What is Happiness?
Happiness has to do with how quickly you vibrate, how intelligently you perceive your world, how subtle your awareness field is, how deep you are, how aware of your eternal part you are. That’s what creates happiness. Pleasure just comes from a temporary working out of things in a way that you like. But it doesn’t last.
As soon as circumstance changes, you’re unhappy if it doesn’t change in a way that you consider favorable. Happiness is endemic. It’s part of us. And Buddhism is the process of getting to that part of us that is always eternally happy, bringing that happiness into our physical and mental and emotional life and experiencing it, enjoying it and knowing it. Meditation is a process of speeding up the vibration.
Happiness comes from self-knowledge. Self-knowledge means that you have understood your mind, and contrary to common believe your mind is not just a series of thoughts that you experience, but your mind, really, is the whole universe.
Happiness is a state of mind. And the key to happiness is being able to disconnect your life from your perceptions, from the way you see things now. There are only states of mind, and you need to develop the discipline and the clarity of mind to see things as they really are. If you’re not happy, it’s because you are in what we call illusion. Illusion means you’re not seeing things as they really are. If you saw things as they really were, you would be happy automatically. You don’t have to do anything to be happy.
“Happiness is a warm puppy.” – says Rama. In other words, happiness is the things around you, and if what’s around you is a warm puppy, then just seeing that puppy you will be happy. You don’t have to do anything; you don’t have to add anything. But if you don’t see that, if you walk by that warm puppy or you want to kick him, well, you’re not happy because you’re in a state of delusion, like most human beings are. Your job is to raise yourself out of that state of delusion. The following happiness strategies will help you with that.
Learn and practice mindfulness
When we change the view we have of our life, of existence, of the world we live in, then everything changes. Including the world. But how do you do that? How can you change the way you look at the life? Besides meditation there is another practice, mindfulness, which, if practiced earnestly, will help you do that. Mindfulness will gradually – and sometimes in leaps and bounds –help you change your view of the world. How much, and how fast, will depend on how intensely you practice and how happy you want to be.
Pursue a different career
“The purpose of work is to make enough money to exclude the abrasiveness, to shelter yourself, to live happily and successfully in a material world” says Rama. With money you can also assist others, choose to pay for your spiritual practice or just have fun. Essentially career is a Buddhist practice. Working occupies a large part of our waking moments and if we don’t use those 8 hours to work towards our spiritual goals, we’re missing out on a big opportunity and are doing ourselves quite a disservice.
Practice Selfless Giving
We have two choices in life. Choice #1 is to focus on how to fulfill our own desires, to do things that make us feel better, to make ourselves happy. Choice #2 is to focus our energy on making other people happy, to ignore our wants, and instead of being concerned about how to make ourselves happy, we are concerned about how to make others happy. These are the two choices we are faced with day in and day out. Most people, although they won’t admit it, end up choosing Choice #1. But is that really the better choice?
Practice Gratitude
Gratitude is self giving in its purest form. Whenever you feel gratitude growing inside your heart, you are diverting your attention from your ego self and directing it towards something or someone else. Gratitude enables you to transcend the ego and become conscious of your limited self. Feel grateful for the fact that you’re alive, that you can sit and feel grateful. Feel grateful just to be, to be happy. But how?
Pursue Meaningful Life Goals
Goals give us a sense of purpose, a feeling of having control of over our lives. They can help us get fired up, enthusiastic and motivated about our future. People who strive for something personally significant, whether it’s learning a new craft, changing careers or becoming spiritually more advanced, are far happier than those who don’t have strong dreams or aspirations. And it’s not about achieving your goal that will make you happy (although for a short time that will, too) but the process of working towards it.
Start a Meditation Practice
As Rama says: “Meditation is the short path to happiness.” It is the way to become completely happy, it streamlines the process. It takes you beyond the desire-aversion operating system that offers very limited happiness and a great deal of frustration.
Stop Watching TV – Especially the News
What does watching TV have to do with your happiness? If you’re very disciplined about what you’re watching (i.e. movies that empower you) and how you’re watching (i.e. without commercials) it can even be a good thing. However, the way most people consume the content – it will do them more harm than good.
Journal Your Way to Happiness
Keeping a journal has a myriad of benefits, but one of the main ones is that it helps you become more mindful, more aware and clear of your thoughts, intentions, emotions. Journaling brings you into that state of mindfulness; past frustrations and future anxieties lose their edge in the present moment. It calls a wandering mind to attention, from passivity to actively engaging with your thoughts.
Practice Smiling
We become what we focus on. This is how the mind works. If you’re just focusing on unhappy things all day long, unhappy states of mind, then you will become unhappy. But if you spend time focusing on happy states of mind, hopeful states of mind, then it will grow in you. We aren’t anything in particular. There is no self. There are only ideas and states of mind. You can generate whatever state of mind or ideas you would like, and that’s what you’ll live in, my friend, that’s the quality of your life — what’s inside your mind. Most people don’t generate it, they just experience whatever happens to be lying around. But in Zen, you’re going to begin to gain control of what you experience, not necessarily externally, but internally — your reaction to things.
Learn to Love Yourself
A large part of the path of love is learning to love yourself – not to love yourself in the egotistical sense but just to enjoy being with yourself, hanging out with yourself, doing things by yourself. And the difficult part: you have to love yourself even when you don’t measure up to your own expectations.
Cultivate a Personality
Another happiness strategy to enhance your state of mind is to reshape your personality, and take on the caretaker personalities.
You can adopt caretaker personalities to work in the world. These are uniforms that you wear, clothing that you put on and that you also take off. Wear that caretaker personality which is apropos, which is appropriate, for what you are doing. Don’t be afraid to be creative and change these caretaker personalities. Modify them as you will and you’ll find that they tend to modify themselves in time.