442: Get Happier Without Losing Your Edge | Kamala Masters

10% Happier with Dan Harris

10% Media, LLC

Dan Harris, Health & Fitness, Mindfulness, Dharma, Mental Health, Meditation

4.6 • 12.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2022

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Can you become happier, more balanced, and practice equanimity without losing your edge?

Guest Kamala Masters was one of the teachers at Dan’s first ever meditation retreat. In this episode she dives into how to develop equanimity and shares her story of learning how to practice meditation during her everyday life while raising three children on her own.

Kamala Masters has been meditating since the 1970s, first with Anagarika Munindra, who was Joseph Goldstein’s first teacher, and then with the Burmese master Sayadaw U Pandita with whom she twice temporarily ordained as a Buddhist nun. More recently, she’s been training with another Burmese master we’ve talked about here on the show, Sayadaw U Tejaniya. She is a Guiding Teacher at the Insight Meditation Society, and the co-founder of the Vipassana Metta Foundation, which developed the Maui Dharma Sanctuary.

In this conversation we talk about:

What is equanimity?
The most common misconception about equanimity
The near and far enemies of equanimity
The power and limitations of setting intentions

Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/kamala-masters-442

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the 10% Happier Podcast.
0:06.4	I'm Dan Harris.
0:08.8	Hey, hey, we're going back to one of my favorite subjects today.
0:13.7	It's a question I have spent a lot of time mulling and that people ask me about all the
0:18.2	time.
0:19.6	Can you get happier, more balanced, more quantamous without losing your edge?
0:25.5	Will it make you complacent or a doormat?
0:27.8	I remember how when I first got interested in meditation as an ambitious network newsman,
0:34.5	I told my dad about my burgeoning interest.
0:37.4	He was a, at the time, he was a hard-charging academic physician and he told me that he had
0:42.4	some colleagues who had gotten into Buddhism and it made them, and I'm quoting here, like
0:46.6	totally ineffective.
0:48.7	You may have heard my spiel about how becoming ineffective or passive or a doormat is a
0:53.5	misunderstanding or a misapplication of the lessons of meditation.
0:57.8	The goal is not to be resigned, but to be more focused, more emotionally agile, and to
1:03.6	be able to surf your emotions rather than drown in them.
1:06.9	In other words, to respond wisely to stuff rather than reacting blindly.
1:11.5	Anyway, I'm going to spare you my rant because you're about to hear a much wiser version
1:16.1	from somebody with vastly more experience than me.
1:20.2	Full disclosure, just by way of background here, when I first encountered Kamala Masters
1:24.6	back in 2010 on my first ever meditation retreat, she was the victim of my rather unfortunate
1:31.7	penchant for judgmentalism.
	...

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