Newsletters – 2020

It’s inevitable that by simply living a life, there will be times of adversity – like now. It’s not because of our attitude that times like these are uncomfortable or heartbreaking. Some things just hurt.Perhaps surprisingly, I find this truth to be liberating.

How are you dealing with the radical unreliability and impermanence of life these days?

In the present moment, loneliness is just a feeling. Often, the most painful aspect of it is how hard we fight to push it away—which, this year, may just not be possible anyway. If we let it be, it can just be a feeling. Maybe not a pleasant one, but one that is still less difficult.

There is a Chinese Buddhist kongan – rather like a Zen koan – in which a figure known as Layman Pang points to the falling snow and says, “Good snowflakes: they don’t fall anywhere else.”

It’s okay to feel afraid right now. Meditation can help you feel it safely, so that you can begin to let it go.

If you’re on edge right now, good news: you’re normal!It’s hard to see how 2020 could get any more stressful, but that’s exactly what’s happened with the election and its contested aftermath. So, like clockwork, your genetically-programmed nervous system is probably responding with heightened anxiety, fear, tension.

In today's society, “equanimity” probably doesn't describe what people are striving for. But what power does embracing equanimity through mindfulness hold?

I love this quote by the great, late Indian spiritual teacher, Krishnamurti. He said (paraphrased by Jane Fonda, who popularized it): “You think you’re thinking your thoughts. You are not. You are thinking the culture’s thoughts.”

Cortisol is your best friend and worst enemy.It’s probably saved your life, if you’ve ever had to make quick decisions in danger. It’s your “fight or flight” hormone, secreted by your adrenal gland (just above your kidneys) when the brain tells it that peril is near.

These are turbulent times: the pandemic, the election, catastrophic climate change, the reckoning with racial injustice. Naturally, many of us are feeling anxious. Which, after all, is why many people turn to meditation in the first place: to relieve anxiety and stress, to build our capacity for resilience.There are, however, two distinct approaches to anxiety in mindfulness meditation. And they lead to different kinds of results.

The purpose of this reflection is to see clearly and experience directly racial suffering. It requires us to feel into the experiences of those who are suffering without turning away, and offer our wish that everyone, without exception, be free from pain and suffering.

Instead of fighting with anger, we have to turn toward it, to experience it without affirming it and waving it around, and to investigate what it really is. It turns out, the closer you look, the more anger can teach us.

During this pandemic, many of us parents are spending a lot more time with our children. With more contact, there's often more conflict. The last half year may have seen some of your worst parenting moments—but also some of your best. Certainly, both hold true for me. How can mindfulness practice help us over the coming months?

One of the best “wisdom-reminders” I ever received was from Sharon Salzberg, when I was on retreat with her in 2004. We spend a lot of our time leaning way forward into life, she said: with anticipation, excitement, anger, worry. We don’t have to turn these emotions off, but we could just lean back a little bit.

The next several weeks, as we enter a highly contentious election season in the midst of an ongoing pandemic, will ask all of us some challenging questions.

For most of my life, I longed to belong. I longed to fit in, I longed to achieve success, and I longed to have a soul mate. And yet, also for most of my life I felt I did not belong anywhere.

Almost everyone I know is experiencing heightened fear right now, with Covid-19, the upcoming election, greater national attention to systemic racism and police brutality, and tremendous uncertainty about the future. Does experiencing all that fear when we sit mean we’re failures at meditation?

The lotus flower, a symbol of awakening in Buddhist and other spiritual traditions, blooms in the muckiest, muddiest swamps. Its roots begin under the swamp water and its buds reach their way to the surface where they burst forth into stunning pink or white flowers. If you want the beauty of the lotus flower, there is no getting around the mud.

Masks suck.They’re hot and uncomfortable, especially for people who have to wear them for hours at a clip. To most Americans, they look threatening, weird, or both. And they make communication, verbal and non-verbal alike, difficult.

This is a scary time. The pandemic, as well as this period of societal and political tension, is testing all of us – as individuals, families, and communities and countries. And we are not always passing the test.Yet we will get through this. There will be another side. Even after the worst events in human history, there is always eventually another side.The question is: how do we get there?

