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

Hello, everybody. Today on the show, we've got some strategies for getting over yourself.

This is part two of our best of Joseph Goldstein series that we're running this week.

Joseph is a fan favorite on this show. He's also a personal favorite of mine, given that he's been my meditation teacher for more than a decade. He's also a great friend.

Every year, Joseph does a three-month silent meditation retreat by himself at his home in Massachusetts.

In this conversation you're about to hear, Joseph had just emerged from one such retreat with a bunch of thoughts on what are called the three proliferating tendencies or three propunches to use the ancient term in the language of Polly.

There are three ways in which we perpetuate a sense of self, and I'm not talking to hear about a healthy sense of self, but an unhealthy sense of self, kind of like the Beatles sang about in that song, I mean mine.

As Joseph has explained to me and many other people before, you can think about the process of going deeper in meditation as a process of lightening up or getting less self-centered.

And so you're about to get a masterclass in doing just that. For the uninitiated, Joseph is one of the co-founders of the Insight Meditation Society and Barry Massachusetts.

His co-founders are two other meditation titans, Sharon Salisberg and Jack Cornfield. Since IMS was founded, thousands of people from around the world have come through to learn about mindfulness from many, many teachers, many leaders in the field.

IMS is an incredible place, so many amazing offerings, and it's beautiful. We'll put a link to their website in the show notes if you want to go check it out, which I urge you to do.

Anyway, Joseph has been a teacher at IMS since the place was founded in the 70s. He continues to be the resident guiding teacher there.

He's also a founding teacher over on our companion meditation app. He helped us create our flagship courses for learning the basics of meditation, as well as some advanced courses on compassion and also stress.

In this conversation, we talked about the framework for understanding the three proliferating tendencies, the basic building blocks of our experience in the world, six things that make up what the Buddha called the All, I love that expression, the All.

What non-self means and why it's essential to the Buddhist teaching of liberation, the two levels of truth, conventional, and ultimate. This is actually incredibly important to understand.

Why language is so important in conditioning how we experience things and how the three proliferating tendencies provide a very practical guide to understanding how we manufacture our own suffering.

And remember, if you want help falling and staying asleep, we offer a whole suite of sleep meditations over on the 10% happier app.

People tell us all the time how much our sleep meditations help them. Here's a quote from one of our users, the sleep meditations have saved my sanity more than once during the pandemic.

I had a complimentary subscription and when it came time to pay for the app, I thought there were other comparable options, but there weren't.

I found I couldn't live without it. Download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps and tap on the sleep tab to get started.

Imagine you're walking down the street and you see someone famous. Really famous. What do you do? Play it cool or stop and stare?

Play it cool. But also, yes, stop and stare.

...