We are in the midst of a momentous event in the evolution of human consciousness, but they won’t be talking about it in the news tonight.

My on-air meltdown was the direct result of an extended run of mindlessness, a period of time during which I was focused on advancement and adventure, to the detriment of pretty much everything else in my life.

This trip was my first taste of what I would describe as journalistic heroin: the pure, sick rush of being somewhere you are not supposed to be and not only getting away with it but also getting on TV.

I realized, with genuine regret, how unthinkingly judgmental I’d been—not only of Ted, but of religious people, generally.

Our entire lives, he argued, are governed by a voice in our heads. … This voice is engaged in a ceaseless stream of thinking—most of it negative, repetitive, and self-referential.

A ringer. This had been true my whole life. … The unspoken assumption behind most of my forward momentum was that whatever was coming next would definitely be better.

After all my reading about the empty nattering of the ego, I realized: These fearful forecasts were just thoughts skittering through my head. … It’s not that my worry suddenly ceased, I just wasn’t as taken in by it.

I left the experience more confused, not less.

As best I could tell, the whole thing appeared to be less a faith than a philosophy, and one that had been intriguing psychologists since the days of Freud, when his early Viennese followers studied those newly translated texts.

As best I could understand it, the Buddha’s main thesis was that in a world where everything is constantly changing, we suffer because we cling to things that won’t last.

Buddhism’s secret sauce went by a hopelessly anodyne name: “mindfulness.” In a nutshell, mindfulness is the ability to recognize what is happening in your mind right now—anger, jealousy, sadness, the pain of a stubbed toe, whatever—without getting carried away by it.

She nailed the method for applying mindfulness in acute situations, albeit with a somewhat dopey acronym: RAIN.

The effect was something like the picture-in-picture feature on a television. Normally, my mental clatter dominated the whole screen. When I pressed the mindfulness button, though, I had some perspective.

What mindfulness does is create some space in your head so you can, as the Buddhists say, “respond” rather than simply “react.”

This is something called “choiceless awareness.” … Once you’ve built up enough concentration, they say, you can drop your obsessive focus on the breath and just “open up” to whatever is there.

I get a real sense of how a few slippery little thoughts I might have in, say, the morning before I go to work—maybe after a quarrel with Bianca, a story I read in the paper, or an imagined dialogue with my boss—can weasel their way into the stream of my mind and pool in unseen eddies, from which they hector and haunt me throughout the day.

It’s okay to worry, plot, and plan, he’s saying—but only until it’s not useful anymore.

I do it because it makes me 10% happier.

It was the perfect answer, really—simultaneously counterprogramming against the overpromising of the self-helpers while also offering an attractive return on investment.

A blockbuster MRI study from Harvard found that people who took the eight-week MBSR course had thicker gray matter in the areas of the brain associated with self-awareness and compassion, while the regions associated with stress actually shrank.

The researchers found meditators were not only deactivating this region while they were practicing, but also when they were not meditating. In other words, meditation created a new default mode.

Studies showed that the best way to engineer an epiphany was to work hard, focus, research, and think about a problem—and then let go.

Striving is fine, as long as it’s tempered by the realization that, in an entropic universe, the final outcome is out of your control. … When you are wisely ambitious, you do everything you can to succeed, but you are not attached to the outcome—so that if you fail, you will be maximally resilient, able to get up, dust yourself off, and get back in the fray.

Nonattachment to results + self compassion = a supple relentlessness that is hard to match.

I now realize that on the issue of enlightenment I was blinded by my own skepticism. … I had, in essence, inverted the normal quandary that spiritual seekers face.

I can definitely be more than 10% happier—and I’m excited to try. … Mindfulness, happiness, and not being a jerk are skills I can hone the rest of my life—every day, every moment, until senility or death.

You are not thinking, you are being mindful—an innate but underused ability we all have, which allows us to be aware without judging.

Mindfulness allows you to slow that process down. Sometimes, of course, you’re right to be pissed. The question is whether you are going to react mindlessly to that anger or respond thoughtfully.

Over time, the mindfulness may grow longer and the wandering shorter. Not incidentally, the ability to begin again and again has significant “off the cushion” benefits. It creates a resilience that can be enormously useful when confronting the ups and downs of everyday life.

Whatever comes up in your mind can be co-opted and turned into the object of meditation. It’s like in judo, where you use the force of your enemy against him.

Being in the moment is necessary but not sufficient for mindfulness—which involves being in the moment, but also being aware of what’s going on.

Meditation is the antidote. It won’t fix everything in your life, make you taller, or (most likely) land you in a state of bliss on a park bench. But it can make you 10% happier, or maybe much more.