10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works—A True Story

Chapter 4 Happiness, Inc.

The first thing you notice is the rhinestone glasses. Then the fragrance—like he’s just stepped out of a two-hour massage.

I met Deepak Chopra six weeks after my interview with Eckhart Tolle. While I had thought of little else other than the ego and its discontents during those weeks, my encounter with Chopra, another self-help superstar, was entirely unplanned. I called it serendipity; Chopra almost certainly would have called it karma.

I had been asked to fly to Seattle to moderate a Nightline debate (or “Face-Off,” in the preferred rebranding of the show’s executive producer) with the extremely subtle title “Does Satan Exist?” Chopra—who was always, as we say in the business, “TV-friendly”—had been booked to argue the “no” case, alongside a Pentecostal bishop who’d lost most of his congregation after publicly reconsidering the existence of the Devil. The “yes” side was made up of a hip, young local pastor as well as a former prostitute who ran an evangelical group called Hookers for Jesus.

I was only vaguely familiar with Chopra. I knew, of course, that he was probably the most famous guru on earth and that he’d written truckloads of bestselling books. I had seen his cameo in the movie The Love Guru. He struck me as the Golden Arches or Nike Swoosh of spirituality—a globally recognized icon next to whom celebrities could pose when they wanted to signal “depth.”

I was also aware that while he preached good vibes and serenity, Chopra enjoyed wading into controversies over politics, science, and faith—sometimes even going on Fox News to mix it up with conservative hosts like Sean Hannity.

It was that combination of spiritual star power and zeal for rhetorical combat that had motivated my producers to book Chopra for this Face-Off, which we were filming in a church in downtown Seattle. The house was packed with a thousand people, all invited by the four debaters. The plan was to have the participants go at it for two hours, while we recorded with a battery of cameras strategically located throughout the room. We would then cut it down to the juiciest moments, and air it as a full half-hour broadcast of Nightline several weeks later.

Before the main event, the producers asked me to tape preinterviews with the combatants, goading them into talking smack like boxers before they go in the ring. After chatting with the ex-hooker and the two pastors, my crew and I found Deepak in one of the church’s back rooms. In addition to blinged-out glasses, he wore jeans, bright red sneakers, and a blazer the likes of which I had never seen—charcoal gray, knee-length, with an elaborate mandarin collar. He had a fleshy face; pleasant, latte-colored skin; and a soft, chocolate baritone, with just enough of an Indian accent to sound exotic.

In the interview, he exuded bravado, as befitted an event such as this. He dismissed Satan as a construct of people who needed an “irrational, mythical explanation” for evil in the world. As for his debate performance, he vowed, “I am not going to do anything to offend anyone, but I still have to speak my own truth.”

Clearly, Chopra was “with the program,” the one envisioned by Nightline, but he also presented an irresistible opportunity for me to pursue my own agenda. I wanted to get his take on Eckhart Tolle. So I told him my story—that I had been intrigued by Tolle’s description of the ego but bemused by his lack of actionable advice.

Right off the bat, Chopra dismissed Tolle as “not a very good writer.” (Apparently self-help gurus talk smack about one another, just as some evangelicals do, I realized.) Then, when I asked him if he knew how to stay in the moment, he allowed that he did. In fact, he insisted that he was permanently present.

Our bosses had been encouraging the on-air types to produce more content for ABCNews.com. I thought talking to Deepak about the notion of the Now might make a good little video, so I whipped out a Flip camera and popped a few more questions.

“So your mind doesn’t wander?” I asked. “You don’t find yourself thinking about things that are in the past or in the future?”

“I have no regrets about the past,” he said, “and I don’t anticipate the future. I live in the moment.”

“Okay, so what if the moment is horrible? What if you really have to go to the bathroom and there’s no toilet nearby? Or what if you’re super hungry and there’s no food?”

“Then I separate myself from the situation surrounding the moment. The moment is always free.”

“Run that by me again,” I said. “It’s a sort of mind trick?”

