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 6 The Power of Negative Thinking

My abiding distaste for anything associated with hippies or the New Age dates back to the mid-1970s when I was about five years old. My parents, still not having sloughed off the cultural residue of the Age of Aquarius, sent me to a children’s yoga class at a local elementary school. I showed up wearing Toughskins, the indestructible children’s jeans that had been recently introduced by Sears. The teacher, who looms in my memory like an airy-fairy praying mantis, pronounced my pants to be insufficiently flexible for the exercises we’d be doing. In front of all the other little kids, she made me strip down and do sun salutations in my tighty-whities.

My early childhood traumas—which also included compulsory camping trips and visits to musty health food stores—were compounded by my years at Colby College, a small liberal arts school in central Maine, where I was repeatedly forced to listen to Jerry Garcia’s interminable guitar noodling by hacky sack–playing, do-ragand Teva-wearing Deadheads from the suburbs of Massachusetts and Connecticut.

All of which left me in a tricky position vis-à-vis Buddhism. Epstein et al. argued that the only way to tame the monkey mind, to truly glimpse impermanence and defeat our habitual tendency toward clinging, was to meditate—and I had absolutely no intention of following their advice. Meditation struck me as the distillation of everything that sucked hardest about the granola lifestyle. I pictured myself seated in an unbearable cross-legged position (my disavowal of yoga having left me less limber than I would have liked) in a room that smelled like feet, with a group of smug “practitioners” ringing bells, ogling crystals, intoning om, and attempting to float off into some sort of cosmic goo. My attitude was summed up nicely by Alec Baldwin’s character on 30 Rock, who said, “Meditation is a waste of time, like learning French or kissing after sex.”

Compounding my resistance was my extremely limited attention span. (Another of the many reasons I went into TV.) I assumed there was no way my particular mind—whirring at best, at worst a whirlwind—could ever stop thinking.

This stalemate between the dharma and me might have dragged on indefinitely, but then a month after my man-date with Epstein, I happened to go see my shrink. I was reluctant to tell Dr. Brotman about my budding interest in Buddhism because, like me, he had an aversion to sloppy sentimentality; it’s part of why we were simpatico. But when I fessed up, he responded by telling me about a former colleague of his from Harvard who had written a bestselling book about the health benefits of meditation. Brotman seemed to think it might do me some good.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s not for me,” I said. Then, as I sat there absorbing his surprising response, I recalled aloud how, on the first day we met, he had used an animal analogy to explain how someone like me needed to not only refrain from drugs but also engage in careful mental and physical upkeep in order to stay balanced.

“When you say you think meditation might be good for me, is that because of the time you told me I needed to treat myself like a stallion?”

He started laughing and shaking his head. “I never said stallion. I said thoroughbred.”

Whatever: semantics. I went ahead and read the book he was referring to by Brotman’s friend. The doctor’s theory was that, in modern life, our ancient fight-or-flight mechanism was being triggered too frequently—in traffic jams, meetings with our bosses, etc.—and that this was contributing to the epidemic of heart disease. Even if the confrontations were themselves minor, our bodies didn’t know that; they reacted as if they were in kill-or-be-killed scenarios, releasing toxic stress chemicals into the bloodstream. The doctor had done studies showing that meditation could reverse the effects of stress and lower blood pressure—which the hypochondriac in me found deeply appealing.

I then read a few books about what Buddhist meditation actually involved, and learned that you didn’t need to wear robes, chant Sanskrit phrases, or listen to Cat Stevens. Perhaps my attitude on this matter was yet another example of my reaching hasty conclusions. My resistance was starting to crack.

Saint Paul, the notorious murderer of Christians, had a conversion experience on the road to Damascus. Nixon, the devout anti-Communist, electrified the world by traveling to China. The sudden renunciation of everything one has previously stood for is a well-established part of the human repertoire. Mine came in a stolen moment on the floor of a beach house.

It was the last weekend in August, and Bianca and I were sharing a big, old, converted barn with a group of friends. The people we were leasing it from, a pair of retired college professors, had rather idiosyncratically decorated the place with antique farm equipment, including sickles, axes, and pitchforks, which were hanging precariously from the rafters and from pretty much every inch of wall space. In addition to the elaborate arrays of saws, scissors, and hammers, there was a barrel filled with wooden rakes.

One afternoon, I was out by the pool, after having just finished reading yet another book about Buddhist meditation. The thought popped into my head: Should I try this? I was in a weakened state. Tenderized by the scientific evidence, and with my reference points for normalcy scrambled by months of marinating in Buddhism, I decided: Damn it, let’s give it a shot. Carpe diem, and whatnot.

While my housemates clearly had a high tolerance for kitsch—given their willingness to live in a house named “Barn Again”—I was not at all sure they were open-minded about meditation, and I had no desire to find out. I sneaked off to our bedroom to give it a try.

The instructions were reassuringly simple:

1. Sit comfortably. You don’t have to be cross-legged. Plop yourself in a chair, on a cushion, on the floor—wherever. Just make sure your spine is reasonably straight.

