How Mindfulness Can Change Your Brain and Your News-Related Stress with Dan Harris
We’re revisiting our conversation with Dan Harris, who you may know from his previous role on weekend Good Morning America or his work with Ten Percent Happier, the book/app/podcast that teach the value of meditation and mindfulness.
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EPISODE RESOURCES
Check out Sarah and Beth’s books Now What? How to Move Forward When We’re Divided (About Basically Everything) and I Think You're Wrong (But I'm Listening)
TRANSCRIPT
Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.
Beth [00:00:08] And this is Beth Silvers.
Sarah [00:00:10] Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics. Hello and welcome to a special episode of Pantsuit Politics. We wanted an episode that meets us where we are all at as we enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday. We had Dan Harris on the podcast in November of 2020 to talk about his career as a journalist and how that led him to become the co-founder of 10% Happier, which started as a book and became an app and a podcast all about mindfulness and how it can improve our lives. It's one of our favorite conversations and we wanted to share it again with all of you.
Beth [00:00:53] And we want to remind you that if you are starting to scramble to get through the month of December, we have a gift guide available for you. Maggie put together all of our favorite things that we've mentioned on the podcast, all of those things that we talk about, and then someone reaches out and says didn't Sarah mentioned the skin care products or didn't Beth mention those pants? It's all here in one place for you. So you can go to the show notes, get that gift guide of our favorite things. And we hope you really enjoy today's episode.
Sarah [00:01:28] We are both huge fans of your work. I read your book 10% Happier back in 2014. We both use your meditation app. And you also work in the news business. So you're really I feel like straddling the worlds that we straddle often, which is news, consciousness, grace in a world where there is not a lot to go around. We're so thrilled to have you. Thank you for coming.
Dan Harris [00:01:52] Thanks for having me. I will warn you that I straddle those worlds imperfectly.
Sarah [00:01:58] As we do, y'all. Now, first and most important question, is Joseph Goldstein in some sort of hermetically sealed situation so that he is protected at all costs?
Dan Harris [00:02:07] Just for the uninitiated, Joseph Goldstein is my meditation teacher and really great friend and founding teacher on the 10% Happier app. Seventy six years old and a living treasure. He doesn't like when I praise him too much, he doesn't like that at all. So I'm just hoping he doesn't listen to this. So I completely understand the spirit in which you've asked that question. And yes, he's taking very good care of himself. I actually saw him recently in his home in central Massachusetts, not venturing out too often. So, yeah, all is well with Joseph.
Sarah [00:02:40] Good. I was listening to the meditation at this morning, a Joseph Goldstein. I was like, well, this is what I want to ask first because we need to make sure that he's very, very safe. Now, for the uninitiated, what do you tell people how you came into the meditation space as a reporter.
Dan Harris [00:02:56] Yeah. Super skeptically. I was not interested in meditation at all. Pretty hostile to it. But the short version is that I had a panic attack on the air in 2004 on Good Morning America. I work at ABC News now for about 20 years, but I was relatively new back then. And it kind of set me off on this weird and winding journey, which I wrote about in a book called 10% Happier. And that journey kind of ultimately landed me on meditation, and I was really skeptical about it, but I ended up noticing that there was a lot of science that really strongly suggests that meditation is very good for you and that it can lower your blood pressure and boost your immune system and rewire key parts of your brain and literally change your brain. It's almost as if you're performing neurosurgery on yourself. And that was compelling to me. My parents are both scientists. My wife is a scientist. I'm not good at math, so I'm not a scientist. I wear make up and talk to television cameras for a living. But I was really compelled and I also had plenty of struggles in my own life with depression, anxiety, substance abuse, found it to be really helpful. It's not a panacea. That's why I kind of semi facetiously called my book 10% Happier. And that's the name I've slapped on everything I've done subsequently from the meditation app to the podcast. Brand continuity is very important. So I became a convert and really have kind of dedicated most of my life subsequently to trying to spread the good news.
Beth [00:04:42] How does this greater level of consciousness and the intentional focus that you've put on meditation change the way that you take in information in the new space?
