of silent, awkward, eyes-averted cooperation fills my eyes to the rim.

  But then, as quickly as it came, the rapture evaporates.

  The afternoon meditation session is a humbling reversion. Sleep beckons with the unwanted seductiveness of a clingy ex-girlfriend. At times, I nod off for a nanosecond, and then come to with what feels like a jackhammer to the head. At the end of forty-five minutes, I have a massive headache. It’s official: the magic is gone.

  The afternoon metta session leaves me cold.

  During the last sitting of the day, I am hit with a sickening jolt of restless energy so strong that it feels as if it might leave my limbs palsied. It gets so bad that I do the heretofore unthinkable. I resort to the one measure that, despite all the preceding difficulties, I have not yet employed: I give up. I open my eyes and sit in the hall, looking around guiltily.

  Day Seven

  Now I’m back to counting the days until I can leave. The thought crosses my mind that maybe I’ve gotten all I’m going to get out of this experience.

  I’m still bowing to the Buddha, but mostly for the hamstring stretch.

  Day Eight

  I’m on the schedule to see Goldstein this morning. I arrive full of piss and vinegar; he’ll be the first person I tell about my recent meditative attainments. I practically bound to my seat, and give him a full report on my breakthrough: the choiceless awareness, the hummingbird, the metta-induced weeping.