10% Happier with Dan Harris
Your Nervous System Is Being Hijacked. Here's How To Get It Back. | Tara Brach
03 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, everybody. I'm Dan Harris. Welcome to the 10% Happier podcast. One of my little taglines is the world is insane, but you don't have to be. I get it. It is tough out there. And given all the chaos and cruelty and uncertainty, it is natural to want to resort to despair or hostility or denial. But none of those things actually feel good.
And more importantly, none of those things actually help the overall situation. So today we're going to talk in great detail about how to feel better about everything that's happening in the world and more importantly, how to engage so that you can make things better, which, by the way, will make you feel better. My guest today is the legendary meditation teacher Tara Brach.
She has written such books as Radical Acceptance and Radical Compassion. And she's out now with something called the Courageous Heart Workbook. We're going to talk all about it. Tara Brach, after this quick break. A few things before we hear from our sponsors. If you haven't already checked out my new-ish meditation app, 10% with Dan Harris, I would love for you to do so.
Chapter 2: Why is emotional shutdown not a true form of self-protection?
Many people fall prey to the myth that taking care of yourself is somehow self-indulgent. One of the big aims of this app is to disprove that, to make the argument that actually taking care of yourself is a public service. As I sometimes say, there's a geopolitical case for you to get your shit together because it unlocks an upward spiral.
The more you work with your own mind, the more you train your mind, the better you will be in your relationships with anybody who crosses your path. And that in turn will make you even happier. And then your relationships will improve even further. And up you go. The whole point of this app is to walk you through the unlocking of this upward spiral. If you sign up,
You'll get ad-free versions of this podcast. You'll get a growing library of meditations from many of the world's greatest teachers, a growing library of courses from many of those same teachers. And we do weekly live video sessions where we meditate together. It's a chance for you to be able to ask your questions of me and many of our teachers as well. The idea there being that habit
change science, the research into what it takes to form and maintain habits shows that social support, in other words, doing it in the carpool lane is a great way to boot up and maintain a habit. I know I said a lot, but I do hope you'll come check it out. You can sign up at danharris.com.
Chapter 3: How can caring be a more effective fuel than rage?
Again, that's danharris.com. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to check it out before you spend any money. We'll be right back after this. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. For some people, summer is their favorite season. Travel picks up, kids are out of school, and adventure is the focus.
For others, juggling it all can be tough and can lead to overwhelm and counting down the minutes until the kids are back in school. Many people worry they're wasting the days of sunshine not feeling at their best. I get it. Actually, historically, summer has been a time where my depression would come back
And then I would feel guilty about not enjoying all the goodness of summer, which can lead to a kind of downward spiral. Therapy can be a great way to help you better understand what your needs are, to feel more confident about setting boundaries, to create a version of summer that actually feels good for you.
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That's betterhelp.com slash happier. Have you ever invested in something that seemed incredible at first but did not live up to the hype? That happened to be back in the 90s when I invested in a company that made the Palm Pilot. People of a certain age will remember those. They were like kind of the precursor to the smartphone, but they were not that smart and not connected to the Internet.
Anyway, lost a little money on that. If you're a marketer, you definitely know this feeling. Marketers optimize for the numbers that look great. Impressions, reach and reacts. But when they don't show revenue, well, that's a conversation with your chief financial officer. LinkedIn has a word for this. Bullspend. LinkedIn ads generate the highest ROAS, 121% of all major ad networks.
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Dara Brock, welcome back to the show.
It is wonderful to be with you, Dan.
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Chapter 4: What does 'spiritual audacity' mean and where does it come from?
This is what's gotten us in trouble in the first place is all too much Namby Pamby love stuff. But being motivated by hatred and aggression on the level of the brain makes you less effective. Love does not mean you're inviting your enemies over for dinner or giving them a free pass or you're being a doormat. It just means you are not miserable, which isn't helping anybody anyway.
OK, so now I'm going to shut up and see if you agree with everything I just said there.
I totally do. I mean, the whole idea of choosing love is not just that it sounds nice. It's really our opening to a more evolved potential. And for me, one of the key pieces of that is... again, Gregory Boyle, is to be able to use our imagination to sense what's possible in others.
I mean, I think as long as we can sense the possibility in others for goodness and the possibilities in our world, it doesn't mean that it's going to happen, but it means that we're part of whatever healing is possible. And
One of my heroes, John Lewis, is that most of you know of, you know, long, long lived civil rights leader, congressman, African-American, lived through decades of racial violence. So he told a story and this was, it was about over 65 years ago. He was talking about how he and a colleague were beaten with baseball bats by a group of white men and they didn't fight back. They didn't press charges.
They treated their wounds and continued their work, which is nonviolent resistance. Okay, so about 15 years ago, one of those attackers, his name was Elwin Wilson, he walked into Lewis's Capitol Hill office with his son. And he said, you know, I'm the man who beat you and I want to atone. Will you forgive me? And so Lewis said, you know, I forgave him.
We embraced, you know, he and his son and I, and we all wept. And then we talked. Then as he's finishing telling the story, and he says this quietly, almost to himself, he says, people can change. So I'm sharing this because here he was, he had the resilience and the courage through these decades. And this is despite the brutality, the cruelty, the hatred and racism.
He maintained his imagination to see potential in humans. And I feel like that's our work is, you know, I quoted Thich Nhat Hanh at the beginning to not let this consume our light. It's to keep having the spiritual audacity to choose love. And the place it's hardest, I think, speaking personally, is for me is when I'm caught in the bad othering.
You described one way is to bring people to mind and have a wish that actually makes a whole lot of sense for them. For me, there's an initial step before I can even do that often when I'm bad othering is to
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Chapter 5: What is lovingkindness meditation and how can I practice it?
It's reality. So reality belongs. And any effort to push away or judge or not pay attention denies reality or at war with reality. So the first two steps are to name the suffering as it arises. And I use blame a lot as an example because so many of us are caught in anger and blame.
Chapter 6: What is the RAIN practice and how can I apply it to difficult emotions?
And then to say, okay, this belongs. And then to begin to really investigate. And it's very somatic. I mean, the mistake most people get into is to do a kind of mental investigation of he said, she said, I shouldn't, I didn't. feel it in our bodies. It helps to say, well, what am I believing when this is going on?
Just to get a little more sense of the limiting thought that's containing us, but go into our body and feel it. And here's a trick I use a lot. Because most of us are pretty dissociated from our bodies, and there's that saying, our issues are in our tissues, and we have to feel what's here to be able to really open. The big question is, well, how do I get into my body?
And what I found helps is... Let's say under blame is a feeling of personal failure or inadequacy or shame or not okayness. To make the facial expression that you think approximates that and take the posture and play with this. This is psychodrama. It's expressive therapies, but it works. It works. It's an outside-in thing that works. Actually make the face and feel the feeling behind the face.
because the vagal nerve runs through the face. It gives a lot of information. And then just have the intention to feel in the body what you're feeling, to say yes to the most vulnerable place inside the body. So that's the way of getting in and feeling feelings. And the healing comes When we sense what that place needs, it's often a place that feels unloved or unworthy.
And what it needs is some flavor of care. And we can kind of be in dialogue with the parts of ourselves and find out what's the flavor. And then I put my hand on my heart, try to offer it. And if we can't offer it ourselves, don't be shy about invoking or imagining, because this is imagination again that works, any source that you wish you could get that affirmation from, any source, imagine it.
Like if it's the mother you didn't have, imagine that mother. You know, if it's formless light and love, imagine that. If it's your dog or if it's a tree, just bring it up and then sense what you needed coming through. Because what I have found is when we can really say yes to the feelings and offer some care, there's an enlarging of being. We're occupying a larger sense of who we are.
And we're living from a larger truth that's like more true, the space of compassion and presence than any story that we were caught in. So I hope that's helpful. I know it's a little abstract when I give the directions in that way, but I hope that gives a feeling for it.
No, it's great. I'm going to say it back to you to make sure I've got it. And of course, by extension, to make sure that the viewers and listeners have it. Is that is that cool with you? Please. You mentioned RAINN. That's an acronym, R-A-I-N, that was first articulated by a Dharma teacher named Michelle McDonald, but popularized by you over many, many years and to great and very helpful effect.
And so we were saying if we're proceeding from the question of like, how do we love the difficult or ugly parts of ourselves, our hatred, our shame? Rain is a great and very practical method that you can use in formal meditation or just as you're moving through the world. So our is to recognize, oh, this is what's happening right now. I'm yeah, I'm just in a spiral of pain. self-loathing.
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Chapter 7: Why do small, local acts of service count as activism?
Well said. Is there anything you were hoping that we would get to that we have failed to get to?
No, this has felt actually really complete. And I've loved the way you've grounded things and what you've added in. I actually took some notes.
Well, thank you for saying that. I appreciate it. And thank you for making the time to do this. It's always such a pleasure to talk to you.
I feel the same, Dan. Thank you.
I want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
Also, one quick ask before I let you go. Head on over, please, to danharris.com to sign up for my weekly newsletter. Every Monday, I drop a little bit of goodness into your inbox. Mondays, especially Monday mornings, can be super stressful. So that is when I drop in one useful nugget that you can use.
operationalize in your life immediately, either from ancient wisdom like Buddhism or from modern science. It's short. It's easy to read. It's worth it. It's free. Sign up at danharris.com.
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