Dan Harris [00:04:54] One of the things that allowed me to do meditation, even though I was, as I said before, hostile-- meditation, that word is a little bit like sports. But when you say the word sports, there's a big difference between hockey and field hockey. Big difference between water polo and badminton. And so when I talk about meditation, I'm talking about mindfulness meditation, which is derived from Buddhism but thoroughly stripped of any religious lingo or metaphysical claims. It's a kind of secular exercise for your brain. And it's very simple. The first step is to kind of sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes. The second step is to bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. Pick one spot where you feel your breath most prominently. And the third step is the most important, which is to really try to do this seemingly simple thing of just feeling your breath. Your mind's going to go nuts. You're going to start having all these random thoughts and urges and emotions and you may be planning a homicide or some sort of, you know...
Sarah [00:06:04] Political coup.
Dan Harris [00:06:05] Yeah, a political coup or some sort of expletive laden speech you're going to deliver to your boss or whatever. And the whole goal is just to notice whenever you've gotten carried away and to start again and again and again, and that noticing the distraction and starting again is meditation. You are not supposed to clear your mind. That's impossible unless you're enlightened or dead. The whole goal, again, is just to notice how wild the mind is and starting again and again and again. And that act is like a bicep curl for your brain and that's what changes the brain. And we see it in the brain scans of meditators. So how does this help when you're consuming the chaos that we're all viewing on the political scene? In a number of ways. I think most prominently what it does is it gives you a kind of self-awareness, this deliberate collision with the voice in your head, the noise in your head allows you to not be so owned by it. So, for example, if you're checking Twitter and then 7 hours later, you have not lifted your head, your nose out of your phone and you're typing in all caps at your voluble uncle, maybe 6 hours and 45 minutes earlier, you would have noticed, oh, yeah, I'm getting overtaken by my anger. I'm going to make a decision to put the phone down. And that can work. You can scale this into almost every aspect of your life. You might decide that you're not going to say something that's going to ruin the next 48 hours of your marriage. You're going to you might decide, I'm not going to eat the 78th Oreo. It's all about the self-awareness that allows you to reduce your emotional reactivity, to reduce your acting uncontrollably on your urges, and that's incredibly useful in a tumultuous time.
Sarah [00:08:02] I think that self-awareness is what I've definitely noticed in my own life, particularly with the doomscrolling. But not just the actions I'm taking with news and politics, but the thought processes that I can see myself sort of cycling through. We were talking about it on episode recently and I said, "I do struggle sometimes because it's the bicep curl gets you to a point whereyou can notice you're doing the doomscrolling and still feel powerless to turn off Twitter." I've been in so many spots where I'm like laying in my bed and I can feel myself going back to the same places over and over and over again, even though I just checked them and still noticing it and being like, oh God, just put it down. It's still really difficult.
Dan Harris [00:08:48] Well, I think you've got to give yourself a break because I'll go back to my whole 10% schtick. Perfection is not on offer here. You're not going to be. I have a strong suspicion and I can't prove this because we're not in that Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors. I can't run your life into parallel tracks and show you the difference. But I have a strong suspicion that if you've been meditating for any significant period of time, you're doing less of the behavior you just described than you would have otherwise done. And that is the proposition here, not perfection, but slow, steady improvement. And really just to say that in another way, the mental skills we want like patience, lower emotional reactivity, calm, greater ability not to be yanked around by urges to check Twitter or to overeat or whatever. All of those things are skills. They're not factory settings, and you can work on them. And so you are working on them. And yes, of course, you're not going to be perfect. But you can also get better at lowering the volume on the self laceration around your mistakes. And you might wake up an hour into a doomscrolling and notice, oh yeah, I'm unhappy. Maybe there are better uses of my time. And then you might notice buckets of self criticism as a consequence of having wasted an hour. You can notice that too and just drop and let that go. And so the skill of mindfulness or self-awareness just gets deeper and deeper.