“It’s not a mind trick. When you’re totally present, whatever the situation is, good or bad, it’s gonna pass. The only thing that remains is the moment. It’s the transformational vortex to the infinite.”

Apparently when one lives in the moment, one becomes unafraid of using terms like “transformational vortex to the infinite.”

He still wasn’t giving me specifics, so I pushed again. “How do you do that? Because while I’m talking to you right now, sometimes my mind wanders, and I think, ‘Wow, those are nice glasses,’ or ‘What am I going to ask next?’ ”

“If you stay in the moment, you’ll have what is called spontaneous right action, which is intuitive, which is creative, which is visionary, which eavesdrops on the mind of the universe.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but we were out of time. The sound tech arrived and began wiring Chopra with his lapel microphone for the debate.

“I still think you make it sound easier than it is,” I said.

He looked at me and gave a good-natured shrug that seemed to say, What can I say, you unlucky schmuck?

“For me it is,” he said.

“How do I become more like you?”

“Hang around with me,” he said. And then, moving in closer as the sound guy struggled to keep up, he asked for my mailing address, which I somewhat reluctantly gave him.

After all that fancy talk of living in the moment and “eavesdropping on the mind of the universe,” as soon we hit the stage and got into the heat of the debate, Chopra was raising his voice, gesticulating wildly, and arguing in a way that certainly did not signal serenity. When he didn’t have the floor, he would slouch back in his chair, feet stretched out in front of him, looking entirely nonplussed. To me, at least, he didn’t seem to be present at all—certainly not in the Eckhart Tolle, blissed-out way. But maybe he was? What did I know? Maybe, I thought to myself, I shouldn’t reach reflexive conclusions as I did with Ted Haggard. Perhaps Deepak Chopra represented the twinning of passionate striving and ego subjugation. Is it possible this guy had it all figured out?

I wasn’t optimistic.

But I was surprised by the reaction when I posted my Chopra video on the ABC News website. First, it generated so much traffic that it landed in the “Most Viewed” column. Then, I got an email from the last person I expected: my boss.

David Westin, the president of the news division, was not the type of man I thought likely to be searching for a transformational vortex to the infinite. Formerly a corporate lawyer, he’d run the news division for more than a decade. He was sharply handsome, with boyish Midwestern features and a full head of slightly blond hair that seemed to stay firmly in place without any discernible application of product. He favored Brooks Brothers suits, striped ties, and loafers, and his personal style was commensurately crisp, earnest, and affable. He easily could have been a politician—or an anchorman.

Westin’s email said he was curious, on a personal level, about my conversation with Chopra. He suggested we meet to discuss.

His assistant set an appointment, and a few days later I found myself walking up one flight of stairs from my office to the executive suite, referred to simply by its geographic designation, the Fifth Floor. The air was different up here, as if it were pumped in from the Sierra Nevada. It was a wide-open room, with offices lining the periphery, and assistants stationed outside of each. The heavy hush was devoid of the clack and clamor that characterized the rest of the news division. In the middle of the space was a kitchen island, perennially stocked with snacks and free-flowing Starbucks.

Westin’s secretary ushered me in, and the man himself got up from his neatly organized desk to give me a firm handshake and a courtly, enthusiastic, “Hi, Dan!”

After a bit of small talk, he brought up Chopra. In his diplomatic way, he said he was surprised to see me taking the guy so seriously. “I respect your opinion on these things, Dan—and Deepak is somebody I’ve only ever seen on daytime television. Is there really something to him?”

As he spoke, I began to suspect that there must be more to my boss’s interest than he was letting on. Here was a man with a supremely stressful job, managing both the outsized personalities within the news division and the demands of his corporate overlords. Once, over lunch, he’d admitted to me that his real personality was at times significantly less sunny than his persona.

“There is something there,” I said, “although I’m not sure Chopra is the best example of it.”