In recent months, death has suddenly become more visible.The Covid-19 pandemic has confronted us worldwide with the fragility of our existence. We’ve lost loved ones, gotten sick ourselves, or just spent months indoors trying to slow the spread of this potentially fatal disease.But death has always been there.

Feel exhausted after a long Zoom call? You may not be breathing enough. Here’s a three-step remedy for ‘Zoom Apnea’ from Dr. Susan Pollak.

In the midst of an ongoing pandemic, being outside in Nature is perhaps the safest way to find healing and solace. The unsurpassed stillness, tranquility and wisdom of the natural world offer the possibility of renewal and resilience.Adding mindful attention to our time outside can greatly enhance these benefits. Here’s one way to do that, which you can try on your own.

You might say that the goal of mindfulness is to change our perspective by seeing thoughts, emotions, body sensations and outer events more clearly.And yet, how do we do this under the stress of a pandemic? And how can we “see clearly” while a collective outrage over injustices that have remained hidden in plain sight for centuries, is now erupting in cities, suburbs and screens across the globe?

My acceptance of self is motivated by my love for others; I can’t advocate for change in a world in which I am too scared to be myself. I am strengthened in knowing that by living and sharing my truth I am not conceding to pressures to conform to a norm that limits all of us in expressing ourselves. There is a reciprocal relation to me living my truth while simultaneously advocating for others to live theirs.

The global anti-racism uprisings have ignited a much-needed reckoning among many mindfulness practitioners about what they can do to address systemic racism. For me, one of the most powerful responses is to transform our own biases as an extension of our mindfulness practice.

“There, do you see?” she said. “You just did it again. It’s all about you.”Ignorance is so humbling.Here I was, a proud would-be ally in the cause of racial justice. I’d read books on anti-racism, learned to see my own white fragility, attended workshops and classes, served on diversity committees. Not to mention that I’d taught thousands of people how to meditate, how to communicate better, and how to live more in line their values.

There is a deep grief inside my body. And there might be in yours as well.Because of street crimes that have shown us a new face of xenophobia, and because Black men are still being hunted down and shot for jogging. Because Black men are still being accused of being sexual predators, while bird watching on a weekday morning, and because another black man couldn’t breathe under the knee of a policeman.

The basic foundation is to have a meditation practice in which you become increasingly self-aware. You're able to self-reflect, you're conscious of your own habitual patterns and your own tendencies towards fear or aggression or whatever it might be. So you can acknowledge what's happening with you.The point is not to make yourself feel bad. Don't turn the mind into some kind of enemy. Instead, cultivate a kind attitude toward your own habitual patterns.

Many of us are entering a new phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. As some restrictions are eased, even as social distancing remains essential for protecting public health, many of us are venturing outside more -- and seeing people in public more than we have in months.Many of us also live in places where people strongly disagree about whether businesses should open, whether people should travel or not, and whether we need to wear masks all the time, or some of the time, or not at all.It’s natural, in this fearful and uncertain time, to sometimes view other people as threats.

If you’re feeling stir-crazy right now, you’re not alone! Social distancing and quarantine have caused many of us to feel restless, cut off, and very fragile – not to mention all of the anxieties about our health, our families, economic insecurity, and so many other things. This is entirely normal.Here are two practices that may be helpful to you: reflection and meditation.

Right now, many of us are spending much more time at home than we are used to. And yet, paradoxically, many of us are also feeling less at home.That’s because our true home is not a physical location but our fundamental nature as human beings, the resting state of body and mind.

Since the Coronavirus pandemic began, all of us have struggled with a wide range of painful emotions: anxiety, grief, fear, extreme stress, you name it. And for many of us, myself included, they’ve been harder and stronger than ever before in our lives. I, personally, have had many very, very rough moments.

How can we resist giving in to overwhelm, letting panicked thoughts take over, or allowing the sirens of the news media infect our mind? We know intellectually that these kinds of reactions don’t help—but how can we actually prevent ourselves from falling under their sway?

For many of us, being confined to quarantine because of the Coronavirus has been the most challenging time in our lives. The very scaffolding of our world, all that we had depended on to sustain us, has come tumbling down—work, school, friends, family, travel, places of worship, gyms, meditation centers, bars and restaurants. So much of what structured our lives and kept us happy is gone.

