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This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I’m Dan Harris.
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Deep the Isles clear of all carry-on items.
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Hey gang, it’s New Years, and we’re making a pretty radical departure from our usual format. Thanks,
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thank you for choosing American Airlines. I
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recently flew with a small team to Daram Salah, India, home to his holiness, the Dalai Lama.
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I’m sitting on board a giant plane. I
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think we’re about 13 hours into our flight. Here’s the backstory. I went because I got this incredible opportunity. The Dalai Lama agreed to do a course for the meditation app that I co-founded, which is also called 10% Happier. The plan was I would interview him on camera about how we can all get happier, and then my team and I would edit that down and serve up the learnings of the people. Now, to be clear, I had actually interviewed his holiness before. The first time was back in 2011, and then a few years later, he was the inaugural guest right here on this podcast. Back then, though, I was a fidgety, skeptical news anchor with a happiness side hustle, but by the time I was making this trip, I had
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changed, or at least that’s what I told myself. I was
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still, of course, skeptical about a lot of things, but I had done so much more meditation and general learning. In fact, I was even in the midst of writing a whole book about love, albeit in my usual, wise-ass style. Another difference with this encounter was that instead of a quick sit-down while he was on tour, here in America, I would be on the Dalai Lama’s home turf. And, in fact, his team had agreed to let me kind of hang around in his orbit for two weeks. So I knew this thing would be cool, but I did not expect that so many extraordinary, fascinating, and even jarring things would go down. Your holiness,
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with the deepest respect I have for you, when I hear you today, your words feel overly simplistic and sentimental. I’ve been in that room since 1992,
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and that’s never happened. His holiness grabbed me by the arm, and he said, don’t
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use mine, just like that. Come, come here.
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There was no
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guarantee that you were going to respond well to that. I didn’t even think about that. That was a risky move. It was the most emotional thing that happened in my life. I was really rattle. It had, like, kind
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of fundamental
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identity ramifications for me. This very mind eventually becomes enlightened mind.
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So much happened that my team and I decided to put together an audio documentary, which is a first for us. Every day this week, you’ll get a new installment of a five-part series that we’re calling the Dalai Lama’s Guide to Happiness. Alongside all the dramatic moments, there are plenty of practical takeaways for doing your life better on the day to day. I talked to the Dalai Lama about his contention that the purpose of life is to be happy. What does that mean exactly? His intriguing theory that we all need to get better at the right kind of selfishness, how he deals with difficult people, including the Chinese government, and whether compassion and kindness can cut it in a cold world. Throughout it all, throughout this whole trip, I wrestled with my own demons. The Dalai Lama’s core thesis is that the key to happiness is the cultivation of mental states such as altruism and warm-heartedness. That’s a term he uses a lot. But I have long struggled to shake the suspicion that I am somehow irreparably selfish. I mean, part of why I got on the plane to India in the first place was selfishness. Was it not? Of course, yes, I was interviewing the Dalai Lama to pass along his insights to you. But it was also a great business opportunity for me. So how much had I really changed from my first encounter with the man back in 2011? We will be landing soon. Landing soon?
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Landing soon? Landing soon? Landing soon? Landing soon? Landing soon? Landing soon? Landing soon?
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Landing soon?
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Landing soon? A quick break. Having a healthy diet is, of course, one very good way to help yourself have a healthy mind. HUEL is an easy way to give your body everything it needs without having to overthink it. By switching just one meal a day to HUEL, you’re giving your body a healthy serving of 40 grams of protein, vitamins and minerals. You can shake it up in 30 seconds to get on with your day. HUEL Black Edition is vegan, gluten-free, lactose-free and has zero artificial sweeteners. So it can fit in with your lifestyle. I personally am looking forward to the banana flavor. Try HUEL today and get a free T-shirt and shaker when you go to HUEL.COM slash happier that’s HUEL.COM slash happier for a free T-shirt and shaker with your order. Okay, 2023
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is here.
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Hey, welcome back. We land and drive into Darham Salah, which is a bustling North Indian city with stunning views of the snow-capped Himalayan mountains. The Vista is so astonishing it doesn’t even look real. Then we drive up a windy, nausea and panic-inducing road. It’s the width of a one lane road, but the vehicles go both ways here in a sort of chaotic
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ballet. I don’t think the Dalai Lama could stay calm in this drive. Or maybe you have to be the Dalai Lama to stay calm in this morass.
