Redemption of a bald, miserable egomaniac
THE U.S. television journalist Dan Harris has had plenty to worry about in his time. In his days as a reporter he saw the bodies of Palestinians being bulldozed into a mass grave; he was caught up in an anti-American mob in Pakistan and shot at by the Taliban. Yet the thing that really bothered him was the prospect of going bald.
On the way home from reporting on an isolated Amazonian tribe, he locked himself in the plane l oo to examine his receding hairline, contemplating a vision of his future that went: ‘Baldness = Unemployment = Flophouse in Duluth’ (a byword for cultural desolation since Gore Vidal’s 1983 novel of that name).
His wife-to-be, Bianca, assured him his hair was not about to set him on the fast track to destitution. So did his psychiatrist, from whom he had sought help after turning to drugs after a long stint of war reporting. But in vain. At 37, in love and with his career soaring, Harris was beset with anxiety.
At this serendipitous moment, his producer suggested he should read a book by someone named Eckhart Tolle. Her exact words were: ‘You might like him. It’s all about controlling your ego.’
Tolle, it transpired, had written a couple of self-help books , which became celebrity sensations. Jim Carrey endorsed The Power Of Now; Paris Hilton took it to jail with her; and Meg Ryan gave a copy to Oprah Winfrey, who plugged it on her show.
‘At first,’ Harris writes, ‘the book struck me as irredeemable poppycock.’ But, unexpectedly, ‘Tolle began to unfurl a fascinating thesis that made me think he must have spent an enormous amount of time inside my skull’.
The revelation concerned the inner critic in our heads that provides an unhelpful running commentary on our actions. Thriving on drama, resentment and ambition, obsessed with the past and the future, heedless of the present, it’s never satisfied. The realisation that ‘the voice inside my head was kind of an a**hole’ was the start of a remarkable conversion to the practice of mindfulness.
It wasn’t a straightforward journey. Harris’s journalistic scepticism kept kicking in at inconvenient moments, such as a ten-day meditation retreat where the rules included ‘no talking, no reading, no sex’. He spent his 39th birthday there, tormented by back pain from the yogic postures and infuriated by the drippy voice of a shawl-wearing teacher named (inevitably) Spring.
Unconvinced by Tolle’s uneasy melange of good sense and mystic waffle, Harris finally found a plausible guru in the person of a Harvardeducated psychiatrist, author and Buddhist Dr Mark Epstein, who managed to convey the essential principles of mindfulness and compassion without the dismaying accretion of loopy psycho-babble.
Five years since Harris first heard of Tolle, he hasn’t quite achieved enlightenment. His ego still seems on fine form, to judge by the way he compares himself with St Paul. And his satisfaction at finding himself in the vanguard of a fashionable movement is touching: these days almost everyone acknowledges the benefits of mindfulness.
Not everyone will find Harris a congenial guide to mindfulness. His gung-ho journalistic style, fearlessly sprinkled with cliche and innocent of irony, is an unusual conduit for the message of compassion and calm. But his answer to a colleague sceptical of ‘the whole meditation thing’, is remarkably persuasive. ‘I do it,’ he said, ‘because it makes me 10 per cent happier.’
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