10% Happier With Dan Harris

Tony Wright spent 25 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. This past August, a Philadelphia jury acquitted Wright of the 1991 rape and murder of an elderly woman after his lawyers, including two from Innocence Project, presented DNA evidence that supported his innocence. He was just 20 years old when he was arrested. During his time in prison, one of Wright's lawyers gave him Dan Harris' book, "10% Happier," and Wright started practicing meditation and yoga. He's now learning to readjust to life on the outside.

Spring Washam was selling timeshares and struggling with depression when she decided to embark on a journey to work on her mind. After looking into psychology texts, self-help books and various forms of meditation, she eventually attended a 10-day meditation retreat that she says changed her life forever. Washam is now a well-known meditation and dharma teacher who started the East Bay Meditation Center, bringing mindfulness meditation practices to the diverse communities in the Oakland, California, area. She also has a somewhat controversial project involving trips into the Amazon jungle and the drug Ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic plant-based tea mixture.

Alan Cumming is an award-winning actor on the Broadway stage and on-screen, a New York Times best-selling author, director, comedian and activist. He's best known for his roles in Broadway's "Cabaret," TV’s "The Good Wife" and as Nightcrawler in "X-Men 2." During the interview with Dan Harris, Cumming talks about his meditation practice and his new book, "You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams: My Life in Stories and Pictures," out this month.

Elizabeth Vargas has been known throughout her 30-year career for her strong reporting around the world, her tough interviews and her steadiness during breaking news coverage. But now for the first time, Vargas reveals that she has also long struggled with alcoholism and anxiety. In her interview with Dan Harris and in her new book, "Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction," Vargas shares that she suffered repeated relapses and says meditation and reaching out to others has helped save her.

Chef Eric Ripert, of the famed Le Bernardin in New York City, is one of the world's best chefs, an Emmy-winning cooking show host and a cookbook author. But while Ripert was building a name for himself in the heat and the stress of a fine-dining restaurant kitchen, he also became a practicing Buddhist. The chef sat down with Dan Harris to talk about his daily meditation rituals, how he found Buddhism after being raised Catholic, and how he got to where he is today.

Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus have been through a lot together. They grew up together in Dayton, Ohio, both in families that struggled to make ends meet. They went on to climb the corporate ladder together and both made a comfortable living. So when Josh discovered minimalism, a practice in which you rid yourself of excess stuff to focus on personal happiness, it wasn't long before Ryan joined him. Today, the two childhood friends live in Montana and host a podcast, a website and have a film called "Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things," all devoted to capturing their minimalism experiences and to help others discover the practice.

Mike Gervais is a high-performance sports psychologist who works with athletes, most famously as the mindfulness coach for the Seattle Seahawks, on training the mind and body to work together under the intense pressure of competition. Gervais has helped pro-basketball players, golfers, swimmers, snowboarders, volleyball Olympians, hall of famers and a host of other elite athletes find new approaches to reaching peak performance from within. He talks with athletes and entrepreneurs about their experiences on his podcast, "Finding Mastery."

A few years ago, Jesse Israel was a sophomore film student who had just signed an up-and-coming college band to a record label he co-founded out of his dorm room. Israel built that record label into a successful company -- then he decided to walk away from all of it and looked into ways he could "bring people together through shared interest." After toying with a few ideas, Israel came up with a plan to start a community for young adults to meet, meditate and "share quiet," he said.

Dr. Richie Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds, has been meditating for over 40 years. But it was the Dalai Lama himself who convinced Davidson to dedicate his life to researching the effects of meditation on the brain. Early in his career, Davidson said he "became a closet meditator" and the Dalai Lama "played a major role in me coming out of the closet and encouraging serious scientific research in this area." Davidson's team flew in monks from Tibet and Nepal for the study and asked them to meditate while undergoing scans. When they first looked at the scans, Davidson said the results were shocking.

Oren J. Sofer, a former child actor turned longtime meditation teacher, was a 19-year-old college student in New York City when he said he felt things in his life were falling apart. "And I had heard about people going to India for study abroad and I had found out about a program where you wake up, 5am every morning, stay at a monastery, meditate twice a day, no drugs, no sex, no alcohol, and I just said, 'Sign me up,'" Sofer said. Fast forward to present day and now one of Sofer's specialties as a meditation teacher is showing people how to use Mindfulness to be better communicators.

Mingyur Rinpoche, the author of "The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness," is a study of contradictions. On one hand, he's been formally recognized as the reincarnation of two Tibetan meditation masters. On the other hand, he has been working with scientists to design research around the impact meditation can have on the brain. In fact, he and other practitioners had their brain activity measured while meditating on compassion and the researchers were stunned by the results. Mingyur also freely admits that he suffered from anxiety and panic attacks as a child, and talks about how he turned to meditation for help.

