You Keep Doing the Thing You Swore You'd Stop — Here's the Actual Fix | Diana Winston

Key Takeaway

When a difficult emotion or recurring habit takes over, do a four-part reset before acting: ground by feeling your feet, name the emotion and its body sensations, offer yourself kindness, then ask your “wisdom mind” what is actually true or needed. This interrupts the reflex to judge, lash out, numb, or spiral. You do not need to eliminate the emotion; lowering its intensity just enough creates room for a wiser next move.

Episode Overview

Diana Winston joins Dan Harris to explore four forms of awakening: returning to the present moment, healing entrenched patterns, becoming more skillful in relationships, and accessing everyday experiences of connection and transcendence. She shares practical mindfulness practices for interrupting emotional reactivity, working with self-judgment and interpersonal judgments, and savoring moments of peace and love.

Full Transcript

Transcript of You Keep Doing the Thing You Swore You'd Stop — Here's the Actual Fix | Diana Winston from 10% Happier. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Here's something that I find frustrating and sometimes humiliating. There are certain mistakes that I just make again and again and again, even though I've got the tools, even though I've done the therapy, I just keep making the same mistakes again. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. Why we get stuck in the same old patterns and how to get out of them. My guest today is Diana Winston. Director of UCLA Mindful and UCLA Health.

Also the author of a book called The Little Book of Being. Not for nothing, she spent a year as a Buddhist nun in Burma, which I find endlessly impressive. One other thing to say about Diana before we dive in here, she's leading a meditation challenge over on my app, 10% with Dan Harris. It's called the Reset Meditation Challenge. It starts next week. It runs from September 21st through the 25th. The goal is to help you reset in lots of ways, to reboot your meditation practice, to help you reset when you wake up at three in the morning, when you're stuck in a thought spiral, when you're trapped in judgments of yourself or other people.

Lots of ways to reset with Diana Winston. Diana, welcome back to the show. Hi Dan, thanks for inviting me back. We're gonna go deep on breaking out of old patterns, but I wanna step all the way back here because when Marissa Schneiderman, one of our veteran producers reached out to you to see what you wanted to talk about, you said you wanted to talk about awakening. Again, we will get to breaking out of old patterns because that is part of how you view awakening. But let me just start there on the word awakening because many of us get into meditation or related practices to relieve stress, sleep a little better.

But the goal of the practice as articulated by a guy known as the Buddha was to awaken. In fact, the word Buddha means awake though, the awakened one. So what do you mean when you use that word awakening? Yeah, it's a pretty broad term, obviously, and it can be used to mean a lot of different things from awakening to more freedom and peace and understanding, awakening from the ways that we're caught in our old habits and that we can find new ways to act and be in the world, awakening into the here and now, which is a huge part of it, like not being lost in our thoughts and ruminations, but just awakening to the experience of being alive in this moment.

And then of course, as you were sort of pointing to, there are these deeper, more profound understandings in the tradition about awakening that sort of have these more esoteric end of things. But I think it can be like really, really specific and useful in daily life. We don't need to worry about nirvana necessarily in this context. We definitely don't need to worry about it, but we might wanna think about it a little bit. I mean, we can talk a tiny bit about it, but here I'm mostly interested in ordinary people doing ordinary things and waking up into more peace and freedom and joy.

Okay, we'll get to the deeper end of the pool because I love thinking about nirvana. I tend not to worry about it. You're right. But it is interesting to think about enlightenment, et cetera, et cetera. But let's start with the more easier to grasp aspects of awakening. You've got these four ways in which you think about the word. The first is to wake up to like what's happening right now. This is one of the principle spiritual cliches, the present moment, but cliches get to be cliches because they point to something deep.

So say a little bit about what you have in mind when you talk about waking up to the present moment. Right, so you're right. It is a little cliched, but it's real, right? It's when we're in the midst of whatever it is that's causing us to be lost, to be out of touch with ourself, to be lost in ruminations and worry and fear. And then suddenly there's this moment where we realize we're lost and we just go, we take a breath and we come into this present moment.

And so coming into the present moment could be a lot of things. It could be like taking a breath and calming ourselves down. It could be pausing and looking and seeing what's around ourselves. But it's really about taking us out of that, the spell. It's kind of like we're under a spell where we're lost and alienated from ourself in a way. And then we can reset into this present moment here and now. And we can do it a hundred times a day because we get lost a hundred times a day.

When you say waking up from the spell, I just think about how Buddhists use the term disenchantment in a positive way. The enchantment is the enchantment that we're separate, that we're lost in our dramas, right? Like we're enchanted. And then when we wake up, when we become disenchanted, we sort of wake up from that confusion, from that spell, that's the language I'm using. But there's also a disenchantment in Buddhism that has to do with a little bit of disenchantment of the cycle of suffering and wanting and receiving and realizing that there's no payoff and that kind of thing.

So there's also that type of disenchantment, yeah. They feel related in some ways to me. Like we get enchanted by our thought processes, our fantasies, negative or positive. And we also get enchanted by the notion that we can continue to achieve and accumulate and that will somehow finally do it for us. But waking up from both of those spells seems productive. Yeah, absolutely. And that is a kind of waking up when we go, oh, I've been lost. Whether it's lost in like thinking that getting my new car is gonna make me happy versus I'm just lost in my drama.

I mean, how many times a day are we lost in our drama and our stories and our worries and our fears and concerns? And then, wait a minute, just come back to yourself for a moment. Come back to this moment. What is here right now? I'm human, I'm standing here, I'm breathing. There's the sound of birds. This is the present moment. It's available to us. So yeah, so there's multiple ways, I think you're right, that we can see this. I mean, everything you're saying sounds so commonsensical and attractive and yet easier said than done, I think.

