You Can Stop Fixing Yourself: Buddhist Advice on Boundaries, Rituals, and Dropping Your Self-Aggression | Susan Piver

**Dan Harris** (0:03)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Normally, given the fact that I'm a skeptical guy and an agnostic, when somebody uses the word magic, I get hives. However, when somebody I trust and respect uses that word, with all of its metaphysical connotations, I actually get interested. Such is the case with my guest today, Susan Piver, who is a Buddhist teacher and a best-selling author and a frequent flyer right here on this show. Susan has a new book and it's called Inexplicable Magic. So what the hell is that about? Let's bring in Susan Piver. Susan, welcome back to the show.

**Susan Piver** (0:41)
Thank you. I'm so happy to be back and it is so good to see you. I think the key word here is inexplicable.
So this magic is, there are no wizard hats, there's no casting of spells unless you're into that.
But I'm sure you can attest to this, Dan, or tell me if not. When you sit in meditation, basically what you're doing is nothing. At some point, however, you and I and countless meditators over the millennia have reported that they become more compassionate. The heart softens, you feel more, you become more permeable, more sensitive, more attuned. You see patterns, you have ideas, and you become more authentic, you become more courageous in being who you really are. In Buddhism, these are called the three qualities of the awakened mind, compassionate, wise, and brave. Now, how does this happen? Dan Harris riddled me this from sitting there doing nothing.

**Dan Harris** (1:42)
I don't fucking know. I mean, it's magic.
It's magic.

**Susan Piver** (1:46)
That's the magic.
How does that happen? It just happens. And there's something about the doing of nothing, of being with yourself, that gives rise to this inexplicable magic.

**Dan Harris** (1:59)
You've just said you don't want to hear this, but let me try it just for the skeptical listener, that actually, on some level, it's really exercise. It's you are doing a practice, just the way if you go to the gym and you run on a treadmill or you systematically pick up and put down heavy things, you are exercising a muscle. In this case, it's your brain and by extension, the mind, and that gets a little mysterious and that may be where the magic lies.
But you are training your brain and mind in systematic ways to pay attention to one thing. Usually, it's your breath. Every time you get distracted, you start again and again and again. It makes sense that if you did that, your attentional capacities would increase. Your ability to not be so yanked around by the voice in your head would also increase because every time you wake up from distraction, you're getting some visibility, some clear seeing to use your words into the machinations of your mind. In that process, you're less owned by said machinations. So doesn't all that make sense in a mechanistic way?

**Susan Piver** (3:08)
Yes and no. It makes sense partially. I think what you're describing is called mindfulness.
That's one of the things that we cultivate in our practice. You place your mind, your thoughts, your brain, whatever it is, on an object of your choosing, other than thoughts. In our case, it's the breath. From that capacity to focus all the things you mention, being less yanked around, being more clear, seeing more precisely happen. There's no question. We can study the data. All of that's good. But there's a second piece to the practice that is less frequently mentioned and that is called awareness. Awareness expands through the practice. That is different than focus. It's a sense of having more intuition, perhaps, of your sense perceptions become more vibrant.
You notice things you had not noticed before. That's not a function of focus. That's a function of awareness, according to this wisdom tradition. While you can work at mindfulness, at focus, and you'll get better at it, you cannot work at awareness. All you can do is allow it. The more one allows awareness to expand, so it's not something you work at, it's something you rest into.
The more you see that what meditation does, among other things, is make you more aware, and this I find really interesting and exciting and inspiring and weird, that what you most long for from your practice, more patience or more insight or more creativity, whatever it might be, or in your life for that matter, these things do not come from you. They come to you when you're paying attention. So in this sense, it's not a mystery that some of the world's greatest insights and inventions and ideas have come to people who are sleeping or showering or walking. There's an awareness expansion that also happens from our practice, and that I would say is the mystic aspect. What do you think?