It's the 10% of Happier Podcast.

I'm Dan Harris.

Hello, everybody. The regular listeners of this podcast know that we've been experimenting with our Friday episodes lately. Sometimes we drop a guided meditation from me or one of my friends. Sometimes we give you little snippets of our community Q&A sessions that we do over on Substack, Danharris.com.

Sometimes we do a behind-the-scenes episode with producers from our team. Anyway, we're experimenting.

Today, we're trying something completely new and different. I'm going to read to you a short essay that I wrote over on Substack with some ideas about how to work with your mind in this

fraught political moment. Full disclosure, I wrote this back in mid-March, but things are still

pretty fucking crazy. So the advice here is both relevant and evergreen. Regardless of who you voted

for or what your particular political priors might be. It's pretty clear that we're in

uncharted waters here and we're in a highly charged and polarized environment. But while the

particulars of the situation may be unique, none of this is truly new. The Buddha and other

smart people pointed out thousands of years ago that everything changes.

And being in touch with that fundamental but often overlooked truth can be very helpful.

So we're going to talk about how to do that and several other ideas I have for staying sane in insane times coming up.

Before we get started, I just want to let you know about something

very cool that we're going to be doing in the second half of May. We are going to be doing

a live meditation mini-series each weekday from Monday, May 19th to Friday, May 23rd at 4 p.m.

Eastern. I will be leading a short guided meditation, and then I'll be taking your

questions. The whole mini-series is going to center around a set of practices that I often refer to

as the Buddhist antidote to anxiety. And I'm not making this up. One of the key practices that I'll be

teaching is loving kindness meditation, which the story goes was invented by the Buddha to help his monks who were

dealing with a lot of fear. And loving kindness is part of a family of four related practices

known as the Brahma Viharas or the divine abodes. I will admit, when I first encountered

...