2. Feel the sensations of your breath as it goes in and out. Pick a spot: nostrils, chest, or gut. Focus your attention there and really try to feel the breath. If it helps to direct your attention, you can use a soft mental note, like “in” and “out.”

3. This one, according to all of the books I’d read, was the biggie. Whenever your attention wanders, just forgive yourself and gently come back to the breath. You don’t need to clear the mind of all thinking; that’s pretty much impossible. (True, when you are focused on the feeling of the breath, the chatter will momentarily cease, but this won’t last too long.) The whole game is to catch your mind wandering and then come back to the breath, over and over again.

I sat on the floor with my back up against the bed and my legs sprawled straight out in front of me. I set the alarm on my BlackBerry to go off in five minutes and let rip.

In.

Out.

In.

Shrubbery. I like that word.

Why, from an evolutionary perspective, do we like the smell of our own filth?

Get in the game, dude.

In.

Out.

My butt hurts. Let me just shift a little bit here.

In.

Idea for old-school hip-hop show: Rap Van Winkle.

Now I have an itch on the ball of my left foot.

Where do gerbils run wild? Would I describe myself as more of a baller or a shot caller? What was the best thing before sliced bread?

And so it went until the alarm went off. By which point it felt like an eternity had passed.

When I opened my eyes, I had an entirely different attitude about meditation. I didn’t like it, per se, but I now respected it. This was not just some hippie time-passing technique, like Ultimate Frisbee or making God’s Eyes. It was a rigorous brain exercise: rep after rep of trying to tame the runaway train of the mind. The repeated attempt to bring the compulsive thought machine to heel was like holding a live fish in your hands. Wrestling your mind to the ground, repeatedly hauling your attention back to the breath in the face of the inner onslaught required genuine grit. This was a badass endeavor.

I resolved to do it every day. I started getting up a little early each morning and banging out ten minutes, sitting on the floor of our living room with my back up against the couch. When I was on the road, I meditated on the floor of hotel rooms.

It didn’t get any easier. Almost immediately upon sitting down, I’d be beset by itches. Then there was the fatigue: a thick ooze, a sludge-like torpor sliding down my forehead. Even when the itches and fatigue lifted, I was left contending with the unstoppable fire hose of thoughts. Focusing on the breath as a way to temporarily stop the thinking was like using a broom to sweep a floor crawling with cockroaches. You could clear the space briefly, but then the bugs came marauding back in. I knew I was supposed to just forgive myself, but I found that to be extremely difficult. Every time I got lost in thought, I went into a mini shame spiral. My wanderings were so tawdry and banal. Is this really what I was thinking about all the time? Lunch? Whether I needed a haircut? My unresolved anger at the Academy for awarding Best Picture to Dances with Wolves instead of Goodfellas?

When I wasn’t lost in random musings, I was obsessing about how much time was left, dying for the ordeal to be over. It was like that Simpsons episode where they showed the world-record holder for longest consecutive case of the hiccups. In between hiccups, she would say, “Kill me.” By the end of ten minutes my jaw was often gritted from the effort. It reminded me of how one of our cats, Steve, who had a serious gum disease, would sometimes literally try to run away from himself when he was in pain. Similarly, when the alarm would go off at the end of a meditation session, I often would bolt out of my seated position, as if I could somehow physically escape the commotion of my own mind.

There were always happy, round-faced statues of the Buddha out front at airport spas and Chinese restaurants. (Although, I had come to learn that the “laughing Buddha” is actually a medieval Chinese monk who somehow became conflated in the Western imagination with the historical Buddha, who only ate one meal a day and was most likely a bag of skin and bones.) His image was bedazzled onto T-shirts sold in the gift shop at my gym. The word Zen had become synonymous with “mellow.” But this was all false advertising. Buddhist meditation was diabolically hard. Despite its difficulties, though, meditation did offer something huge: an actual method for shutting down the monkey mind, if only for a moment. It was like tricking the furry little gibbon, distracting it with something shiny so it would sit still. Unlike Tolle, who offered very little by way of actionable advice, meditation presented a real remedy, a temporary escape route from the clammy embrace of self-obsession. It may have been miserable, but it was the best—and only—solution I’d heard yet.

Pretty quickly, my efforts began to bear fruit “off the cushion,” to use a Buddhist term of art. I started to be able to use the breath to jolt myself back to the present moment—in airport security lines, waiting for elevators, you name it. I found it to be a surprisingly satisfying exercise. Life became a little bit like walking into a familiar room where all the furniture had been rearranged. And I was much better at forgiving myself out in the real world than while actually meditating. Every moment was an opportunity for a do-over. A million mulligans.

Meditation was radically altering my relationship to boredom, something I’d spent my whole life scrambling to avoid. The only advice I ever got from my college adviser, a novelist of minor renown named James Boylan (who later had a sex change operation, changed his name to Jenny, wrote a bestselling book, and appeared on Oprah) was to never go anywhere without something to read. I diligently heeded that guidance, taking elaborate precautions to make sure every spare moment was filled with distraction. I scanned my BlackBerry at stoplights, brought reams of work research to read in the doctor’s waiting room, and watched videos on my iPhone while riding in taxicabs.

