It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

Hello, everybody. Today we are diving into a question that I have puzzled over for many, many years.

How do you balance openness and skepticism? In my book, I used a quote from one of my favorite punk bands, the meat puppets.

Here's the quote, open your mind, in pours the trash that really sums up the dilemma as soon as you

get interested in something like meditation or for lack of a better word spirituality you have to

start wading through oceans of bullshit before you can find the good stuff how do you know how to

separate wheat from chaff so we're going to approach this question today and the way we're going to approach this question today. And the way

we're going to approach it is a little bit different than how we usually do it. Actually, it's very

different. In other words, this is an unusual and dare I say special episode. We're not going to do

a straight one-on-one interview, which is what we normally do. Instead, we're going to deliver

a highly produced narrative. Some context here. For years, I've been hearing

many of my meditation teachers, people I respect immensely, discuss the fact that they regularly

consult a psychic medium. Said psychic medium's name is Laurelind Jackson. As you can imagine,

this news created a lot of cognitive dissonance for me. How can these

brilliant people who've helped me so much in my life sign up for something that seemed so clearly,

to me at least, to be questionable at best? So last year, I decided to reach out to Laura Lynn Jackson

for an interview right here on the show.

Now, you may be thinking, I don't remember that episode. That's because we never aired it.

I walked away from that conversation, even more curious than when I went in. So I went back to

Laura Lynn Jackson, and I asked her if she would give me a reading, which she did and which I also recorded. And after that reading,

honestly, I still didn't know what to think or what to do with all the audio tape we had gathered.

I just didn't know how to make it into like an episode of this show. So I reached out to some friends.

...