Happiness 3

We are continuing a series of talks based on Matthieu Ricard’s book, Happiness:  A Guide to developing Life’s most important skill.    Think about how many of us learned about happiness as children.  Our parents or mentors had our best intentions at heart, but they may have thought that happiness was derived from some external set of circumstances.  When most of us were growing up, we were told that we needed to go to college, marry the right person, get the right job, have children—these things were supposed to make us happy, right?  Was there any encouragement or advice that happiness was an inside job?  If you did, please go home and thank your parents profusely!

 It's NOT the wound from our past that shapes our life; it's the choices we make in the present moment.  We each have a choice beyond continuing to re-injure ourselves by wallowing in our wounds or raging against them. We each have a choice in each moment to acknowledge the past, extract the lessons, and live in the present with a sense of curiosity and  deeper wisdom, exploring more skillful responses to our thoughts, our emotions and the world around us.

We each now have an opportunity to look more deeply into what will bring us happiness, a happiness that comes from deep sense of innate well-being.  Matthieu Ricard encourages us to look deeply into what is causing us to have a sense of struggle, a sense of suffering.  With these thoughts and emotions more clearly identified, we can then work to clarify, to see through and move beyond these old unskillful habits of thinking and feeling.  He calls these practices, antidotes.

What is an antidote?  A medicine taken or given to counteract a particular poison.  Something that counteracts or neutralizes an unpleasant feeling or situation.

We often think of our thoughts and our emotions as who we are.  “I’m mad”.  “I’m depressed”, or whatever afflictive emotions we might be feeling or thought we might be having.  Matthieu describes thoughts and emotions in an entirely different way.  A thought is just an electrical process, an emotion is something bio-chemical—the two are often inter-related.  We have a thought, and it triggers an emotion.  We have an emotion and it triggers a thought.  However, neither the thought nor the emotion is a solid, permanent “thing”.  They are NOT who or what we fundamentally “are”.  Thoughts and emotions are like paint on a wall, they are simply an outer covering.  We can strip away the paint to find the original surface.  From a Buddhist perspective, the truth of who and what we are is NOT our thoughts or our emotions at all.  We are no “thing”, just innate moment-to-moment awareness beneath and beyond it all.  

When we wake up each morning, we have a momentarily sense of this simple awareness.  Then, we quickly refill our thoughts and emotions with this sense of “me”, with a past and a certain present set of circumstances, and an anticipated future based on this illusion of “me”.  Illusion does not mean that “me” doesn’t exist, but imagine that we are not some solid, permanent self.  In fact, we are constantly changing, we are nothing more than a set of processes, continually arising and falling away, that creates this sense of being.   When we see “me” more clearly as this ever-changing process, we can more easily drop this coat of “self” that we’ve been wearing and thinking of as “me”.  Beneath the coat of assumptions and past experiences, lies a living/breathing, ever-changing experience of what it is to be alive.  That’s where the experience of inner happiness will be found.

Martin Seligman is a pioneer in positive psychology and has done quite a bit of studying of Matthieu Ricard and his Buddhist practices.  There is a website entitled, www.authenticHappiness.org that has a wealth of information about what scientists are learning about happiness.   There is also an excellent TED talk on his theories on happiness.

Martin breaks happiness down into three components:

• Pleasure (Savoring):  Buddhists are not anti-pleasure!  However, we recognize that pleasure is a fleeting emotion.  The first few moments of any experience of pleasure is wonderful, like the first three bites of chocolate ice cream.  Then, with the next few bites, the pleasure begins to diminish, slowly the pleasurable experience becomes neutral, then it actually becomes painful if we continue to grab on, long after the savoring moments have vanished. 
• Flow (Finding our strengths and increasing our use of them):  We each have some skill or activity that when we are doing it, we get lost in the process.  Time might even seem to stand still.  It might be some artistic pursuit or reading a book, or interacting with people, or riding a bike, or all the many possibilities for what we each do well.  Martin describes being in the flow as part of flourishing.  Matthieu describes it as being fully present in the moment.  Being in the flow increases our sense of deep well-being.  We can look for ways to incorporate moments of flow into each and every day.
• Purpose (Finding ways to serve a greater good):  Both Martin and Matthieu recognize that having a sense of purpose greater than ourselves leads to a deep sense of well-being.  Whether it’s helping abandoned animals at the shelter or feeding the hungry, there are a myriad of ways to find a greater purpose to our lives.  In Buddhism, cultivating a sense of compassion leads to discovering the many ways we can help others, which, by its very nature, gives us a greater sense of well-being.

Matthieu goes further to describe in great detail the practices and processes that can generate and expand savoring, flow and purpose.  These are the antidotes for the struggle and suffering that most of us experience each day, brought on by our reactions to our external circumstances, often based on our individual past experiences. 

Antidotes for afflictive thoughts and emotions:

Direct seeing:  Matthieu encourages us to “look” directly at the afflictive emotion/thought, not the perceived cause or extraneous musings that arise around it.  What does it feel like to just sit with the anger/fear/anxiety/depression/resentment/fear?  This is the starting point to sort out what is really happening when a thought or emotion arises.  Behind the pain, we will find a pristine awareness, an inner strength that we can tap into to see ourselves, the situation, others and the circumstance with more clarity.

Imagery:   I recently had an opportunity to hear a Dharma talk on loving-kindness by Khenmo Drolma, who is the head of the first Tibetan Buddhist nunnery in North America (www.vajradakininunnery.org).  She talked about the difficulty we often have experiencing an open heart when we think about another person—relationships, even great ones, include certain complications--we are complicated creatures.  So, it can be helpful to begin with an uncomplicated situation to create a sense of an open heart, like sitting by the ocean, or in the mountains, or by a babbling brook, or looking at a baby, a puppy or kitten. We can practice experiencing more fully what it feels like to allow our heart to be fully open.  Then, we can contrast that experience by bringing to mind some situation in the past that caused us to have a sense of struggle or suffering.  We can imagine in great deal what it felt like in that circumstance, perhaps to have a feeling of closing down, a sense of needing to protect our heart, to guard our emotions.  Visualizing that in great detail can help us experience the contrast of a closed heart.  If we then freeze-frame that moment in that past experience, and return to the open-heart experience, we can begin to tell the difference between when we are fully open or shut down.  Lastly, we can explore what it might feel like to allow our heart to stay open, even in the difficult situation that we recalled.  We begin to realize that we have the powerful tool of imagery to completely transform our experience of ourselves and the world around us.

Compassion:  When we are in the midst of an afflictive emotion/thought, it can often seem like we are more alone , more isolated.  That moment of shutting down can actually be the best time to practice finding compassion, for ourselves and for others.  Whatever emotion or thought you are experiencing, remember that others have felt/thought it as well, probably are feeling/thinking it in this exact moment somewhere on the planet.  Feel a sense of compassion for yourself and all others who are experiencing the suffering of the afflictive thought/emotion.  From this sense of connection to others, we can begin to widen our sphere of concern, beyond our internal struggle and suffering, to a greater sense of encouraging, supporting and being part of the entire human experience.