Dan Harris - 10% Happier - How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works—A True Story

Then I learned more about who this guy actually was. After several nights of reading his book well into the wee hours, I padded over to the computer to do a little Googling. I don’t know what I was expecting, but certainly not this: a small, sandy-haired German man who appeared to be at some indeterminate point north of middle age. His presentation style was totally at odds with the voice-of-God tone he affected on the page. In YouTube videos, he spoke softly and slowly, excruciatingly so, as if someone had forced him to ingest a large dose of my leftover Klonopin. His wardrobe appeared to consist solely of sweater-vests and pleated khakis. One observer described him as looking like a “Communist-era librarian.” Another called him a “pale, kindly otter.”

The seminal event of his personal history was an experience he claimed to have had as a severely depressed graduate student at Oxford University. He said he was lying in bed when he was overcome with suicidal thoughts. Suddenly, he felt himself being “sucked into a void.” He heard a voice telling him to “resist nothing.” Then everything went dark. He woke up the next morning and the birds were chirping, the sunlight was a revelation, and his life was a shiny, sparkly thing. It was, quite literally, an overnight panacea. Bingo. Done. Sorted. After that is when he spent two years living on park benches “in a state of the most intense joy.” This was his spiritual awakening, of which he would later say, “The realization of peace is so deep that even if I met the Buddha and the Buddha said you are wrong, I would say, ‘Oh, isn’t that interesting, even the Buddha can be wrong.’ ”

Eventually, he moved to Canada, which had the right “energy field” for his first book “to be born.” That book, The Power of Now , became a celebrity sensation. Meg Ryan gave it to Oprah, who put copies on the nightstands in the guest rooms of all of her homes. Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy produced videotaped testimonials (before they broke up). Paris Hilton carried the book through a gauntlet of paparazzi on her way into jail over a driving violation.

When his follow-up, A New Earth, came out, Oprah put on an unprecedented, eleven-part “webinar.” Millions of people tuned in to watch her and Tolle sit at a desk, deconstructing the book, chapter by chapter. Their personal styles were almost comically mismatched: Oprah would whoop and holler as Tolle looked on placidly; Tolle would prattle on about “energy fields” as Oprah mmm ed and aah ed credulously. At one point she threw up her arms for a double high five, and Tolle, clearly not knowing what such a thing was, awkwardly clasped her hands.

Sitting there in my underwear in front of my computer in the middle of the night, I put my head in my hands. My whole life, I’d prided myself on being a skeptic. I’d spent nearly a decade interviewing spiritual leaders, and none of them had penetrated my defenses. Now this guy—who looked like a character from The Hobbit —was the one who had punched through?

I was looking in the mirror again—this time at an angry red hole, the size of a quarter, smack in the middle of my right cheek.

When the dermatologist first discovered the milky patch on my cheek—basal cell carcinoma, a nonlethal form of skin cancer—I was tempted to just leave it there. Face surgery was an unappetizing prospect for a guy who went on TV for a living. The doctor, however, along with Bianca, argued that inaction was not an option. If I let it spread unchecked, they told me, it could get into my eye socket and blind me. For a nanosecond, I considered whether I might prefer partial blindness to a scar, even though the doctor promised that, if everything went well, said scar would be a small one.

The surgery was Chinese water torture. The surgeon—a crisp young woman—made an initial incision, using a microscopically guided scalpel to remove the cancer. After that first stab, she sent me out to the waiting room as she ran some tests to see if she’d gotten it all. I joined Bianca at a bank of chairs, where I pulled out my copy of A New Earth , which I was now reading for the third time.

After a half hour or so, the doctor called me back and said they needed to dig a little deeper. So I went under the knife again, and then back to the waiting room, where I read more of the book. Another half hour passed, and then the nurse came back and told me they still hadn’t gotten every last teeny bit; they’d need to take a wider slice.

When I arrived back in the procedure room this time, the doctor explained that the cancer was bigger than she had thought—and she still didn’t know how big. I pressed her for worst-case scenarios and she admitted that there was a danger that it might have spread up into the lower part of my eyelid. If that were true, closing the wound would likely involve a scar that permanently pulled down my right eye.

I could feel my heartbeat accelerate as the following movie instantly played out in my mind:

Scar the size of Omar Little’s from The Wire → Fired from ABC News → Seeks career in radio

But then a funny thing happened. After all my reading about the empty nattering of the ego, I realized: These fearful forecasts were just thoughts skittering through my head. They weren’t irrational, but they weren’t necessarily true. It was a momentary glimpse of the wisdom of Tolle’s thesis. It’s not like I’d never been aware of my thoughts before. I’d had plenty of experience with being scared and knowing I was scared. What made this different was that I was able to see my thoughts for what they were: just thoughts, with no concrete reality. It’s not that my worry suddenly ceased, I just wasn’t as taken in by it. I recognized the truth of this situation: I had no idea what was going to happen to my face, and reflexively believing the worst-case scenarios coughed up by ego certainly wasn’t going to help.

The doctor made her third slice, and then sent me back out into the waiting room. Bianca remarked that I was staying surprisingly calm. I didn’t want to give the credit to Tolle, lest she think I was going crazy. She already thought it was weird that I’d been reading this book for so long.

Ultimately, I had to go back in for four facial slices before the tumor was fully removed. They came within a millimeter, but the lower part of my eyelid was spared. Before they sewed me up, the doctor showed me the wound in a mirror and I nearly fainted. I could see well into the side of my cheek—blood, fat, and all. Bianca took out her phone and snapped a picture.

I had done surprisingly well in the crucible of face surgery, but you can’t carry an Eckhart Tolle book around with you everywhere you go.

A couple of weeks later, I was checking TVNewser , an addictive website that tracks the doings of the broadcast news industry, and I came across a list of the anchors and correspondents who would be covering the inauguration of President Barack Obama. My name was not mentioned. I was, to put it mildly, displeased.

Unlike my experience with the surgery, here I was unable to achieve any distance from the angry thoughts caroming through my head. Instead, I took the bait dangled by my ego, which was yammering on in high dudgeon: You’re getting screwed here, dude. I shoved back my chair and started pacing around my office in tight circles, like a Chihuahua doing dressage. Over the next twenty-four hours, I buttonholed every executive I could find and voiced my complaints. Instead of winning me a role in the coverage, however, the whining earned me a reprimand. One of my bosses took me aside and told me that the decision wasn’t personal, and then advised me to stop “bleeding all over the place.”