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The road crests and we arrive at a part of town called Macloud Gaj, which is perched precariously on top of a Himalayan foothill. This is where the Dalai Lama’s compound is.
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Walking through the streets of Darham Salah is pretty chaotic for a Buddhist town. You got sacred cows, roman around, people beeping. The beeping is jarring, but actually they do it here more as sonar rather than aggression. Monks, pedestrian shoppers, tons of smells, incense, fresh-cooked
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bread,
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lots of stores selling pre-blessed artifacts from his Holiness the Dalai Lama.
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Given that I write books and host a podcast about meditation and happiness, it is perhaps unsurprising that I am a huge fan of the Dalai Lama. But I will admit I’ve long had just a few little reservations. On the one hand, I have an incredible admiration for and fascination with the man. I mean, just his life story is extraordinary. His birth name was Lamo Thundep. He was just a two-year-old living in a remote village in northeastern Tibet when he was identified by religious officials as the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama. So this little kid was all of a sudden tagged as the 14th Dalai Lama, the spiritual and political leader of the Tibetan people. He was whisked away from his family and brought to the capital city of Lhasa where he lived in a massive palace surrounded by monks and where he underwent many years of intense Buddhist training. He was put through a dizzying array of courses and exams,
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which covers such subjects as Buddhist philosophy, transcendental wisdom, metaphysics, logic and dialectics. The candidate, in this case the Dalai Lama himself, is tested for his ability to question his examiners.
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And by all accounts, he was a meditative and academic adept. In 1959, when the Dalai Lama was just 23 years old, the Chinese invaded Tibet and took over the country. The Dalai Lama was forced to escape on foot over the mountains to India where he set up a government in exile. The 23-year-old God King of Tibet makes his first public appearance since his escape from the Chinese Communists. For more than two weeks, he has been sheltered in inaccessible frontier territory out of reach, even to newsmen. Back in Tibet, thousands of people died fighting the Chinese forces. The struggle continued and it still does in fact and has been marked by bloodshed, political repression and martial law. During this time, the Dalai Lama became a global figure meeting with world leaders and promoting the Tibetan cause. He also became a cultural figure featured in Apple ads and the Brad Pitt movie Seven Years in Tibet. It’s
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an honor to meet your holiness.
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And he did all of this while promoting a very simple message of compassion. It’s what earned him a Nobel Peace Prize. Even in the face of the violence and desecration perpetrated by the Chinese, the Dalai Lama stood steadfast for kindness. And I know this is a loaded word, but love.
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I pray for all of us, oppressor and friend, that together we succeed in building a better world through human understanding and love. So we may reduce the pain and suffering of all sentient beings.
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Not only does he have an astonishing biography, but the Dalai Lama has also helped to get the word out about practical actionable tools for training your mind to become more compassionate and by extension happier. In fact, he has actively helped to catalyze an explosion of scientific research into how meditation changes the brain. This work has demonstrated that happiness isn’t just a factory setting, it’s a skill, which is why I got into this whole meditation game in the first place. So because of all of the foregoing, I, as I said, truly respect and admire the Dalai Lama. And yet, there are those little reservations on my end. First, as a lifelong agnostic and a trained skeptic, I do struggle a bit with the fact that he is a religious leader. I was raised by atheist scientists. And then when I was a network newsman, I spent a lot of time covering scandals involving religious authorities and cases of gurus gone wrong. This is not to criticize all religion, but just to admit that given my personal history and my Western proclivities and biases, the Dalai Lama’s metaphysical claims about things like reincarnation, enlightenment, and the existence of various deities can be just a little hard for me to compute. All right, well, it’s done. The prayer will circuit. All over DarmSala, there are prayer wheels, these engraved cylinders that if spun clockwise are believed to purify negative energy and accumulate good karma. There are also huge murals of various Buddhist deities.
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But then you have a lot of protector deities up here. These are ferocious looking or standing on corpses. They have heads, they’re drinking from skull cups, and they’re terrifying.
