“10% Happier”: A book review by Michelle Welch

Book Review: 10% Happier, by Dan Harris

Review by Michelle Welch

If I hadn’t made my way to a meditation center before reading this book, I certainly would have after reading it. Now I want to keep copies at hand to give to everyone who asks me what the heck is meditation and why would anyone want do it, everyone who lumps the Dalai Lama and the folks behind The Secret together and dismisses them all as bunk, and everyone who’s tied up in a knot of stress and can’t seem to find the way out.

Dan Harris was an up-and-coming ABC news correspondent doing a coveted spot on Good Morning America when he had a panic attack on camera. Talking to a therapist helped him identify that his problem was a runaway brain, constantly attacking himself with critical and catastrophizing thoughts. (“Lose my hair -> lose my job -> flophouse in Duluth.”) A new assignment covering religion in America put him in touch with various spiritual writers, such as Eckhart Tolle, who confirmed the problem with obsessive thoughts but didn’t seem to offer a solution. After a long and skeptical journey talking to others in the New Age and self-help worlds, Harris finally encountered Buddhism, and rather reluctantly made his first attempts at meditation.

It’s not an overstatement to say that the experience changed his life – not all at once, but a little at a time, as the book’s title suggests. Soon he found himself promoting meditation to others, always keeping in mind the difficulty of persuading people in a fast-paced world to do what looks like nothing, acknowledging those who insist meditation can’t be for them because they think too much, and remembering what he calls “meditation’s PR problem” in a generally skeptical society. Writing honestly about his personal experiences, he cuts through to the practical process and benefits of meditation. Most of us will probably see ourselves in Harris, and those we lend the book to might, as well.