Beth [00:10:40] Dan, How do you respond to criticisms around this conversation that it is centered and privilege or that it creates a level of denial or space from crises that prevent us from action? I mean, my own experience is that maybe sometimes if you dip your toe in to a meditation practice, you can say things like, well, I just have to turn off the news because it's not good for me. But then when you get deeper into it, it actually brings you in closer connection to the world's problems and your place in constructively contributing to solutions. But I wonder if that's been your experience or how you talk about those types of critiques.
Dan Harris [00:11:23] This is a great question and I'm glad you asked it. First of all, just to note, there is a lot of privilege, in part because the aforementioned good news around meditation seems to be sort of largely circulated in upper middle class white communities. So there's a pretty big overlap between people who are interested in meditation and people who go to SoulCycle and shop at WholeFoods. And I don't say that with any hate in my heart. I am that person-- back before the pandemic at least. But these skills that I'm describing, first of all, were not invented by white people. They were invented 2600 years ago in the Indian subcontinent. And they are human capacities that are your birthright, no matter your pigmentation or socio economic status. And so what we need is to get the word out in a more broad fashion. And I've been really focused on this, finding people who can speak to different communities because based on the womb I came out of, my appeal is going to be limited. And so I try on my podcast to give the mic to people of all different backgrounds and socioeconomic status and race and gender and sexual orientation. And so that's really important. The second thing to say, though, is for sure, I think a misunderstanding or even a misapplication of mindfulness meditation might lead to a numbing out. But that is not the proposition here. I'm not saying never check Twitter. I'm definitely not saying never check the news. I am a newsman. I think the key is in the type of engagement that will allow you to stay engaged and do meaningful work without losing your mind. And that's where meditation comes in. So it's really not about disengagement or detachment. It's about sort of leaning in in a way that allows you to stay leaned in and focused on the things that matter rather than wasting your time and energy in ways that reduce your resilience.
Sarah [00:14:01] I'm fascinated when I think back when you were saying, well, I've been with ABC News since 2004. You wrote this book in 2014, and since then you've grown on the podcast and the app. I'm just fascinated by the prospect of you in one area of your life and the new space, in the political space, watching this emotional reactivity just grow and grow and grow culturally, societally, while simultaneously being in this consciousness space. And when you're really advocating for a different type of approach and experiencing the results of that in your personal life, how have you navigated that without feeling ripped in two by these two spaces that seemingly have nothing in common and have been going in different directions? Because I do feel like there's a growing consciousness and that's one subset. But it does seem difficult to build the bridge and this other societal space of news and politics, which seem to be the consciousness seems to be decreasing.
Dan Harris [00:15:09] I guess I would say three things that come to mind based on that question. One is it's definitely frustrating and sad to watch the ripping apart of our social fabric. And I notice that I have anger, frustration, despair when I check the news sometimes or when I give in sometimes. But I go back to what I was just saying, which is I actually really feel more fortified and resourced to engage calmly and more effectively now that I have this mental exercise in my life that I know is changing my brain and by extension my mind, allowing me to not be so owned by my emotions, even as it seemed pretty clear that many other people are owned by their emotions in ways that I think are pretty unhealthy. So I'm really grateful that I have this in my life, otherwise I worry that I might be part of the problem. And then I guess the final thing I'd say is that I've been running a little bit of an experiment that I'll just mention, I don't know if you guys ever really talked about it that much publicly, but we'll see what you guys think. Just for myself, for the last four years, I'm really trying to truly vary my media diet. So I'm in the news and I get a ton of my news just by reading the internal ABC News emails that we get the news first and then we're talking about it internally. And so traditionally that's basically been where I got most of my news, just being in the job and also reading let's just say The Times, a few other news outlets. But I really over the last four years try to do a much better job at consuming left, right, center. So just by example, fo I'll listen to [Inaudible], but I'll also listen to Ben Shapiro or The Commentary Podcast on the right. I'll listen to the so-called intellectual darkweb figures like Sam Harris, who happens to be a friend, or Glenn Loury, who's not that well known but should be, who's an African-American economics professor at Brown.