Now I started to see life’s in-between moments—sitting at a red light, waiting for my crew to get set up for an interview—as a chance to focus on my breath, or just take in my surroundings. As soon as I began playing this game, I really noticed how much sleepwalking I did, how powerfully my mind propelled me forward or backward. Mostly, I saw the world through a scrim of skittering thoughts, which created a kind of buffer between me and reality. As one Buddhist author put it, the “craving to be otherwise, to be elsewhere” permeated my whole life.

The net effect of meditation, plus trying to stay present during my daily life, was striking. It was like anchoring myself to an underground aquifer of calm. It became a way to steel myself as I moved through the world. On Sunday nights, in the seconds right before the start of World News, I would take a few deep breaths and look around the room—out at the milling stage crew, up at the ceiling rigged with lights—grounding myself in reality before launching into the unreality of bellowing into a camera with unseen millions behind it.

All of this was great, of course, but as it turns out, it wasn’t actually the main point.

Buddhism’s secret sauce went by a hopelessly anodyne name: “mindfulness.” In a nutshell, mindfulness is the ability to recognize what is happening in your mind right now—anger, jealousy, sadness, the pain of a stubbed toe, whatever—without getting carried away by it. According to the Buddha, we have three habitual responses to everything we experience. We want it, reject it, or we zone out. Cookies: I want. Mosquitoes: I reject. The safety instructions the flight attendants read aloud on an airplane: I zone out. Mindfulness is a fourth option, a way to view the contents of our mind with nonjudgmental remove. I found this theory elegant, but utterly unfeasible.

On the cushion, the best opportunities to learn mindfulness are when you experience itches or pain. Instead of scratching or shifting position, you’re supposed to just sit there and impartially witness the discomfort. The instruction is simply to employ what the teachers call “noting,” applying a soft mental label: itching, itching or throbbing, throbbing. For me, this was infernally difficult. A daggerlike tingle would appear under my thigh, a little pinprick portal to Hades, and I would grit my teeth and question the choices I was making in life. I couldn’t suspend judgment; I hated it.

The idea is that, once you’ve mastered things like itches, eventually you’ll be able to apply mindfulness to thoughts and emotions. This nonjudgmental noting—Oh, that’s a blast of self-pity . . . Oh, that’s me ruminating about work—is supposed to sap much of the power, the emotional charge, out of the contents of consciousness.

It was easy to see how scalable mindfulness could be. For instance, it’d be late in the day, and I’d get a call from the World News rim telling me the story I’d spent hours scrambling to produce was no longer going to air in tonight’s show. My usual response was to think to myself, I’m angry. Reflexively, I would then fully inhabit that thought—and actually become angry. I would then give the person on the other end of the line some unnecessary chin music, even though I knew intellectually that they usually had a very good reason for killing the piece. In the end, I was left feeling bad about having expended energy on a story that didn’t air, and also feeling guilty for having been needlessly salty. The point of mindfulness was to short-circuit what had always been a habitual, mindless chain reaction.

Once I started thinking about how this whole system of seemingly spontaneous psychological combustion worked, I realized how blindly impelled—impaled, even—I was by my ego. I spent so much time, as one Buddhist writer put it, “drifting unaware on a surge of habitual impulses.” This is what led me on the misadventures of war, drugs, and panic. It’s what propelled me to eat when I wasn’t hungry or get snippy with Bianca because I was stewing about something that happened in the office. Mindfulness represented an alternative to living reactively.

This was not some mental parlor trick. Mindfulness is an inborn trait, a birthright. It is, one could argue, what makes us human. Taxonomically, we are classified as Homo sapiens sapiens, “the man who thinks and knows he thinks.” Our minds have this other capability—a bonus level, to put it in gamerspeak—that no one ever tells us about in school. (Not here in the West, at least.) We can do more than just think; we also have the power simply to be aware of things—without judgment, without the ego. This is not to denigrate thinking, just to say that thinking without awareness can be a harsh master.

By way of example: you can be mindful of hunger pangs, but you think about where to get your next meal and whether it will involve pork products. You can be mindful of the pressure in your bladder telling you it’s time to pee, but you think about whether the frequency of your urination means you’re getting old and need a prostate exam. There’s a difference between the raw sensations we experience and the mental spinning we do in reaction to said stimuli.

The Buddhists had a helpful analogy here. Picture the mind like a waterfall, they said: the water is the torrent of thoughts and emotions; mindfulness is the space behind the waterfall. Again, elegant theory—but, easier said than done.

