Buddhist Strategies for Protecting Yourself from Everyday Chaos | Bart van Melik

10% Happier with Dan Harris

10% Media, LLC

Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.6 • 12.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 January 2026

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ever lie awake at night replaying all the moments you lost it with your kids, your partner, or your co-workers? You're not alone.

Bart van Melik is back on the show (his first appearance was four years ago) as our Teacher of the Month for January. Bart has one of the more interesting origin stories in the meditation world: from a small town in the Netherlands to Kenya on an exchange program (where he met his wife of 30 years), to studying in Thailand, to teaching meditation to teenagers in juvenile detention in the South Bronx.

In this conversation with executive producer DJ Cashmere, we talk about:

The difference between being mindful and knowing you're mindful (and why this matters when your 11-year-old is pushing every button)
Why awareness feels like protection
How to stop the cycle of: snap, regret, repeat
What Bart learned teaching meditation to kids in juvie who told him his meditation was "lit"
Why your kids might be your fiercest Zen teachers
The surprising power of saying "no" without aversion
How everything actually goes faster when you stop rushing
His favorite teaching from a modern-day monk: "Keep calmly knowing change"

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:18.2	Hey, gang, today a conversation about how to be less reactive, how to handle it when you work a lot on your reactivity and you still lose your shit, how to say no without being a jerk, how to set boundaries, and much more.
0:33.3	Bart Van Mellick has been on this show before. He's a fantastic meditation and Dharma teacher
0:38.7	in the Insight tradition. He has studied very closely with Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg
0:44.1	and many other legendary teachers. Bart is also the teacher of the month on our new app, which is
0:49.3	called 10% with Dan Harris, which means Bart will be crafting a whole set of fresh guided meditations for you
0:56.2	and participating in some of our live meditation and Q&A sessions, which we do every Tuesday at 4-Eastern.
1:03.6	Speaking of the app, if you want to sign up for the app, you can do so at Danharris.com.
1:08.8	There's a free 30-day trial if you want to try before you buy okay we'll
1:13.9	get started with bart van mellick in conversation with the executive producer of this show dj cashmere
1:18.9	right after this bart van mellick welcome back to the show thank you dj thank you dj for having me. This is such a pleasure. I've been looking forward to this or a couple of weeks now. Likewise. It's been four years. It has, yeah. Yeah, so you were on the show once before, but to your point, it was a long time ago. I was listening to that episode last week.
1:44.3	It's a great episode.
1:45.3	We'll put a link in the show notes all about how to bring mindfulness and meditative practices
1:50.3	into our relationships with other people.
1:52.9	It's wonderful.
1:54.2	Right.
1:54.6	But anyway, you're back now and you're a teacher of the month for the rest of January here.
1:59.8	And so I just wanted to take this opportunity to kind of reintroduce you to our audience and
2:05.6	start with a, yeah, maybe simple but not easy question, which is how did you become a meditation teacher?
2:13.5	Well, first of all, thanks for having me.
2:15.8	That's like asking someone about their life story.
2:20.2	And so I'd given some thought.
	...

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