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 5 The Jew-Bu

I was back at the Tribeca Grand, the self-consciously hip hotel in downtown Manhattan where I’d stayed in the days after 9/11. The place had now been restored to its natural state, with mood lighting, techno music, and well-dressed people sipping foreign beers on fluffy chairs. Hardly the environment in which I would have expected to find the kind of guru I was looking for. Until this moment, in fact, I hadn’t quite realized that looking for a guru was what I’d been doing all along.

The guy standing here with me at the bar certainly would not have embraced the title, which was, of course, part of his appeal. He was totally reasonable and utterly uncheesy, a man with actual credentials, including a medical degree from Harvard, which conferred a sort of legitimacy that, say, an online degree from the University of Sedona did not.

His basic message was that the best self-help program was developed 2,500 years ago—a worldview that, oddly enough, held that there is actually no “self” to “help.”

The seeds of this encounter had been planted one evening at home as I was changing out of my suit and tie and into sweatpants, shucking sartorial detritus—pants, socks, belt—all over the floor. I enjoyed doing this not only because it appealed to both my laziness and my constant desire to rush to the next thing (The sooner I get these clothes off, the sooner I’ll get dinner), but also because it annoyed Bianca, who sometimes playfully called me Hurricane Harris. On this night, though, she was not taking the bait. She was coming at me with a gift, in fact.

In her hands she had a pair of books written by someone named Dr. Mark Epstein. She told me that, after months of listening to me alternately rhapsodize or carp about Eckhart Tolle et al., it had finally clicked with her why the ideas I was yammering on about with varying levels of cogency sounded so familiar. About ten years prior, she had read some books by Epstein who, she explained, was a psychiatrist and a practicing Buddhist. His writing had been useful for her during a difficult time in her twenties, a quarter-life crisis when she was struggling with family issues as well as the decision about whether to embark on the interminable training necessary to become a doctor.

I flipped over one of the paperbacks to get a look at this Epstein character, and there on the back cover was a kind-faced, middle-aged guy wearing a V-neck sweater and wire-rimmed glasses, sitting on the floor against the type of white backdrop you often see in photography studios. Even though he looked infinitely less weird than either Eckhart Tolle or Deepak Chopra, I still found myself thinking, Not my kind of guy.

That mild, momentary spasm of aversion was assuaged by the little bio next to Epstein’s picture, which said he was a trained psychiatrist with a private practice in Manhattan.

Thus began another night of delayed sleep and revelatory reading, with Bianca quietly dozing by my side. It was like my first evening with Tolle, only less embarrassing. What I found in the pages of Epstein’s book was thunderously satisfying. Like scratching an itch in an unreachable area. Like finally figuring out why Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia’s sexual tension never felt right. Very quickly, it became blazingly clear: The best parts of Tolle were largely unattributed Buddhism. Tolle had not, as I’d assumed when I’d first read A New Earth, made up his insights out of whole cloth. Apparently he’d appropriated them, and then effected a sort of intellectual elephantiasis, exaggerating their features in the most profitable of ways. Two and a half millennia before Eckhart Tolle started cashing his royalty checks, it was the Buddha who originally came up with that brilliant diagnosis of the way the mind works.

In Epstein’s writings, it was all there: the insatiable wanting, the inability to be present, the repetitive, relentlessly self-referential thinking. Here was everything that fascinated me about Tolle, without the pseudoscience and grandiloquence. To boot, the good doctor could actually write. Compared to Tolle, in fact, this guy was Tolstoy. After months of swimming against the riptide of bathos and bullshit peddled by the self-help subculture, it was phenomenally refreshing to see the ego depicted with wry wit.

“We are constantly murmuring, muttering, scheming, or wondering to ourselves under our breath,” wrote Epstein. “ ‘I like this. I don’t like that. She hurt me. How can I get that? More of this, no more of that.’ Much of our inner dialogue is this constant reaction to experience by a selfish, childish protagonist. None of us has moved very far from the seven-year-old who vigilantly watches to see who got more.” There were also delightful passages about the human tendency to lurch headlong from one pleasurable experience to the next without ever achieving satisfaction. Epstein totally nailed my habit of hunting around my plate for the next bite before I’d tasted what was in my mouth. As he described it, “I do not want to experience the fading of the flavor—the colorless, cottony pulp that succeeds that spectacular burst over my taste buds.”