There were many areas of my life in which I badly needed this mindfulness thing. Eating, for example. After quitting drugs, food became my replacement dopamine rush. Once I met Bianca, the situation got worse, because I was also happy and homebound. She would cook large meals of pasta followed by fresh-baked cookies. For a bantamweight, I could crush plate after plate. I would tell myself I would be moderate, but once the frenzy started, I couldn’t stop. I was feeding the pleasure centers of my brain rather than my stomach, and I was particularly bad with dessert. The fact that my parents never let me have sugar when I was a kid produced a lifelong obsession. (The same thing happened with television, ironically.) I could eat piles of cookies, my teeth scything through the chewy goodness. Airports were particularly dangerous. Auntie Anne, that seductress, would lure me in with a bouquet of Cinnamon Sugar Stix. As my paunch grew, it became the source of nearly as much angst as the recession of my hairline. Neither vanity nor mindfulness helped, though. It wasn’t uncommon for me to get directly up from meditating and stuff my face, enter into a postprandial remorse jag, and take a nap.

But where I really could have used a nice dose of mindfulness was in dealing with the events set in motion after I received a call from Amy Entelis, the senior vice president for talent development. Amy was in charge of recruiting and managing all the anchors and correspondents. She reached me when I was on my way to the airport for a story. This was in early September of 2009, about a month after I’d started meditating. She had big news. Later in the day, she told me, management would announce that Charlie Gibson had decided to step down as the anchor of World News. They would simultaneously announce that Diane Sawyer would be leaving Good Morning America to take over the evenings. This was huge. I was happy for Diane. She’d initially agreed to host GMA a full decade ago on a temporary basis, but she’d performed so well that the bosses repeatedly cajoled her into sticking around. Now the brightest star in our news division would be ascending to the Big Chair, a promotion many of us felt she richly deserved.

It didn’t take long, though, for me to shift into what-does-it-all-mean-for-me mode. This announcement would surely set off an avalanche of a magnitude akin to what happened after Peter Jennings died. Many dominoes were about to fall. Diane’s departure from the mornings meant the brass would probably have to remake the anchor team on GMA, which would have ripple effects throughout the on-air ranks. What was coming was a radical reshuffling of the dramatis personae. I had been anchoring World News on Sundays for about four years now and still loved it, but if new jobs were going to be opening up, I wanted in. My desire for forward momentum—even when the lack thereof was illusory—roughly resembled that of Woody Allen in that classic scene from Annie Hall where he breaks up with Diane Keaton. “A relationship, I think, is like a shark,” he says. “It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.”

Not long after the Gibson-Sawyer news, the situation intensified. We got word of two other departures: John Stossel, the co-anchor of 20/20, and Martin Bashir, one of the three anchors of Nightline. The latter development was of especial interest to me. After years of working as a correspondent on Nightline, I had begun making it known that I would love to join the staff as an anchor. It seemed like the perfect job for me, the type of gig I could ride all the way to retirement. I genuinely enjoyed the rush of “crashing” short pieces for GMA and World News—especially in breaking news situations—but these stories were basically haikus: 90-to 120-second-long recitations of the day’s events. On Nightline, the pieces ran anywhere from four to eight minutes. If the story was really good, they might give you the entire half hour.

It wasn’t just the length of the stories that I liked, but also the variety. The show matched my catholic interests. On any given night, they were as likely to do a hard-hitting investigation as they were a profile of a movie star or a story about doggy fat camps. In recent months, Nightline had given me even more chances to slake my thirst for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. I’d gone off searching for endangered tree kangaroos in Papua New Guinea, hunting down American sex tourists in Cambodia, and confronting pastors in the Congo who made money by convincing parents to submit their children to painful exorcisms.

Problem was, there was another contender. Bill Weir, the weekend GMA anchor. Bill had joined ABC News in 2004 from the local affiliate in Los Angeles, where he was the sports guy. He exuded an old-school and sometimes brooding cool. Notwithstanding his lack of hard-news pedigree, Bill very quickly established himself as an excellent journalist, covering major breaking news as well as producing amazingly inventive feature stories.

My favorite example of the latter was Bill’s profile of Don LaFontaine, the guy who did all the voice-overs for movie trailers. LaFontaine’s voice was so deep that when he delivered his classic lines (“In a world . . .”), it sounded like he had a third testicle. Instead of just doing a traditional sit-down interview, Bill had LaFontaine follow him around L.A., narrating his life through a handheld microphone. The best scene took place at an outdoor café, where Bill was nonchalantly eyeballing the menu.

LaFontaine: “He’s the world’s deadliest assassin. His identity is a secret—even from himself. This summer, love . . . gets lethal.”

Weir: “I’m thinking about getting an omelet.”

LaFontaine: “I’m thinking about getting a salad.”

Weir: “Is it too early for a salad?”

[cut to a close-up of LaFontaine] “It’s never too early

. . . for a salad.”

It was gingerly suggested to me by the bosses that perhaps I should also consider the possibility of moving into Bill’s spot on weekend GMA if he got the nod for Nightline. Initially, I dismissed this as a lateral move, but was ultimately convinced to reconsider. This assignment, I came to realize, would not only quadruple my airtime (from a half hour on Sundays to two full hours on Saturdays and Sundays) but it would also provide me with a chance to try a different type of broadcasting, to break out of the mold of the staid, Jennings-esque anchorman. Morning television wasn’t just one guy and a teleprompter; it was live, loose, and largely unscripted. Moreover, mornings were where the action was in network news. GMA had the younger viewers that advertisers wanted to reach, which made the show the profit center for the entire news division.

