It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm your host Dan Harris.

Hello, everybody.

When I first heard about today's guest.

I was, and this is not unusual for me,

I was a little bit skeptical and dismissive,

but his work has had a genuinely profound impact

on my life and that was only reinforced by this interview which you're about to hear.

A book by Father Gregory Boyle who's my guest today was first recommended to me by Joseph Goldstein

the great meditation teacher who's been on the show many many times and if I'm honest my initial

reaction to that book suggestion was negative because as you can tell by his name, Father Boyle is a priest.

To be clear, it's not that I'm, you know, incurably hostile to religion.

It's more that as a skeptic who was raised by atheist scientists and the

People's Republic of Massachusetts, I generally don't think

of organized religion as a source of practical answers to my problems.

My resistance to Father Boyle was exacerbated by the fact that the argument that he was advancing in his book

was the idea of loving people no matter what, no matter how obnoxious or unacceptable their behavior.

To me that sounded simultaneously treakly and

downright impossible.

But Father Boyle has been testing this notion in some of the most extreme circumstances

imaginable.

For decades he's been working with gang members in Los Angeles.

He is a Jesuit priest who founded a remarkable organization

...