A Unified Theory of Happiness

Why Must I Worry: Five Zen Remedies

2014-03-24T10:32:00.001-07:00

Zen Psychology does not begin with a concept of your self or your problems, but with an open mind. The intervention emerges within the sacred space of kind attention, deep listening, and questioning. When I meet a person who wishes to widen his or her inner space to let go of worry, we look at the experience and examine various paths together.

First of all we have to understand that worry is connected to fear which has its place in reality. I don’t think anybody in his or her right mind wishes to be completely fearless. At least after the fact of a close encounter we can appreciate when our internal warning signal is aligned with a red traffic light, preventing us to cross the street and become road kill. However, I don’t know anybody who appreciates being afraid for no good reason, or even just anxious about future events which is the definition of worry. Once we start worrying above and beyond what is needed for our survival, worry builds on worry and can spin out of control. The question is what to do about worrying when it makes no sense. In my opinion, the answers I have found are all good, but it is up to the individual to find which one or ones work the best.

1. Don’t Believe Everything You Think

Thinking is a wonderful tool, but when it is unclear or overused, it can also wreak havoc. The most intelligent person in the world can fall victim to muddled thinking. There are so many errors we can make, listed by Cognitive psychologists. The most fundamental remedy here is to ask simply, “Is it true what I think?” You can write down the dialectic arguments to gain clarity, but the mere question will already put some distance between you and your worry. If you overuse your thinking, you may have to learn to put down your tool that’s gone over to the dark side. Questioning the very act of thinking may be a good beginning, followed by relaxation techniques. If this does not change you profoundly, you might have to:

2. Desensitize Yourself

The story goes: an angry man went to a Zen master and complained about his wife’s horrible wrong-doing with righteous indignation. The master advised him to let himself become completely filled with hate - of course with his wife not in proximity. Then the angry man was supposed to ask himself if he feels better. He didn’t and gave up his anger altogether. Viktor Frankl would’ve called this intervention “paradox”. If you have the right constitution, you might want to worsen your worry and learn to tolerate the worst case scenario. It is possible that you notice right then, it isn’t the end of the world after all. On the other hand, you may have to become more curious and:

3. Learn From Your Anxiety

Your anxiety might just be your best teacher ever. In Zen Buddhism, which is integrated in Zen Psychology, there is no running away from your subjective experiences, but a turning towards and becoming present with them. While experiencing the worry, you might want to ask yourself what it wants to tell you and what its origin is. Learning about the experience while paying attention to it in a meditative way is putting further distance between you and the experience (see also Chapter 9 of my book www.AUnifiedTheoryofHappiness.com). It also informs you of the deeper obstacles that you need to face. Those who can use this remedy successfully come out stronger and wiser than ever. There is an upside to being forced to wrestle with your inner demons. However, most everybody must also train the brain to create new pathways and:

4. Become Mindful

The worried mind is accustomed to seeing only the negative, ignoring the rest of life which is actually an awe-inspiring spectacle of beauty, abundance, and boundless opportunity. Surely, all humans are bestowed with a negative bias by Mother Nature which is a propensity to react to and memorize a negative before a positive event.* In order to fully understand worry, we need to know that this bias is there because we encountered multiple physical threats in our evolutionary history but also potential competitors. We worry that others surpass us. Noticing the positive, love, and collaboration is way harder than noticing the negative, hatred, and envy. Becoming mindful means that we train our brain to notice our whole ordinary existence. Instead of homing in on threats, we need to home in on what is right in our life, which is the “little” things, such as that we are breathing, the beautiful sky, the flower in the crevice. What’s in your perception? New, more positive focal points are to cure you from worrying. If they don’t, you might have to:

5. Question Your Entire Value System

The worrier worries because she or he operates in the physical world in which everything is relative and hierarchical. It seems dismal. You can never be sure of things. It is easy for humans to suffer as we are so aware of the uncertainty in life. The most powerful remedy here is to question whether this relative existence matters as much as we are tempted to believe. What if Mother Nature bestowed us with the gift of a negative bias while there is no hierarchy in reality? What if we are all special and interconnected within one amazing whole called life? The most powerful remedy to worrying may just be the access of the absolute dimension in which we relate and realize, there’s nothing further to accomplish. Life’s a gift. When we realize how great a gift, we may just relax into this reality and celebrate whenever possible.