Prior to reading Epstein, my most substantial interaction with Buddhism was when, as a fifteen-year-old punk kid, I stole a Buddha statue from a local gardening store and put it my bedroom because I thought it looked cool. Despite the fact that I was now a religion reporter, I still had only a glancing understanding of this faith. With Buddhists comprising only about 1/300 of the U.S. population and not being in the habit of taking strident political stands, they didn’t attract much coverage. What I knew of Buddhism was limited to the following: it was from Asia somewhere; the Buddha was overweight; and his followers believed in things like karma, rebirth, and enlightenment.

Epstein made clear, though, that you didn’t have to buy into any of the above to derive benefit from Buddhism. The Buddha himself didn’t claim to be a god or a prophet. He specifically told people not to adopt any of his teachings until they’d test-driven the material themselves. He wasn’t even trying to start a religion, per se. The word Buddhism was actually an invention of the nineteenth-century Western scholars who discovered and translated the original texts. As best I could tell, the whole thing appeared to be less a faith than a philosophy, and one that had been intriguing psychologists since the days of Freud, when his early Viennese followers studied those newly translated texts. In recent decades, the mental health community had come to embrace Buddhism in an increasingly thoroughgoing way. According to Epstein, the Buddha may well have been the “original psychoanalyst.” To my surprise, Epstein seemed to be arguing that Buddhism was better than seeing a shrink. Therapy, he said, often leads to “understanding without relief.” Even Freud himself had conceded that the best therapy could do was bring us from “hysteric misery” to “common unhappiness.”

Epstein’s frank admissions about the limitations of therapy tracked with my personal experiences. I was, of course, grateful to Dr. Brotman for getting me to quit drugs and then steadfastly but affably making sure I stayed the course. I was also fond of him personally—especially for his ability to point out my idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies. However, I still had that nagging and perhaps naive sense of disappointment that he had failed to come up with some sort of “unifying theory” to explain my entire psychology. Now Epstein seemed to be saying that even if Brotman had ripped the cover off some primordial wound, it wouldn’t have left me better off. The limitation wasn’t my therapist, Epstein seemed to be arguing—it was therapy.

So what exactly was this not-quite-religion that could purportedly do a better job of salving the tortured soul? I attacked the question the way I would a major investigative news story, learning everything I could. I bought a ton of books, adding them next to the already precarious stack of self-help tomes on my bedside table. (A tableau Bianca often insisted on covering up when we had company.)

According to the official story, the Buddha was born about five hundred years before Christ in northeast India, in what is now Nepal. As legend has it, his mother was spontaneously impregnated, in what sounded like the Buddhist version of the Immaculate Conception. She died seven days after the birth, leaving the boy, whose name was Siddhartha, to be raised by his father, a regional king.

The king had been advised by a local wise man that Siddhartha would grow up to either be a powerful monarch or a great spiritual leader. Eager to ensure that the boy would one day take the throne, the king arranged to have him confined to the palace walls, protected from the outside world and anything that might trigger his mystical tendencies.

At age twenty-nine, however, Siddhartha grew curious, ran away from home, and became a wandering monk. This was a pretty common practice back in those days. Penniless renunciates with shaved heads, bare feet, and tattered robes would roam the forests, seeking spiritual awakening. The prince did this for six years, until one night he sat under a bodhi tree, vowing not to get up until he’d achieved enlightenment. At dawn, the man formerly known as Siddhartha opened his eyes and gazed out at the world as the Buddha, “the awakened one.”

For a skeptic, there was obviously a lot not to like in this story. However, the substance of what the Buddha allegedly realized beneath the bodhi tree—and then began disseminating to his followers—was fascinating, illuminating, and once again appeared to have been crafted by someone who had spent a great deal of time inside my brain.

