Meditation teacher and writer Jeff Warren and our host Dan Harris reflect on their January 2017 road trip, in which they traveled from New York City to Los Angeles to talk with people about what keeps them from meditating, and in the process, the two friends discuss how meditation has helped them work through their own personal struggles. Their new book on their journey, written with Carlye Adler, is called “Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-to Book.”
10% Happier with Dan Harris #113: After the Road Trip
Dan and Jeff reflect on their January 2017 road trip, in which they traveled from New York City to Los Angeles to talk with people about what keeps them from meditating, and in the process, the two friends discuss how meditation has helped them work through their own personal struggles.
Sandler: “If you’ve ever wanted to quiet your mind, and get in the zen zone, then do we have the show for you!
This a companion piece to “
I had no idea when I agreed that the project would expose a deeper layer of my own peculiar brand of mental struggle. Our narrative is a road trip across America, where we meet real people wanting to build a meditation practice. We help them with different stumbling blocks, from the worry that they’re not doing it right, or might lose their edge, or open a Pandora’s box, through to more structural obstacles like finding the time to meditate, building continuity in a practice, and so on. One by one, from cops to caregivers to celebrities, we share their stories and concerns, all while rolling out what we hope is a lively teaching curriculum. It’s both a journalistic adventure and a how-to-meditate book. 
ADD is a funny thing. To many, it can seem like an invented problem, or maybe some vague condition that everyone suffers from a bit in these techno-distracted times. The latter may be true, but not the former (although it is probably over-diagnosed). Full-blown ADD – which I have – is sometimes called “executive function disorder.” It’s a 
The only tool you have to help yourself – your mind – is the very thing pulling you down. And down. And down.
The bottom line is we don’t know yet what meditation can and can’t do. What I can say is that when I think about mental health, I think about a much broader safety net of practice and support, one that includes community, nature, exercise, diet, psychotherapy, and – for most of us – a structured daily routine.
Many of us are at war with ourselves. We’re divided, we have mixed feelings. We’re of two minds, of four minds, of eight minds. How many minds do we have in there?
It wasn’t until I began meditating that I realized what a divided mess I was. Listening to my various neuroses sing, off-key, in a deranged internal choir. One group singing ‘cheeseburgers now!’ one obsessing about witty repartees I should have made, yet another about whether I was even doing this stupid meditation thing correctly. And then, deeper down: who I thought I was, who I thought they wanted me to be, my fears, my insecurities, and all the rest of it. Boring to others, inescapable to yourself, and thus … even more hideously boring.
We’re all deformed.
This mystical perspective is something Wallace himself was passionately interested in, although he doubted it too, as many thinking people do (as I did). The exact nature of this “something more general” is impossible to capture in words, for, as every mystic in every era has rather helplessly declared, it is larger than the mind’s categories and concepts. We can only describe our experience, and then as through a glass, darkly.
In 2017, the 
I find this thrilling to write about. To champion the integrity of different paths, obviously, but also to defend the possibility of an “invisible centre.”
We start in January with mindfulness, the art of paying careful attention to the moment. Many practitioners have found that, over time, inner and outer experience can thin-out. We begin to orient to its “empty,” constructed aspect. Solid objects and even solid selves are understood to be assembled on the fly – blooming, pixelating, and disappearing over and over again. Yet this emptiness is not barren or blank – rather, it is lush, shimmering, “a generative unfolding of something and nothing” to use Avi’s fine phrase. Emptiness (like its paradoxical flip-side, awareness) can become a kind of background to orient to, regardless of what is happening in the foreground of our lives.
I’ve fallen for it many times – I’ve foolishly judged my own experience by the standards of someone else’s. Some other teacher or authority’s notion of “progress,” or “awakening,” or “truth.” It can mess you up. Eventually I figured out what any grandparent could have told me, had I thought to ask (or listen): our truths are for us to work out – no one else.
Anyway, to return to my stupid map and theory, after a breakthrough, if you’re practicing well, you don’t entirely return to where you were. But neither do you sustain the dizzying heights of your peak experience. That’s because, although you may have a better view, you still have a lifetime of ridiculous habits behind you. The gap between what you know and where you actually are is, to say the least, sobering. It can bum a person out. This is the terrain of challenge. The fruit of the final terrain, integration, seems to arrive only when we accept this. It’s what allows you to ultimately update your life and behavior to reflect your understanding. Another word for this is maturity.
This zooming out might be particularly useful right now, on the cusp of this anxiety-inducing US election. People – myself included – really are freaked out about the deep divisions in the US. The theory about meditation is it can help us get space around such tough emotions and, in turn, make better – saner – responses.