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The Dalai Lama is considered to be an emanation of a Buddhist deity named Avaloki Teshvara, who has a thousand arms. And on the palm of each hand, there is an eyeball scanning the world for suffering that can then be relieved. And this brings me to another issue that does come up for me, vis-a-vis the Dalai Lama. All of his talk of compassion, altruism, and kindness, it sometimes provokes a kind of imposter syndrome for me. As I mentioned earlier, in my low moments, I sometimes wonder whether I might suffer from some sort of terminal self-involvement, like maybe I’m a thousand armed being, but my palm-based eyeballs are just scanning for self-centered gratification. Anyway, I have long figured this was just me. I mean, who else other than maybe the Chinese government could possibly have any sort of beef with this figure? But then I show up for my first audience with his holiness, and a young activist in the room goes after the Dalai Lama. We, everyone in this room,
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is losing to the forces of power in this world. Tibet is losing. As we speak, today, C.G. Ping is assuming a third term as a Chinese premier, and it’s creating an authoritarian state that will be very difficult to defeat through words of compassion and
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love.
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And so that’s what we’re going to tackle in this first episode of our series. In a chaotic and often brutal world, is the Dalai Lama’s message still relevant? Is he still relevant? That’s coming up after the break. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. For Better or Worse, life does not come with a user’s manual, so when things are not going your way, it’s pretty normal to feel stuck. The good news is there is such a thing as a therapist. A therapist is somebody who can help you figure out the cause of your challenging emotions and then give you some coping skills for dealing with those emotions. I’ve been seeing my therapist for many years now, and he is just a font of wisdom, both practical and profound. As I’ve mentioned before in the show, I’ve been dealing with this resurgence of claustrophobia, which has made getting on elevators and in airplanes, difficult, but with the help of my therapist. I’ve been noticing some genuine improvements. I also find that talking to him about the various difficulties I may encounter throughout my life, be it worries about career or money or family, he has always just incredibly helpful. As the world’s largest therapy service, BetterHelp has matched 3 million people with professionally licensed and vetted therapists available 100% online, plus it’s affordable. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to match up with a therapist. If things aren’t clicking, you can easily switch to a new therapist anytime. It could not be simpler. No waiting rooms, no traffic, no endless searching for the right therapist. Learn more and save 10% off your first month at BetterHelp.com. That’s BetterHelpHELP.com.
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Thank you.
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Okay, welcome back. Even though my one-on-one interview with the Dalai Lama isn’t for a few days, we’ve come about a week early in order to attend an event called the Compassionate Leadership Summit, where his holiness will be meeting with young activists from around the world. It’s early on
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Tuesday morning. This is our first official event with his holiness, the Dalai Lama. Everybody’s bustling around as we anticipate the Dalai Lama’s arrival. There’s definitely a palpable buzz in the air.
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To tell the truth, we didn’t really think this event would be that exciting. We figured it would really just be an opportunity to get some extra footage and audio tape. This was an underestimation.
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So indeed, I’m very, very happy on meeting.
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That is, of course, his holiness, the Dalai Lama.
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And particularly, you two leaders. You two leaders. You two
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leaders, man. And that is, Thogton Jintpa, who’s been his holiness translator for nearly 40 years. It’s the first morning of the summit and his holiness is delivering
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some opening remarks, hitting many of his usual notes. And we
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say, seven to eight billion human beings, we are same. Now we have to think we all human brothers, sisters. We have to live on this planet together. So I firmly believe that we really need concept oneness of seven to eight billion human beings, we are same.
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Here he makes a reference to the indigenous group from New Zealand, the Maoris. New
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Zealander Maoris, their way of greeting is such a noise. No, we all human beings, same, except to some bigger nose.
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So the morning starts off warm and fuzzy. We’re in a large conference room on the second floor of the Dalai Lama’s compound, which is a heavily guarded facility on the outskirts of McLeod Gange. We’ve all had to be searched and COVID tested before gaining entry. The room has yellow potted flowers, golden statues of the Buddha and small tables for cake and tea, which are distributed at the midpoint of the morning. The 15 activists are sitting in a semicircle facing his holiness, and the rest of us are in rows behind them. The summit is split over two days. They keep these events quite brief, just two hours a day because the Dalai Lama is really getting on in age. And there’s a very structured format. Each activist is allotted just a few minutes to introduce themselves, say a little bit about their work, and then ask the Dalai Lama a question. My name
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is Dishan. I was born here in India. My name is Greece. I’m from Ghana. My name is Rameses, and I come from Mexico.
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All of their remarks are pretty tightly scripted. In fact, the whole event is, really. The activists have been workshopping their questions with the conference organizers for the past two years.
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And I want to ask you, if you have ever felt powerless, and how did you overcome that, and how do I overcome that?
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As the activists begin to speak, there’s a real heaviness, a sense of desperation even. They’re wondering if they’re doing enough, or if their work even matters.
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How do we motivate ourselves, even at a point where we feel like our contributions might not be significant?
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And the Dalai Lama responds by basically repeating the same message from his opening remarks, talking about oneness, and how the seven to eight billion human beings need to view ourselves as brothers and sisters. It’s the same answer whether the question is about women’s education in Afghanistan, climate change, or mental health. I’m sitting here starting to think, is the Dalai Lama maybe whiffing on this? Maybe it’s because his hearing has gotten worse, or maybe it’s because he’s gotten older, he’s 87 after all. In any event, my doubts are starting to build.
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Seven to eight billion human beings, we are the same.
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Then the last scheduled speaker of the day takes the mic.
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How can we organize our compassionate action
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to whom
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shall we begin with?
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We have to do the changes, generation, and to do the changes. So his ownness feels that actually if we work hard, we really should be able to promote this idea of the oneness of everybody, so that people relate to each other at this fundamental shared humanity.
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How?
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Can you ask him how do we do this? Okay, it’s a little hard to make out that last comment, but that is one of the activists breaking the tightly structured format and asking, how? Can you ask him how we do this? Somebody is finally saying what you can read on all of the activists’ faces. They want some practical answers here. At this point, the whole choreography of the event goes entirely out the window when a political strategist and climate activist named Ronan Harrington, who has clearly had enough, gets a hold of the mic.
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Your holiness, there’s a quote that I often remember from Martin Luther King, that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. And I’m going to be honest with the deepest respect I have for you. When I hear you today, your words feel overly simplistic and sentimental, and I believe that it requires more than a shift to realize that we are one. It requires political organizing. It requires power. It is illegal for women to get secondary education in Afghanistan. I do not believe the Taliban will be overcome with a spiritual shift in perspective. I believe they will be forced out of power, or they will be isolated and strangled until they relinquish. We, everyone in this room, is losing to the forces of power in this world. Tibet is losing. As we speak today, Xi Jinping is assuming a third term as a Chinese premier, and is creating an authoritarian state that will be very difficult to defeat through words of compassion and love. I don’t have a question for you, but that’s how I feel.
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While JINPA
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is translating, you can see the activists trading glances and nods like visual fist bumps across the room. Ronan has clearly articulated something
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they’re all feeling. But the reality is that many of the challenges that we experience collectively does call for that kind of oneness of humanity. The whole humanity, I think, eventually have to think oneness of 7 to 8 billion human beings as a one human family. Well, this oneness is making the point that in a sense we don’t have a choice. We have to move there.
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Again, oneness without concrete action. So the activists start to pile on now, taking the mic and again pressing for specifics. Today in
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Afghanistan, women are demanding their right and Taliban are holding gun to their faces. Where do you preach oneness with a group that truly doesn’t understand or believe in the power of oneness?
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And yet again, the Dalai Lama talks about oneness 7 to 8 billion human beings, one human family, until finally the meeting just ends. Everybody empties out into the courtyard of the Dalai Lama’s compound. I’m very curious to get your fresh response to the intensity of those questions and the… That is Roshi Joan Halifax. She’s an American Zen master who has a long-standing relationship with the Dalai Lama. And she’s here serving as a mentor to some of the young activists.
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Because something broke open. And Ronan spoke for many of us in the audience. You know, he was the one who sort of broke the trance of goodness in that meeting. It’s one of the most valuable acts I’ve seen in that room. I’ve been in that room since 1992.
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And that’s never happened. Really? No.
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Somebody speaking up in such a tart and
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direct manner. Yeah, and also speaking the heart minds of many of the people who were in the room but would never go over that edge. It was really courageous. But
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did he give an answer? He did.