As best I could understand it, the Buddha’s main thesis was that in a world where everything is constantly changing, we suffer because we cling to things that won’t last. A central theme of the Buddha’s “dharma” (which roughly translates to “teaching”) revolved around the very word that had been wafting through my consciousness when I used to lie on my office couch, pondering the unpredictability of television news: “impermanence.” The Buddha embraced an often overlooked truism: nothing lasts—including us. We and everyone we love will die. Fame fizzles, beauty fades, continents shift. Pharaohs are swallowed by emperors, who fall to sultans, kings, kaisers, and presidents—and it all plays out against the backdrop of an infinite universe in which our bodies are made up of atoms from the very first exploding stars. We may know this intellectually, but on an emotional level we seem to be hardwired for denial. We comport ourselves as if we had solid ground beneath our feet, as if we had control. We quarantine the elderly in nursing homes and pretend aging will never happen to us. We suffer because we get attached to people and possessions that ultimately evaporate. When we lose our hair, when we can no longer score that hit of adrenaline from a war zone we so crave, we grow anxious and make bad decisions.

Unlike many of the faiths I’d come across as a religion reporter, the Buddha wasn’t promising salvation in the form of some death-defying dogma, but rather through the embrace of the very stuff that will destroy us. The route to true happiness, he argued, was to achieve a visceral understanding of impermanence, which would take you off the emotional roller coaster and allow you to see your dramas and desires through a wider lens. Waking up to the reality of our situation allows you to, as the Buddhists say, “let go,” to drop your “attachments.” As one Buddhist writer put it, the key is to recognize the “wisdom of insecurity.”

That phrase—“the wisdom of insecurity”—really struck me. It was the perfect rejoinder to my “price of security” motto. It made me see my work worries in an entirely different light. If there was no such thing as security, then why bother with the insecurity?

For 2,500 years, the Buddhists had been comprehensively mapping the mind—that tasteless, odorless, formless thing (or, more accurately, no-thing) through which we experience our entire lives. They compiled meticulous lists: The Three Characteristics of All Phenomena, The Four Noble Truths, The Four Highest Emotions, The Seven Factors of Enlightenment, etc. They also came up with names for so many of the mental habits I’d come to notice in myself, such as “comparing mind,” and “wanting mind.” They had a term, too, for that thing I did where something would bother me and I would immediately project forward to an unpleasant future (e.g., Balding → Unemployment → Flophouse). The Buddhists called this prapañca (pronounced pra-PUN-cha), which roughly translates to “proliferation,” or “the imperialistic tendency of mind.” That captured it beautifully, I thought: something happens, I worry, and that concern instantaneously colonizes my future. My favorite Buddhist catchphrase, however, was the one they used to describe the churning of the ego: “monkey mind.” I’ve always been a sucker for animal metaphors, and I thought this one was perfect. Our minds are like furry little gibbons: always agitated, never at rest.

As compelling as the Buddhist view was for me, though, it once again threw me back up against the same old questions I’d been wrestling with since the days of Eckhart Tolle. Wasn’t the Buddhist emphasis on “letting go” a recipe for passivity? Was the denigration of desire another way of saying we shouldn’t bother to strive? Furthermore, shouldn’t we be “attached” to our loved ones?

There were other things I did not get. If Buddhism was about being happier, why was the Buddha’s signature declaration “Life is suffering”? Then, of course, there was still the issue of enlightenment. The Buddha’s claim—which, as far as I could tell, modern Buddhists, including Dr. Epstein, still believed—was that it was possible to achieve “the end of suffering,” to reach Nirvana. I couldn’t very well mock Tolle for his claims of “spiritual awakening” and give the Buddhists a pass on enlightenment.

Notwithstanding my confusion, the more I learned about the 2,500-year-old historical figure known to me previously as a lawn ornament, the more intrigued I grew. I felt like I was finally onto something truly substantial. This wasn’t just the doctrine of one weird German dude, but an ancient tradition that was given serious credence by smart people like Epstein. My hitherto haphazard quest suddenly felt infinitely more directed.

Right in the middle of our wedding reception, I decided to make a conscious effort to put everything I was learning about Buddhism to work. Dinner had been served and consumed, and the dancing was under way. That’s when we heard it: the swell of horns in the distance. Marching in were about eight Bahamians, all dressed in elaborate local costumes and playing trumpets, trombones, tubas, and drums. It was what islanders call a “Junkanoo Rush.” It took me a minute to recognize the song, U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” Perhaps not the best sentiment for a wedding, I thought. But never mind: the music was beautiful, and our guests were going wild. I grabbed Bianca, who was looking incandescent in her dress, and we formed a conga line behind the band. I was fully present, totally in the moment. No clinging: I knew this wouldn’t last and I was wringing every bit of pleasure out of it while I could.

