With the holiday season just around the corner, families and households will soon be gathering to give and receive gifts. Many will also be sending donations to communities in crisis, and organizing charity events and food drives to help others.
Sam speaks with mediator and Zen teacher Diane Musho Hamilton. They discuss Diane’s “powerful confrontation with life and death” as a teenager; her experience studying with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Genpo Roshi; the all-too-frequent disconnect between spiritual insight and ethical behavior; recognizing vs. learning dharma;
transmuting vs. relinquishing emotional energy; the growth model vs. the awakening model of personal development; the possibility and promise of stabilizing non-dual insight; the moral importance of conceptual knowledge; psychedelics; meditation instructors vs. conventional gurus; mental states vs. psychological traits; the liability of spiritual teachers as organizational leaders; the power of cultural incentives; and other topics.
Philopher, neuroscientist and celebrated speaker Sam Harris, is the author of five New York Times best sellers.
Most of us have gotten at least a little emotional at some point recently. It’s natural. But why do we have emotions and how much should we pay attention to them on any given day? Can we learn to skillfully choose which emotions to listen to and which ones to just let move on by?
In More Than A Feeling, the latest podcast from Ten Percent Happier, Host Saleem Reshamwala goes on a real life quest to find the answers to these questions. He’ll experiment with neuroscientists, dive into stories with historians and philosophers, and document how musicians, therapists, hairdressers and airplane pilots work with emotions.
A new study finds that we ask for and receive help countless times per day—a fundamental human behavior across cultures.
When was the last time you asked someone for help?
Many of us might think back to bigger moments—like a ride to the airport or talking through a personal problem—but it turns out that asking for (and receiving) help is such a common occurrence that we might not even notice how often we do it. For example, we can ask someone to pass the salt at dinner or to open the window for some fresh air.
It is hilarious when principals introduce me to students by saying, Today, we get to meet a real, live author! I am delighted not to be a fake, dead author, which wouldn’t be as fun. Children’s book authors are invited to schools to give presentations that are called author talks and these assemblies focus, of course, on reading and writing books, but when I visit schools, I often end up talking about something much more personal—my mother’s death.