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

Hello, everybody. For me, one of the frustrating and actually hilarious aspects of starting

to take seriously things like meditation or contemplation or personal growth, whatever

you want to call it, one of the frustrating slash hilarious aspects of all of this is

that sooner rather than later, you're going to bump up against cliches like authenticity,

love, even self-love. And in my experience, more often than not, you are confronted with the

fact that these cliches, as I often say, became cliché for a reason because they're true.

Today, we're going to try to revivify some of these hackneyed notions with the great Sharon

Salzburg. She hardly needs an introduction, but here's a brief one anyway. She is one of the co-founders

of the Insight Meditation Society, which is a retreat center in Barry, Massachusetts. She's written

many, many books, including her latest, which is called Finding Your Way. Meditations, thoughts,

and wisdom for living an authentic life. It's what's called a gift book with short segments

and colorful illustrations. The kind of thing you can just pick up and browse through at random

and find something thought-provoking and useful. In this conversation, we talked about what Sharon

means by an authentic life, learning to be your own BFF, how the notion of self-love squares with

the Buddhist notion of emptiness. In other words, the idea that the self is an illusion. We also talk

about love writ large and why it can be harder to receive it rather than give it. And speaking of

Buddhist misunderstandings, we also talk about how to square the notion of love with the idea of

non-attachment. It's a dead man's in here, and I'm delighted to tell you that I am the new host

of the rather popular podcast out to lunch. I take some amazing and rather fascinating people

out for a slap-up lunch and press record. In a way, it's like you're sat at the table withers.

You'll need to bring your own food though. From Sony Music Entertainment, you can follow this new

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