Joseph Goldstein On How To Train Your Runaway Brain
Episode
68 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Productivity, Health & Wellness, Crypto & Web3
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Begin Again Practice: When the mind wanders during meditation, gently return attention to the breath without self-judgment. This repeated act of noticing distraction and refocusing is the actual training mechanism, not an obstacle to overcome. Most practitioners experience constant mind-wandering initially.
- ✓Relaxed Alertness Balance: Effective meditation requires simultaneous relaxation to prevent over-efforting and manipulation of breath, plus alertness to avoid spacing out. This balance requires continuous micro-adjustments like a high-wire acrobat constantly shifting weight, not a static state once achieved.
- ✓Rushing as Feedback: Notice subtle feelings of rushing or leaning forward into the next moment, even when moving slowly. This indicates being ahead of yourself rather than grounded in present experience. Speed has nothing to do with rushing; you can move quickly without rushing or slowly while rushing.
- ✓Undercurrent Thoughts: Quickly passing background thoughts function like a movie soundtrack, subtly manipulating emotions and reconditioning mental patterns without awareness. These thoughts frequently contain self-references and continuously reinforce the sense of self, stealing mindfulness throughout daily activities like showering or walking.
- ✓Mara I See You: When recognizing unwholesome mental patterns or defilements arising, name them directly with humor rather than self-judgment. This recognition alone often causes the pattern to dissolve. The wisdom of seeing clearly matters more than the content of what you see.
What It Covers
Meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein explains practical phrases and techniques for training attention, managing distraction, and deconditioning habitual mental patterns through Buddhist meditation practice spanning formal sitting and daily life activities.
Key Questions Answered
- •Begin Again Practice: When the mind wanders during meditation, gently return attention to the breath without self-judgment. This repeated act of noticing distraction and refocusing is the actual training mechanism, not an obstacle to overcome. Most practitioners experience constant mind-wandering initially.
- •Relaxed Alertness Balance: Effective meditation requires simultaneous relaxation to prevent over-efforting and manipulation of breath, plus alertness to avoid spacing out. This balance requires continuous micro-adjustments like a high-wire acrobat constantly shifting weight, not a static state once achieved.
- •Rushing as Feedback: Notice subtle feelings of rushing or leaning forward into the next moment, even when moving slowly. This indicates being ahead of yourself rather than grounded in present experience. Speed has nothing to do with rushing; you can move quickly without rushing or slowly while rushing.
- •Undercurrent Thoughts: Quickly passing background thoughts function like a movie soundtrack, subtly manipulating emotions and reconditioning mental patterns without awareness. These thoughts frequently contain self-references and continuously reinforce the sense of self, stealing mindfulness throughout daily activities like showering or walking.
- •Mara I See You: When recognizing unwholesome mental patterns or defilements arising, name them directly with humor rather than self-judgment. This recognition alone often causes the pattern to dissolve. The wisdom of seeing clearly matters more than the content of what you see.
Notable Moment
Goldstein describes moving in extremely slow walking meditation when the lunch bell rang. Though his physical speed remained unchanged, he felt himself energetically leaning toward the lunch line, demonstrating how rushing operates as internal attitude rather than external speed.
Episode Transcript
This is the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. Happy New Year. Welcome to 2026. We've got a fantastic pair of episodes to kick off this new year, both of them featuring my guy, Joseph Goldstein. So let's get right to it. You may have noticed, that your mind is often out of control. It's populated by racing thoughts, habitual neuroses, ancient grudges. I could go on. So what can be done about this? Today, as mentioned, I'm gonna talk to one of my favorite people, also one of the most prominent meditation teachers in the West, Joseph Goldstein, about how ridiculous our minds are. And by the way, that's a word he uses a lot to describe the mind, ridiculous. So we're gonna talk about how ridiculous the mind is, and we're gonna talk about some very compelling ways to train these unruly minds. Let me give you a little bit of context for what we're gonna do here. I, managed to convince Joseph to coauthor a book with me. This book will not be out for several years, but it's gonna be a compilation of the phrases that Joseph uses while he's teaching meditation and Buddhism. These are pithy, catchy phrases that are, as Joseph says, kind of like hacks for working with your mind. I've been studying with Joseph for more than fifteen years, and I've made a list of, I think, close to a 100 of these phrases. Each of which has been incredibly helpful for me in my own life and in my own practice. Some of these phrases are designed to help you with meditation. Some of them are just to help pull your head out of your ass when you're stuck in useless anxiety or you're in the grips of an unwise desire, etcetera, etcetera. So I've been conducting a series of interviews with Joseph about these phrases, these Buddhist earworms. And these interviews will form, the spine of the aforementioned book project. And as I record these interviews, I'm gonna release them here on the podcast. So this is the first one I'm releasing. There's another one coming out this coming Sunday, January 4, and then many more will start dribbling out over the next year or so. Just to give you a little taste, here are some of the phrases we'll be covering in today's episode. Just begin again, sit and know you're sitting, relaxed, not casual, more or less mindful, the thieves of meditation, Mara, I see you, the mind has no pride, and the mind is the forerunner of all things. These might not make any sense right now, but you will hear Joseph explain each of the phrases, where they came from, and how to use them in your life. Speaking of Joseph, he will be leading our free seven day New Year's meditation challenge, which will be running from, January 5 through the eleventh. You can sign up by downloading my new app, Ten Percent …
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