Shadowing Practice: Sam Harris basically breaks down the secret to life (again) - Learn English Speaking with Video
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You've got the cacophony of the unpleasant experience, and then you've got this place in the middle of it, or apparent place in the middle of it,
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from which you're trying to resist this experience, right?
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Or trying to figure out how to change it, right?
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So let's say you have a terrible pain, you know, somewhere in your body.
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You know, there's the pain, there's the strong stimulus of unpleasant sensation, you know, the burning and stabbing and twisting feeling.
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And then there's this reaction to it from apparently some point outside the pain, very likely, you know, for most people up in the head.
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I mean, most people feel like they're a subject in their heads
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that is not truly coincident with the rest of their body.
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Most people, for the most part, don't feel identical to their bodies.
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They feel like they have bodies and these bodies can misbehave in various ways.
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And again, so you have a terrible pain, the pain's down there.
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Let's say it's in your knee.
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You're up here now a hostage being tortured by the misbehavior of the rest of your body, right?
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And you're trying to find some way of resisting these sensations.
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And so it is with emotional distress or unpleasant thoughts, right? you know, that you can have thoughts that terrorize you.
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And all of it seems to suggest, I mean, this is, you know, this is the extreme case of stark unhappiness.
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But even in the best of times, right, even when things are going really well, and every experience is very smooth, and we're getting what we want, and that, you know, we,
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you know, our favorite treats are just an arm's length away, and we're filling our mouths with gumdrops or whatever it is,
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we're gratifying this thing at the center of our experience.
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And it can never be finally gratified because experience itself is impermanent.
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It's just, you know, it's just, you get to the thing you want and you gorge yourself on it.
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And then not only - Then you want a new thing.
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You want a new thing.
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Then you need a drink of water because this lingering taste in your mouth of chocolate mousse or whatever it is, is too cloying and too much.
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And you got to wash that out so that you just, I mean, you wouldn't want to stay in that state even if you could.
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And there's kind of this rolling dissatisfaction, even in satisfaction, that we all encounter, even in the best of times, right?
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Even when you literally can get anything, more or less anything you want.
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And yet we know, at any moment, it can be subverted by something terrible happening.
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You know, at any moment, you can suddenly feel like you might be having a heart attack, right?
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And then that becomes the thing that the sense of me in the middle of everything collapses upon.
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And it makes life, I mean,
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again, the sense of being in this vulnerable center,
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it makes life this kind of long emergency that can be pacified by increasingly strenuous efforts to control experience, right?
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We have to control this thing because at any moment, we're constantly, if you just look at...
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At any moment, we might die.
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Yeah, we're avoiding death, you know, but even, you know, even for those of us who don't think about death very often, and there are those people,
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we're constantly modifying our experience so as to avoid discomfort,
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whether it's social discomfort or physical discomfort, or just every every correction in our body.
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I mean, if you just try to sit still for an hour, you'll notice that all of the micro adjustments in posture that you're now no longer making
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are made because you really don't have to wait long before you feel miserable.
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I mean, your body, the amount of pain you can get just sitting in the most comfortable chair you can find in your home
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and just resolving not to move is quite extraordinary.
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It's just, you know, it's, it's just, there's no position that's comfortable enough that it will be comfortable an hour from now.
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And so it is in fact true to say that for most people, I mean, literally 99 .9 % of our audience,
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they couldn't pay attention to the breath for a full minute, say, even if their lives depended on it, right?
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It's just like, it's simply not in the cards.
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It's not, it's, you know, the fate of the world could depend on it.
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And someone who's not really fairly well trained in this just couldn't do it.
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And so that's interesting, right?
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What's interesting is that despite your best efforts, you get carried away by thought helplessly moment after moment.
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Now.
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Being able to break that spell, being able to see thought as thought, eventually once you get some degree of mindfulness in hand,
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you no longer confine your attention to the breath or any other arbitrary object.
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You begin to open it up to everything you can possibly experience.
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So it's just, you know, sights and sounds and sensations and emotions and thoughts themselves can become objects of mindfulness,
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but when you can, but this is where, this is the kind of the crucial, you know, kind of almost binary difference,
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which produces an immense amount of psychological benefit.
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The moment you can really notice thoughts themselves as appearances in consciousness rather than what you are in each moment.
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Because what happens is, in the default case, the thoughts kind of creep up from behind us in some sense.
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They kind of come out of nowhere.
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And that just feels like me, right?
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So I'm, you know, I'm trying to...
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It's a reflex of identification.
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Well, you wouldn't act the damn things out if they didn't feel like you, you know?
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And so they have to have that impulse to action in them that's part of felt identity.
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Right.
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So you're saying that you're saying, and this is part of, I suppose, part of the Buddhist tradition,
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particularly, although not only that being the puppet of those thoughts is part of what prolongs suffering,
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at least under some circumstances, especially being the puppet of them.
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Yes.
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Okay.
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Yeah.
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And so, and so this is so, but the people, you know, listening to us now can feel this.
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So, you know, the, you know, we're talking and people are trying to understand the thread of this conversation, but it's that they have a voice in their head that's competing with this, right?
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They, you know, they're trying to listen to us, but they're also thinking, right?
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And they think, so they might think, well, what the hell is he talking about?
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Right?
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Like there's just some, some intrusive thought comes in or like, oh, no, wait a minute.