I had always kind of assumed that I might not enjoy my own wedding. These events were all about the bride, I thought; the groom was just supposed to stand there, smiling. I also feared that after a lifetime of avoiding commitment, I would experience some significant last-minute jitters. As usual, my powers of prognostication were completely off. It turned out to be the best weekend of my life.

Admittedly, this was a hard place to be unhappy. We were getting married on Harbour Island, a magical spot where most people drove around in golf carts instead of cars, and where free-range chickens were given right-of-way in the streets.

The wedding was a small affair: just fifty people, our nuclear families and our closest friends. Everyone came for three days. During the day, people lounged on the beach, where the sand was literally pink, and every night we threw a party. Instead of the usual flybys that most newlyweds do on receiving lines and at guests’ tables, Bianca and I got plenty of face time with everyone.

I was also buoyed by my confidence that I was making the right decision. I couldn’t imagine marrying anyone other than Bianca. As my friend Regina had quipped, “For a person with terrible judgment, you did a great job with the most important decision of your life.”

But there was something else at work here, too. My consumption of Buddhist books was paying off. Throughout the weekend, I made a deliberate effort to pause, look around, and savor things while they lasted. There were little moments, like running errands for Bianca—for example, putting her carefully curated gift bags in people’s rooms—and actually enjoying it. Or when I babysat my adorable, big-eyed baby niece Campbell in my room while everyone else was out having lunch. She sat on my lap and cooed contentedly while I ate a cheeseburger, trying not to drip ketchup on her head.

There were big moments, too, like the ceremony itself, where I watched Bianca walk down the aisle and wondered how I’d gotten so lucky.

As soon as I got back home from the honeymoon, though, my penchant for worry reasserted itself—provoked by a conundrum at work that I simply could not figure out how to handle in a Buddhist way.

One Friday evening, I looked up at the TV in my office and saw David Muir anchoring World News—the weekday version, the Big Show. He was doing a fantastic job, which threw me into a Triple Lindy of “comparing mind,” “monkey mind,” and prapañca. Muir is kicking ass right now. I’m going down.

I was feeling bad—and then, on top of that, feeling bad about feeling bad. I liked the guy, after all. This incident again crystallized all of my nagging questions about Buddhism. Doesn’t competitiveness serve a useful purpose? Is the “price of security” simply incompatible with the “wisdom of insecurity”?

It was time for me to play my trump card. Despite the fact that more than 50 percent of Americans tell pollsters they don’t trust the media, generally speaking, people return our calls. I found Mark Epstein’s office number and left him a message saying I was a reporter and also a fan. I asked if he’d be willing to meet up, and he called me back right away to say he was game.

So, about a week later, roughly eight months after I’d first discovered Eckhart Tolle, I took a cab downtown for my man-date with the Buddhist shrink at the Tribeca Grand, just a few blocks from his office—the same chichi hotel where I’d stayed in the days after 9/11.

It was an oddly cool spot for two guys meeting to discuss Eastern spirituality. When I arrived, Epstein was already at the bar, located in the atrium, with seven floors looming overhead. He’d aged a bit since the picture on the back of his books, but I still recognized him, and he still looked considerably younger than his fifty-five years. His hair, which he wore combed back, was graying, but his hairline was robustly intact. (I notice these things.) He was about my height and lean, wearing a slightly oversized blazer with a T-shirt underneath. He greeted me warmly, with a voice that had a soft quality to it, perhaps the product of decades in a confined space, discussing people’s most private and painful issues.

After the preliminaries—the ordering of beers, my annoying habit of telling anyone who has a medical degree about the educational pedigrees of my wife and parents—we got down to business.

Conditioned as I was by my time with the self-help gurus, I started by asking Epstein flat out whether his life had been radically and grandly transformed by his embrace of Buddhism. For a nanosecond he looked at me like I was crazy, but then he caught himself. He didn’t quite laugh at me; he was too polite for that. Instead, he explained that he, like everyone else, got sad, angry, obsessive, you name it—the entire range of emotions, negative and positive.

“Are you always able to stay in the moment?”