Originally posted in Psychology Today: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/unified-theory-happiness/201403/what-you-worry

*http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200306/our-brains-negative-bias and

http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcreprints/ilsc98.pdf

The Ultimate Gift of Love

2013-03-01T21:07:00.001-08:00

All experiences are mysterious; love is no exception. We cannot accurately reconstruct any experience because too many vivacious variables are involved, however attentive or scientific we go about the reconstruction. Bits and pieces and the whole of life are twirling around, inside out and outside in, firing and dying fast, often beyond rhyme or reason. Everthing reflects everything in the diamond of life. Because everything is relational in nature, pinning experiences down is impossible. Even though it is invaluable to our all happiness to approximate the truth with the practice of mindfulness, we can never really know ourselves completely. It really feels as if we do know ourselves though, doesn’t it? Most of us have a sense of certainty about who we are, who others are, and how the world is really like. When I was young, I thought I had figured out the entire world, especially my boyfriends. I knew what was right with them and I certainly knew what was wrong with them.…. In Eastern philosophies, this sense of certainty is called an illusion (see my book, Chapter 11 (AUnifiedTheoryofHappiness). And Western scientists have caught up with this insight, noting that we often don’t hear and see what is said or what is really happening *, **. Instead we perceive that which we are prepared to perceive. Give me a bit of information, give me a man in a hoody in twilight, and I make a whole scary story out of that. We have categories for everything. It’s difficult to realize that a good man can lie, that a beautiful woman can have ugly thoughts, that a Zen master can be egotistical, and that a criminal can be gentle and kind. Of course, our sense of certainty about the world fosters the tendency to jump to conclusions which makes the “truth” an even greater, often terrible mystery. Love is so important an experience, almost all of us have looked into that one, deeming it, rightfully, mysterious. Here we can see it. Rarely do we understand why we fall in love with a particular person. What is attractive and intriguing to us is the result of either trillions of beautiful, ugly moments before ever having laid eyes on the chosen one or a few, quantum-leaping, powerful moments that make us do the unthinkable: kiss that frog. Still, I think most people agree on this: Love is a form of saying “Yes” to one another, the ability to open up, become compassionate, and available to somebody the way we think she or he is, flaws included. This “Yes” needs to be said again and again to pass as real love in the long run. Most know that this becomes harder as we get a better taste of the other’s flaws while simultaneously habituating to the attractive, intriguing parts. There are relatively simple Zen things we can do to keep love going, as I have blogged about previously (ten-zen-things-save-your-marriage). But there is one not so simple Zen thing we must do, or better: be, to invite long-term love . To read the rest of this blog, please visit www.PsychologyToday.com and type in Andrea Polard or go to the following link: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/unified-theory-happiness/201302/the-ultimate-gift-love

2013-01-21T16:16:00.001-08:00

Author and Zen Psychologist Dr. Andrea F. Polard invites to: FREE interactive talk about happiness at the Pacific Palisades Library. When: Saturday, Februrary 2, 2 pm www.AUnifiedTheoryofHappiness.com I hope you can make it. Please share this announcement with people from the general area.

