10% Happier — Dan Harris

Kindle Highlights

“We are in the midst of a momentous event in the evolution of human consciousness, but they won’t be talking about it in the news tonight.”

“Your demons may have been ejected from the building, but they’re out in the parking lot, doing push-ups.”

“The ego is never satisfied. No matter how much stuff we buy, no matter how many arguments we win or delicious meals we consume, the ego never feels complete.”

“Perhaps the most powerful Tollean insight into the ego was that it is obsessed with the past and the future, at the expense of the present.”

“The most powerful change comes actually out of that different state of consciousness. This is why people so admire what Gandhi did, because he was bringing about change from a state of consciousness that was already at peace. And people sometimes believe that if you’re already at peace you’re never going to do anything. But that’s not the case. Very powerful actions come out of that.”

“Make the present moment your friend rather than your enemy. Because many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment. And imagine living your whole life like that, where always this moment is never quite right, not good enough because you need to get to the next one. That is continuous stress.”

“The best self-help program was developed 2,500 years ago — a worldview that, oddly enough, held that there is actually no “self” to “help.”

“If there was no such thing as security, then why bother with the insecurity?”

“Meditation was radically altering my relationship to boredom, something I’d spent my whole life scrambling to avoid.”

“What mindfulness does is create some space in your head so you can, as the Buddhists say, “respond” rather than simply “react.” In the Buddhist view, you can’t control what comes up in your head; it all arises out of a mysterious void. We spend a lot of time judging ourselves harshly for feelings that we had no role in summoning. The only thing you can control is how you handle it.”

“Moment after moment, experiences are arising, and it’s as if each one has a hook . . . and we’re the fish. Do we bite? Or do we not bite, and just swim freely in the ocean?”

“When good things happen, we bake them very quickly into our baseline expectations, and yet the primordial void goes unfilled.”

“We live so much of our lives pushed forward by these “if only” thoughts, and yet the itch remains. The pursuit of happiness becomes the source of our unhappiness.”

“A blockbuster MRI study from Harvard found that people who took the eight-week Mindfulness Base Stress Reduction(MBSR) course had thicker gray matter in the areas of the brain associated with self-awareness and compassion, while the regions associated with stress actually shrank.

“Most of one’s own troubles, worries, and sadness come from self-cherishing, self-centeredness.”

“The meditators were more empathic, spent more time with other people, laughed more, and used the word “I” less.”

“Acknowledging other people’s basic humanity is a remarkably effective way of shooing away the swarm of self-referential thoughts that buzz like gnats around our heads.”

“The Buddha captured it well when he said that anger, which can be so seductive at first, has “a honeyed tip” but a “poisoned root.”

“It’s nonattachment to the results. I think for an ambitious person who cares about their career — who wants to create things and be successful — it’s natural to be trying really hard. Then the Buddhist thing comes in around the results — because it doesn’t always happen the way you think it should.”

“It’s like, you write a book, you want it to be well received, you want it to be at the top of the bestsellers list, but you have limited control over what happens. You can hire a publicist, you can do every interview, you can be prepared, but you have very little control over the marketplace. So you put it out there without attachment, so it has its own life. Everything is like that.”

“Striving is fine, as long as it’s tempered by the realization that, in an entropic universe, the final outcome is out of your control. If you don’t waste your energy on variables you cannot influence, you can focus much more effectively on those you can. When you are wisely ambitious, you do everything you can to succeed, but you are not attached to the outcome — so that if you fail, you will be maximally resilient, able to get up, dust yourself off, and get back in the fray. That, to use a loaded term, is enlightened self-interest.”

“There’s a reason why they call Buddhism “advanced common sense”; it’s all about methodically confronting obvious-but-often-overlooked truths (everything changes, nothing fully satisfies) until something in you shifts.”

“There’s no point in being unhappy about things you can’t change, and no point being unhappy about things you can.”

“Nonattachment to results + self compassion = a supple relentlessness that is hard to match. Push hard, play to win, but don’t assume the fetal position if things don’t go your way. This, I came to believe, is what T. S. Eliot meant when he talked about learning “to care and not to care.”