[00:17:38] He's a sort of centered right and has a podcast that he does called The Glenn Show. And then I'll read newsletters and follow a whole variety of people across the spectrum on Twitter. And I found initially when I was doing that, that it would be head spinning because some a big event would happen in the news and I would process it by listening to Morning Joe or reading The Times or whatever. And then I'd listen to a completely different point of view from Ben Shapiro or The Commentary guys and I would be so confused. But what I found is that confusion is I feel healthy. It's like I'm gaslighting myself, but in a good way because it's knocking me off my-- it's so easy to fall into a kind of an information bubble and a sort of blind dogmatism. Whereas, if I'm having my own viewpoints challenged regularly, it puts me into what the Buddhists call beginner's mind. And it doesn't knock me off of my core values, but it does mean that I'm really opening up to many different points of view. And I feel like that strikes at the heart of the problem that we're facing in this country, which is that since most of us are tailoring our own information bubbles on Facebook or Twitter or wherever, or just reading The Times or just watching Fox News, we don't understand how other people think. And then the temptation to vilify is really powerful and maybe even irresistible. And I wish more of us were doing that. It reminds me of a tweet I saw that said, If you're only following people you agree with, you're doing it wrong.
Beth [00:19:35] Something I think about a lot is that sense of equanimity does not mean that you believe all things are equal or that you lack passion or emotion about anything. It's just more about decision making in the process. And so when I look at that disparate treatment of an issue across media, I feel the same way. I like to take in a lot of different voices on a specific subject. I find that less head spinning at this point than just the pace of new information developing. And I'm really working on myself at saying I'm not ready to talk about this yet. I'm not ready to make a podcast about this yet. I'm not ready to have an opinion about it. I need more information and I need some time for that information to sink in. Now I have that luxury because we make an independent podcast. I'm interested in whether that comes up for you and how you deal with that in an environment like ABC, where the speed really does matter in terms of how you communicate with viewers, listeners, etc..
Dan Harris [00:20:37] Well, the beauty and freedom of working in a place like ABC News is we are not taking sides. Now, we certainly get criticized from both left and right. But generally speaking, our our motto is straight forward. In my opinion (and obviously I am super biased here so you should take what I say with a grain of salt) I think having worked at ABC News for 20 years, that we do a really good job of just kind of delivering the facts. And so I don't really feel like I need to come in with a point of view. I do come in with questions and I do try to always take my time to understand what the raw data is. But generally, we're in the business of giving you the information rather than having a hot take on the information. So I think that's an easier job than, say, working at Vox or having a Twitter feed where I'm commenting on every jot and tittle of the news cycle. But just to go back to what you said about equanimity, I think that's exactly right. There is a difference between equanimity and a complete numbing out. And the proposition of mindfulness is not that you should be sort of blissed out and neutral and bovine, but instead that you should be able to respond wisely to all of the stimuli in your life rather than reacting blindly. And, again, you're not going to get perfect at this, but you can develop that capacity over time systematically through meditation. And there are other modalities for sure, but meditation for me has been the most helpful. I know you're helping me with this, but to emphasize, this is not about having the luxury to tune out. It's about staying engaged without burning out.
Sarah [00:22:36] I'm also intrigued by these two worlds where you work for a more traditional media source and while you're simultaneously building a podcast and an app and in a very new media source. And I'm wondering, as you're taking in all these voices and you're hearing the wide variety of approaches to media and the approaches to really just consumer outreach, where do you see this space going? What you've learned from living in both of these two worlds and when you can have that beginner's mind. I feel like being a podcaster, I'm forced in a way to have a beginner's mind about the industry. And I don't love it, Dan. I don't love it. So I'm wondering if you could offer any insight.
Dan Harris [00:23:29] So when you say industry, just to clarify, are you talking about the news industry generally or the podcast industry?