So like very practically, how can we get better at waking up to what's here right now? As a meditation teacher, I'd have to say meditate is one way because that's how you gain the tool of understanding when you're lost in thought and when you come back into the present moment. And if you do this over time and with practice, you get better and better at it so that when you're out in daily life, then your mind is more easily like, oh, I'm lost, right, come back.

So that's just the baseline of it. But the second one is like, is how do we do this informal practice? You know, we call it informal versus formal practice, the formal when you're deliberately sitting down to meditate, informal when you're doing it out in the world, in the midst of life. And it's like, the mind can come back to the present moment at any moment. It's always available. It's gonna take something to kind of like remind you to get there. And it could be your practice is a reminder and because you've been doing it a lot, you are reminded, but it might not be that.

It might be there's little alarm bells going off like, oh, I'm suffering, I'm really uncomfortable. That's a mindfulness spell. And then we can very practically do something that is like a reset into the present moment. What is here right now? My heart is aching, my stomach is clenched, my jaw is tight, breathe. Yeah, there's just this aliveness that's happening and it's manifesting in that way, but I can be here, be present with it and it can pull us out of the drama. What if we don't wanna wake up to the present moment because what's happening right now, either in reality or in our body and our mind is we believe too unpleasant to be with?

Yeah, it's an interesting question. And one thing is, for instance, let's say someone has a lot of pain in their body and so they don't wanna be in this present moment because the present moment feels really painful. There are other ways to explore the present moment that are not focusing on the suffering, right? So a person who's having a lot of physical pain might turn their attention to the sounds around them and there might be a sense of rest by just listening to whatever sounds are coming and going or open your eyes and look at, I have a window in front of me and there's a garden and it's just, if I allow myself to take that in, it's resetting into the present moment but not into the thing that is difficult.

So that's one way, it's kind of like a, I mean, it's almost like a distraction but it's a mindful distraction. So it's quite useful or when you're having a really intense emotional experience and you don't wanna be present at all, going on a mindful walk and just taking in the sights and sounds and feeling your body as you're moving might be the thing to do rather than I have to feel this awful thing. But also, as you gain skills with meditation, you start to have the ability to be present even when it's hard and that's another step.

One thing I've noticed and I think this is pretty common is especially if you've got a little bit of meditation experience and you fancy yourself to be a meditator but I think this can be true for non-meditators as well and I always try to make content that appeals to everybody. Waking back up can be accompanied by a loud blast of self-criticism for like having been lost for so long. So how do we, yeah, what do you recommend if I'm moving through the day and something, I use the term mindfulness bell, there's some sort of mindfulness bell and I wake back up but my first instinct is to be like, well, what the fuck have you been doing for the last seven hours, Harris?

I mean, this is where practicing kindness and compassion comes in, which obviously I know you talk about and you share with people but the main thing is, it's like life is conditioning us to not be in the present moment. Life is conditioning us to be busy, checking off our to-do list, do it right. So it's actually more unusual to reset into the present moment. So when you have, when you come back rather than going, I'm such a jerk though, so I can't believe I was spacing out all day, reframe it like, oh, I'm back, that's cool, that's great.

So it's a little bit more of an attitude shift and then we can continue practices that help us have less of that reactive voice to that. So it's a two-ply approach. One, there are practices that too in depth today that can help you just kind of warm up your inner weather, practices like Metta or loving kindness, as it's also known. That's one thing. And the second thing is, you can learn over time, tune into, yeah, the self-judgment might be there when you wake up, but you can like kind of tune into the deliciousness of waking up.

I'm back. Yeah, I'm back. Yes, I was on a loving kindness retreat like 10 years ago with a teacher named Spring Washam, who I suspect you might know, who, side note, Spring just is on a year-long compassion meditation retreat right now. There goes Spring. Yeah, which is very impressive. I was on a nine-day retreat with her, so much less impressive, but still, not nothing. And I was really beating myself up for my penchant for distraction. And I don't know if it was her suggestion or mine, but I got into the habit, and I still do this, when I wake up, I'll say to myself, great job, welcome back.

And it's a nice little mantra. That's awesome. I love that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember like many, many years ago when I started meditating, and I was trying really hard to be mindful in the day, and I called this friend of mine who I'd met on a retreat, and I said, I said, I'm doing a horrible job. I'm only mindful five times in the entire day. And he said, no, no, no. That's five times you're mindful. That's amazing. Good job. And I had to rethink my judgmental mind.

Yes, yes. I love that. There are so many times in my life, and I suspect this is true for you, where you just need a little reset, some little hack to get you out of a thought spiral, or to help you fall back to sleep when you wake up at three in the morning, or help you recover from some sort of temper tantrum. You know what I'm talking about. Which brings me to a little meditation challenge we're launching over on my app, 10% with Dan Harris.

Starting on Monday, September 21st, we're kicking off a five-day meditation challenge. It's called Reset, and it's all about getting back on solid ground when life throws you for a loop, which is inevitable in all of our lives. This challenge is guided by the amazing Diana Winston, who's a really legendary and fascinating and very nice meditation teacher. And crucially, she has crafted each daily practice to be something you can actually do in a moment of suffering, when you're struggling in some way, large or small. These practices can literally help you reset.

September 21st through the 25th, Reset with Diana and friends and me over on the 10% with Dan Harris app. You can sign up now at danharris.com. I was just told by my wife and son that we're taking a trip to Italy next year. They make these decisions and then tell me about them later, but I'm really excited about it. And if and when we confirm those plans, I'm going to use Rosetta Stone to learn some Italian. So I've got a fighting chance of being understood as we move through the country, which I'm very excited to do.