I said I was up for it, but made it clear that my first choice was still Nightline. I was now in the tricky position of arguing for both jobs simultaneously—and neither was a lock. I kept picturing the worst possible outcomes. Prapañca, in full effect: No promotion → Eventually lose my hair and, as a consequence, all future job prospects → Flophouse in Duluth.

I was granted an audience with David Westin, where I would be given a chance to plead my case. At the appointed hour, I walked one flight up from my office to the Fifth Floor. After the requisite wait on the couch outside his office, I was whisked inside by his secretary, and greeted by David’s wide grin and firm handshake.

He listened politely as I made my case, first for Nightline, then for GMA. He asked some smart questions, which I answered to the best of my ability. I thought I did okay, but it was hard to tell; like all skilled managers, David was a master at uttering a lot of words without actually committing himself to a position. I knew not to push too hard, to minimize the displays of plumage. Anyone’s affability can turn brittle under too much pressure.

Our business concluded, the rest of the meeting moved on to non-work issues. Here things became very relaxed. There was banter and badinage, and I left feeling deceptively buoyant. This lasted about ninety seconds. By the time I’d made it downstairs to my office, I had thoroughly soured. Given a moment to reflect, I realized that David had said absolutely nothing concrete or reassuring. In fact, I came away with the vague sense that he was going to pass me over. Worse, I knew it was possible that he wouldn’t make his decision for quite a while.

If ever there was a good time to see if I could summon some mindfulness, this seemed like it. I tried meditating on the couch in my office, but it didn’t work. I just couldn’t clamber up behind the waterfall. Every time I tried to watch my thoughts, to nonjudgmentally observe my frustration over this professional limbo, I didn’t know what to look for—or how to look at it. Wasn’t “noting” just another form of thinking? What the hell am I supposed to be seeing here?

And wait a minute—wasn’t there a practical value to disquiet? Just because my thoughts didn’t have any inherent reality didn’t preclude them from being connected to real-world problems that need to be dealt with.

Here I was back at square one, pondering the same questions I’d been pondering since first reading Eckhart Tolle. I was still unshakably certain that looking at a problem from all angles and searching for the right move gave me an edge. And yet I was also still concerned that too much worrying was driving me nuts.

I spent the ensuing weeks in a bit of a funk. I tried to “note” it, but I didn’t know if I was being mindful or just indulging it. I decided it was time to follow a piece of advice from my new friend Mark Epstein.

The event was held in a huge, nondescript function hall at the Sheraton Towers in midtown Manhattan, and as soon as I got there I regretted it. The place had all the charm of an offtrack betting parlor. It was packed with mostly middle-aged women wearing dangly earrings and intricately arranged scarves. Any one of them could have been the yoga teacher who made me strip down to my underwear as a child.

I’d seen worse, of course, in the self-help trenches, but this was different. I was here at this three-day Buddhist conference not as a journalistic observer, but as a paying customer who’d come for his own personal purposes, a thought that propelled just the tiniest bit of vomit into my mouth.

Making matters worse, this was proving to be very embarrassing in front of a new friend of mine, who I’d roped into coming along. His name was Jason. He was the drummer for one of my favorite bands, Mates of State. They were a husband-and-wife indie act who wrote infectious pop songs about suburban angst. I had done a feature story on them for Sunday World News, focusing on how they took their two young children on tour and wrote a blog about it, called Band on the Diaper Run. After the story aired, Bianca and I struck up a friendship with Jason and his wife, Kori. Jason was one of the few people to whom I had successfully evangelized about Buddhism. Interestingly, he voiced a concern about meditation that seemed to be a corollary to my ongoing security/insecurity conundrum. He worried that if he became too happy, it would defang his angst and disable his ability to write music. A comedy writer friend of mine had said something similar—that he was worried meditation would make him less “judgmental,” and therefore less funny.

Here in the hall, Jason—who was six-foot-three, had fashionably long bangs, and could pull off wearing skinny jeans—stood out like a sore thumb. I was having a mild freak-out. I had been talking up Mark Epstein to Jason for months, and now Mark was up on the stage, seated alongside two other Buddhist teachers, presiding over this horror show.

The opening speaker was a woman in her fifties named Tara Brach. She had long brown hair and pleasant Semitic features. She was holding forth in a creamy, cloying tone. The style was astonishingly affected—artificially soft and slow, as if she were trying to give you a Reiki massage with her voice. She exhorted us to love ourselves, “invited” us to close our eyes and “trust in the ocean-ness, in the vastness, in the mystery, in the awareness, in the love—so that you could really sense, ‘Nothing is wrong with me.’ ” I couldn’t bear to look over at Jason, who I imagined must be silently cursing my name. Brach closed with a poem, then a dramatic pause and, finally, a self-serious, sotto voce “Thank you.”

