Real Happiness

Mindfulness allows us to enjoy pleasant experiences without that extra thing we do, which is to grasp at the pleasure in an attempt to keep it from changing. In fact, we’re often so preoccupied with trying to make a pleasurable experience stay that we’re unable to enjoy it while it lasts.

When we can’t let the moment in front of us be what it is (because we’re afraid that if it’s good, it will end too soon; if it’s bad, it’ll go on forever; and if it’s neutral, it’ll bore us to tears), we’re out of balance. Mindfulness restores that balance; we catch our habitual reactions of clinging, condemning, and zoning out, and let them go.

Often we can take the lessons we learn from observing one single activity and apply them to the rest of our life. See if you can use a part of your everyday routine as a meditation, a time of coming into the moment, paying attention to your actual experience, learning about yourself, deepening your enjoyment of simple pleasures, or perhaps seeing how you could approach a task more skillfully.

A reporter asked another boy participating in the program to describe mindfulness. “It’s not hitting someone in the mouth,” the eleven-year-old said. His answer is wise, wide, and deep. It illustrates one of the most important uses of mindfulness—helping us deal with difficult emotions. It suggests the possibility of finding the gap between a trigger event and our usual conditioned response to it, and of using that pause to collect ourselves and change our response. And it demonstrates in a very real way that we can learn to make better choices.

The four steps in dealing with an emotion mindfully—recognition, acceptance, investigation, and nonidentification (some teachers of meditation like to use the acronym RAIN)—can also be applied to thoughts. We tend to identify with our thoughts in a way we don’t identify with our bodies. When we’re feeling blue and thinking lots of sorrowful thoughts, we say to ourselves, I am a sad person. But if we bang our funny bone, we don’t usually say to ourselves, I am a sore elbow. Most of the time, we think we are our thoughts. We forget, or have never noticed, that there’s an aspect of our mind that’s watching these thoughts arise and pass away. The point of mindfulness is to get in touch with that witnessing capacity. Sometimes I ask students to imagine each thought as a visitor knocking at the door of their house. The thoughts don’t live there; you can greet them, acknowledge them, and watch them go.

Mindfulness practice isn’t meant to eliminate thinking but rather to help us know what we’re thinking when we’re thinking it, just as we want to know what we’re feeling when we’re feeling it.

Throughout history, wise observers of human behavior have pinpointed over and over again a core group of unhealthy human tendencies that are obstacles to happiness. They’re the states of mind that distract us in meditation practice, and trip us up in the rest of our lives. Broadly speaking, they are: desire, aversion, sloth, restlessness, and doubt.

I really want this car. Should I get this upholstery or that upholstery? What about the sound system? It’s pricey, but I really love it. How can I swing the payments? I’ve got to have it!—instead of turning our attention to the most important question: “What does it feel like to want something so much?” The practice of mindfulness is to take the state itself—in this case, the feeling of desire—as the object of meditation. Can you feel that leaning-forward acquisitiveness, the vulnerability, the unease, the insecurity that is part of grasping, trying to hold on? Can you just be with those feelings and not get involved in the story?

“It is better to do nothing than to waste your time.” I loved it. Doing nothing in this case really means not doing many of the things we usually do, like holding on to or hiding from our experience, so that we can get new perspectives, new insights, and new sources of strength.

The investigators concluded that the practice of lovingkindness meditation trains the brain to make us more empathic and more capable of reading subtle emotional states.

“What arises in our experience is much less important than how we relate to what arises in our experience.”

“Just Put Your Body There” I once complained to my teacher Munindra-Ji about being unable to maintain a regular practice. “When I sit at home and meditate and it feels good, I’m exhilarated, and I have faith and I know that it’s the most important thing in my life,” I said. “But as soon as it feels bad, I stop. I’m disheartened and discouraged so I just give up.” He gave me quite a wonderful piece of advice. “Just put your body there,” he said. “That’s what you have to do. Just put your body there. Your mind will do different things all of the time, but you just put your body there. Because that’s the expression of commitment, and the rest will follow from that.”