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This is the 10% Happier podcast.

I'm Dan Harris.

Thank you. I'm Dan Harris.

Hello, everybody. How we doing?

We're going to go back to one of my favorite subjects today.

This is a question that I have spent a lot of time mulling and that people ask me about all the time. Can you get happier, more balanced, more quantumists without losing your edge? Will getting happier make you complacent or make you a doormat? I remember how when I first got interested in meditation as an ambitious network newsman, I told my dad about my burgeoning interest,

and he was a hard-charging academic physician at the time. And he told me that he had some colleagues who had gotten into Buddhism and it made them, and these were his words, like,

totally ineffective. You may have heard my spiel about how this is a misunderstanding,

a misapplication of the lessons of meditation.

The goal is not to be resigned, but instead to be more focused and more emotionally agile, to surf your emotions rather than drowning in them.

In other words, to learn how to respond wisely to life instead of reacting blindly.

In any event, I will spare you my rant on this because you're about to hear it from somebody

with vastly more experience than I have.

Full disclosure, when I first encountered Kamala Masters back in 2010 on my first ever meditation

retreat, she was the victim of my unfortunate penchant for judgmentalism.

I initially dismissed her a little bit because her presentation,

I thought, was sort of typically touchy-feely meditation-teachery or whatever. But this was just

me being dumb. The more I heard her speak, the more I realized both the depth of her practice and also

the steelyness underneath. Kamala Masters has been meditating since the 1970s,

first with Anagorika Munindra, who was Joseph Goldstein's first teacher, and then with the Burmese

...