Dan Ryckert works in an industry where you wouldn't imagine there would be a whole lot of meditation: Video games. Ryckert is a senior editor at the popular video game website, Giant Bomb, and he's the author of "Anxiety as an Ally: How I Turned a Worried Mind into My Best Friend." Ryckert's raw memoir details his struggles with anxiety and panic attacks, from trying to find a diagnosis and then with learning how to deal with the attacks in his personal and professional life, and then how he eventually turned to meditation.

Author and journalist Claire Hoffman has been practicing Transcendental Meditation since she was 3 years old. When she was 5, she and her family moved to a secluded meditation community in Fairfield, Iowa -- Maharishi's national headquarters for Heaven and Earth. In her new memoir, "Greetings from Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood," Hoffman describes what it was like to grow up in a place where people aspired to follow all of Maharishi's principles, what happened after she began to question them, and how she feels about her spiritual upbringing now as an adult.

Dr. Amishi Jha, a neuroscientist and an associate professor of psychology at the University of Miami, and Maj. Gen. Walter Piatt of the U.S. Army might seem like an unlikely pair, but they have worked together to bring Mindfulness to the troops. Jha studies how the demands of high-stress, high-stakes professions may degrade the brain's ability to make decisions and she has found in her work that groups like accountants, students, athletes and military service members benefit from Mindfulness training. Piatt has served in numerous assignments all over the world, including tours in Korea and Panama, in his more than 35-year military career. He's also completed several operational deployments including Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.

World-renowned chef Mario Batali has 28 restaurants, 10 cookbooks, a daytime cooking show, a food emporium in New York City, and now plans for a food theme park. He also -- somehow -- finds time to keep a daily meditation routine. Batali says he started practicing mantra-based Transcendental Meditation (TM) six years ago after Jerry Seinfeld and his wife, Jessica, suggested he look into it. Batali said he now practices twice a day for 20 minutes, and that it's helped calm his temper.

Buddhist psychiatrist and author Dr. Mark Epstein has for years written about the overlap between Western psychotherapy and Eastern Buddhist philosophies. Epstein sat down with Dan Harris to talk about the impact meditation can have on the mind, both positive and negative, for those looking for an escape from suffering. He also went deep into the Buddhist concept of the "no-self," whether Enlightenment can be reached ... and what it might look or feel like. He has written numerous books on these topics, his most recent being, "The Trauma of Everyday Life." Epstein first discovered meditation in college and one of the "breakthroughs" he said that made the practice click for him happened while he was learning to juggle. "Once I got the three oranges in the air, my mind had to relax in order to keep it going and I understood, 'Oh yeah, this is what they're trying to teach me in mediation.'" Before he found meditation, Epstein said he was a very anxious person who worried all the time. Now after practicing medita

Arianna Huffington has a multimillion-dollar media website that reacts to world events by the millisecond, she's a mother of two -- and yet she says she always gets a good night's sleep. Not only that, she says wants to help everyone else do the same. Huffington, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, has a new book -- her fifteenth -- called "The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life One Night at a Time." In the book, she traces sleep deprivation back to the Industrial Revolution and argues that our culture's chronic need to be "plugged in" is hurting our health, productivity, relationships and happiness. She started researching the effects of sleep deprivation after she collapsed from exhaustion in 2007, two years after launching The Huffington Post. It was also around this time, Huffington said, that she went back to meditation, a practice she had first started at age 13 while living in her home country of Greece.

Acclaimed movie producer and director Adam Shankman is best known for his upbeat, family-friendly movies, including "Hairspray," "A Walk to Remember" and "The Pacifier," but behind the scenes, Shankman says he spent years grappling with substance abuse and self-loathing. Growing up in Hollywood, Shankman, who is openly gay, remembers being "an incredibly happy kid." But when he was three years old, he says, his parents set him up with a doctor who was doing a study on sexual identity. Unbeknownst to his parents at the time, Shankman says he was placed in "conversion therapy." When he was a teen, Shankman turned to alcohol and later drugs to quiet the "ugly voice" in his head. In 2012, Shankman says, he entered a "really dark" place and the following year checked himself into a month-long rehab program -- where he discovered meditation.

Success and happiness: Can you have one without the other? Many may assume that these two things are at cross purposes but Emma Seppala, the science director of Stanford University's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, argues that that assumption is actually dead wrong. The Ph.D. holder and author of "The Happiness Track" sat down with Dan Harris to tackle this subject -- a central theme in Dan's own book, "10% Happier."

Chade-Meng Tan was employee No. 107 at Google. But the software engineer's career took a turn when he began teaching meditation to the company's employees and executives, adopting the job title of "Jolly Good Fellow." While he's no longer at Google, Meng -- as everyone calls him -- continues to meditate and has written a new book, "Joy on Demand," detailing how anyone can access joy through meditation.