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At the very end. I mean,
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it was subtle.
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You’d have to… Roshi Joan leans over, cupping her hand to her ear, pantomiming somebody’s straining to hear. She says his holiness did answer the question. But perhaps in a way people may not have heard both literally and figuratively. The answer, she says, came in this key moment just as his holiness was having his microphone taken off.
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I want to share my daily practice actualism. That really gives you inner peace, inner strength. That brings fearless and your mind truly peace.
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I want to share my daily practice, he said. Altruism. That really gives you inner peace, inner strength. That brings fearlessness and your mind is truly at peace. What he’s saying here, and to be honest, I actually missed it in the moment, but what he’s saying is that if you can cultivate an inner attitude of generosity, of compassion, of care for the suffering of other people, no matter how difficult those other people might be, that will give you the confidence and resilience to navigate any challenge. To be clear, to be super clear about this, that does not mean that you should be a doormat or that you shouldn’t speak up for your needs, actually one Tibetan teacher has called that posture, idiot compassion. Instead, it means taking care of your own inner weather so you can handle whatever the outer world throws at you. That
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is the really the, I think, the most important thing to understand. Altruism is not a self-sacrifice standard, it actually builds resilience. It’s a resource that very few people understand because they have this idea of altruism as sacrifice, but actually it’s generative, it’s liberative.
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This is a tricky concept to understand. So later in the day, I sit down with Roshi Joan to get her to unpack it a little bit more. Let me see if I can sum up what I took away from both your comments and from the Dalai Lama’s comments. I think what he was saying in a way was, yes, the world is harsh. Yes, there are people out there with weapons who don’t necessarily buy into my message of oneness. And yes, you do need to work with these challenges, but how do you want to do it from a place of rage or
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from a place of compassion and altruism, and that, the latter choice of compassion and altruism, will
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help you navigate these challenges just as effectively and you will be happier and calmer while you do
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it.
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Yeah, and one of the things that you’re pointing to, I think, is really important. And that is, you don’t really want to mirror the misery of the other. In other words, if someone is holding a gun to your head, you don’t want to experience the same kind of suffering that they’re experiencing and holding the gun to the head. That suffering too is really powerful to be able to see the truth of suffering, of a person who harms another in that way. You know, we’re in a very messy time. Compassion, altruism, essential at this time. Wisdom essential.
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This all sounds nice, but if you’re one of the activists in the room, it’s got to be something of a bitter pill. Compassion means asking a climate change activist to consider the suffering of oil executives. Altruism means asking an advocate for women’s education in Afghanistan to act in a way that benefits everybody, including the Taliban. When the dust has settled, I catch up with Ronan after he’s had some time to process to see where his head is at now. Do you walk away with anything approaching, even a pointing in the right direction? Yeah, I suppose for me, you can’t
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be expecting the Dalai Lama to have sophisticated answers on the how. We can figure that out on the ground, but what he’s saying is that those attempts will be futile unless you actually really understand what it means to embody this position of a global perspective and oneness, which is very easy to talk about and sound by it, but actually incredibly difficult to do. And his job is to hold that poll and stay and emphasize that. And in a way, the healing and the teachings that I received on that level are more resourcing and inspiring from my work than any technical discussion on systems change.
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So where you net out is, yeah, he didn’t answer the specifics of how do you use compassion and force together, but he did give you advice about how to work with your own mind, so everything
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you do is more effective. Yeah, and there was also just profound teachings that on some level were straight out of this. It will take probably weeks and months and years to integrate. I mean,
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people spend lifetimes
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teaching and studying and practicing Buddhism and these concepts, so I don’t think it’s meant to be immediately, totally, viscerally understood.
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Yeah, and it’s not an exam anyone has to pass today.
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Correct. Yes, and I think you said it beautifully with, he’s holding the poll. And he’s really not movable. Yeah,
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yeah, yeah. And in a way, it’s almost more interesting that he’s holding the poll of oneness and isn’t as interested in talking about the how when he’s been doing the how for so many decades. Right.