Causing A Great Ripple Effect

2013-01-21T16:04:00.001-08:00

When I was young, I wanted to change in major ways. I wanted to be as thin as my sister, as beautiful as Marilyn Monroe, as creative as Einstein and Picasso combined, as trail-blazing as Madame Curie, as loving as Jesus, as natural as Lao Tzu, and as still as a Buddha statue. These wants were sins of my youth. Why? Ambition is good as long as it helps us experience our participation in the stream of life as opposed to survive in it only. This important distinction is laid out in Chapter Four of my book. I am with Mark Twain who wrote, “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” And, believe it or not, I was not ambitious in this grand way because I felt the need to be somebody. I knew deep down I was somebody already. No outside goal, however noble, can ever make us feel complete. I knew this to be true from my early experiences of stillness. In stillness we realize that we are complete and that on the deepest level, there is no reason to strive for anything at all. The reason why my ambition was destructive is that I aimed at a result instead of a path. I pictured the perfect me and was pretty disgusted with myself for being so terribly far away from that ideal. Many current self-help gurus tell us that picturing exactly what we want, gives us what we want. Our intention would make our wish a done-deal. Not in my experience! And not according to scientific studies either, as noted by psychologist Richard Wiseman. http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/books/59-seconds-think-a-little-change-a-lot/. Pursuing a high goal can leave us stifled and thoroughly unprepared for inevitable fallbacks. Therefore the first order of business is to direct our ambition away from an ideal goal and towards a doable path, especially a first step, and possibly a second and third. In other words, what we need is a strategy. To become as thin as my sister or as beautiful as Marilyn Monroe, I needed to forget about their bodies and think of a first step, such as “Stop eating refined sugar” or “Learn to apply make-up.” Just this one thing in each category caused me to lose pounds and look a lot more like Marilyn than previously thought possible. In the long run, I even gave up the silly notion of wanting to look like somebody else. It is so much fun to change for the better, why ruin it with a culturally imposed fantasy? When we focus on our path and actually walk it, we start to love the path. When I started to read books on science, draw charcoal portraits, go for nature walks, and learn about stillness more formally with Zen, I lost the desire to be anybody else but me. It has become a pleasure to see myself grow. And it is quite possible to realize, I assure you, that mistakes are wonderful growth experiences, instead of obstacles to the goal. Indeed, by walking the path instead of chasing our goals we learn that pretty much everything is a glorious mistake. As Dogen Zenji put it, “A Zen master’s life is one continuous mistake.” After identifying the first step of our path, the second order of business is to be....Please continue on reading this blog in @ PsychologyToday.com http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/unified-theory-happiness/201212/how-create-ripple-effect-in-your-and-others-lives

Ten Zen things to save your marriage (or any other form of long-term relationship)

2012-11-04T12:14:00.001-08:00

Zen is not magic,so I am not about to tell you that you have all the power when it comes to your relationship. Even when you are in total peace with yourself or have accepted full responsibility for your baggage, your partner may remain at total war with himself or continue to blame and batter you for his baggage. Some marriages can only be saved with 100 Zen things; some with 1,000; and some cannot be saved at all. However, a lot of marriages can be saved with initiating ridiculously few and easy changes. Zen is noticing the flow of life, which can be quite magical. As a Zen psychologist, I look at any particular aspect of us – any experience, action, characteristic, or event- –as connected to all other aspects inside and outside of ourselves. Everything belongs to an interconnected whole that many refer to as the constantly changing stream of life. When we start ripples on our side of the embankment, they may just reach the other side, softly and without too much effort. Psychologically speaking this means that changing but a few areas of our inner lives and our behaviors can trigger a great chain reaction that may touch our life partner deeply. So we don’t have to change every neurotic or unhealthy little aspect of ourselves to make a profound difference in our marriage. First, let’s focus on undoing some damaging behavior and reduce the discomfort we or our partner experiences as of now. For more suggestions and the science behind it, please refer to my book www.AUnifiedTheoryofHappiness.com. Five Zen things to not do.... To read the whole BLOG that I origically wrote for Psychology Today, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/unified-theory-happiness/201210/ten-zen-things-save-your-marriage. Please go to

Honest Happiness

2012-09-30T22:29:00.000-07:00

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/unified-theory-happiness/201209/the-how-honest-happiness Please go to Psychology Today and check out my newest BLOG. I find it so important to be grounded in reality when it comes to happiness. Isn't reality the way it is, with all its good and bad, enough? Do we really need fantasy? Empty promises? When we are aware, we see life as it is. That will suffice.

Radio Event in Seattle and Internet Radio

2012-09-30T11:56:00.001-07:00

* A UNIFIED THEORY OF HAPPINESS * with Andrea Polard ConsciousSHIFT! > http://ht.ly/e5QGp How to blend the best of both Western & Eastern modes of consciousness for full-life participation & wholeness! * LIVE WED., 10/3! 2pm Pacific! > ht tp://ht.ly/e5QGp Catch the Global #ConsciousSHIFT Show as Andrea Polard joins Host Julie Ann Turner for a thought-provoking dialogue (just crossed 125K+ global subscribers - celebrating with all fellow ConsciousSHIFT-ers! Thanks!) Join us for ConsciousSHIFT >>> http://ht.ly/e5QGp * Discover how combining the can-do drive to achieve with the simple presence of mindful awareness can enable a balanced happiness to take flight ... We'd LOVE for you to join us! (& Help us spread the word! ;-D)

Can You Afford Compassion?