Then I launched into an unsuccessful and overly emphatic soliloquy about Eckhart Tolle, the ego, the present moment, and God knows what else. The longer I yammered on about the “thinking mind” and the “voice in the head,” the more I realized that I wasn’t making much sense. This was the first opportunity I’d had to discuss this material with anyone, aside from actually interviewing Tolle and Chopra themselves, and it suddenly hit me that I didn’t really know what I was talking about. Which made me even more anxious and, by turns, even more talkative. Finally, seeing I’d lost my audience, I swallowed the flood of saliva in my mouth and concluded by saying that maybe Westin should just read Tolle’s book.

The next day, I slinked back upstairs and dropped it off with his secretary, all the while thinking: This is what it’s come to. I’m the crazy guy handing out religious tracts on the street.

I still wanted to talk about this stuff, though, to people I liked and trusted. It wasn’t that I felt compelled to convert anyone; I just wanted a sounding board. Figuring that this would be easier with someone who wasn’t my boss, I broached the subject at a dinner with my friend Regina. For a decade, Regina and I had been having no-holds-barred debates about everything from TV shows to New York real estate to my sometimes questionable, pre-Bianca romantic decisions. I figured the machinery of the ego would be terrific fodder. Moments after I started blathering about Eckhart Tolle, however, Regina cut me off. “Whatever, Dan. If you need this, fine.” Then she changed the subject to which soups we should order. The verdict was rendered with such offhand ferocity that it made me realize that this topic I thought so alive with potential could come off as merely fuzzy and embarrassing. She wasn’t engaged enough to even needle me about it.

My losing streak continued at a family brunch, when I floated Tolle past my younger brother. I should have seen this one coming. Matt’s mission in life since emerging from the womb had been to torment me. Even though he was now a venture capitalist and the father of a beautiful baby girl, his devotion to puncturing my balloon had not diminished. As soon as I finished my spiel, he just stared back at me with a satisfied smirk. The knife inserted with nary a word. (Not long afterward, he gave me an Eckhart Tolle calendar for Christmas. I unwrapped it, looked up, and saw him on the other side of the room, wearing the same smirk.)

What made this series of failures especially frustrating was the realization that the expressions on the faces of my interlocutors were probably not dissimilar to the way I must have looked when confronted with some of the fringier religious people I’d interviewed over the years.

Even with people who weren’t reflexively hostile to the material, I wasn’t making terrific inroads. At a group dinner downtown, I cornered my friend Kaiama, an open-minded professor of French Lit at Columbia. As I concluded my discourse on the Now, she asked, “But how do you really stay in the moment when it’s always slipping away?” I had no answer.

Perhaps the most meaningful exchange I had on the subject was a completely random discussion with my uncle Martin at my parents’ annual summer pool party. Martin, a former entrepreneur who was now in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, turned to me and asked an intriguing question: “Which is more exciting to you? Reality or memory?” I paused, considered it, and said, “I wish I could say reality, but it’s probably memory.” And then I asked, “What about you?” At which point Martin stared blankly back at me and asked, “What was the question?”

Bianca was mildly receptive to my newfound area of interest. Mostly, she was intrigued by the notion of having a less stressed husband-to-be. Then again, I had just come through a yearlong obsession with climate change. It was reasonable to assume that this was just another of my transient fixations, only kookier.

I was stuck in the same place I’d found myself at the end of my Tolle interview, knowing my hair was on fire but lacking an extinguisher. With Tolle having failed to answer my questions, and struggling with an ongoing inability to explain what intrigued me about all of this in even the most basic, comprehensible terms, I was at my wit’s end. I didn’t know where to turn. I recalled what Chopra had said to me at the end of our interview: “Hang around with me.” Just days after I met him, he’d sent a whole stack of his books to my office, with titles like The Book of Secrets and Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul. He’d been texting and emailing me, and even forwarding me a Google Alert he’d set on himself, in which Kim Kardashian sang his praises. Warily, I figured: What do I have to lose?

