How To Use Psychology and Buddhism To Handle Your Inner Critic | Amita Schmidt

This is the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing today? On this episode, we're talking about how to harness two incredibly powerful modalities to deal with your inner critic, or frankly, to deal with any difficult part of your personality. My guest has been working for years in both psychotherapy and in Buddhism, and she very skillfully blends these two disciplines. Specifically, she combines Buddhist meditation with a kind of therapy called Internal Family Systems or IFS. It was invented by a man named Dick Schwartz who's been a guest on the show a couple times. The basic idea of IFS is that we all have an inner cast of characters in IFS. They're called parts. And there are ways to identify and work with these various parts, including your inner critic, so that you're not owned by your parts all of the time. My guest today is Amita Schmidt. She's been working for decades as both a Buddhist meditation teacher. In fact, she was a resident teacher at the legendary Insight Meditation Society for years. And also as a licensed psychotherapist. In this conversation, you'll hear us talk about how psychology and Buddhist meditation can work together, the basics of internal family system, her own personal path through trauma, depression, and then a pivotal insight that changed everything, Why states like depression are not as solid as they may feel. How to work with your inner critic. Simple ways to access the sanest and wisest version of yourself. The shift from psychological healing to spiritual insight. The value of acceptance and surrender, simple pointers for sensing what's called aware presence beneath all of your mental noise, and much more. Don't forget to download my new app, Ten Percent with Dan Harris. You can sign up at danharris.com. There's a free thirty day trial if you wanna try before you buy. Right now, we're running a seven day New Year's meditation challenge with Joseph Goldstein. It started on January 5, but it's not too late to join. Again, you can sign up at danharris.com. We'll get started with Amita Schmidt right after this. The best b to b marketing often gets wasted on the wrong people. I can't tell you how often I'm scrolling and I get served ads for stuff I have no interest in. So when you wanna reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over a billion professionals, including a 130,000,000 decision makers. And that's where it stands apart from other ad buys. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company roles, seniority, skills, company revenue. So you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience. It's why LinkedIn ads generates the highest b to b return on ad spend of all major ad networks. Seriously, all of them. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to …