2012-09-04T19:35:00.000-07:00

I invite you to visit psychologytoday.com and search for Andrea Polard to read my first BLOG about happiness and compassion there. I have to say I understand now more than ever how it is most rewarding to talk about love, compassion, or lovingkindness. It feels as though it is the most relevant issue of our lives. The tranquil mind is the soil in which lies the seed of compassion. Our attention is the water. Our practice is watering so that the seed can grow. It is never the wrong time to practice compassion as long as we understand it encompasses ourselves. Too many women believe in abdicating self-interest. We are all part of the ONE. No one left out. Let's keep watering our garden. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/unified-theory-happiness/201208/can-you-afford-compassion With heart, Andrea

Free Retreat and Open House Event

2012-06-30T12:15:00.001-07:00

Los Angeles Center for Zen Psychology Author of A Unified Theory of Happiness: An East-Meets-West Approach to Fully Loving Your Life Dr. Andrea F. Polard 881 Alma Real Dr. #305 B Pacific Palisades, CA 90272 www.andreapolard.com You are cordially invited to come to a free retreat and open house event Saturday, August 11, 2012. After the book signing and give-aways, I'd like to give people a taste of Zen, and the Los Angeles Center for Zen Psychology in general. It is an obligation-free event. You will get the space and time to connect with your true self, which is really no-self, your inner peace, your light, your tranquility. No psychotherapy, but various meditation techniques and compassion exercises are offered. You can come and leave as you please. 11:00 Engaging talk about Happiness, Book signing, inspirational give-aways (Pocket Buddhas, Bookmarks, Happiness Invitations) 12:00 Meditation 1 -- INTRO, SOUND, MUSIC, MOVEMENT 1: 00 PM Mindfulness Hour -- TEA CEREMONY, COMPASSION EXERCISES, WIDENING OF CONSCIOUSNESS EXERCISE 2 :00 PM Meditation 2 -- ZAZEN AND DISCUSSION After each segment, there is time to ask questions and relax. You can come for the whole time or choose a segment. You are welcome to bring a cushion. Please RSVP 310-455-0928 so I can prepare refreshments. With heart, Andrea

Official Book Launching Party in Malibu

2012-04-27T16:01:00.000-07:00

Dear Malibu friends, I would like to invite you to my official book launching party for, A Unified Theory of Happiness: An East-Meets-West Approach to Fully Loving Your Life Where: Malibu Diesel Bookstore; 23410 Civic Center Way; Suite A3; 310-456-9961 When: Sunday May 6th, at 3pm It'll be a celebratory reading, with good wine, cheese, fruits, and lots of curious people like yourself. You will meet me of course and I will sign every single book with heart. I hope to see on Sunday! Warmly, Andrea

Los Angeles Festival of Books 2012

2012-04-19T22:40:00.000-07:00

For the bookworms amongst us, the ones who love to surround themselves with ideas and like to communicate with authors, I wish to recommend the LA Festival of Books at USC, April 21 to April 22. The event is free. I will be at booth # 223 in the Troudsdale building. I will hand out pocket Buddhas and bookmarks for those who tell me that they have read this blog. I love to talk to you, Andrea

Balance

2012-01-02T13:28:00.000-08:00

It is really amazing how we tend to rigidify in our beliefs. Once we detect a good thought, a good method, a good anything, we hold onto that good without noticing that it too is but a puzzle piece, a part of the whole. There is always something else that is needed to complete the picture. Yet we become blind to that which could compete with our original discovery. Our Ego atttaches to what we subscribe.

Those who swear by a particular psychotherapy as a means to promote change by addressing pain and problems,cannot be convinced that there are different venues out there, venues that may be equally or even more effective.

On the other hand, those who swear by a particular transpersonal method or meditation practice to promote change by seeing and smelling the roses, cannot be convinced that dealing with pain and problems can be rewarding.

To be happy, we need to question all our beliefs, be open to new ideas, broaden our consciousness via curiosity, wonder, and kindness.

The mind is like a garden. Some of us tend only to the weeds; others only to the good seeds. Tend to the whole, and you will have balance.

