Dan Harris Quotes

In fact, when you're mindful, you actually feel irritation more keenly. However, once you unburden yourself from the delusion that people are deliberately trying to screw you, it's easier to stop getting carried away.

Overall, compassionate people tended to be healthier, happier, more popular, and more successful at work. Most

Imagine a world where people were 10% happier and less reactive. Marriage, parenting, road rage, politics - all would be improved upon. Public health revolutions can happen rapidly. Most Americans didn't brush their teeth until after world war 2 after soldiers were demanded to maintain oral hygiene. Exercise didn't get popular until science proved its benefits. Mindfulness, I had come to believe, could, in fact, change the world.

Turns out, it's pretty simple to win people over, especially in tense situations, if you're able to take their perspective and validate their feelings.

All we can do is everything we can do. (David Axelrod)

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.

We are constantly murmuring, muttering, scheming, or wondering to ourselves under our breath," wrote Epstein. " 'I like this. I don't like that. She hurt me. How can I get that? More of this, no more of that.' Much of our inner dialogue is this constant reaction to experience by a selfish, childish protagonist. None of us has moved very far from the seven-year-old who vigilantly watches to see who got more." There were also delightful passages about the human tendency to lurch headlong from one pleasurable experience to the next without ever achieving satisfaction. Epstein totally nailed my habit of hunting around my plate for the next bite before I'd tasted what was in my mouth. As he described it, "I do not want to experience the fading of the flavor - the colorless, cottony pulp that succeeds that spectacular burst over my taste buds." Prior

Another stereotype I spent a lot of time batting down: that Christians were all spittle-spewing hatemongers. I met a few of those in my travels, of course, but they struck me as a distinct minority. Wonbo and I - two nonreligious New Yorkers, one of them gay, the other gay-friendly - were never treated with anything short of respect. Often, in fact, what we found was kindness, hospitality, and curiosity. Yes, people would always ask whether we were believers, but when we said no, there were never gasps or glares. They may have thought we were going to hell, but they were perfectly nice about it.

Axelrod responded, "All we can do is everything we can do.

it is entirely possible to be depressed without being conscious of it. When you're cut off from your emotions, he said, they often manifest in your body.

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.

Picture the mind like a waterfall, they said: the water is the torrent of thoughts and emotions; mindfulness is the space behind the waterfall. Again, elegant theory – but, easier said than done.

When you lurch from one thing to the next, constantly scheming, or reacting to incoming fire, the mind gets exhausted. You get sloppy and make bad decisions.

Much of our inner dialogue is this constant reaction to experience by a selfish, childish protagonist.

What mindfulness does is create some space in your head so you can, as the Buddhists say, "respond" rather than simply "react." In

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. We "live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation," he wrote. We wax nostalgic for prior events during which we were doubtless ruminating or projecting. We cast forward to future events during which we will certainly be fantasizing. But as Tolle pointed out, it is, quite literally, always Now. (He liked to capitalize the word.) The present moment is all we've got. We experienced everything in our past through the present moment, and we will experience everything in the future the same way.

The pursuit of happiness becomes the source of our unhappiness.

When you have one foot in the future and the other in the past, you piss on the present.

But if we can achieve a deeper understanding of "suffering," of the unreliability of everything we experience, it will help us appreciate the inherent poignancy of everything in the world. "It's like we've been enchanted," he says. "We've been put under a spell - believing that this or that is going to be the source of our ultimate freedom or happiness. And to wake up from that, to wake up from that enchantment, to be more aligned with what is true, it brings us much greater happiness.

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.

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.

I was always hurtling headlong through the day, checking things off my to-do list, constantly picturing completion instead of calmly and carefully enjoying the process.

It was the longest, most exquisite high of my life, but the hangover came first.

Add it all up, and some prominent Obama supporters are now saying that it paints a picture of an opposition driven, in part, by a refusal to accept a black President.

The ego is constantly comparing itself to others. It has us measuring our self-worth against the looks, wealth, and social status of everyone else. Did this not explain some of my worrying at work?

Is this useful?" It's a simple, elegant corrective to my "price of security" motto. It's okay to worry, plot, and plan, he's saying - but only until it's not useful anymore.

There's actually a term for this - "hedonic adaptation." When good things happen, we bake them very quickly into our baseline expectations,

Secrets and Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul

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.

On the one hand, I was utterly convinced that the continuation of any success I had achieved was contingent upon persistent hypervigilance. I figured this kind of behavior must be adaptive from an evolutionary standpoint - cavemen who worried about possible threats, real or imagined, probably survived longer. On the other hand, I was keenly aware that while this kind of insecurity might prolong life, it also made it less enjoyable.

With uncontrived sincerity he said, "I want to know you." That was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to me.

Prepare like no other, know that there was nothing left for you to do when it's all said and done. This way a loss is just a stat. The better man will always win if he prepared like no other.

I had long assumed that ceaseless planning was the recipe for effectiveness, but Marturano's point was that too much mental churning was counterproductive. When you lurch from one thing to the next, constantly scheming, or reacting to incoming fire, the mind gets exhausted. You get sloppy and make bad decisions. I could see how the counterintuitive act of stopping, even for a few seconds, could be a source of strength, not weakness.

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