“Eh, I try to remain aware of my surroundings,” he said, but he admitted he didn’t always succeed.

I pushed him on some of the Buddhist metaphysics. “Do you believe in reincarnation?” I asked.

“It’s nice,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. This was not a dogmatic individual.

It hit me that what I had on my hands here was a previously undiscovered species: a normal human being. Epstein, it appeared to me, was the anti-Tolle, the anti-Chopra. Not a guru in the popular sense of the word, just a regular guy with whom I was having a drink on a Friday night.

We started to talk about his background. He, too, had grown up in the Boston area. His dad was also a doctor. He didn’t have some fancy backstory, à la Tolle or Chopra. No sudden, late-night spiritual awakening, no hearing of voices. He’d discovered Buddhism after signing up for an Introduction to World Religion course during his freshman year in college because a girl he liked was also in the class. His fling with the girl didn’t last (although he did end up dating her roommate), but he did develop an immediate and abiding interest in the dharma, which resonated with him after a lifelong struggle with feelings of emptiness and unreality, and questions about whether he really mattered.

I explained to him that I was drawn to Buddhism for the exact opposite reasons. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a man who appeared on television for a living, the question of whether I mattered had never occurred to me. I did not struggle, as Mark did, with feelings of being empty or unreal. “On the contrary,” I said, only half-jokingly, “I feel all too real. I still kinda have a residual suspicion from childhood that the whole world is laid out for my benefit and nothing happens out of my line of sight. Does that place me at a disadvantage in terms of being a Buddhist?”

He thought this was hilarious. “Absolutely not,” he said, laughing. “Your personality and mine are really different. When I’m thinking about it, it’s from a much more introverted place. You’re talking from an extroverted place. There’s an energy there, an enthusiasm there, a rambunctiousness there.” Buddhism, he said, could be helpful for both personality types.

I asked what a beginner should do to get deeper into this world. I didn’t want to be a Buddhist, per se; I just wanted to better manage my ego. He told me how, after that initial religion class at Harvard, he had fallen in with a bunch of young people who were also interested in Eastern spirituality. Many of these people had gone on to become influential teachers and writers, who’d helped popularize the dharma in America. He suggested I read some of their books, and he started ticking off names. As I madly typed notes into my BlackBerry for future reference, it was impossible not to notice that nearly all of these names were Jewish: Goldstein, Goleman, Kornfield, Salzberg. “This is a whole subculture,” he said. The little cabal even had a nickname: the “Jew-Bus.”

It sounded like a remarkable group. They had all met at elite Northeast universities and also while taking exotic, druggy romps through the subcontinent. Mark theorized that many of these young Jewish people, having been raised in secular environments, felt a spiritual hole in their lives. He also acknowledged that the Jewish penchant for anxiety probably played a role in their collective attraction to Buddhism. Over the ensuing decades, the Jew-Bus had been a major force in figuring out how to translate the wisdom of the East for a Western audience—mostly by making it less hierarchical and devotional. Mark mentioned that he and some of his peers taught Buddhist-themed seminars around town, where they gave talks and answered questions. “Go to some events,” he advised, “until you get bored.”

I laughed. I liked this guy. This man whose picture I had reflexively rejected turned out to be somebody with whom I could see myself being friends. We were a bit of an odd pair, to be sure, but there was a certain compatibility, too. He was a professional listener; I was a professional talker. We both had the whole Boston–New York–Jewish cultural affinity thing. He didn’t feel foreign, like Tolle and Chopra. He could have been one of my uncles. I wanted to be his friend, but what I really wanted was to figure out how to get what he appeared to have. Not some self-conscious, allegedly unbreakable equanimity, but a quiet confidence, an easy charm. There was no denial of his neuroses; he seemed to find them amusing rather than enervating.

Normally at this point in the conversation—at least with a Tolle or a Chopra—I’d have been asking for practical advice and in return getting a blizzard of nonanswers. Mark, however, had a very explicit prescription. This is where the Buddhists diverged quite dramatically from self-help: They had an actual, practical program. It wasn’t expensive gimcrackery. No spendy seminars, no credit cards required. It was totally free. It was a radical internal jujitsu move that was supposed to allow you to face the asshole in your head directly, and peacefully disarm him. Problem was, I found what they were proposing to be repellent.