Easiest Meditation Practice Ever

2011-11-20T16:46:00.000-08:00

This video deserves its own blog.
It is grounded into Western life and just very helpful.
Please enjoy!

Warmly, Andrea

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvsmBwOWozI&sns=fb

Laughter

2011-11-19T08:55:00.000-08:00

So, I have not blogged for a while as I had to work with the editors of "The Unified Theory of Happiness: An East-Meets-West to fully Loving Your Life."

It is done. Good.

So much has happened in the meantime. I have founded the Los Angeles Center of Zen Psychology (www.andreapolard.com) and have had my first official interview about my book. I will let you know when "Amazing Mind," an Internet TV show, will be shown.

Work, problems in the world, personal problems...when is there time for happiness?

I cannot tell you how often I reminded myself to smell the flowers, to enjoy my kids, my husband, just sitting. It takes more effort to center ourselves during tough times, well-worth effort though.

The greatest remedy: LAUGHTER.

Laughter comes easy to me usually, but now I had to consciously make sure that laughter can rise up from my belly. Remove obstacles! For example, I limited the time I was going to talk about my problems and work load. Sharing is good until it is no longer, so I made space for laughter. I picked up some funny movies, laughed deliberately with my kids, told jokes, laughed at old ones such as:

How many psychologist does it take to change a light bulb?
One, but the light bulb has to really wanna change.

I made light of the worst shock that we had to endure as a family....

Laughter remains the best medicine...take it frequently.

Warmly, Andrea

Chasing Happiness

2011-06-02T09:12:00.000-07:00

"Shall we chase happiness? Is wanting happiness really a good goal?" are the rhetorical questions most frequently asked by those weary of happiness.

And of course the answer of those in favor of fostering happiness is predictable too, "No. Happiness is as elusive as a rainbow. There is no point in chasing it. However, what we can do is remove obstacles to happiness and give ourselves permission to enjoy it when it comes along."

I shall add to this interchange only one thought:

We should not chase happiness as we should not chase beauty, love, and excellence either. Clinging to any form that our mind fancies is in itself an obstacle to happiness. But that does not mean we ought not to look in the mirror in the morning; to date and build relationship skills; to work hard to acquire a sense of mastery. It just means we ought not to be obsessed or identify with what we deem a worthy goal.

If we dream up how we want to participate in life, acquire and apply the right skills in order to fulfill that dream, and then turn it over, surrender, and be content with what is, if we breathe in and breathe out, dream up and let go, we do a lot more than just remove obstacles: we begin to love life and enjoy all it can be as it comes.

"He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise."
---WILLIAM BLAKE

Monkey Business

2011-05-16T11:21:00.000-07:00

This planet needs every form of kindness it can get; I shall not complain about reciprocal giving: I scratch your back -- you scratch my back. It makes for an efficient way of giving. It works. We only have so much time. If we did not watch over our interest and gave without expecting something in return, we would undoubtedly become exploited, burned out, bankrupted. No, I like good monkeys and the way they handle social needs within the group. I like us doing monkey business.

But it is not fulfilling our human potential. To be a Mensch, we must go beyond looking out for ourselves and our precious genes. Because we are more than gene-driven monkeys, because we can choose to give without getting back, because we are capable of altruism that reaches into uncharted, unknown, unpopular territory, we must act accordingly. Kindness without EGO reflects how much inner space we have, and, at the same time, widens that space.

Happiness needs Goodness

2011-05-09T08:59:00.000-07:00

The thief can feel excitement and even joy when he brings home his stolen goods, but he lacks the tranquility needed for the All. If he was tranquil, he would notice that he was robbed and that he was now poorer for it. Most intuitively agree: we must be good to be happy.

The problem is that we cannot all get a medal for goodness. Those few who are identified for their goodness get all the honors. We praise the Dalai Lama, Mother Theresa, Buddha, Jesus, Moses, saints, celebrities, rich philanthropists, famous freedom fighters; their graves or birthplaces we pilgrimage to. And we know about their contributions without which we would not like to live. We are grateful to them, as much, at least, as envy and other forms of blindness let us.

The rest of us, the vast majority, is asked to be good without honors. We are even asked to be good while being maltreated and despised. Billions of mothers are supposed to give without acknowledgement. Soldiers die in the dirt, forgotten and trampled upon. The good man is punished for his honesty and overlooked when it's time for a promotion. The good kid is often called a nerd, a weirdo, a little mouse.

