10% Happier

If you give your brain enough of a taste of mindfulness, it will eventually create a self-reinforcing spiral—a retreat from greed and hatred that could, Jud insisted, potentially lead all the way to the definitive uprooting of negative emotions (in other words, enlightenment). “Why would it stop?” he said. “Evolutionarily, it doesn’t make sense tha

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

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

Joseph got up to hit the bathroom. He came back smiling and pronounced, “I’ve figured it out. A useful mantra in those moments is ‘What matters most?’ ” At first, this struck me as somewhat generic, but as I sat with the idea for a while, it eventually emerged as the bottom-line, gut-check precept. When worrying about the future, I learned to ask m

Here in the real world, people like me, who the Buddha called “unenlightened worldlings,” had to pursue happiness, as evanescent as it might be.

“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.

This problem was, of course, exacerbated in the age of what had been dubbed the “info-blitzkrieg,” where it took superhuman strength to ignore the siren call of the latest tweet, or the blinking red light on the BlackBerry. Scientists had even come up with a term for this condition: “continuous partial attention.” It was a syndrome with which I was

As one Buddhist author put it, the “craving to be otherwise, to be elsewhere” permeated my whole life.

I recognize that part of the goal of a retreat is to systematically strip away all of the things we use—sex, work, email, food, TV—to avoid a confrontation with what’s been called “the wound of existence.”