Deepak was wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with a peace sign made out of sequins as he enthusiastically showed me around the Manhattan outpost of the Chopra Center. Located in a chichi midtown hotel, the Center offered spa treatments, medical consults, yoga, and astrological readings. We were in the gift shop. As I let my eyes fall on his vast array of personally branded products (Ayurvedic Cold & Allergy Remedies, Antioxidant Supplements, “Harmonizing” necklaces, shirts printed with the word abundance, and books (fifty-five or fifty-six of them, he couldn’t remember exactly—on everything from God to golf to cooking) I was thinking about Jay Z, who once rapped, “I’m not a businessman . . . I’m a business, man.”

Felicia and I had decided to profile Deepak for Sunday World News. It didn’t take a lot of convincing to get him on board, and it became readily apparent how this man had landed on the Forbes list of richest celebrities, with an estimated income of $22 million a year. His itinerary was a manic, many-splendored thing. In just a few days I personally saw him host a satellite radio show, hold meetings with video game developers for a project based on his spiritual teachings, and discuss a Broadway show with a man who claimed he could bend spoons with the power of his mind.

On many levels, Deepak seemed like a walking contradiction. He claimed to be perennially present, and yet we filmed him pounding down the street while furiously typing on his BlackBerry, and then voraciously devouring articles on his Kindle while ostensibly working out on an elliptical machine. These didn’t strike me as the actions of a man living in perfect harmony with himself; this was the type of shit I did.

We did an interview at a picnic table in Central Park, and I challenged his self-proclaimed imperturbability. Thinking back to his performance at the Face-Off, I said, “Sometimes I’ve seen you worked up.”

“But even though I was worked up,” he responded, “did you find that there was anger, resentment, or hostility in that?”

“I can’t read your mind, but judging from your body language, you weren’t pleased.”

“Without passion, you’d be a walking dead person,” he said. “Even though you’re dynamically engaged, you’re not stressed.”

Was it really just “dynamic engagement” and not stress? Deepak insisted that, in fact, he hadn’t experienced stress in decades. He told me that, years ago, when he was a frazzled young medical resident in suburban Massachusetts he smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and drank too much. “We used to take care of a cardiac arrest and then we’d go outside and smoke a cigarette,” he said. But then, quite suddenly, he changed everything. “It was dramatic,” he told me. “I finally one day made a decision that that part of my life was over. I said, ‘I’ve been there, done that.’ ”

He quit his day job and went to work for the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the bearded Indian holy man perhaps most famous for his stint as the official guru of the Beatles. (After a brief stay at his ashram, John Lennon left in a huff over allegations that the Maharishi had tried to fondle Mia Farrow. On his way back to London, Lennon wrote the song “Sexy Sadie,” featuring the lyric, “What have you done? You’ve made a fool of everyone.”) Deepak climbed to the rank of the Maharishi’s top lieutenant. But he and the Maharishi grew apart. Deepak started feeling like the group had become too cultish; the Maharishi thought Deepak too ambitious. So Deepak left.

Unleashed from hierarchical constraint, Deepak spread his wings. He’d become intrigued by “spontaneous remissions,” those dramatic and inexplicable recoveries, where people bounce back from serious illnesses. When he couldn’t get any reputable medical journals to publish his research, he paid a vanity press five thousand dollars to put it out as a book. It was a hit. Scores more followed. He became friends with Michael Jackson, who introduced him to Oprah, who put him on television. The rest was history. By the time I met Deepak, he was sixty-three years old. He’d recorded an album of freaky New Age music with Martin Sheen, Madonna, and Demi Moore; Lady Gaga had called him the most influential person in her life; Time had dubbed him “the poet-prophet of alternative medicine.” He had fierce critics, though. The publisher of Skeptic magazine put Deepak on the cover, lampooning his medical conclusions as “mostly wild speculations based on only the slimmest of evidence.”