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He didn't answer the question that thought that that feels
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if you're identified with it if you don't see it as mere language appearing in consciousness
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or mere imagery right it feels like me it's like
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that is the self
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that isn't it feels like what i believe yeah that's interesting
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yeah well one of the things you do in clinical work
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all the time especially in the cognitive behavioral field is you
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help people identify those thoughts in some sense as as objects
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that yeah to no longer identify with them
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and to say you know just because you think
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that it's not necessarily true it's not necessarily you
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and it's not necessarily helpful yeah
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and it is it does have this dream like character of both coming out of nowhere
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and seizing completely seizing the reins of attention and identity and taking us elsewhere.
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And also we forget it, it has a...
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That's part of the totalitarian spirit of rationality, that proclivity.
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Well, but a lot of these thoughts aren't rational.
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It's just, you're just rehearsing your experience.
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It's just like, I mean, you'll tell yourself the same thing 10 times in a row and never, and you won't be bored on the 10th time.
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You'll, like, if you just imagine
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what it would be like to externalize your thoughts on a loud speaker for everyone to listen to, you know, and you were just, it was just helplessly, you know, externalized.
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Every, every normal person would sound insane, you know, because, because of the, the perseveration and the, and the, just the redundancy and the,
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and the strange structure to the discursiveness this.
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I mean, this is ever -present.
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It's so ever -present that it doesn't strike people as strange.
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But to be presuming...
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We have a dialogue with ourselves as though the eye could talk to the me and that made any sense at all.
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It's like, you know, I'm sitting here
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and you're getting set up for this interview right
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and i i'll think um oh i gotta get some water right now i know
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if i'm the one to say it
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and i'm the one to hear it i know i need
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water who am i telling yeah it's like it's like i'm
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telling someone else right who needs to be informed about this well you're probably telling the prefrontal cortex
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and it tells the motor cortex
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so you know it's that's probably the hypothalamus talking to the prefrontal cortex
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because it doesn't have direct output over the motor cortex.
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It's something like that.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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So there are two levels at which we can address this problem of thought and its connection to suffering.
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And one is at the level of thought itself, right?
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So you can replace bad thoughts with better thoughts.
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And you can get some, you can triangulate on your tendency to have one kind of conversation with yourself and engineer a better conversation with yourself, right?
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And that's, you know, yes, in cognitive behavioral therapies.
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Yeah, you can stop thinking like a six -year -old, for example, and start thinking like a 30 -year -old.
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Right, right.
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And what's more, a 30 -year -old that actually has good intentions for you, right?
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Like a friend, right?
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Yes, right, right.
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You can make your mind your friend.
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Yeah, yeah, a loved one even.
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Yes, yeah, yeah, can you imagine that?
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Yeah, imagine that.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 132 sentences and 1715 words to shadow. The speech runs for 10:19. The speaker talks at a natural 166 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 89% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| cortex noun | /ˈkɔɹtɛks/ | The outer layer of an internal organ or body structure, such as the kidney or the brain. |
| necessarily adverb | /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/ | Inevitably; of necessity. |
| sensation noun | /sɛnˈseɪʃən/ | A physical feeling or perception from something that comes into contact with the body; something sensed. |
| unpleasant adjective | /ʌnˈplɛzn̩t/ | Not pleasant. |
| discomfort noun | /dɪsˈkʌmfɚt/ | Mental or bodily distress. |
| suffer verb | /ˈsʌfɚ/ | To undergo hardship. |
| nowhere adverb | /ˈnoʊ.(h)wɛɹ/ | In no place. |
| breathe verb | /bɹiːð/ | To draw air into (inhale), and expel air from (exhale), the lungs in order to extract oxygen and excrete waste gases. |
| depend verb | /dɪˈpɛnd/ | To be contingent or conditioned; to have something as a necessary condition |
| resist verb | /ɹɪˈzɪst/ | To attempt to counter the actions or effects of. |
| consciousness noun | /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/ | The state of being conscious or aware; awareness. |
| mere adjective | /mɪɚ/ | Just, only; no more than, pure and simple, neither more nor better than might be expected. |
| cognitive adjective | /ˈkɑɡ.nɪ.tɪv/ | Relating to the part of mental functions that deals with logic, as opposed to affective which deals with emotions. |
| behavioral adjective | /bɪˈheɪvjəɹəl/ | Of or relating to behavior. |
| puppet noun | /ˈpʌpɪt/ | Any small model of a person or animal able to be moved by strings or rods, or in the form of a glove. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| carried away adjective | Made excessively emotional or excited, so that one goes too far. |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 48 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, we're, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: breathe /bɹiːð/, thread /ˈθɹɛd/, smooth /smuːð/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: sensation /sɛnˈseɪʃən/, consciousness /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/, crucial /ˈkɹuː.ʃəl/, emotion /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/, identification /aɪˌdɛn(t)ɪfɪˈkeɪʃn̩/
- Long words — get the stress right: necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, behavioral /bɪˈheɪvjəɹəl/, extraordinary /ɪksˈtɹɔːrdɪn(ə)ɹi/, psychological /ˌsaɪ.kəˈlɑː.d͡ʒɪ.kl̩/, identification /aɪˌdɛn(t)ɪfɪˈkeɪʃn̩/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like cortex, necessarily, sensation.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.