This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

Hello, Happy Friday, everybody. The mind is a wild place.

There's this joke.

I don't know who originated the joke, but one meditation teacher said something like,

my mind is a dangerous neighborhood.

I don't go in there alone.

You know, it's just boiling over with all these different neurotic patterns and little

characters that we've got, you know,

from me, I've got like an angry character who I named after my grandfather.

I've got a hustler, ambitious character who I named after a great grandfather of mine who was a

crook.

Seriously, he was a crook.

And so there's so much going on internally, much of it very, very difficult.

The good news is there are ways to boost your sanity quotient, practices that have stood the test of time, and also are now withstanding a lot of scientific scrutiny.

And today we're going to talk about how you can pick the sanest or smartest aspect of your mental repertoire in any moment and go with that

instead of the more venal or unconstructive shit that may be happening in your brain. The technical

term for this is alignment. You're going to hear about how to align from Vinnie Ferraro, who's an incredible

meditation teacher, in a minute. But let me just step back for a second, give you some context.

All this month on Fridays, we're highlighting golden nuggets from our vast archive, and we do it

this way. We ask our staff members to think of some of their favorite moments from our long history here on this

podcast. And what we're going to do is we're going to play you a member of our staff today.

It's one of our ace producers, Eleanor Vassili. She's going to describe why she found the golden

...