How a Zen master deals with everyday problems

Two moves that might make life easier

We’ve officially moved into our new home: the 10% with Dan Harris app. Paid subscribers can find step-by-step instructions here to get set up. If you’re not a paid subscriber, now is the time to sign up. Get a 30-day free trial that includes the New Year’s Challenge — a seven-day masterclass in mindfulness and meditation led by the inimitable Joseph Goldstein.

My whole life, going back to when I was a kid, I can remember always feeling like I had some problem I needed to deal with. And the subconscious lie I always told myself was: as soon as I get this problem off my plate, everything’s going to be great. The Elysian Fields, in perpetuity.

But as my friend and teacher Joseph Goldstein often says, “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” We’re always going to have problems to deal with. The real question is: how do you cultivate a state of mind to deal with them effectively?

I recently spoke with the Zen teacher Jiryu Rutschman-Byler, who argues that meditation is the perfect training ground for handling the problems in your life. The practice is not about reaching some blissful, problem-free state. It’s about creating a safe laboratory where you can experiment with softening your mind in the face of all the stuff that arises—anger, anxiety, random thoughts. The full catastrophe. In other words, meditation can help build resilience and sturdiness. It fortifies you for all the shit life will inevitably throw at you.

What I like about Jiryu is that he doesn’t make this argument as bland exhortation. He backs it up with practical strategies for meditating in ways that will stabilize the mind.

Here are two of his suggestions:

1. Use the “training wheels” of counting. If just “watching the breath” during meditation feels too vague, give your brain a job. Count your out-breaths from one to ten. It helps you “plant your feet” in the feeling of being alive. Most of us will get lost around count two or three, and that’s perfectly okay. Just begin again. Which leads me to…

2. Celebrate the return. This is the game-changer. When you lose track of your breath and realize you’ve been daydreaming for five minutes, what is your reaction? The unhelpful way: “You idiot, you suck at this.” If you greet yourself with harshness, you disincentive the mind from returning to the present moment. The Zen way: As soon as you come back to your senses, be grateful you noticed. (Here’s a little mantra that I use in my own practice: Great job, welcome back.)

This process of getting lost and starting again—and again, and again—is so crucial. It helps you build both resilience (because it requires grit) and self-awareness (because every time you wake up from distraction, you are really seeing what your mind is like). And those tools are exactly what we need to handle life’s inevitable vexations.

If you want more from Jiryu, check out my episode with him. The episode comes with a custom guided meditation called “Simple & Easy” from Teacher of the Month Jeff Warren.

Also out today: my episode with Dr. Kirstin Ferguson about how to make fewer dumb decisions. There’s a guided meditation for this episode, too, called “An Antidote to Rumination and Regret.”

Episode cheatsheets and transcripts can be found in the episode posts in the new 10% app.

Tomorrow, Jeff Warren is going live for a guided meditation and Q&A sesh for paid subscribers. We don’t have a live next Tuesday, Dec. 30 due to the holiday week.

I’ll be back live with you three times during our New Year’s Challenge. The first live is during our regular Tuesday time on Jan. 6 at 4:00 p.m. ET. I’ll also be live on Jan. 8 and Jan. 11 – all at 4:00 p.m. ET.

Important note: These three live sessions for our New Year’s Challenge use a different Zoom link than our regular Tuesday Zoom lives. You can find the link here, and we’ll also email it out before each live. You can also find it in the new app under “Upcoming Events.”

These three live sessions are open to everyone. The Zoom link will work whether you’re a paid or free subscriber, so please join us!

Going forward, all podcast and meditation links will point to the app instead of Substack. We’ll stop posting meditations and podcasts to Substack after Jan. 12.

Have a safe and happy holiday. See you in the new app, and I’ll see you live on Jan. 6.