Then Mark jumped in and saved the night. “Well, I’m gonna give you a slightly different perspective,” he said, with a mischievous glint in his eye, “which is that, actually, there’s plenty still wrong with me.” People started laughing, and a tight smile came over Tara’s face. Jason, who’d seemed oddly detached—but not in a Buddhist way—sat up in his seat.

“People come to me a lot feeling like they ought to be loving themselves, and I actually counsel against it,” he said. His delivery was off-the-cuff and shtick-free. In stark contrast to Brach, he argued that we needed to actively get in touch with our ugly side. “Mindfulness gives us a way to examine our self-hatred without trying to make it go away, without trying to love it particularly.” Just being mindful of it, he said, could be “tremendously liberating.”

The idea of leaning into what bothered us struck me as radical, because our reflex is usually to flee, to go buy something, eat something, or get faded on polypharmacy. But, as the Buddhists say, “The only way out is through.” Another analogy: When a big wave is coming at you, the best way not to get pummeled is to dive right in. This jibed with what I had learned through my own painful, public experience after returning from Iraq, using drugs, and losing my mind on television; when you squelch something, you give it power. Ignorance is not bliss.

Mark’s thesis was a direct response to the fears Jason and my comedy writer friend had about meditation leaving them without an edge. If anything, mindfulness brought you closer to your neuroses, acting as a sort of Doppler radar, mapping your mental microclimates, making you more insightful, not less. It was the complete opposite of the reckless hope preached by the self-helpers. It was the power of negative thinking.

As I sat there in the audience, I was feeling proud of Mark, increasingly enthralled with the theory of mindfulness—and hopelessly frustrated by my inability to put it to work.

To my profound surprise, the person who unlocked this mystery for me was Tara Brach.

Driven by some unfathomable masochistic urge, and even though I knew Mark wouldn’t be speaking, I had dragged myself back to the ballroom for the second day of the conference. At first, Brach was driving me nuts with all of her ostentatious head-bowing, bell-ringing, and Namaste-saying. But then she redeemed herself.

She nailed the method for applying mindfulness in acute situations, albeit with a somewhat dopey acronym: RAIN.

“Recognize” was self-explanatory. Using my David Westin example, in those moments after our—even in the best light—quite ambivalent meeting, job number one was simply to acknowledge my feelings. “It’s like agreeing to pause in the face of what’s here, and just acknowledge the actuality,” said Brach. The first step is admitting it.

“Allow” is where you lean into it. The Buddhists were always talking about how you have to “let go,” but what they really meant is “let it be.” Or, as Brach put it in her inimitable way, “offer the inner whisper of ‘yes.’ ”

The third step—“investigate”—is where things got truly practical. Sticking with the Westin example—after I’ve acknowledged my feelings and let them be, the next move would be to check out how they’re affecting my body. Is it making my face hot, my chest buzzy, my head throb? This strategy sounded intuitively correct to me, especially given that I was a guy whose undiagnosed postwar depression had manifest itself in flulike symptoms.

The final step—“non-identification”—meant seeing that just because I was feeling angry or jealous or fearful, that did not render me a permanently angry or jealous person. These were just passing states of mind.

The Brach Plan seemed eminently workable to me. And as grating as she’d seemed at first, I now found something comforting about her manner. She was, after all, a trained professional—in both Buddhism and psychotherapy—who had spent her life helping people. I realized, with a hot blast of self-directed opprobrium that, yet again, I had been unfair.

Just a few weeks later, I put her advice to work, and got behind the waterfall.

I was having a bad day. I was worrying again about whether I’d get the promotion—and then beating myself up for said worrying. I hit the couch in my office again, but this time I tried Brach’s RAIN technique, especially the bit about investigating how my inner turmoil was playing out physically.

Noting: chest buzzing.

Head pounding.

Flophouse in Duluth in six months, guaranteed.

Noting: worrying.

Chest buzzing, pounding.

Earlobes hot.

I didn’t try to stop it; I just felt it. I was “allowing,” “letting be,” and “investigating.”

Buzzing. Tension. Buzzing.

I’m doing it! I’m being mindful of my angst!

Noting: self-congratulation.

The effect was something like the picture-in-picture feature on a television. Normally, my mental clatter dominated the whole screen. When I pressed the mindfulness button, though, I had some perspective. My thoughts were playing out in a larger space, and while they still burned, they burned a little less. The process felt, in a sense, journalistic. (Or at least it conformed to what we reporters tell ourselves we are: objective, dispassionate—fair and balanced, if you will.)

It was a revelation: the voice in my head, which I’d always taken so seriously, suddenly lost much of its authority. It was like peering behind the curtain and seeing that the Wizard of Oz was a frightened, frail old man. Not only did it ease my agita in the moment, but it suddenly imbued me with a sense of hope about better handling whatever garbage my ego coughed up going forward.

A success, yes—but I still had questions. While mindfulness was clearly very powerful, it nonetheless did not erase my real-world problems. So what had really changed? I added a new entry into a file I had created on my BlackBerry, labeled “Questions for Mark.”

