How to make the hard stuff less horrible

A little phrase that can be a powerful reminder

Our natural tendency when confronted with anything difficult—boredom, loneliness, a weird itch in an unreachable spot—is to try to make it go away. We self-medicate with booze, shopping, gambling, scrolling, you name it.

But the radical move of mindfulness meditation is to sit with the tough stuff. In this way, you learn to better cope with the inevitable vexations of life. Because, as the Buddhist monk on HBO’s “The White Lotus” says, no matter how many purchases and pleasures you accumulate, “You cannot outrun your pain.”

Usually meditators are taught to be able to sit with their physical or emotional distress by investigating more closely. Under the microscope of mindfulness, you see that your pain consists of fleeting and fluxing phenomena. It’s not as solid and monolithic as you thought.

The meditation teacher Henry Shukman has an even more radical approach. He calls it “loving your obstacles.” Instead of gritting your teeth and reluctantly letting in your pain, can you actually welcome it?

Can you even possibly feel gratitude? This discomfort is teaching you how to be with yourself. How to grow.

Here’s a little phrase you can use the next time you’re experiencing something unpleasant:

“Thank you for waking me up.”

Speaking of waking up, Henry is a teacher on the Waking Up app, which is a top-notch meditation app run by my friend Sam Harris, with amazing teachers and a ton of courses for all levels. If you want to check it out, go to wakingup.com/tenpercent. You'll get a 30-day free trial (and you’ll also be helping out me and my team). Full and partial scholarships are available.

You can also hear Henry on my podcast today. Paid subscribers can listen ad-free here. It’s also available wherever you get your podcasts, and on YouTube.

In addition to getting the 10% Happier podcast ad-free, paid subs get a cheatsheet for each episode (with key takeaways, time-coded highlights, and a transcript), can comment on my posts, access my subscriber chats, and join my twice-monthly live video sessions, in which I guide a meditation and take questions. Our next session is April 22nd at 5:00PM ET. Join the party.

Episode cheatsheet

The big takeaway

Henry Shukman, Zen teacher and author, shares his journey of spiritual awakening and outlines four key stages or "inns" on the path to awakening: mindfulness, support, absorption, and awakening itself. He emphasizes that while we can cultivate practices to make ourselves more "accident-prone" to awakening experiences, they often come unexpectedly and cannot be forced through effort alone.