Sarah [00:23:34] Well, how can we separate those anymore? If you're a news man and you're saying I'm taking in all these different sources, particularly from podcasts. I listen to ABC News podcast every morning. We start here. So I think that's what's so hard. It's like we really can't compartmentalize them anymore. And I think what's so interesting is to see you have these sort of parallel tracks. And I'm just wondering because you've built that muscle of beginner's mind and equanimity when you see how fast things are changing and how they're starting to intersect in real ways, in the way people interact with news, in the way people enter even meditation. I think five years ago, if you'd said meditation app is the future, people would've been like, what? I think it's all changing so rapidly. And I think sometimes it feels like we're staying in that beginner's mind space is destabilizing, which I guess is the point.
Dan Harris [00:24:38] Yeah, for me it's the point. I'll tell you one thing as I look out at the landscape that I feel a yearning for, and I feel like maybe you can recommend a show where this is done. But I notice that in listening to or watching or reading people across the spectrum, one thing I haven't seen much of is them talking to each other. I know on the Sunday Shows you'll have people who have differing opinions, but it's all pretty fast. I kind of yearn for a podcast where you're getting people together who genuinely disagree but can talk about it without screaming. And because what I find frustrating at times is I'm trying to hold two different fact sets in my mind in any given moment on any given issue. And then, of course, in the Trump era, the issue is literally du jour tomorrow. It's a completely new thing that I'm having to learn about. And I've forgotten everything that happened the day before. There are a thousand controversies I can't even remember anymore. And so it would be nice to have a space where you could have people in conversation, hear each other out and rather than trying to score points. I haven't found that.
Sarah [00:26:04] I think the reason you don't see that in the model runs up against each other is what we always tell people is you have to build trust and that takes time. And so switching people out every time is hard. There's a lot of political podcasts that I think are pretty good interview shows. I think the power of our show is we don't-- you're here for an interview, but we don't do interviews a ton because what we're trying to show is what takes place over time inside one relationship where you're discussing your differing worldviews and you're working on each other and you're building that trust and you're building that connection. And that's not what you're going to see if you're switching out the panelists constantly. I mean, that's definitely why we started our show. We are not professional pundits. We're not journalists. We're just at the time when we started was two moms from Kentucky. And we would have conversations about politics that we felt like weren't taking place anywhere else and it was an ongoing conversation. And I think that's what's hard is it's even the new media environment doesn't give a lot of space for that ongoing conversation. I don't know. What do you think, Beth?
Beth [00:27:13] Well, I think the connection I would draw between this discussion and the mindfulness conversation is that our brains are trained to hear disagreement one way as well. And so for a lot of listeners who come into Pantsuit Politics with the expectation that we're going to disagree, in their minds that means we should disagree all the time on everything, and it should sound like disagreement and disagreement has a certain tenor, and so we don't meet that expectation. So we hear from people what you're saying all the time. I want a show where people genuinely disagree. And it sounds like they mean on every single topic through the rubric of the talking points that I hear on maybe the Sunday Shows, but just at a different volume. And I'm not sure that that can exist, because I think what Sarah was saying is right, there has to be a trusting relationship. And trust is only built when you concede the points that you agree on or you say like, actually, we don't break down differently on this issue. It's so fundamental that we're aligned on it.
Dan Harris [00:28:13] Well, good on you guys.
Sarah [00:28:14] We're trying. We're trying over here. We do our own thing. That's why we had you on here, because we love the idea that there's a space for mindfulness and everything, but particularly in the news and politics space. I mean, we've all come through an incredibly difficult time. We're still in it as far as the pandemic and hopefully we'll be at the end of it soon with the election. And I think anything where we can show that politics is about how we live together in community and the news is what's happening in our communities and how we take in that information as individuals, it doesn't just have to zap us. Like you said, it doesn't have to be something that is constantly depleting our energy. People always ask, well, how do you talk about the news every week? And I'm like, well, I'm sitting down with a close friend and processing it. That's how. I'm not just taking it and shoving it in a box in my mind and trying not to look at the box. I'm actually processing what's giving me anxiety and thinking through my emotional reactions and bringing that mindfulness to it. And thank you because your work has been an essential part of that in my life.