We were back at the Tribeca Grand, where I had talked Mark into meeting me for another beer summit. As he kicked off his man-clogs and folded his legs up under his butt on his chair, I was reminded of what an odd pair we made. Before I could even get to my questions, I noticed that he had an eager look on his face that clearly signaled he had something he wanted to tell me.

He then mentioned with a conspiratorial grin that he’d just come from a prescheduled phone meeting with Tara Brach. She’d requested they talk; she was not happy with his contradicting her onstage. Mark managed to relate this juicy little nugget without seeming mean-spirited. I argued strenuously that his obligation was not to her but to the audience. He seemed appreciative. In any event, he and Brach had apparently smoothed it all out in the end.

When I launched into my question about whether mindfulness left you flaccid in the face of life’s thorny problems, he circled right back to the Brach incident.

“That’s the same thing,” he said.

Up on that stage in the Hilton ballroom, Mark had disliked what Brach was saying. Instead of mindlessly criticizing her, though, he calmly and tactfully disagreed. Seeing a problem clearly does not prevent you from taking action, he explained. Acceptance is not passivity. Sometimes we are justifiably displeased. What mindfulness does is create some space in your head so you can, as the Buddhists say, “respond” rather than simply “react.” In the Buddhist view, you can’t control what comes up in your head; it all arises out of a mysterious void. We spend a lot of time judging ourselves harshly for feelings that we had no role in summoning. The only thing you can control is how you handle it.

Bingo: respond not react. This, it struck me, was the whole ball of wax. This was why, as I’d recently learned, so many surprising people had become meditators. Basketball coach Phil Jackson, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Ford CEO Bill Ford, Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo. Even the rapper 50 Cent. Even Tom Bergeron. A successful dotcom friend of mine said that once he started meditating he noticed he was always the calmest person in the room during heated meetings. He called it a “superpower.”

Mark said this had a direct bearing on my ongoing work situation. “Sitting with your feelings won’t always solve your problems or make your feelings go away,” he said, “but it can make you stop acting blindly. Maybe you won’t be sullen with your boss, for example.”

As I sipped my beer in the swank hotel bar with the shrink who I’d forced into doing bespoke guru work for me, I realized that the smart play in my current professional circumstances was to just sit tight. I had made my case; the only thing I could do now was put my head down, work hard, and hope for the best. In other words: respond—don’t react.

Mark also pointed out that mindfulness was a skill—one that would improve as I got more meditation hours under my belt. In that spirit, he said I should consider going on a retreat. The type of thing Mark was talking about was much more demanding than the Buddhist seminar with Tara Brach. He was recommending a silent, ten-day slog, where I would be cloistered at a Buddhist retreat center with dozens of other meditators. No talking, no television, no beer—just meditation, all day. When I indicated that I would rather lie down in traffic, he reassured me, saying it would be hard but worth it. Specifically, he recommended that I sign up for a retreat led by someone named Joseph Goldstein, who Mark referred to as “his” meditation teacher. He spoke about this Goldstein character in the most glowing of terms, which intrigued me. I figured if a guy I revered revered another guy, I should probably check that other guy out.

As we were paying the bill, I said, “If you’re up for it, I’d love to get together every month or two.”

“Sure,” he said, looking up from the remains of his drink and meeting my gaze. With uncontrived sincerity he said, “I want to know you.” That was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to me. After we’d finished, as we said good-bye, he gave me a hug. It was touching, and I appreciated his willingness to be my friend, but there was no way in hell I was going on a retreat.

Then Deepak reentered the scene. Via an aggressive email and text campaign, he had convinced me and the executives at Nightline to produce another Face-Off. This time, the debate would be between Chopra and his longtime nemesis, Michael Shermer, a former fundamentalist Christian turned militant atheist and professional debunker of pseudoscience. Shermer was the one who, as the head of the Skeptics Society, had decided to plaster Deepak on the cover of Skeptic magazine several years prior, with the headline “Doctor Woo Woo.”

The subject of the debate was whether God and science were compatible, which would be an interesting twist on the usual is-there-a-God debate, since Deepak didn’t believe in what he called the “dead white man” God of the Bible, but rather in an indescribable intelligence at the heart of the universe, a view he believed science could support. In true Nightline fashion, we gave the event an understated title: “Does God Have a Future?”

One of the first people I ran into when I got to the debate site—an auditorium at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena—was Sam Harris, who’d published a pair of acerbic, bestselling anti-religion books, making him one of the heroes of a budding atheist movement. We had actually met back in 2007, when I was shooting a story at the American Atheists convention in Washington, D.C. His writings were so controversial that he lived in an undisclosed location and often traveled with security. I had a visual memory of interviewing him amid vendors of bumper stickers with slogans like JESUS, SAVE ME FROM YOUR FOLLOWERS. I recalled liking the guy; he was much more pleasant than his prose would have suggested.

