Happiness is a Skill

Transcript

So today on Facebook I started writing something about the nature of happiness and I got a bit carried away and started writing a lot about this so I thought for today I could read this out to you so you can hopefully soak up some of the positivity that I’m trying to express from the heart of hearts, from my solar plexus.

It goes like this.

If you don’t have money, or don’t understand money, you might believe that money comes easily to some, with little effort, or that the majority of wealth is inherited.
Likewise, if you’re unhappy or depressed, and don’t understand happiness, you might believe that happiness comes easily to some, and your case is just a question of bad luck.

Surely some people have won the lottery of birth or happiness roulette… but many people who are happy are so because they have put in the effort of integrating their “negative” experiences in a way that, perhaps counter-intuitively, adds to their happiness.

They don’t always need to distract from their pain, because, as more whole beings, they can put pain within a greater context, like a dissonant chord in a majestic symphony.

If you’re not aware that such a thing is possible, then you might assume that people just simply never had negative experiences. Perhaps you even judge them as being simpletons, or somehow weak because they never had to deal with the depth of suffering that you do.

We might call this “the synthesis blindspot” – being unable to imagine how someone integrated certain classes of experience, we believe that they never had them.

That is possible, and true in some cases. It’s also possible that people who have learnt to be truly happy have experienced much deeper suffering, leading to what is called “the way of the cross”, a point of pain so intense that leads a person to say “no more; I will do whatever it takes to enjoy life.”
I know that people who are depressed will often reject the viewpoints of people who are not depressed.

They say, this person has never been depressed, and so he doesn’t understand my struggle, and so he has nothing to teach me. In fact, whether someone has been depressed or not can be irrelevant. If you want to learn to fly a plane, go to someone who knows how to fly a plane. If you want to model happiness, go to a happy person.

There may be exceptions to this, but my experience is that truly happy people are those who have learnt how to be unhappy. They do not run from unhappiness. They embrace it, explore it, without necessarily dwelling on it.

They understand it, and yes, they are even grateful for it. They may even find ways to take on the suffering of others in order to ease their burden. The rule of thumb is, a greater capacity for suffering leads to a greater capacity for happiness.

People tell a story about Ram Dass… He is experiencing intense physical pain, a back problem or similar. Our Teacher’s comment: with joy, “I like my pain.”

It is possible to enjoy one’s pain, not in a way that desires pain, not in a way that is attached to pain, experiencing it just as you might the bloom of the huachuma cactus’s flowers. It arrives without anticipation, it allows wonder, and quickly it is gone, without cause for missing it.

Of course you say, it is hard. Maybe it is, or maybe it is the easiest thing you’ve ever done… to get over yourself, to let go of your worries and watch them float away like boats on Loi Krathong.

Maybe it is so hard simply because we don’t want to believe it’s easy, because we believe our suffering with difficulty gives us purpose, gives us identity. Maybe we don’t need purpose, or identity.

Maybe happiness is more important than purpose or identity. Maybe happiness can be our purpose and our identity.

Happiness may be hard. If we make our priorities well, then sometimes hard things come at the top of the list.

Be well and God bless.

So that’s my message for today. Happiness is a skill.

Happiness is available to you.

Thank you for listening, thank you for looking for opportunities to be happy. And seeking different strategies to bring happiness into your life and the lives of others.

Thanks for listening, have a great day, I’ll talk to you soon.