So, we need the big good guys to come in and change big unfair circumstances. "Life is unfair" will not do to better the world. We need action.

After making this demand and holding the big guys responsible, what are we left with? What is our reward? I could not say it better than George Eliot in his novel "Middlemarch". In it he describes Dorothea, having started out with youthful enthusiasm about doing good, but ending up with little to show for.

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

And having a deep understanding about our incalculably diffusive effect, about our good karma, helps make us feel our part in the All to which we belong.

Unconditional Connection and Happiness

2011-05-03T09:06:00.000-07:00

It makes immediate sense that our happiness depends on our ability to connect; we are most unhappy when we feel isolated. But it takes skill to connect, skill we often lack.

It takes more skill to connect with human beings than with dogs, not only because dogs are simple and always happy when we arrive, but because we do not see them as competitors. They may kill our neighbor's puppy, piss on the carpet, run away and cause an accident that costs us dearly, but we love them anyway. We know that they don't know any better. We don't expect too much. We do not cling. We can forgive.

It does not take very much for us to disconnect from another human being. They may just look different from us or utter one wrong word and viola, we reject them. We expect close to perfection and cling to our every expectation. We are convinced that they know better, or could have known better. We cannot forgive them.

We cannot be a Mensch when we see only the competitor in the other. Up and foremost we are all sentient beings, made up of water and carbon. Up and foremost we are all living on this planet Earth in a universe that gave birth to us against all odds.

Pressure to Be Happy

2011-04-14T14:15:00.000-07:00

There are many pressures in modern life: the pressure to have a job, keep a job, do well at a job, to give birth a certain way, to give birthday presents, to remember birthdays, to make an appointment, to keep an appointment, to look confident, to be confident and so on and so on.

We all know that constant pressure is unhealthy and an antidote to happiness. Still, nobody suggests that there is something inherently wrong with the idea of having a job, birthdays, appointments, confidence.

However, when it comes to happiness, we like to throw the baby out with the bathwater. How is that the mere fact that people feel pressure to be happy (in the US) is reason to declare happiness to be a very bad idea? Why kick that one? I suspect that the Puritans and other religious groups have their hands in singling out happiness.

Happiness, I want to shout, is not a sin, is not dangerous, is actually really good for you, and is pretty inexpensive too. People will not lose their morals as there is no happiness without morals. They won't be selfish as happiness cannot happen in a vacuum. They won't be superficial as that is confusing pleasure with happiness.

While there are many of us who have to relax our efforts to be happy, there are also many who have to relax when pondering happiness. Happiness is good stuff. Breathe in, breathe out...

Compassion And Inner Strength

2011-04-04T08:05:00.001-07:00

Happiness is the umbrella experience for a number of other experiences of which connection may be most important. The "other" is support, comfort, delight, a mirror and a promoter of growth and change only if we can connect with her. This is one reason why all religions teach compassion, promote love, and charity.

When I was young, I was taught to love everybody like a brother or a sister, especially the disadvantaged. My compassion grew in accord with my awareness, but instead of this causing happiness only, it also caused unhappiness. There seemed so little I could do. I felt overwhelmed. "But there is so much you are doing," some nice people would say, "You are making a real difference. Everything has a snowball effect even when you cannot see it." That helped, I must say, until I saw another suffering being. What had gone wrong?

Caring about others takes a lot of inner strength. Before we have that inner strength, compassion can burn us out and up. That inner strength grows slowly. And only when we are recipients of compassion, have learned to be kind to ourselves, and have cultivated a sense of inner peace and tranquility, will it cause happiness. The more peaceful we grow, the greater the space for Being, no matter how Being is expressed.

Quietly we can sit, accepting the world 'as is', surrendering to what we cannot change, never becoming tired to changing what we can change. A compassionate heart needs to be held by something even greater, something we can only deeply experience when we are still, something that is always good and never lets us down, which some call God or the hand of God, and others Being, or the One to which we all belong.

Wrestling with the Word "Happiness"

2011-02-15T13:30:00.000-08:00

Most people of the modern world take no issue with the word "happiness." Their associations are largely positive. Accordingly most people want to be happy, appear happy, and share their happy experience with their peers.