Dan Harris [00:29:29] Let me ask you guys a question. There's a debate that I've been following that I find really interesting. I've seen this play out on Twitter a couple of times now where you see kind of center left or just folks from the center saying something to the effect of, hey, everybody on the left, we should try to understand why 70 million people voted for Trump. Or Sewell Chan who was the editor of the L.A. Times Opinion Page posted that they turn the whole page over to Trump voters to write letters to the editor. And then they basically filled the whole opinion page with that. And there's been an enormous amount of pushback from the left saying we've heard enough. And the call for empathy and understanding is a privileged one because your lives aren't at stake the way ours are. And so I find myself, on the one hand as somebody who is incredibly privileged, thrown back in my chair by that like because I can see how oftentimes when people point out privilege it's a moment of for me to go into self-awareness, and at the same time this fear that we are living in the same country and we have to try to get along and understand one another. And so I'm just curious where you guys fall on in this debate.
Beth [00:31:05] I just don't think there has to be one call and that the problem with Twitter is that it often feels like there is a right answer and if we all just work on the problem long enough, we get to the right responses. I think there is a different call to people of privilege sometimes in political engagement, than people who are marginalized by our systems and by humans that they share space with. And so, to me, it's not right or wrong for a newspaper to devote that space to a viewpoint. And it's not right or wrong for people to point out that there's a lot of privilege around that and that some of us don't need that information, that for some of us the time for empathy has expired. But I always feel as a white person and a person who's in the middle class and safe everywhere I go for the most part, that it is my job to build those bridges and understand people who think very differently about the world than I do. And it's also my job to hear out the voices who say, "Enough of that, put me in the center and not that person." And that living in that tension is part of the responsibility that I have as a person of privilege.
Sarah [00:32:11] I've been thinking about this a lot. When you mentioned Vox, I've been sort of obsessed with Matt Iglesias's decision to leave Vox and his writings about that. I have enormous respect for him. I think he's so smart and you see this more and more. And I think mindfulness and equanimity is powerful here. And what it's taught me is that exactly what Beth was articulating, there's a force binary here. And I think that we use-- particularly, I'm going to say the left a lot-- the political space to moralize. And let me be clear. I think there's a space for moralizing. I really think it's important to say this is right and this is wrong. But sometimes political Twitter is not the space to do that. Sometimes politics is not the space to do that. And we wrote about this in our book that we've just put everything in that box. We just put identity and moral and ethical values and how we're going to run the sewer system, I mean, everything along that entire spectrum in this one box. And I just don't think it's built to hold it. And I think you're seeing that struggle inside journalism right now in particular. And maybe I'm projecting, but sometimes what I'm hearing from people like Matt Iglesias is, like, you're asking me to do things that aren't my job.
[00:33:29] And I think that's really hard. And I don't think there's an easy answer. And like I said, I'm not sure there is one answer we need to reach one. But she said once on our podcast I don't ever want to turn away from more information. And so I think that there is a tension between saying learning is learning and being curious about our fellow citizens is important and making sure we don't elevate that above other important and essential and historically marginalized perspectives. But no one's asking-- and we certainly aren't anyway asking-- just random strangers to walk up to Trump voters and try to figure it out. There's spaces in which that can be done, either because you have a personal connection to that person and you can continue the hard work of influencing them because you are a journalist and it's your job to report on all aspects of the electorate. And I feel there's a sense on Twitter, like, well, we have to decide the right way. And not only do we not have to decide that, but Twitter is just about the worst place to work that out.
Dan Harris [00:34:38] Yeah, such an interesting response. I actually posed the same question to Laurie Santos the other day, who's the host of a really popular podcast called The Happiness Lab. She's a professor at Yale who studies human well-being. And she said a very similar thing to what Beth said of if we feel like we have the resources and the capacity and the privilege, frankly, to reach out and try to understand people with whom we disagree, then great. But if you feel like you don't, you shouldn't be forced to.
Sarah [00:35:11] But who's forcing you to if they put it on the L.A Opinion page.
Dan Harris [00:35:14] Yeah. What you're bringing up brings to mind the one of the primary conundrum of the age, which is there's always another good point.