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This gets you access to Rosetta Stone Sapphire in 25 languages. Visit rosettastone.com slash happier to redeem your 20% off. Speaking of mindfulness bells, things that can kind of bring us back to the present moment, to name-check another teacher, Joseph Goldstein. He often talks about using rushing, the sensation of toppling forward, as a reminder to wake up. I'm just curious how that goes down with you. I hadn't heard that in a while, but now I'm remembering that he does say that. I think it's fantastic. You look at the thing that is the opposite of mindfulness, and when you see that you're doing it, it invites you to bring the mindfulness in in that moment.

So rushing is typically not mindful, so it's great. One of the tools that I like is what I call a mindfulness frame. When you put a frame around a painting or a photograph, it's to make you see it more clearly. So when we know we're going into something that's going to be particularly hard to be mindful, and it may be rushing, or it may be that you're going into a meeting with people you're having a hard time with, or it may be like you always lose your keys when you come in from the house or something, sort of do what I call put this mindfulness frame around it, which means you kind of beef up your mindfulness in that moment.

So when you're getting out of the car, you just set an intention to be extra mindful. You walk in with mindfulness, you put the keys down with awareness, and then you stay a little mindful afterwards. And you've kind of like framed the experience so that you're more likely to be mindful in a time that you would less likely be mindful. You've crafted a series of guided meditations that we're going to be using as a meditation challenge next week. And you've got one around waking back up to the present moment, and this is a formal meditation practice.

We don't have to do it right now, but can you just give a brief description of it, so people might be able to glean whatever wisdom they can from the basic description, and also hopefully it inspires them to go do it. I call it the three-center check-in. It's really just resetting us into the present moment, what is happening. So you can do it in the middle of your day, or you can do it as a meditation practice, and you just pause for a moment, and the three centers would be your body, your emotions, and your mind.

So you stop and you check in. I mean, we can even quickly do it, like what's happening in my body right now. There's heaviness, lightness, warmth, tingling, just kind of feel what's here. Maybe take a breath, especially if you notice some tension. And then maybe what's happening in my emotions, in my heart, and like what's here. I'm sad, happy, scared, angry, irritated, letting whatever is here be here. And then what's going on in my mind? Is my mind racing? Is it present? Is there a thought that just keeps going over and over?

And just kind of notice for a moment, again, letting whatever is here be here. And then notice the whole thing together. What's present? All of it. Okay, if you're practicing along with me, that's kind of a very short version of what would be like a five or seven-minute meditation. But it's just coming into the reality, the truth of this present moment. What's happening in my body, my emotions, and my mind? It's a reset. I mean, it's super helpful. I have people do this particular meditation a lot.

If one could develop the habit of doing the three-center check-in, am I getting the name correct? Yeah. Okay. If one could develop that habit, it would lead to a non-trivial increase in life satisfaction, like more than 10%. Why do you think that? I was doing it along with you, even though not everything I tuned into was awesome. There's something like, I don't know, it's hard to put words to it, just very satisfying to, as Ram Dass says, be here now. There is something kind of delicious about that.

Yeah, so much of my life is lived, even after all these years of hosting this show and meditating and trying to not be a hypocrite and practice what I preach, so much of my life is in this forward momentum, racing, planning. When you just press the pause button on that, it really feels good. Again, even if not everything you're waking up to is rainbow-barfing unicorns. It's real. It's like, what's here now? Oh, letting yourself be as you are, without a sensor, without like, oh, I'm supposed to be feeling great or something.

It's just, oh, this is me in this moment. This is life. This is one of my favorite practices that I offer, and I was just teaching a retreat with families, and families trying to meditate is chaotic, as you know. I often encourage them just to take a moment and go, this is life. We're waking up from the spell of, I'm in my life, I'm lost in it, I'm so you know, disconnected to recognizing that whatever it is you're doing, washing the dishes, getting your kid into pajamas, getting them to go to sleep, whatever it is, this is life.

When we just pause for a moment and we breathe and go, yeah, this is life, it's actually quite joyful in the same way that you're pointing to. You're just honoring that your life is here. It's who you are. It's what's happening. That really lands for me like the, and it could be a function of age. It could be a function of, yeah, I just turned 55. It could be a function of having practiced the Dharma for nearly two decades, but I really am aware of how short this whole thing is.

And by the way, it could end on my next outbreath, you know, and so why do I want to spend whatever time I have left thinking about the number of likes on my most recent Instagram post? I mean, when you get into this, the depth of this, we don't know how much time we have. So what is meaningful? I'm sure you've probably, you know, interviewed guests over the years that can talk about this and look at the science of it, but what is meaningful? It's, I mean, as far as I can tell, like, inhabiting our life is right there at the top and not missing it, you know, and we do, which is the sad thing.

You know, I once taught this, I taught like a six-week mindfulness class years ago at UCLA with this physician. He said, he finished the class and he said, you know, I've lived on my street for 15 years, and until I learned mindfulness, I never realized there were mountains at the end of the street. I mean, it's extreme, you know, but it's emblematic of how many of us are in that rushing space and the to-doing, the accomplishing, and then meanwhile, life is what's happening, right? I mean, the famous, what is the John Lennon quote, is what happens when you're busy making other plans, is that him?

I can't remember. I don't think that was John Lennon. Marissa, can you Google that? I think it was somebody else, but we'll get the answer. Okay. I feel like it was, maybe I'm wrong. So actually, it was from Alan Saunders in a 1957 Reader's Digest article, but it was popularized by John Lennon in 1980 in a song, Beautiful Boy. That's a good quote, regardless. All right. So we've covered one way to wake up, one flavor of awakening, waking up to the present moment, but we've got four we want to talk about.

