Best 30 quotes of Dan Harris on MyQuotes

Add it all up, and some prominent Obama supporters are now saying that it paints a picture of an opposition driven, in part, by a refusal to accept a black President.

But it was in this moment, lying in bed late at night, that I first realized that the voice in my head—the running commentary that had dominated my field of consciousness since I could remember—was kind of an asshole.

Happiness, it turns out, is a skill-one that you can train, just like you train your body in the gym. This is the next big public health revolution. Get on board.

I am still mostly a moron, I do get into bad moods, I am not a perfected being.

If you're meditating and it's easy, you're either enlightened or you're cheating.

Meditation is hard. You are constantly trying to focus on one thing, usually your breath, and your mind is going to go berserk.

Meditation is just simple brain exercise. I exercise and this made sense to me.

Meditation suffers from a towering PR problem.… If you can get past the cultural baggage, though, what you’ll find is that meditation is simply exercise for your brain.

Prepare like no other, know that there was nothing left for you to do when it's all said and done. This way a loss is just a stat. The better man will always win if he prepared like no other.

The act of catching yourself wandering and coming back to your breath is a bicep curl for your brain.

The getting lost and recovering - that is the meditation.

What meditation does is allow you to actually survive these emotions as opposed to compartmentalizing and having them come up and make you a shithead in other areas of your life. The alternative is to be miserable, and I don't think we're living in a wise way when we do that.

Your demons may have been ejected from the building, but they’re out in the parking lot, doing push-ups.”)

A big part of (Janice) Marturano's success in bringing mindfulness to this unlikely venue was that she talked about it not as a "spiritual" exercise but instead as something that made you a "better leader" and "more focused," and that enhanced your "creativity and innovation." She didn't even like the term "stress reduction." "For a lot of us," she said, "we think that having stress in our lives isn't a bad thing. It gives us an edge.

All we can do is everything we can do. (David Axelrod)

Dalai Lama: "If a scientist confirm nonexistence of something we believe, then we have to accept that." Dan Harris: "So if scientists come up with something that contradicts your beliefs, you will change your beliefs?" Dalai Lama: "Oh yes. Yes.

Forget mindfulness. You just have to be a gorgeous lazy slacker.

If everything in this world was in constant decay, why expend so much energy gnashing my teeth over work?

If you don't waste your energy on variables you cannot influence, you can focus much more effectively on those you can. (Mark Epstein)

Imagine a world where people were 10% happier and less reactive. Marriage, parenting, road rage, politics - all would be improved upon. Public health revolutions can happen rapidly. Most Americans didn't brush their teeth until after world war 2 after soldiers were demanded to maintain oral hygiene. Exercise didn't get popular until science proved its benefits. Mindfulness, I had come to believe, could, in fact, change the world.

In fact, when you're mindful, you actually feel irritation more keenly. However, once you unburden yourself from the delusion that people are deliberately trying to screw you, it's easier to stop getting carried away.

Make the present moment your friend rather than your enemy. Because many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment.

Meditation has countless benefits - from better health to increased focus to a deeper sense of calm - but the biggie is the ability to respond instead of react to your impulses and urges. In meditation, instead of succumbing to deeply rooted habits of the mind like desire & aversion, you simply watch what comes up in your head non-judgementally.

Meditation is the best tool for neutralizing the voice in the head. It's a muzzle for the ego. Being mindful is an innate but underused ability we all have, the act of being aware without judging. When you repeatedly go through the cycle of trying to focus on your breath, losing that focus, and noticing and returning to the practice, you are literally building your mindfulness muscle the same way dumbbell curls build your biceps. As this mind-muscle develops, you start being way more aware of thoughts, emotions, and sensations as what they really are: squirts of chemicals & hormones that enter, peak and then fade completely back to the nothingness of which they arose. In other words, mindfulness provides space between impulse and action, so you're not a slave to whatever pops into your head. You are not your thoughts. You are the awareness of them.

The brain is a pleasure seeking machine. Once you teach it, through meditation, that abiding calmly in the present moment feels better than our habitual state of clinging l, over time, the brain will want more and more mindfulness.

There was something important being overlooked, they argued, in the mainstreaming of meditation - a central plank in the Buddhist platform: compassion.

The route of true happiness, the Buddha argued, was to achieve a visceral understanding of impermanence, which would take you off the emotional roller coaster and allow you to see your dramas and desires through a wider lens. To truly tame the 'monkey mind' and defeat our habitual tendency toward clinging, meditation was the prescription, and sitting and actively facing the 'voice in your head' mindfully for a few minutes a day might be the hardest thing you'll ever do. Accept that challenge and improve your life drastically. It's about mitigation, not alleviation. It's that simple. The only way out is through.

Turns out, it's pretty simple to win people over, especially in tense situations, if you're able to take their perspective and validate their feelings.

We all have an innate feeling of being separate from the world, peering out at life from behind our own little self. But how can we truly be separate from the same world that created us? You can no more disconnect from the universe and it's inhabitants than a wave can extricate itself from the ocean.

When you lurch from one thing to the next, constantly scheming, or reacting to incoming fire, the mind gets exhausted. You get sloppy and make bad decisions.