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That’s an important point. The Dalai Lama does, in fact, have unimpeachable credentials when it comes to dealing with the hard realities of the world. He’s a master political strategist who has spent 70 years in a face off with China, arguably the second most powerful country on earth, even though the Dalai Lama has not gained independence from China. He has in the face of massive resistance put the Tibetan cause firmly on the map. And instead of fading into irrelevance after having been ousted, he’s made himself into a household name globally. So he’s not advising these young activists from some blissful, problem free mountain tops surrounded by rainbow barfing unicorns. And his advice to cultivate mental states such as compassion and altruism is not just relevant to activists. It’s applicable to all of us, to all of our lives. Reams of research have shown that cultivating compassion, or as I like to say, pulling your head out of your own ass so you’re less stuck in self consciousness and self judgment and have more bandwidth for other people. And more successful. But again, as one of the young activists demanded to know during the summit with a Dalai Lama, how do you actually do this? Okay, so at this point, I have some good news for you. There’s a whole menu of practical options. Are
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you feeling?
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All right, I’m feeling good. Okay. That
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is Dr.
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Richard Davidson, his friends column Richie. He and I actually planned this trip to Dharam Salah together as part of a collaboration for the course we’re shooting. Richie is one of the world’s leading neuroscientists for 30 years. He’s been partnering with the Dalai Lama to research what meditation does to your brain. There are very few other people who stand at the crossroads of deep contemplative practice and the cutting edge of neuroscience and the way Richie does. And this extraordinary conversation between modern science and ancient Buddhism has shown that the brain is trainable via meditation.
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Our research shows that even five minutes a day of practice is sufficient if a person is able to do that consistently for a month. And what we find is that when we teach people simple, short practices that they can sprinkle through their daily life, it really can make a difference. And it doesn’t take that much to begin to change these systems in our mind and our brain. I think that the evidence is very, very clear. And it shows measurable changes in happiness and well-being and decreases on standardized measures of depression and anxiety. And so I do think it is available to all of us. We are born to flourish. This is part of our nature.
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When Richie talks about simple, short practices, these can take any number of different forms. One is mindfulness meditation. You sit down, focus on your breath or some other neutral object. And then when you get distracted, which will happen a million times, you just notice that you’ve become distracted and you start again and again. And again, a lot of people think that they’re failing when they get distracted. But it’s actually the process of waking up and starting over. That is the whole point. This deliberate collision with the voice in your head gives you a kind of self-awareness, which we in the meditation world call mindfulness. And when you’re more aware of your thoughts and urges and emotions, you’re not so yanked around by them. And that can make you much nicer to be around. Ask
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my wife.
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Another practice is called loving kindness. You sit quietly, close your eyes and call to mind a succession of people. You start usually with an easy person, like a pet or a kid. As soon as you’ve established a mental image, you silently send four phrases. May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be healthy. May you live with ease. And then you move on to yourself. And a mentor, a neutral person, somebody you might overlook, a difficult person, and then all beings everywhere. There is radical good news here. As I mentioned earlier, we know that pro-social, as opposed to antisocial states of mind, make us happier. But we also now know that these attributes are trainable through meditation. In other words, you can change. To be clear, meditation is not the only item on the menu here. There are simple, informal practices that you can sprinkle throughout your day. For example, before you do anything, before any daily activity, you can just take a second to quietly dedicated to the benefit of everybody.
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We can do this when we eat. We’re eating to become strong and healthy, not just for ourselves, but so that we can be of service to others. We do this with all the other things that we do. The work that we do is not just for to get money for ourselves, but why are we getting money for ourselves? Well, we’re going to help feed our family. We’re going to take care of others. So there’s always this altruistic motive. If we can remind ourselves as much as possible as we go through the day, it is an elixir for the soul.
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Let me just say here that when Richie uses the term elixir for the soul, he basically means happiness. These practices we’ve just described really can make you happier. And when we use the term happier here, we’re not
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talking the, I got a lot of likes on Instagram kind of
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happiness, or even the I won the lottery kind of happiness. We’re talking more about the Dalai Lama version of happiness.