So the second is the awakening of healing ourselves, and I think this is where you really get into how we can notice and break out of our old patterns. So before I pepper you with questions, do you want to just set the table? One of the greatest ways in which awakening happens is when we break through or we have deep insight and recognition of our patterns, and we start to act differently in the world. And this can happen through all sorts of ways. It can happen, of course, through meditation.

Obviously, we teach it, but also it can happen in therapy. It can happen in reflecting or talking with a friend, but it can be when we see that we've been lost in something that's been causing suffering in one way or the other, and we break free of it. And sometimes it takes a really long time, and sometimes it's an immediate thing. And I know that when we've been on retreat, we can have an insight into ourself that just like explodes a pattern that's been going on forever.

I mean, these things happen on retreats. I've seen it with people. It's a profound healing that can happen. I'm waiting for that flavor of healing to happen to me. So let me, I have had profound experiences on retreat, but I don't know if I've exploded any of my patterns. All right. That was extreme language that I used. No, no, I'm not criticizing you. I believe that it is a thing that happens and not infrequently. I was more being self-critical. But just to go back to the way I started this podcast, as I mentioned, it can be humbling, if not humiliating, to keep making the same mistake over and over again.

I mean, for me, just a silly one is eating dessert when I'm not hungry and having trouble sleeping and feeling like shit the next day. And, you know, like I don't do that nearly as much as I used to. That's so that's a win. But still, it does happen. And and then I kind of go into a toilet vortex over that. And I, I suspect we all have our own things like that, you know, getting snippy with our partner, rushing, working too much, going, you know, shopping too much when we're bored or lonely or whatever it is.

And so, yeah, well, I guess my first question is, what do we do with that shame that we that might descend in those moments? Yeah, I mean, that's intense and we all do it. And I know for myself, I've been meditating decades and decades, and I still do stuff like that, too. And then I beat myself up. Why did I do that? I can't believe I said that. That was so stupid, right? So but what I do is I work with it on the spot. You know, when I see my mind going into the judgment or some kind of shame, I might do something like just pause for a moment and feel that feeling of shame, feel what's happening in my body, take a breath, bring some kindness to that part of me that's in the shame, try to remember the shared humanity piece, which, you know, I'm not the only one who's ever done this stupid thing.

So it's very natural that we go to those places, you know, that we have been meditating for 10 years, 20 years, and I'm still yelling at my kid or I'm still so just really acknowledging that we're humans and we're on a path. And this is part of it. And we start to laugh at ourselves after a while. I know you do. I mean, I hear you when you when you speak and you teach it. So if you do, we laugh at ourselves because it's so outrageously silly that we're again doing that stupid thing again.

You know, a sense of humor is incredibly helpful. I've said this a million times, so I apologize for people who've listened to the show for a long time. My job is to interview, you know, some of the greatest meditation teachers and contemplative teachers and gurus and whatever you want to call them. That's my job. And the common denominator among all the great ones and the good ones is a sense of humor. There's a kind of lightness. I think I referenced Ram Dass before who who wrote a book called Be Here Now.

But another thing, Ram Dass, who many people know this, but some won't, his given name is Richard Alpert. He's a Jewish kid from Boston who went over to India and met a guru who gave him the name Ram Dass. And another thing he talked about is how, like, with enough practice, you can turn your neuroses into and this is his quote, little schmooze. Yeah. I think he also said you become a connoisseur of your neuroses. And so that kind of humor really allows you, I think, to ride these waves with a little bit more sophistication.

Oh, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And being able to laugh at yourself, big one. And what's great is our families help us laugh at ourselves. Not the ones that do it in a harsh way, but the ones that point out your foibles. And we all laugh about it. I love it when my husband and my daughter gang up on me when I do something stupid. It's like funny. And I just go, yeah, that was really, really dumb. Oh, well, you know, it's cute. I prefer it when my son and I gang up on my wife.

But, you know, I can deal with it when they gang up on me. So tell me a little bit about the practice you've crafted for the Reset Meditation Challenge that goes right at this issue of breaking out of old patterns. So I have a meditation that I'm calling a four-part reset for when you're in the midst of a difficult emotion. You can do it right on the spot, or you can also do it afterwards and reflect on it. But it's mainly for like right here, right now, I'm really anxious or I'm really angry or whatever is happening.

So the first step is grounding in your body. Like just, you know, grounding, that word, it's a funny word because I think that it like get grounded people or something. But really, it is very powerful practice of feeling your feet on the ground, feeling connected to the earth. That's the first part because that helps us when we're lost in emotion and it's really intense. We're sort of up in our head and up in the kind of like the upper part of our body. So getting grounded is the first step.

The second is notice the emotion, right? Like, what is it? How do I feel in my body? My heart is racing. My stomach is clenched. My jaw is tight. So it brings us into the actual experience. just like with that other reset, we allow whatever is here to be here. And this is really key, because what we could do is be like, oh, I'm feeling fear, but I shouldn't be feeling fear. So see if you can just be like, yeah, fear is here, and breathe into it and feel it.

And then the third part is to offer kindness, because when we're lost in a difficult emotion, kindness can be super helpful. And then the last one is what I call enlisting the wisdom mind. What I mean by that is, often when we're in an emotion, we're just lost in it. But sometimes there's another part of ourself that knows that we're okay, or that maybe we're having a more extreme reaction to something than we need to be. There's a lot of ways that our wisdom is a bit buried when we're in the difficult emotion.

