How To Learn From Your Ancestors | Spring Washam

10% Happier with Dan Harris

10% Media, LLC

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

4.6 • 12.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2025

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Our guest argues that looking back on those who came before us can help us understand who we are and why we do the things we do. Plus, a very special request from Dan.

Spring Washam is a well-known teacher, author, and visionary leader based in Oakland, California. She is the author of A Fierce Heart: Finding Strength, Courage and Wisdom in Any Moment and her newest book, The Spirit of Harriet Tubman: Awakening from the Underground. Spring is considered a pioneer in bringing mindfulness-based meditation practices to diverse communities. She is one of the founding teachers at the East Bay Meditation Center, located in downtown Oakland, CA and has practiced and studied Buddhist philosophy in both the Theravada and Tibetan schools of Buddhism since 1999.

In this episode we talk about:

How Spring came to write about Harriet Tubman’s life
Her work with plant medicine and the shamanic tradition
The dream and the “conversations” Spring had with Tubman
Why we are all so interested in ancestry
How we can deepen our relationship with our ancestors
Family Constellation Therapy as a modality for doing ancestry work
Spring’s own family history
Why she is still processing the experience of writing her book about Harriet Tubman
What she means by the “inner underground railroad” and how it is alive today
And, how, in the inner underground railroad, freedom equates to nirvana

Content Warning: mentions of suicide

This episode originally aired in February 2023, and we’re re-airing it today for two reasons: first, because it’s awesome; and second, because Spring needs help. A few months ago, Spring was hit by a delivery truck while crossing the street in Atlanta. She suffered extensive injuries and has been largely unable to work since then. As a result, she's been experiencing some financial distress between her mounting medical bills and her inability to be fully employed.

We’ve teamed up with the meditation teachers Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman to start a GoFundMe page to help Spring raise a little bit of money. Jack, Trudy and Dan have all contributed. If you can make a contribution, please do. No amount is too small.

You can find the GoFundMe here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-spring-washams-healing-journey

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:19.0	Hello, my fellow suffering beings, how we doing? Today we've got a bit of a doozy for you.
0:24.6	So many of us are interested in our family tree. We do things like 23 and me or Ancestry.com. We look at
0:30.6	black and white photos and quiz our older relatives about the forebears we never had a chance to meet.
0:36.4	We want to know what are our roots, what made us.
0:40.9	Today we're going to take this very natural human impulse to a deeper, and for many of you,
0:46.0	much stranger place. Before I dive into the basic information about this episode, let me just say
0:51.8	a quick word about my attitude when it comes to
0:55.1	magic. I, as I think you probably know, I'm naturally quite a skeptical person. I'm a journalist
1:01.5	and agnostic. I was raised by scientists, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I'm also a Buddhist.
1:06.5	Not in the sense that I pound the table and declare that things like enlightenment or rebirth
1:11.0	or absolutely true. I don't have any direct evidence, at least for either of those things.
1:16.5	But instead, in the sense that I practice quite a bit of Buddhist meditation and have found
1:21.0	that meditation and many other techniques that the Buddha discussed have made a huge difference
1:27.2	for me. And it doesn't hurt for me that
1:29.5	modern researchers have lent a sheen of scientific validity to many of these practices.
1:34.9	All of which leaves me in a very funny position vis-a-vis some of the more out-there claims
1:39.2	that you can find in the Buddhist texts. The claims go way beyond things like rebirth and enlightenment.
1:46.0	I'm talking about things like the notion that meditation can give you superpowers or the
1:50.7	idea that there are other realms of existence, some of them populated by deities.
1:55.9	The good news here is that the Buddha himself explicitly said that you should not take any
1:59.7	of this stuff at face value.
	...

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