So was he full of shit? I couldn’t tell. As with Tolle, I found him to be a baffling mixtape of the interesting and the incomprehensible—like a DJ toggling between the Rolling Stones and Rick Astley, the Band and Dokken. I liked it when he said things like, “The fact that you exist is a highly statistically improbable event, and if you are not perpetually surprised by the fact that you exist you don’t deserve to be here.” But too often, he reverted to a seemingly involuntary, impenetrable spiritual patois that had a certain je ne sais pas pourquoi. His memorable assertions to me included “The universe is a nanotechnology workshop in the mind of god,” and “Don’t call it God, call it a-causal, non-local, quantum-mechanical inter-religiousness.”

Chopra was infinitely more fun to hang out with than Tolle—I preferred Deepak’s rascally What Makes Sammy Run? style to the German’s otherworldly diffidence—but I left the experience more confused, not less. It was intriguing that someone could strive so nakedly and yet claim to be without stress. That would have answered many of my questions about defeating the ego without killing your edge—if only I believed him.

My next move was motivated by sheer desperation. It was mercifully brief, but unrelentingly absurd. Felicia and I decided to launch a whole series of stories on self-help for Sunday World News. We called it “Happiness, Inc.” The idea was to delve into an unregulated, $11 billion industry that had attracted a growing number of followers as Americans moved away from organized religion. With no answers forthcoming from Tolle or Chopra, this was the only thing I could think to do. What I found in this distinctly American subculture was beyond crazy—a parade of the unctuous and the unqualified, preaching to the desperate and, often, destitute.

One of the leading players in this questionable game was Joe Vitale, who had risen to prominence after landing a cameo in what would become a monster cultural phenomenon called The Secret. This was a high-gloss book and DVD that came out in 2006 and featured a whole crew of self-help gurus expounding on the “Law of Attraction,” which offered the prospect of getting anything you wanted—health, wealth, love—simply by thinking about it in the right way. It was essentially a slick repackaging of an old idea that had been sent up the flagpole by such pioneering turkeys as Napoleon Hill, who produced the 1930s bestseller Think and Grow Rich, and Norman Vincent Peale, author of the canonical turd, The Power of Positive Thinking.

As I slid into the backseat of Vitale’s Rolls-Royce, it truly hit home to me how far Deepak was on the benign end of the self-help spectrum. Vitale had a doughy face and a large, hairless head, which gave the impression of a vastly overgrown baby. He was giving my crew and me a free taste of what would normally cost $5,000: something he called the “Rolls-Royce Phantom Mastermind” session. As his driver squired us through the Texas countryside, Vitale explained that people paid to come to his home in exurban Austin and take a ride with him, during which he helped them “mastermind ideas that change lives.”

With the camera pointing back at us from the front seat, I said, “This is an amazing car, but five grand is a lot for three hours with you.”

“Well, there are people who think I should charge a lot more than that. They think that’s giving it away.”

The Rolls was just one of many sources of income for “Dr.” Vitale. Homeless just thirty years ago, Vitale had earned his PhD in “metaphysics” through a correspondence course from the University of Sedona. He now lived in a large house with many cars, purchased with the proceeds from dozens of books, with titles like Expect Miracles and Attract Money Now. He also sold products like margarita mix, a health drink called YouthJuice, and stickers with pictures of Russian dolls on them that, for reasons I couldn’t quite understand, Vitale insisted would help the owner meet his or her life goals. (List price: $39.)

In an interview in Vitale’s home office, I asked, “You never wake up in the middle of the night thinking, ‘I can’t believe I’m getting away with this’?”

“No, never,” he said, laughing as if this were the last thing that would have ever occurred to him.

While, in theory, I could see the appeal of positive thinking—especially as a man who unquestionably spent too much time ruminating—when I scratched the surface of this “philosophy,” I quickly encountered gale force inanity. On the DVD version of The Secret, Vitale pops on-screen to utter such memorable chestnuts as “You are the Michelangelo of your own life. The David that you are sculpting is you—and you do it with your own thoughts.” Under questioning in our interview, though, Vitale admitted that it was not that easy. In fact, he folded like a cheap lawn chair.