Sarah [00:35:31] Right. And that's where, again-- not to steal your point, but that's where mindfulness, I think, is helpful. We tell people all the time it's a country of 300 million people. There's going to be tension and complexity and we're just going to have to hold it. Sometimes we're going to have to say I don't know. Sometimes we're going to have to say I think you're both right. You know what, I see both of your points. And that's hard. And I think that bicep curl of noticing I feel pulled or I feel that tension of a space in which there is not an easy binary yes or no, right or wrong answer is really the most valuable, at least for me personally, in this current historical moment and the political space and the new space.
Dan Harris [00:36:20] Can I give you two little mantras from Joseph Goldstein?
Beth [00:36:27] Yes, please.
Sarah [00:36:28] Always.
Dan Harris [00:36:29] I say this gingerly because if you're feeling taxed, these are challenging practices, so just go at your own pace or decide not to do it. One of them is don't side with yourself. And that's just really useful personally and politically. If you find yourself wound up, feeling dogmatic, really convinced you're right (could be in any context), but I just notice when that happens to me that there's a pain there. There's a sort of subtle pain of shutting out any other point of view, really trying to convince myself or work myself up into something when some part of my brain knows well maybe there's another way to look at this. And just in those moments, if I can remember don't side with yourself, it's pretty useful. And then the other is-- and this is going to sound for me as a guy who's really tried to make his bones as somebody who doesn't lapse into too much sentimentality, sound a little off brand but I like it anyway. It's love no matter what. This is challenging and I'm not saying everybody should do it, but it is useful personally and politically. And it's like, yeah, I'm going to remain unshakably convinced of the fact that no matter how much we disagree, we are fundamentally connected simply by dint of the fact that we're both drawing air on the same planet, drawing breath on the same planet. And love no matter what means there's no back door. And so I have applied this incredibly imperfectly, and I usually just forget to even try. But in the moments where I try, it's interesting. So I just toss it out there for consideration.
Sarah [00:38:34] I think all the time about hearing Sharon Salzberg on being. She's another one of your meditation teachers. I love her dearly. And she was on there and she was saying that people think love is passive. People hear love and they think it's some sort of either romantic or schmaltzy or a passive act. And she's, like, it's not. It's powerful. It's an action. I think about that all the time.
Beth [00:39:00] What helps me with this kind of dilemma? So I think about that Tom Cotton op-ed as a good illustration of what we were just talking about, that I feel that The Times was both justified in running it and that the criticisms of running it were fair. I go to the Palmer children's story about Tigers Above and Tigers Below. And this is just the condition of your life that there is always peril and tension, and that we're basically always caught in a moment where we have a decision to make about how we meet the moment. And that helps me understand that it is not my task to resolve that tension as much as to just see it for what it is and then make a decision about how I can act constructively. And I think that's where the love always and anyway and in spite of is really helpful.
Dan Harris [00:39:54] I wonder if these people listening to this will think, okay, take the Tom Cotton thing. If you're going to hold both sides, where are you? Are you just left with a sort of mushy nothingness? What would you say to that?
Beth [00:40:10] I feel more grounded when I can hold onto both sides than when I try to sit in one or the other, because it doesn't mean that I don't have a perspective. So if I were a decision maker about the Tom Cotton op-ed, I would have run it. That to me rests on the principle that I don't ever want to be afraid of information, and I would rather know where people stand than speculate about it. So it doesn't feel like mushy nothingness. It just feels like an acceptance. It feels like a radical acceptance of what is. That I don't like this viewpoint in and exist. That some people will feel attacked by this viewpoint. But surfacing it makes it less powerful to me than if it is on surface. It just feels like I'm putting my feet on the ground. And this ,s where I sit with the 70 million people who voted for Donald Trump when I did not and can't fathom how 70 million people did. There is a moment of just accepting, well, they did. And so Donald Trump's presidency was not a fluke. And these are dynamics that are going to persist in American life. And I feel less mushy when I can just acknowledge all of that and then ask the question, who do I want to be in that reality?