But if you do the first three steps, and you ground, you notice, and you bring in some kindness, that allows the intensity of the emotion to drop, and then we can start to let the wisdom mind kick in. And it might say something like, you'll get through this, or it's not as bad as I think, or you might ask yourself a question. Do I really know this is true? So we can use our wisdom mind. And this is where we start to, in the long-term, begin to break the habits.

Because prior to mindfulness of emotions, we're just in it. We're just lost in the emotion. We're having the difficult emotion all the time. But now with mindfulness, we have different tools to wake us up from the kind of primacy of our drama into a recognition that, oh, okay, I might be able to get through this, or I'm not the only one, or I can find a place of ease, even in the midst of the difficult emotion. You've come back to this several times now, the idea of being kind to ourselves.

I imagine there are people listening to this who kind of resist it, either because they think it's gonna make them go soft, or it's like letting themselves off the hook, or because they just kind of find it cheesy. I say that because I felt all of those things before I- Yeah, I was gonna say, weren't you one of those people? I was until I got over myself. But what do you say to the old me? There's a beautiful quote from the feminist theorist, Bell Hooks, and she says, self-love is the foundation of our loving practice.

Without it, our other efforts to love fail. It's a longer quote, but she talks about her friends who think that being loving to yourself is selfish, that your friends say you shouldn't be focusing on yourself, but actually, the profound wisdom in that is that it is the foundation of our ability to love others. And so, first of all, what I would say to a skeptic about it is take your time. Don't believe anything I say. Try it yourself and see what happens. If you're kind, what happens?

And the question is, how do you be kind? Because that's hard. So sometimes it's just imagining someone you love being kind to you, or imagine your dog. So you can imagine your dog or somebody kind in your life and kind of channel that energy and direct it toward yourself. Yes, yeah, so that's one way to do it, especially when it feels impossible to do it for yourself. Some people use touch, which some people hate. For some people, it's sweet, like just to put your hand on your cheek or on your chest or on your belly or something.

Finding ways to, and then, of course, in the traditional practices, like in the metta or loving-kindness practice, we'd say phrases, and that's may I be safe. I like to start with somebody else who's sending it to us rather than trying to do it for ourselves because that feels hard for a lot of people. But then you can also send it to yourself at different times in life. You can send it to yourself for when you're a child or a little baby, and that can sometimes bring it up.

But the most important thing, I think, just getting to the people who are skeptics about it is try it. I didn't really like doing these kindness practices myself for about 10 years of my practice. Whenever I would be on a retreat and they'd offer it, I would just leave the room. And so, I did. It took me a long time before I realized how powerful it was. And for me, partly it was because the insight practice was so strong and interesting that I didn't wanna do another practice.

I just wanted to stay. But, and not that my insight practice wasn't infused somewhat with its own level of kindness, but it took me a long time before I started doing the traditional practices. And then I found I really loved them. And I only did them after I had left a nonprofit job. I was totally burned out and exhausted and needed kindness for myself really clearly. And it was like a glaring neon sign, be kind to yourself. One other thing I would say to skeptics, and then we can move on, is just pay attention to the science.

The science is really strong, not only from Kristin Neff, who's the godmother of self-compassion, which has shown that you can learn to relate to yourself differently, but also from Ethan Cross, another veteran of the frequent flyer on the show who's at the University of Michigan, whose work has shown that you can sort of rewire your inner dialogue, your inner chatter, that's the term he uses, where you just talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend. Kristin talks about this too. Ethan has shown that if you use your name when you're talking to yourself and you can just do bro or dude or sweetie, whatever, that it actually increases the impact.

Bruh, as my son calls me. Your daughter calls you that too? Yeah, I like it, I love it. I love when kids call their moms bruh, that particularly makes me laugh. Yeah, but so talking to yourself that way, there's just so much compelling evidence that it has benefits in terms of reaching your goals and self-reported happiness, anxiety, et cetera, et cetera. Violent threats against executives are growing at an alarming rate. When a company experiences backlash, executives are the first people blamed. When their address and other personal details are sitting online, this backlash can then lead right to their front door.

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That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. ♪ Okay, let's move on to the third way to awaken. Relational awakening or working with judgments. What do you mean by that? This practice, you know, the meditation practice is often seen as this very solitary practice, but also profoundly relational. And as we shift and change and we change our relationships and we change how we behave in our relationships, our relationships change and we model it. And the relationships themselves can be an interesting place for more waking up, more self-understanding, more kindness, more compassion, more freedom from difficult emotions.

So one of my dear friends and colleagues, Donald Rothberg, developed a whole methodology on working with judgments. And judgments are this really fantastic place to learn more about ourselves and to have the development of more compassion, understanding, and also even wise action. So judgments are harsh, primarily negative thoughts about ourself or other people or situations or the world. And they could be about people we know, could be about people we don't know. I mean, judgments are these typically harsh negative thoughts and they're accompanied by some kind of reactivity like aversion in our body, tension, aversive thinking.

And they almost always lead to suffering of ourselves or others. It can be mild, it can be strong. But what's interesting about judgments is there's a significant amount of truth related to them. And that's the hook. So what typically happens when we think about judgments is like, oh no, I shouldn't judge, right? There's something wrong with me that I'm judging or I'm not spiritual enough as I'm judging. But actually, there is truth in it. And maybe, for instance, we're judging a person for acting in an obnoxious way and maybe they actually really are.

So, but we can see something clearly, but with a judgment, we typically have so much reactivity about it. And so the long-term intention with judgments is to preserve the intelligence and the insight, but separate it from the reactivity and then also see what we can learn there. So judgments become, they move from being a reactive thing into more of a discernment. And I can give, I'll give examples of this, but I just wanna kind of lay it out for you. So rather than rejecting a judgment, they can be kind of a doorway into a deep learning about ourselves.