“So, what if I want a diamond necklace for my wife?” I asked. “Can I get that by thinking about it?”

“Not just by thinking about it. That’s one of the biggest misconceptions of all time. You have to take action. It’s not just thinking—it’s thinking coupled with action.”

“Isn’t that a statement of the glaringly obvious? You think it’s news to most people that if you want something you have to try to get it?”

“You know, when you put it that way, it sounds silly,” he said, laughing sheepishly. “Pretty brainless.”

The more worrisome message of The Secret phenomenon was not the preposterousness of its primary sales pitch, but instead its destructive undercurrent. “The inverse of your logic,” I argued to Vitale, “seems to blame the victim. Because if you aren’t getting what you want, it must be your fault.”

“This is not a blame game,” he insisted. “Our unconscious thoughts is [sic] what’s creating our reality—and many of our unconscious thoughts are not very positive; they are negative. They actually attract problems.”

So this would be true of kids with cancer? Victims of genocide? “It strains credulity,” I said, “to say that everybody who got hit by the earthquake in Haiti had some unconscious thinking going on that led to them being victims.”

“None of those people are being victimized. In other words—”

“In an earthquake, you’re victimized, aren’t you?”

An awkward pause. A stutter. And then he conceded, “In an earthquake you’re victimized.”

The other star of The Secret I covered managed to push the absurdity level directly into the truly dangerous range. James Arthur Ray was a fit, fifty-something, divorced junior college dropout who oozed smarmy overconfidence. An oily character, he looked like he always had a thin sheen of sweat covering his face. He promised his followers that he could help them achieve “harmonic wealth” in all areas of their life. He claimed that, using his own techniques, he’d not only gotten rich, but that he also no longer so much as caught a cold.

There was clearly some sort of error in his thinking, however, because in October of 2009, at a “Spiritual Warrior Retreat” in Arizona, which cost nearly ten grand per person, three of Ray’s followers died in a sweat lodge ceremony over which he personally presided. It was an imitation of a Native American ritual that Ray promised would be a “re-birthing exercise.”

As the sweat lodge story began to gain national traction, the producers of Nightline sent me to Arizona to check it out. Sedona, a city known as the New Age Vatican, set amid dramatic red rock cliffs, was a mecca for spiritual tourists who were catered to by a legion of self-proclaimed healers, mystics, wind whisperers, and intuitive counselors who offered such services as “soul-retrieval,” “energy healing,” and “aura photos.” The downtown shopping district echoed with the sounds of wind chimes and the low hum of didgeridoo.

For me, the most pathetic part of the entire story was talking to the survivors who still claimed to believe in Ray. We went to the home of Brian Essad, an unassuming employee at an event production company. He showed us his “visioning board,” on which he had a picture of Alyssa Milano, who he was hoping to meet. He also showed us the books and handouts he’d collected from all the Ray retreats he’d attended. Then he revealed all the unpaid bills that were mounting on his kitchen table—bills he might have been able to pay if he hadn’t given so much money to Ray. “It’s like right now, I don’t actually have enough cash in my account to pay all these bills. So I’m just kind of putting out there that I need to attract money that I need to pay all these.”

After investigating for four months, police in Arizona charged Ray with manslaughter. The man who once told viewers of The Secret that they should treat the universe as if it were Aladdin’s lamp was perp-walked in front of news cameras, wearing handcuffs and leg irons, looking mortified. Even though he’d authored a book called Harmonic Wealth, he said he didn’t have enough money to make bail. In another delicious twist, investigators released documents that seemed to explain how Ray maintained his robust physical appearance. It wasn’t the Law of Attraction. After the sweat lodge, police found a suitcase in Ray’s room, filled with diet supplements and prescribed steroids.

That discovery in the hotel room crystallized everything that I found most absurd and hypocritical about the self-help industry. To tell the truth, it hadn’t taken long for me to figure out that this scene was not for me. Luckily, with an assist from my future wife, I’d found something more promising.