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

After a truly horrible hour, I hear a gentle ringing sound, kind of like a gong. The teacher has just tapped on what looks like a metal bowl, but apparently is a bell.

Everyone gets up and shuffles—mindfully—down the hill toward the dining hall. I follow along in a daze, like I’ve just had the bejeezus kicked out of me. A line forms outside the building. Oh, right. We’re not allowed to go in until one of the chefs comes out and rings a bell. There’s something a little pathetic about this.

I look around. While the word yogi sounds goofy—like Yogi Berra or Yogi Bear—these people all seem so grim. Turns out, mindfulness isn’t such a cute look. Everyone is in his or her own world, trying very hard to stay in the moment. The effort of concentration produces facial expressions that range from blank to defecatory. The instruction sheets gently advise us not to make eye contact with our fellow retreatants, so as to not interrupt one another’s meditative concentration. Which makes this the only place on earth where the truly compassionate response to a sneeze is to ignore it completely.

The outfits aren’t helping this little zombie jamboree. Aesthetically, many of these people seem to be cultivating an aggressive plainness—and in some cases, a deliberate oddness. Their clothes are often mismatched or several decades out of style. One guy is wearing pleated acid-washed jeans.

Breakfast is followed by a break, and then the second sitting of the day.

Even though I’ve retreated to my chair, I am nonetheless besieged by screaming back pain. I still can’t maintain concentration for more than one or two breaths. Perhaps because I’m having some sort of performance anxiety, the meditation is much harder for me here than it is at home. I feel like a rookie who’s been called up to the big leagues and just can’t cut it. I cannot believe I’m going to be sitting in this chair, here in this room, with these people, for the next nine days of my life.

During the first period of walking meditation, I’m at a loss. I have no idea what walking meditation even means, so I decide to just take a stroll. There are lots of animals here: salamanders, baby deer, wild turkeys. They come right up to you, totally unafraid. Apparently the “commitment to non-harming” memo has reached the woodland creatures. And the humans take it very seriously. Last night, I saw a guy in the meditation hall make a big show out of ushering a bug out of the room on a sheet of paper rather than squashing it.

The third sitting is even more of a nightmare. My body has now found a new way to revolt: my mouth keeps filling up with saliva. I’m trying not to move, but this situation is untenable. I can’t sit here with a mouth full of spit. So I swallow. Every time I gulp it down, though, my mouth refills almost immediately. This, of course, completely derails my attempts to establish any rhythm whatsoever with my breath. My interior monologue now centers almost entirely on when the session will end.

Did I just hear the stupid bell?

Is that the bell?

No, it’s not the bell.

Shit.

Shit, Shit, Shit, Shit, Shit . . . Shit.

When the bell finally does ring, Goldstein clears his voice to speak. This is the first time we’ll be hearing from the Great Man himself. His voice is deep and booming, yet also has the slight nasal twang of a New York Jew, an accent apparently impervious to years of studying meditation in Asia.

Goldstein begins by setting us straight on walking meditation. “It is not recess,” he intones. In other words, no strolling around and taking in the scenery. The drill is this, he explains: stake out a patch of ground about ten yards long, and then slowly pace back and forth, mindfully deconstructing every stride. With each step, you’re supposed to note yourself lifting, moving, and placing. And repeat. Ad infinitum .

Excellent. So there will be no break from the tedium all day long.

And while Goldstein’s laying down the law, he makes another request. When each seated meditation session is finished, he wants us to wait to leave the hall until after all of the teachers have filed out. This, he says, would be more “decorous.”

Over lunch in a room filled with zombies, most of them chewing with their eyes closed, a giant wave of sadness rolls over me. I feel all alone and utterly trapped. The sheer volume of time left in this ordeal looms over my head like a mile of ocean water. It feels like the desperate homesickness I experienced every summer as a kid when my parents dropped me off at sleepaway camp.

Also, I feel stupid. Why am I here, when I could be spending this time on a beach with Bianca? She and I had had a few tense chats about this retreat. She wanted to be supportive of my “spiritual” quest, but it was hard not to be resentful of my using up ten days of vacation to go meditate, especially given how little time off I get. Furthermore, at least when I travel to someplace like Papua New Guinea or the Congo, I can call her every day, assuming I can get a signal. Here, I’m completely sequestered.

And now I’m sitting in this room full of strangers, thinking: I shouldn’t have come here. I’m such an idiot.

As the wash of sadness and regret crests, I am able to muster some mindfulness, to see my feelings with some nonjudgmental remove. I tell myself that it’s just a passing squall. It’s not a silver bullet, but it does keep the demons at bay.

In the next walking meditation period, I stake out my strip of land on the stone patio in front of the meditation hall, then pace slowly back and forth, trying to note each component of my stride. Lift, move, place. Lift, move, place. If a civilian were to stumble upon all of us yogis out here walking in slow motion, they’d probably conclude that a loony bin was having a fire drill.

Back on the cushion, I’m waging a Sisyphean battle, trying to roll the boulder of concentration up a never-ending hill. I’m straining to focus on my breath, gripping at it like it’s a rope hanging off the side of a cliff. I’m no match, though, for the pageant of pain, fatigue, and saliva. I find it humiliating—infuriating, really—that after a year of daily meditation, I cannot get a toehold here. Every instance of mental wandering is met with a tornadic blast of self-flagellation.

In.

Out.

I wonder if they’ll have more of that fresh bread at dinner?

Damn, dude.

In.

Did someone actually invent and patent the sneeze guard or, like math and language, was it devised in several disconnected civilizations, more or less simultaneously?

Idiot.

Incompetent.

Irretrievably, irrevocably, irredeemably stupid.

By the time the evening dharma talk begins, I’m feeling utterly defeated.

Goldstein and his crew process into the chamber, with Goldstein leading the way with giant, magisterial strides. He sits at the center of the altar; all the other teachers array themselves around him in their meditative positions, eyes closed.

Goldstein is trying to figure out how to put on the wireless headset. It’s the kind of microphone singers wear in concert so their hands can be free as they caper around the stage. Once he has it on, he says, “I feel like a rock star.”

A woman sitting behind me says reverently under her breath, “You are .”

As he starts his talk, I realize he’s infinitely less austere than he seemed in the hothouse of the meditation session. He’s actually funny, with a delivery that reminds me of those borscht belt comedians with names like Shecky.

He’s talking about the power of desire in our minds, and how our culture conditions us to believe that the more pleasant experiences we have—sex, movies, food, shopping trips, etc.—the happier we’ll be. He reads out some advertising slogans he’s collected over the years: