65 Quotes by Dan Harris

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

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.

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.

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.

Science experiments have found that people who practice meditation release significantly lower doses of cortisol, known as the stress hormone. This is consequential because frequent release of cortisol can lead to heart disease, diabetes, dementia, cancer, and depression.

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

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.

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.

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.