But then there are those whose emotions become stirred up almost automatically when confronted with the word, as if it was a red flag only they can see and against which the rest of us must be warned. Negative connotations of happiness are manifold, such as it being a chase, an empty, impossible dream, a sign of decadence and of a spiritual void.

Ironically, I agree with most of the warning labels that this group intents to attach to the word "happiness." I concur that many chase their own tails. I agree that many have unrealistic expectations about positive emotions, expectations manufactured by big business, enhancing greediness for pleasure, comfort, and security. And yet.

I wrote a book on happiness. I have claimed the word "happiness" for a higher purpose. I have made the word my own, or better, made it that which most thinkers intended it to be. After analyzing hundreds of explications about happiness, I have come to understand that "happiness" more often than not stands for the experience of being alive. And who in his right mind does not want that?

Fighting happiness as a worthy goal and/or path is mostly based on a semantic problem, a problem I hope to help overcome.

Is Happiness Possible in our Broken Reality?

2011-02-10T18:16:00.000-08:00

A new book about the benefits of playing computer games makes the claim that reality is broken, explaining why we seek the unbroken virtual reality of games. This I learned recently on the radio. My first reaction was confusion. Why would anybody describe our reality as broken? It did not take me long to back-track my sense of reality when I am interrupted, distracted, obstracted, and bombarded with stimuli of a world that wants my attention. Sometimes there seems no end to the demands on me. My kids want my love; business wants my money; friends my time; schools my upmost devotion...

But is my reality broken? At best I could say that we humans are making it hard on ourselves to maintain unbroken attention. This, however, has been a long-standing problem of Homo Sapiens. In one way or the other we are standing in our own way to experience peace, our participation in this one world, our happiness.

I don't think we should blame modern times for our experience of reality. I don't think we find any answers in games or in any other escape. Living is not easy, but it is not because reality is broken, but because we dissect reality with our perception and our anxiety. Reality has always been just one interconnected whole. If we paid attention to our reality, it would not appear broken. Happiness is possible when we come from inner tranquility, regardless of outer turmoil.

Ideals and Happiness

2010-12-02T13:39:00.000-08:00

Working towards a higher goal provides direction and impetus, setting us up on the path of happiness, facilitating the steps we take. Ideals come in many shapes and colors and include: becoming a compassionate self, a non-dual self, a tranquil self, a real self, a true self, a good person, a master, a light, or love. Without aspiring to an ideal we are tempted to fall back onto unconscious, primitive goals to secure our survival such as gaining relative advantages with power, money, security and comfort.
And yet, and yet.
If we put ourselves under pressure with our ideal, it no longer serves our happiness, but begins to stand in the way. Guilt and shame are common responses. But there are even worse responses, such as self-deception and outward lies. Some solve the tension between real self and ideal self by pretending to have arrived at the ideal. At this point we better say: "Hokus-pokus," because perfect human beings do not exist, a fact that should be perfectly alright with us.
No being is perfect and will ever be. Only Being is, and, luckily, we are part of that.

At the End of the Path of Happiness

2010-10-16T10:19:00.001-07:00

After fulfilling our basic needs to secure our survival, needs that do not include a new computer how ever much we want one, after committing to the path of happiness with a good understanding of what happiness is, after assuring our mind/body fitness with good nutrition and exercise we enjoy, after learning how to relate to the world of the many and the world of the One, after practicing the skills necessary for these relations, it seems to me that there is one more thing left to do and that is: engaging in life-long dialogue, learning from and with others because, I am sure you knew, our path of happiness has no end.

At The End Of Our Path

2010-10-16T10:02:00.001-07:00

After fulfilling our basic needs to secure our survival, needs that do not include a new computer how ever much we think of a machine as "basic", after commiting to the path of happiness with a good understanding of what happiness is, after assuring our mind/body fitness with good nutrition and exercise that is enjoyable,after relating to the world of the many in a way that creates flow, after relating to the world of One in a way that makes us feel whole and fully integrated, after practicing the many skills necessary for these relations, skills that can, of course, be learned in The Two Wings of Happiness, it seems to me that there is only one more thing left to do and that is for the rest of our lives: engaging in dialogue, learning from and with others, because actually, as you sure know, the path of happines has no end.