475: Run Towards the Danger | Sarah Polley

10% Happier with Dan Harris

10% Media, LLC

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

4.6 • 12.2K Ratings

🗓️ 18 July 2022

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Often, when you’re afraid of something, the best advice is deeply counterintuitive, not to mention inconvenient: to turn toward the source of your fear.

Today we’re going to talk about the fear of confronting your own past with our guest Sarah Polley.

Polley is an Oscar nominated filmmaker and actress who recently wrote a new book, called Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory. In her book, she explores the relationship between her past and present and how the two are in constant dialogue.

In this episode we talk about:

The story of her concussion and the unusual advice she got from a specialist that became not just a path to recovery, but a sort of personal credo, “run toward the danger”
What we often do with our stories of childhood shame, and the immense power of talking about it
How she has come to stop seeing her anxiety as a stop sign
Her argument that the advice to “listen to your body” is not always the best advice
The liberating potential of intentionally making uncharacteristic decisions
Her path to meditation and her current practice
And the limits of her own “run towards the danger” mantra

Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/sarah-polley-475

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the 10% happier podcast.
0:06.2	I'm Dan Harris.
0:08.3	Hello, my fellow suffering beings.
0:14.0	Often when you're afraid of something, the best advice is deeply counterintuitive not
0:19.3	to mention very, very inconvenient.
0:21.9	The advice is to turn toward the source of your fear.
0:25.0	I've been seeing this recently with a resurgence of claustrophobia I've been experiencing.
0:29.6	The best way to deal with it and there's a lot of evidence to back this up is to continuously
0:34.5	expose myself to the things that freak me out like airplanes and small elevators.
0:39.9	I don't enjoy it, but it definitely helps.
0:42.4	Today, though, we're not talking about claustrophobia.
0:44.5	We're talking about another flavor of fear, another source of fear, the fear of confronting
0:50.0	your own past.
0:51.5	We've all got our skeletons.
0:52.8	So what do you think is the better move to engage in compartmentalization and denial,
0:57.9	to pretend none of those things ever happened, to stuff your anger and shame and whatever
1:01.8	else?
1:02.8	I think you know the answer.
1:03.8	So today, we're going to talk to somebody with a fascinating and challenging past who's
1:07.7	done the hard work of looking at it squarely and has lived to tell the tale.
1:13.5	Sarah Polly is an actress and filmmaker.
1:15.6	She was actually a child star for a while.
	...

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