Annoying Partners, Aging Parents, Impossible Coworkers: Buddhist Advice for Conflict, Communication, and "Patience with Teeth" | devon and nico hase

Dan Harris (0:03)

Hello, everybody, welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. In my opinion, having been alive on this planet for several decades now, one of the ultimate life skills is the ability to handle conflict. Interpersonal affairs are messy often, and conflict is inevitable. And if you can handle it smoothly, you are much more likely to have healthy relationships. And as we know, healthy relationships are the key, according to a vast scientific literature, the key to a happy life. So I was very interested when I heard that a pair of Buddhist teachers who happened to be married to one another had written a book, a whole book about how to manage conflict. The teachers in question are Devon and Nico Hase, and they have a book called This Messy, Gorgeous Love, A Buddhist Guide to Lasting Partnerships. And this is not just, I should be clear, not just about how to manage conflict in your romantic relationships, but also at work and beyond. A little bit of background on Nico and Devon. Nico, who's the husband, spent six years living in a monastery before he earned a PhD in counseling psychology and then became an Insight Meditation teacher.

Devon teaches at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California, and also starting in October, so very soon, she will be the Teacher of the Month on My Meditation App, 10% with Dan Harris. This is Devon and Nico's second appearance on the show.

Devon and Nico Hase, welcome back to the show.

Devon Hase (1:28)

Thanks, Dan. It's so great to be back.

Dan Harris (1:31)

Let me just start by asking, it seems like one of the most treacherous relationship challenges one could ever imagine endeavoring upon is writing a book together. Did you guys ever plan some sort of homicide during the course of this?

Devon Hase (1:51)

We tell all our conflicts. We tell all our secrets in this book. We're very happy to share our book process with you as well.

You want to go ahead and explain some of that, Nico?

Nico Hase (2:02)

Yeah. Actually, this is the second book that we have written together. We worked out a lot of the kinks in that first book, which was called How Not to Be a Hot Mess. We were on this podcast last time to talk about that book.

By the time we got to this book, we knew what we wanted to do and we had a whole process of how to do it, which was basically outlining in detail together. Then I wrote the entire manuscript in 30 days with no break, locked in an apartment, talking to no one. Then I handed the whole manuscript over to Devon and she rewrote the whole thing while talking to everyone. She rewrote by committee and then we spent an entire month going through it together and hashing out all of the last details. There were definitely tensions, but there was no murder plans.

Dan Harris (2:57)

I consider that kind of a proof of concept to the fact that you were able to do this together.

Nico Hase (3:01)

We really worked with the principles in the book while writing the book.

Devon Hase (3:05)

Well, and we tell stories in the book about our differences. Nico, he's an introvert. He's very good at self-regulating and he loves working alone.

That process where he just locked himself away and was so single-focused on writing really worked for him.

And I'm an extrovert. I'm all about relationships and people. And so I needed to write by committee. It was so fun to go to our communities and ask about their opinions, our stories, all these different crowdsourcing the whole time. And we had to balance that. I mean, we know our differences. And so we crafted it in a way that we could each write according to our style.

Dan Harris (3:44)

Let me ask a foundational question before we jump into the ideas and practices in the book.

The book is primarily focused on romantic relationships. You're a married couple. But this conversation, and I just want to check that we're all on the same page, this conversation really will apply to all sorts of relationships.

Nico Hase (4:03)

That's the idea. So in writing the book, we were focused on partnership. But what we found out through writing was that the principles and the practices that we are offering in this book can be applied to any kind of relationship. So people who have kids have talked about how useful it has been to apply what's in the book to their parenting. And then people who are dealing with their aging parents maybe are talking about how useful it has been to apply with those relationships. We had one workshop participant just last weekend tell us that they were there with their partner, but they barely thought about their partner at all because they were so focused on a conflict that they're having at work. And it was incredibly useful to use the partnership workshop and all the things that we were saying to go back to work with a fresh set of eyes and figure out how am I going to be in harmony? How am I going to work with this person? So it can apply across the board to any kind of relationship.