And they can also be a place that we can cultivate compassion and there can be a profound reset of how we judge. So that's the overall picture because there's actually a lot of wisdom in the judgments. So what are the tools you recommend we use with these incredibly seductive mental phenomena? Some of the tools are just like a self-observation, noticing that you're judging, labeling it as judging, feeling it in your body. I'm just rushing through it, but I wanna kind of give you a good example.

When our minds, when we're not lost in reactivity, similar to what we talked about earlier, there's more compassion that can be brought in. We can attempt to understand what is the wisdom, right? So that's the tricky thing with the judgments, like what is the wisdom underneath? So I'll just give you an example from my life. I have a teenage daughter, she's almost 17, and this is a funny summer for her because when they're 16, they're not quite old enough to get a real job, but they're too old to do the fun things that they used to do when they were little.

And so they're kind of sitting around a lot, and I could feel my judgments arising about it. Oh my gosh, she slept till 11 this morning, and then she just spent half the day on TikTok, and just what's gonna happen? Judgment kind of combined with some worry, like what is she doing with herself? What is she doing, right? So there was this judgment, and it's funny, we don't like to judge our kids, right? So there's a little bit of shame, like, oh, I shouldn't be judging my child.

I love this person more than anyone, but then I'm judging my child. Like, what is going on here? So there was more judgment. I said to her, like, what do you wanna do this summer? And she said, I just wanna drive around and see my friends. And I was like, oh my gosh, what's gonna, and then I would go into these stories, like, oh, that's gonna look great on a college application, driving around and seeing your friends, right? So all this story, and then I felt bad that I was judging her.

So it was like a whole constellation of suffering. So how do we wake up from that, right? How do we wake up? So that's where these judgment practices are really profound. So what I did was I started noticing what I was feeling in my body, and offering some, here we talked about offering kindness, like, okay, yeah, you're really upset. that? You're not like, what's here? And I started noticing that as I could feel the judgment, with judgment, there's always a feeling of self-righteousness. Like that feeling like, oh, I'm right.

You know, this person is doing something that they shouldn't be doing and I'm right. So, if you let yourself actually feel the self-judgment, it's quite interesting. It feels kind of like, for me, it feels like a powerful pressure in my stomach area. And I kind of pause and allow that to be there. And then I might ask myself, what am I really wanting? What's going on here? As I bring some kindness, feel it, notice it, notice that I'm lost in it. Like, what's really going on?

And when I investigate, what I find is, you know, what the truth is. Like, I want my child to be happy. I want her to be okay. I want her to be engaged. I want her to, you know, I have all these like hopes and dreams for her. And all of that is like true and real, you know? But the reactivity is, what's wrong with her? She's lazy. She's on TikTok all day. What's going to happen? What's going to happen to her brain, right? That's all the judgment.

But the wisdom in it is the care that I have for her. And so, when I can calm down from the reactivity and find out what is true, then I start to feel also more compassion for her and for me. Like, oh, of course you're worried about her. You love this being. Like, you want her to have a life that is joyous and connected. You don't want her to have a life that's like shut down and in screens all the time. And then once I'm calm and connected and clear, then I can relate to her differently.

And then we can talk about it in a way that's not reactive. Because there's a way, like, I could talk to her from my judgments. What is going on? Why are you still on the phone? Blah, blah, blah. Get to work. Go find a job. Why haven't you found a job? You know, those kinds of things. Or let's talk about this together and let's see what's going to work. And spoiler alert, she did find some good things to do this summer. So, it wasn't entirely. But anyway, I hope this is getting, I just wanted to give you like a real example to show how we might use this judgment thing that's typically seen kind of negative as a way to have more connection and more compassion, understanding of ourself.

If I'm hearing you correctly, it's kind of a two-step process. The first is to like, you know, get in touch with what you're feeling, send yourself some kindness, relax the nervous system so that you can see what the wisdom is beneath the judgment. Get below the reflexive aspects of it, the self-righteous aspects into like, oh, no, I'm experiencing all of this because I give a shit. I care on some deep level. Sometimes I talk about it moves from being a judgment to a discernment. So, a judgment is all the reactivity around it with the same discernment.

The discernment is buried in there. You know, the discernment is my kid needs something to do for the summer. That would be helpful for her, right? But the judgment is what's wrong with her? Why is she being so lazy? She's sleeping in, blah, blah, blah, you know, all of that. So, that's just like kind of like a family example. But we can, so we can do this when we have judgments with anyone and anything. And if we don't reject our judgments, but actually use them as a kind of like a portal to self-understanding and more compassion, it's like really, really interesting.

It's an incredible practice. In the interest of time, I want to get to the fourth because this is where things get weird in a good way. The fourth way to awaken per the great Diana Winston is awakening as transcendence. Yeah. So, this is where you start getting into, you know, at the far end of the spectrum, you know, enlightenment and nirvana, but on a more down to earth side of things, it's like kind of getting over yourself, self-transcendence in ways that can be really meaningful. So, yes, say a little bit about this.

Yeah, this is sort of a fun and interesting one. And also a little like hard to understand, I think. I mean, obviously, that's the nature of it. So, I guess we could think of this as like the deep reset in different, you know, like in Buddhist traditions, there's this idea of like an enlightened experience where you have a moment which completely transforms your life and you never go back to what you were before. What I see is over years of teaching and my own practice is that people have many, many experiences that are these in this territory of, I'm saying it, transcendence, but it could be, we can use other words.