Sarah [00:41:22] Well, and for me, one of the things that we find so hard to convey-- and I'm sure that you do too-- is often when we're saying this is our approach and this is what it means to us. Like, we can't say it. You have to feel it. You have to experience. Like you can talk about meditation, but there is a certain amount of the impact of mindfulness that you have to feel. And I think for me what I've realized doing this podcast and learning to think and talk about politics in a different way and just living through the last five years in our country, is it's not a mushy nothingness of no right and wrong. I think when people say that what they're confronting is a lack of control. I think what the undercurrent in so many of these conversations is about control. I think that when we say there's a right thing to do and we should do it, what we're saying is, I think there's a way to be in control of this environment and or I think there is a way for me to assert personal or individual control in a way that makes me feel more comfortable in this environment. I think that that need to control and to assert your individual like authority or empowerment, I don't know the right word I want, is what happens so much on Twitter. It's we want to feel better. We want to feel like we've done something and we have some control in this space because there's a right thing to do and we tweeted about it and that's it. And I think for me in my life particularly with mindfulness, but with those teachings around equanimity and how often that train of thought or that keyboard engine or whatever it was, it wasn't some fear of nothingness. It was a fear of my own lack of personal control and just fighting at every chance for the feeling that I had some control over the environment. And it's so hard to convey to people that if you can let go of that, that it actually is empowering. And it's not that you see you have control, it's just that you see you're not alone, and that you see that there is comfort in that connection and that grounding of realizing this is the human condition and you're not alone in it. And all those illusions of control were just that. They were just illusions. And it felt scary to drop them, but once you did drop them, that the connection to other people was way more rewarding than any individual sense of control or righteousness or moral authority.
Dan Harris [00:43:55] We don't live in easy times.
Sarah [00:43:57] Mm-mh
Beth [00:43:58] Well, we've kept you longer than we ask for, so thank you so much for spending time with us. Before we let you go, can you just tell people where they should connect with you?
Dan Harris [00:44:08] So I have a podcast called 10% Happier. Check that out. We talk to meditation teachers, researchers who have developed expertize in various areas of psychology and the human condition. Occasionally, we'll talk to somebody famous who is doing good work on his or her own mind. And also have a meditation app which Sarah and Beth I now know both use, which I'm really grateful for. It's also called 10% Happier. And more ABC News. I'm one of the co-hosts of Weekend Good Morning America, so that's probably more than enough. Dan Harris.
Beth [00:44:46] Well, we're so glad we got some Dan Harris here. Thank you very much for your time today.
Dan Harris [00:44:50] Yeah, great questions. You got me thinking. And, yeah, I appreciate you having me on. Thank you.
Beth [00:44:54] It was lots of fun.
Sarah [00:45:01] Thank you to all of you for joining us for another episode of Pantsuit Politics. We hope that you are having the best Thanksgiving holiday available to you, and we will be back in your ears on Tuesday of next week. And until then, keep it nuanced y'all.
Beth [00:45:30] Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our managing director.
Sarah [00:45:36] Maggie Penton is our community engagement manager. Dante Lima is the composer and performer of our theme music.
Beth [00:45:42] Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers.
Executive Producers (Read their own names) [00:45:46] Martha Bronitski. Linda Daniel. Allie Edwards. Janice Elliott. Sarah Greenup. Julie Haller. Helen Handley. Tiffany Hasler, Emily Holiday. Katie Johnson. Katina Zugenalis Kasling. Barry Kaufman. Molly Kohrs. Laurie LaDow. Lilly McClure. Emily Neesley. Tawni Peterson. Tracy Puthoff. Sarah Ralph. Jeremy Sequoia. Katie Stiggers. Karen True. Onica Ulveling. Nick and Alysa Villeli. Katherine Vollmer. Amy Whited,.
Beth [00:46:21] Jeff Davis. Melinda Johnston. Michelle Wood. Joshua Allen. Morgan McCue. Nicole Berklas. Paula Bremer and Tim Miller.