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It’s
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really not about being happy all the time if you’ve just been confronted by some tragic loss. It’s not really appropriate to be happy in that moment. It’s healthy to show sadness. I’ve seen the Dalai Lama cry with sadness when tragic circumstances have been described. But the next moment, he could be laughing. That is to us a sign of well-being. It’s a kind of fundamental okay-edness. There is a sense in which everything is really going to be okay. And so I think that’s really what the Dalai Lama means about happiness. He sometimes uses the qualifier genuine happiness or authentic happiness. And what he means by that is that happiness that is not dependent on external circumstances.
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Happiness that is not dependent on external circumstances. This is pretty counterintuitive stuff. So many of us believe consciously or otherwise the exact opposite, that what makes us happier is the external stuff, promotions, vacations, falling in love, having kids, etc. I do want to be clear, all of that stuff is super important. I’m not denying that in any way. But given how insatiable the human animal is, external rewards will never be enough. The pursuit of happiness enshrined in America’s founding documents can become the source of your unhappiness. By contrast, mental states such as compassion, warmth, and generosity are a cleaner, burning fuel, infinitely renewable. I want to say yet again that I’m aware that these are all pretty grandiose words and I’m going to use an even more loaded term, which I’ve already used a few times in this podcast, but I’m going to do it again. Love. I know that word is confusing since we use it to describe our feelings for our romantic partners, our family members, and those ridiculously addictive dried mango strips or whatever. But I think of love as our evolutionary capacity to give a shit. These, by the way, are probably not the exact same words that Dalai Lama would use, but I believe we’re probably aligned on the core thesis here, which is that love is our capacity to cooperate, communicate, and connect. This is what allowed our species to thrive. If you ignore this, it’s at your own peril. Now, that does not mean it’s easy. Other people can sometimes be rather difficult. They can be extremely annoying or downright dangerous. So how do we deal with them? And here’s another question. Don’t we need to be a little bit selfish sometimes? Or maybe I’m just trying to justify my own overweening ambition here. So these are the questions we’re going to be tackling in the rest of the series. And the answers we’re going to uncover for you, I promise, will be both surprising and deeply practical. We’re going to spend a lot more time with his holiness, the Dalai Lama, who is perhaps the happiest person I’ve ever met. We’re going to talk to him about how he musters compassion for difficult people, including the Chinese government. We’re also going to go way into the deep end and hear about his holiness’s own meditation practice. And while we’re at it, Richie and I will wrestle with whether there’s any scientific evidence for ideas such as rebirth, and how Western scientific materialists, who happen to be fans of the Dalai Lama, can deal with these kinds of metaphysical claims. Plus, we are going to watch as the Dalai Lama, who is believed to be the avatar of compassion, works to alleviate the suffering of other people live in real time. And I got to say his moves are not what I expected them to be. And they produce quite a reaction.
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Dan, come
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here.
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That is coming up tomorrow
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on the second installment of the Dalai Lama’s Guide to Happiness. And just to say here, as we’re wrapping up, if you’re interested in learning more about all of the various meditation practices we’ve been describing, coming up on January 9th, we at 10% Happier are launching that meditation challenge that I mentioned earlier at the top of this show. It’s free, and you can find it on the 10% Happier app. Every day for 10 days, you’ll get a short video featuring the Dalai Lama, Richie and Roshi Joan, followed by a guided meditation to help you pound all of the lessons from this podcast and from the videos into your neurons. So I highly encourage you to go check it out. 10% Happier is produced by DJ Cashmere, Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davey and Lauren Smith, our supervising producer is Marissa Schneiderman. Kimmy Regler, who I have to say has been the driving force behind this series and is amazing. Thank you, Kimmy. Kimmy is our managing producer and our executive producer is Jen Poitat. Audio services are provided by Ultraviolet Audio with scoring mixing and sound design by the great Matt Boynton, and we had additional engineering by Peter Bonaventre. Nick Thorburn composed our theme. Check out his excellent band, Islands. And there are a lot of other folks I want to thank from the wider TPH universe and beyond. They include Liz Levin, Jade Weston, Gemma Vardy, Connor Donahue. I also want to thank Richie Davidson and the whole team at Healthy Mind’s Innovations. As collaborators on this course, you can find out more about them in our show notes. And I do want to give a special shout out to Daniel Gohlman and Tara Bennett Gohlman, who are two of the prime movers behind the Compassionate Leaders Summit. Thank you, Daniel Tara.