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Our Two Online Meditation Events, Starting August 1st!
1. Learn to
Go Deeper Into Stillness
Letting Go Into Joy is
particularly helpful if you want to go deeper into meditation and
to experience greater stillness and peace of mind. It's a 50 day
meditation event in which we will explore jhana — a state of
calm, focused, and joyful attention. Jhana is what modern
psychology calls a “flow state,” where we're effortlessly and joyfully
absorbed in our experience.
This flow state is not something we make happen.
It’s something we let happen. This course will help
you to let go of unhelpful thinking, emotions, and physical tension, so
that you can experience more calm, energy, pleasure, joy, and
focused attention — both in your meditation practice and in your daily
life.
2. 14 Days
of Mindfulness!
Learn to practice acceptance, to choose your
thoughts, and to calm your emotions, in order to reduce stress,
and promote feelings of wellbeing. This all can come about through
the clinically proven method of mindfulness, which has been shown
to improve both mental and physical health.
Over the 14 days of our Mindfulness Meditation Challenge, you
will feel calmer and more in control of your life, and learn
how to set up a daily meditation habit.
This event is suitable for people of all levels of experience,
including complete beginners.
Sign up now to
help establish a rock-solid daily meditation practice and to experience
the benefits of mindful living!
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Happiness
Is Not a Choice
by Bodhipaksa
 The saying that
“happiness is a choice” is extremely common. There’s a book by that
title, as well as a gazillion articles. They all say that you can
choose to be happy.
It’s not true. Happiness is not a choice.
Or at least it’s not strictly true that happiness is
a choice. There’s a grain of truth here; we can influence our
happiness. But happiness is a feeling, and we can’t directly choose our
feelings.
What is true is that happiness is the result of our choices.
We can choose actions that will bring long-term
happiness. We can choose what we say. We can choose our attitudes. We
can choose to have thoughts that increase our happiness.
You might be thinking, “So, tell me what these choices
are, so I can go and make them and then be happy!” as if they were
major life decisions, like choosing the right home or the right job.
But it’s more fine-grained than that. It’s a case of looking at what
we’re thinking, saying, and doing, and making choices about the nature
of each of those actions. It’s a question of making moment-by-moment
choices, not big, once-in-a-lifetime choices (although those can be
important too).
We need to be aware of what we’re doing physically,
and how that makes us feel. So, for example, when I’m chopping
vegetables I often find that I’m clenching my jaw for some reason. When
I’m working on the computer I often find that my breathing is a little
tight. These things contribute to a general sense of emotional tension
that inhibits my happiness. As soon as I relax my jaw or let my
breathing go back to a normal pattern, my being moves more in the
direction of happiness. Relaxing promotes happiness.
I’ve often recommended that people watch Amy Cuddy’s TED talk on how our
posture influences how we feel. Stand or sit in an open and expansive
way, and you’ll feel more confident. Confidence leads to happiness. Stand
or sit in a hunched, defensive, closed way, and you’ll feel more
fearful and unhappy. This is a great illustration of my point. We
choose our actions, and those actions change our level of happiness. We
don’t just simply “choose to be happy.” If you try to choose happiness
without changing the conditions that are undermining your happiness,
nothing much is going to change. You’ll probably just get depressed.
We’re always going to have thoughts arising that
contribute to our unhappiness. When you make a mistake it’s natural to
think, “Man, that was stupid!” You can make a choice not to buy into
and believe such thoughts, however. When we buy into our thoughts we
magnify them. We take “Man, that was stupid!” and elaborate and expand
it into a story about how useless we are and how we’re never going to
be good at anything. And that proliferation of thought makes us
unhappy. Simply letting the thought “Man, that was stupid!” pass
through the mind without engaging with it makes us happier. Encouraging
a more realistic, honest, and skillful thought, like “It’s OK. We all
make mistakes,” helps us to be more at ease with ourselves, and thus to
be happier. We’re not choosing happiness. We’re choosing how we think,
and that can lead to us being happier.
We can choose to pay attention to our feelings, and
that will make us happier. When my attention is caught up in my
thoughts, I sometimes lose touch with my feelings, and my experience
becomes kind of cold and hard. But when I pay attention to my heart (an
area of the body innervated by the emotionally important vagus nerve)
I’m more emotionally open and sensitive. I feel more connected with
myself and with others. That’s enriching, like a black and white movie
suddenly turning into color.
We can choose how we speak. Connecting honestly and
kindly with others builds up bonds that lead to happiness arising in
the short term (saying kind things to others makes both them and us
happy in that moment) and in the long term (having positive connections
with others gives us support when times get hard, and makes the good
times better). Again, we’re choosing actions, not happiness. But those
actions lead to happiness.
Happiness arises from a million momentary choices.
This is why we need to cultivate mindfulness. Without the ability to
monitor our actions moment by moment, the mind will habitually and
automatically default to decisions that make us unhappy.
Feelings like happiness are, according to Buddhist
teachings, not actions. They’re not things we do. They’re the results of
actions. They’re the consequences of our actions.
You can’t choose happiness. But if you want to be happier, you can make
choices that allow that to happen.
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