Dan Harris

I think one of the psychological trends for me in looking back at my life is a fear of feeling unmoored, alone, adrift.

And some of the earliest traumas, and this may be a small T trauma, for me, I've had a very...

charmed life.

But going to summer camp as a kid was incredibly hard for me.

And I used to have these really intense, gnarly bouts of homesickness.

I have a very clear memory of sitting in the back of my dad's shit-brown Plymouth Valiant and weeping in his lap on visiting day.

And I would be bereft every summer for a period of time, and then I would recover.

Yes, loneliness.

Yes, but it's loneliness, but it's also this kind of yearning for some connection or stability.

Homesickness feels like a better word for it, but like a much, much bigger than wanting my actual home, wherever that happens to be in the moment.

But why – what do you get out of putting yourself intentionally in that position?

I mean, 10 days is a long time.

Now you're going to do 14 days, silent retreat, no people, hardly.

I mean, I guess it's exposure therapy.

I don't know.

Well, a couple things to say about it.

The perfect question – I'm laughing because it's perfect –

One of the immense sources of power in mindfulness meditation is that you see that some poet said this, maybe Rilke, I can't believe I'm the kind of guy who quotes poetry now, but anyway, that no feeling is final.

Everything changes all the time.

And so when you get really quiet and your mind is tuned up because you're doing this exercise of trying to focus on one thing at a time, usually the feeling of your breath coming in and going out, and then every time you get distracted, you start again and again and again, what it helps you see is