And it can happen in meditation. It can also happen in other places. It can happen, we have transcendent experiences in nature. We have transcendent experiences in, I mean, people talk about it with psychedelics. We have experiences in sex. Like we can have these peak spontaneous experiences where we feel feelings of oneness and connection or profound equanimity or joy. And it's all available. The human mind and body has the capacity to experience these transcendent states. And sometimes these transcendent states are profoundly kind of like empty. I mean, that word is confusing, but not a sense of self disappears, right?

So, you're with a lover, like you could, the other person and you merge and there's no sense of me or it can be an experience where you feel one with everything, right? There are a lot of experiences that people describe. There's this really interesting book from the 70s, which was by Philip Kapler Roshi called The Three Pillars of Zen. And what he did, unlike anything I've ever seen since or before, was that he interviewed people who had so-called enlightenment experiences in Japan. He was studying Japanese Buddhism and he interviewed, I don't know, all these people, a lot of Japanese people, some Westerners, and he just wrote little stories about what their experience was.

And what it appeared to me was that there were different, some people experienced it as like a profound no-self and other people experienced it from like oneness with all things. And like there were different ways of experiencing it. So, this is possible for humans to access these beautiful states. And that's like really big awakenings, but we can have little versions of it too. Most of us can remember being about 15 and feeling completely invisible or worse, extremely visible, but for the wrong reasons. I remember one year when I was a teenager, I had a pimple in the crevice of my nose for the entire year.

I didn't like that. Either way, even if we have painful memories of that age, most of us tend to soften it in memory. And it was actually harder than we remember it now. That is the territory of Carrie, streaming October 7th on Prime Video, the first ever television adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie. Eight episodes from Mike Flanagan with Stephen King as an executive producer. Flanagan had described this show as a tragedy. It's about a girl who doesn't feel seen by anyone and about how small everyday acts of unkindness compound into something nobody meant to cause, which happens now at a speed and scale that would have been unimaginable not long ago.

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Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com happier get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash happier. So how can we get little tastes of of enlightenment in our daily lives? Well I often do something even with total beginners where I have a meditation in one of my books called I call a recollection and I just say to people just take a moment to reflect on a time in your life where you felt connected, peaceful, a sense of connection.

So I just I offer the kind of language that I mean we could do this practice right this second. So just and this is also part of the reset meditation series so so just everyone take a moment and pause and take a breath and if you're driving keep your eyes open thank you and see if you can bring to mind a time in your life where you felt a sense of peace, ease, connection, openness, joy and this doesn't have to be a big dramatic moment. It could be something kind of small or tender.

It could be with your animals or your best friend or could be out in nature or even in the midst of art or creativity but this place where this sense of me felt more expansive, more connected. So just see what comes to mind as I say that to you and let it come to mind and if you can't think of anything maybe imagine this possibility and then if you can where were you? Can you see or sense or feel where you were? What did you hear?

Any smells? Any tastes? Like what was around you in this moment and most importantly what did you feel? So if you can remember what you felt in that moment. I think you can let that be here. Okay so we'll stop a little meditation here. Dan what happened for you when you did that? Well my son and I had a boys weekend and we went out to the beach on Long Island and on Sunday afternoon we went over to my friend Jonathan's house, our friend Jonathan's house, Deb and Jonathan's house and there were four families there, three of whom we know really well and Alexander and I walked in and just like so many people hugging us and offering us food and dogs licking us and little kids being adorable in the pool and it was just a very warm experience that I've been thinking about a lot since it happened.

I love that example because it's not like some mystical woo-woo event or something it was just like a real thing that happened recently where there was a lot of love and connection and joy. People have this a lot but they often skip over it or like they just they forget about it or so one of the things that's really important to do when you have these beautiful moments is to stop and experience it and savor it and also exactly what you did reflect on it, right?

Remember because when you reflect on it it brings it back and it brings these states of well-being and the more of these states and qualities of well-being that we can have the more we you know we can live from those places instead of like feeling like they're a million miles away they are accessible to all of us in any moment. Yeah so when we have these moments of transcendence where we're not so stuck in thinking about you know how's my hair look or you know my how far am I behind at work and I'm these are obviously other people's thoughts not mine.

When we're really in to use some grandiose terms in like states of connection and love which don't have to be grandiose it could be a Sunday at your friend's house but where you really are feeling that to allow yourself to feel it and then to allow yourself to relive it even though you might not be in the present moment strictly speaking when you're reliving it well you you can do your best to tune into the feelings that are here right now and when you conjure those experiences.

That's everyday completely accessible self-transcendence. And then we start to have more and more of them because we start identifying them and seeing them and then there's like just the joy becomes like stronger than the non-joy you know like like I feel like I always feel like people are so familiar with the negative states you know I live on anxiety street. I know that one really really well that when they start to feel these moments they're very like they're almost even confusing for people. I've had so many people over the years like in meditation retreat come up and say you know I'm feeling this thing I'm not really sure what it is but I think it's peace maybe you know and I'm like yeah.

But then as you start to be able to recognize it to savor it and to as a We were talking about recollect, and then it starts to become more and more a part of you, and you can not have to live on Anxiety Street. You can live on Equanimity Road or something. You've upgraded your living arrangements when you moved from Anxiety Street to Equanimity Road, and ultimately, Nirvana Boulevard. Exactly. Yeah, I have found, specifically on this thing of love, and it's a big word, if you want connection, friendliness, whatever word you wanna use, I always just go for the big swing, so let me just say love.

Like, the more I've tuned into that in my life, just what you said a couple minutes ago has happened, in that, you said before, when you savor and recollect these experiences, they happen more frequently. That has happened, that has just, these experiences have become a bigger part of my life, and I've gone from, you know, I still have a million flaws, but I've gone from somebody who I think was really, you know, heads down, workaholic, self-centered, and all of that is definitely still in me, and I can definitely get there pretty easily, but just these little glimpses of the other way of being start to accumulate.