He was here now, backstage in this auditorium, because Michael Shermer had chosen Sam as his debating partner. (Deepak had chosen a religious scholar named Jean Houston, perhaps best known for helping then first lady Hillary Clinton commune with the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt.) My positive impression from that first encounter was quickly reaffirmed. Sam and I had the immediate rapport that two semi-Semites with the same last name are bound to have. With his close-cropped Jewfro and a face with just a touch of the shtetl, he reminded me a little bit of my brother. His affect was crisp and serious, but affable. He was dressed in a dark suit and nicely pressed blue shirt. His elegant and clearly very bright wife, Annaka, was with him. As the three of us chatted in Sam’s narrow little dressing room, it somehow came up that I was interested in meditation. They both perked up, then admitted that they were, too.

This I wasn’t expecting. It turned out that Mr. Atheist had a whole groovy past. As an undergrad at Stanford, Sam had experimented with ecstasy and LSD, had his mind blown, dropped out, and then spent eleven years traveling back and forth between the United States and Asia, where he lived in monasteries and ashrams, studying with various meditation teachers. During that time, he accumulated an aggregate total of roughly two years on silent retreats, meditating for twelve to eighteen hours a day. (Annaka, too, had years of meditation experience, and even worked as a volunteer teaching mindfulness to kids.)

Sam had never tried to hide this part of his past. In fact, as he reminded me, just moments after I had interviewed him at that convention back in 2007 he delivered a controversial speech in which he told the assembled atheists that denying the potential of “spiritual” experiences (he put the word in quotes, arguing it was an embarrassing term, but there were no real alternatives) made them just as ignorant as people who believed in Jesus. “It was the only time I’ve ever given a speech,” he said, “that started with a standing ovation and ended with boos.”

Sam truly did not mind pissing people off, though—and that rhetorical bloodlust was on full display at the debate. The hall was packed with partisans from both camps, a thousand people in all. Deepak’s opening statement was a vintage Choprian word salad. It included lines like this: “Today, science tells us that the essential nature of reality is nonlocal correlation.” As he spoke, our cameras captured Shermer and Harris rolling their eyes. Deepak wrapped up by calling the people at Caltech the “jihadists and Vatican of conservative and orthodox science.”

To which Sam responded, “I would never be tempted to lecture a room full of a thousand people at Caltech about physics. I’m not a physicist, you’re not a physicist—and basically every sentence you have uttered demonstrates that.” The crowd roared in approval.

As the debate ground on, Deepak made his points while gesticulating and shouting. When others talked, he slumped in his chair, looking annoyed, like he had somewhere better to be, even though he was the one who initiated this whole thing.

When it was over and the audience cleared out and I prepared to take off, I made sure to circle back to Sam and Annaka, who once again raised the subject of meditation. They had a suggestion for me: I should go on a retreat. Recognizing the look of dread on my face, they acknowledged it could be a little tough, but assured me it would be worth it. They knew an amazing teacher, they said. His name: Joseph Goldstein.

It was hard to ignore two brilliant people recommending the same meditation teacher. (Turned out, Sam, too, was old friends with Goldstein, although Sam and Mark had never met.) So when I got home, I promptly read a few books by this purported meditative genius. While the books provided terrific explications of how to employ mindfulness as a way to create space between stimulus and response in everyday life, there was also a lot of talk about reincarnation, psychic powers, and “beings on other planes of existence.” I wondered how Sam handled assertions like this one: “There are those even today who have developed the power of mind to see karmic unfolding through past and future lifetimes.” Charitably, Goldstein did say if you don’t find this stuff credible, it wouldn’t affect your chances for “liberation.”

Still, I had Mark’s and Sam’s advice ringing in my ears like a taunt. My curiosity was piqued; a little bit of pride was on the line. If I was in this meditation thing now, I might as well go the distance. I went online and saw that Goldstein was leading a retreat in California, called simply the “July Insight Meditation Retreat.” Certainly less grandiose than James Ray’s “Spiritual Warrior Retreat.” Less expensive, too: about a thousand bucks for ten days.

When I tried to sign up, though, I found to my wonderment that it wasn’t so easy to get in. There were so many applicants that slots were awarded through a lottery system. I called Goldstein’s people and tried to pull the reporter card. They were unmoved. Now that I couldn’t have it, I wanted it even more.

I emailed Sam Harris and asked if he could hook me up. He told me he’d put in a word, but gave no guarantees. (In the course of our email correspondence, I was surprised to learn that the hard-nosed atheist used emoticons.) Since this was the only retreat Goldstein would be leading anytime soon, I was now in the awkward position of stressing over getting into an event designed to help me manage stress, and that I was sure I would dislike intensely.

Not long thereafter, I got another chance to test my mindfulness skills under duress. Amy Entelis called to tell me that they were giving the Nightline job to Bill Weir. There was still no word on whether I’d gotten GMA, and no date certain for a decision. So I would be in a special kind of purgatory for the foreseeable future.

The timing was interesting, though. The very next day, thanks to Sam, I was headed to California. As he put it in an email, he had “toyed with the laws of karma” and gotten me into the retreat.