These are difficult times: frightening, painful, groundless. There are plenty of reasons to feel tight and scared right now.Still, speaking for myself, I know that I still want to find ways to be kind, helpful, maybe even joyful at times. And I know from mentoring meditators from all over the country these past weeks, I am definitely not alone in this.

“I can’t breathe again,” I said in short gusts, as my chest constricted. I felt lightheaded and dizzy, and I was covered in a cold sweat. It was my third panic attack that month.Sasha told me to focus on what was in front of me. “Touch the clothing,” she said, “How does it feel?”

In Vermont, where I live, there are six seasons—the usual four, plus stick season (that long stretch from mid-October to the first snows, when the trees are bare and the landscape grey) and mud season, which is now.

When my daughter is upset, anxious, or angry, my job as a parent is to hold her in a loving presence. I don’t have to fix her emotion, give her advice, tell her not to be sad, or take the pain away. My job is simply be there for her.The same is often true in meditation—except for myself.

Meditation and mindfulness can be valuable allies at times like this. Of course, they don’t keep you free from disease. But they can help you be free-er from panic, more able to protect yourself, and more in touch with your own inner wisdom and resilience. Here are three examples.

If we were to simply walk past the fires of racism, sexism, and so on because illusions of separation exist within them, we would be walking past one of the widest gateways to liberation. It is a misinterpretation to suppose that attending to the fires of our existence cannot lead us to experience the waters of peace.

Everywhere I teach, people describe how the mounting anxieties of modern life are exhausting them. They want help to remain calm and confident amid so much danger, real and perceived. But how do we do that? The first step in coping is to learn to distinguish anxiety from realistic fear.

For the new ABC News documentary Guardians of the Amazon, Dan Harris traveled to the remote Amazon to follow a group of indigenous people from the Guajajara tribe who are fighting back against illegal – but government-encouraged – logging and destruction of their native lands.I asked Dan about how his two lives – tough journalist on the one hand, meditation guru on the other – intersected.

My daughter is about to turn two years old, but I still describe my partner and myself as “new parents,” since we still seem to be figuring everything out by the seats of our pants.Pretty much every day, I’ve had one thought in particular: I have no idea how people without a mindfulness practice do this. In fact, while mindfulness has taught me a lot about being a better parent, parenting has taught me even more about the value of mindfulness. Here are four things I’ve learned.

I’ve spent nineteen years researching these questions in my scientific career, together with my colleagues Ken Sheldon and David Schkade. Our research has shown that the key to happiness lies not in changing our genetic makeup (which is impossible) and not in changing our circumstances (which is ineffectual) but in undertaking daily intentional activities that promote it. Happiness is a practice.

There’s an old Zen saying: “The world is topsy-turvy.” Who is not aware of this today? The state of the world is painful to everyone. The world careens onward in its topsy-turvy course, causing a pervasive sense of inward dread many of us can’t afford to entertain.

If you’re like me, you might have made a New Year’s resolution to exercise more, meditate more, sleep better, or eat healthier. But also if you’re like me, you’ve failed at this before, ending up on an endless treadmill of trying and failing, trying and failing.That’s why Ten Percent Happier has just launched a new course on Healthy Habits featuring bestselling author and Stanford University psychologist Kelly McGonigal. Here’s a little taste of what Kelly teaches in the course.

Having practiced meditation for around twenty years now, the most important word I’ve learned about it is: Intuitive.Here’s what I mean.Trying to be mindful is a lot of work. You have to remember, all the time, to notice your body, notice what you’re saying, notice your surroundings, notice notice notice.

Most parents (and most people!) have unbelievably full and fast-paced schedules -- we barely have time to fit in the basics. Not only are we quite busy, but most of the time we’re multi-tasking: getting dinner on, nudging one kid to get started on homework while listening to a story from another, keeping from stepping on the cat’s tail, thinking about how to respond to the text message that just came in… all at once.

One of the most common questions I get from students is how to maintain a meditation practice. This is especially hard when you’re starting out. Once you begin to see the benefits of meditation, it’s easier to stay with it. The simple practice of noticing and sensing what is happening in a non-judgmental way makes a big difference in how you respond to the whole of life. You can notice in just a few conscious breaths that it’s possible to create a gap between the stimulation and response of our nervous system. We can get out of fight and flight. We can evolve into something bigger than always self-protecting. And we can feel this when we meditate.