It's great to hear, and it bears out with my experience with teaching and my own self as well. Yeah, I have this friend who, he said he was like this super petty, judgmental person, and he's like, you do not wanna know me. 30 years ago, you would hate me. And then now, he, after all these years of practice, it's like he gets so excited by when he sees a glass, and there's light shining, and it's just, there's the beauty there right in this moment, and it's like, he lives in gratitude.

And it's from practicing, doing these practices, and it's extraordinary. He's like, he doesn't recognize himself. But he says, and there are times that I go back, just like you said, to being the way I was, but that becomes, it's like foreground background. Like the more beautiful states, and the more states of well-being, they start to come more and more into the foreground, and it's just, it's gorgeous. I mean, that's why I do what I do. Well, this has been a delightful romp through for Ways to Awaken.

Before I let you go, though, anything that you were hoping to cover that we didn't cover? I don't know. I think we kinda covered it all. There was some stuff, but we, I feel like it's not that important. I feel good about what we covered. Okay, well, speaking of good, we're experimenting with this little closing segment, what's good? We basically just, I try to get in the habit of asking guests, like what's something good? It could be just a personal development. It could be a practice.

It could be a TV show, a song, a book, whatever. Yeah, what can you recommend? One thing's good is I got married last year. What? Yeah, I did, yes. To whittle it down, your recommendation is fall in love and get married. Not everyone believes in marriage, but fall in love is a really good thing to make, to boost the oxytocin and the dopamine. Anyway, it's fantastic. So that's something good in my life, just sharing. That's awesome. I love it. Congratulations. Thank you. That's really cool. Days ago, so this will be dated for, this is coming out in September.

We're recording in August. So this movie will have been out there for quite a while by the time I talk about it. My wife and I took our son and one of his friends, three families, we all went together to see Spider-Man, the latest Spider-Man movie when it came out on Thursday, opening weekend. So we were there the first night. I watch a lot of Marvel movies because I have an 11 and a half year old son. I'm not particularly a fan of them, but I watch them.

This one was interesting for two reasons. One, because it was kind of a mix of a Marvel movie and an A24 movie, like it was pretty emo. And instead of it just being about like Spider-Man defeating bad guys, it was also about, you know, his love for his friends. But on a deeper level, there was a lot of stuff that we would talk about on this show, like the, and I'm not going to spoil anything, but one of the- Really? In Spider-Man? Yes, yes. So he is in great distress because he's lonely and his whole body and mind start to disintegrate because he's disconnected from all the people he loves.

And over the course of the movie, there is a lot of healing that happens in this regard. It is a major driver of the plot that he doesn't have connection and his, and you see his body and mind just disintegrate as a consequence. Wow, now you're making me want to see it. I'm not here to say that I, you know, pound the table and say everybody needs to go see Spider-Man. More that I'm glad that a movie that is as critical as cultural commentators are observing is kind of restoring the monoculture for a minute.

Like we, you know, in a fragmented media ecosystem, like a big event like this really does bring a lot of people together. It's cool that something that's going to reach this many people has this not so subtle message of, yeah, if you're disconnected and lonely, nothing good's happening. Well, that's great. Great recommendation. Can I give another recommendation? Yeah, go for it. There's no rule. I read a book that I just loved so much and it was, it's Anne Patchett's new book called Whistler. And it's, she's an incredible writer.

Pretty much anything she writes is amazing. But this one is like, in my mind, it's like a perfect book. It just, it's so beautifully written. It's so compelling, but it's really not about anything. It's not, it doesn't have like a lot of drama to it, but it's just about like good people living a good life in connection with each other. And it's just a beautiful book, so I highly recommend it. But I'm making a note of that. Whistler by Anne Patchett. I'm gonna go Amazon that.

Okay, Diana Winston, it's such a pleasure to talk to you. Just to remind everybody, Diana has at least one book. There's a book called The Little Book of Being, but then there's another book. Fully Present, which I co-wrote with a scientist, the science art and practice of mindfulness. And then I have a book for teens called Wide Awake, a Buddhist Guide for Teens. While we're plugging Diana's work, she, as mentioned, is teaching and leading the meditation challenge that will be running on my app, 10% with Dan Harris, starting next week, the 21st through the 25th.

And every day you'll get a fresh guided meditation from Diana to help you reset in lots of different ways, like when you can't sleep, when you're distracted, when you're stuck in your judgments, et cetera, et cetera. I think if you've made it this far in the interview, you will be entirely convinced that said meditations will be ferociously useful. So Diana, thank you so much. Great job with this. Always great to talk to you. Yeah, so much fun. Thanks for doing this, it's great, yeah. One last thing before I let you go.

If you wanna listen to this show without ads, check out 10% Happier Plus, which is a subscription that is available right inside Apple Podcasts. If you become a subscriber, you'll get every episode ad-free. That's new episodes and all the episodes from our vast 10-year-plus archive. Look for 10% Happier Plus in Apple Podcasts and just hit subscribe. And a quick heads up, if you're already a subscriber to my app, 10% with Dan Harris, you've already got access to ad-free podcasts. Ad-free listening is baked right into your app subscription along with everything else, so please don't pay twice.

You can check out the app at danharris.com and you can check out 10% Happier Plus inside Apple Podcasts. Thank you very much for listening to the show. I deeply appreciate it. See you soon, deuces. Thank you so much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson, Marissa Schneiderman, DJ Kashmir, David Hart, and Hayden Broom. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. And Nick Thorburn of the indie rock band Islands wrote our theme.

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