All of us have a secret desire to be seen as heroes, saints, martyrs.
We are afraid to be children, to be ourselves.
Jean Vanier, Community and Growth
Tag: Look for Happiness
The garden of love
The garden of
Love is green without limit, and yields many fruits other than sorrow
and joy.
Love is beyond either condition:
without spring,
without autumn,
it is always fresh.
Rumi
Wonder and Happiness
A person I have known for some years now just recently got engaged. It is a time of celebration and joy. Moments like these bring a smile to all and has made me realize how much I like the word happiness However I am slow to use it and it nearly always provokes a strange look on the faces of those who hear. It seems almost presumptious to speak as if we have any right to expect full happiness. And yet happiness has been the concern of humans since earliest times, as we can see in the Greek Philosophers reflections on happiness. And we are told that among Jesus’ first words in his early Sermon on the Mount was “Happy are those who…. ” In more recent times, Daniel Gilbert has made the focus of his study happiness and what makes us happy, as seen in his excellent book Stumbling on Happiness.
We are told that happiness is deep within us, even if we do not feel it. However, it seems to me that we have to work at it every day. It can occur even when times are tough, if we cultivate a spirit of noticing and wonder. We can practice the brain’s capacity for happiness by explicitly noting to ourselves the moments which are pleasant in each day, even the simplest. As in response to my friend’s engagement we can mentally toast these moments. And we can go further: we can create occasions of celebration in even the smallest events in our lives. This reminds us that life is not there just to be endured but to be celebrated. As Brother Roger of Taize used to say, we should ensure that the spring of jubilation will never dry up in our hearts.
The eye is meant to see things. The soul is here for its own joy.
Rumi
The Eighty Fourth Problem
Stories about ourselves and how we are doing arise non-stop in our minds and influence our beliefs about reality and about what happens in each day. These mental impressions – thoughts and feelings – often revolve around some sense that we are not in the right place, that something is wrong with us. This feeling that our life is out of sync or that from time to time we do not know where we are going is not new. The Buddha’s fundamental insight, more than 2500 years ago, was that there is an unsatisfactory quality to our lives and that we are frequently aware of being out of balance. It is just the nature of life. We often have to deal with uncertainty and difficulties.
As told in the story of the farmer meeting the Buddha, we will always have our “eighty-three problems” – anxieties about our career or finances, difficulties in relationships, fears about sickness and health, getting the balance right in living with others, and so on. It is the “eighty-fourth problem” – that we think all of these should not be in our lives from time to time – that adds to our difficulty and makes our day full of distress. When we fall into this eight fourth problem we go on to make ourselves more miserable over the fact that we have problems. We judge our situation harshly because we are lacking a feeling of ease. We feel we have to “get rid of” something. We so quickly make the move from “something” is going wrong at the moment, to “I” am wrong, and read events as some sort of sign of an interior or psychological malaise. One thing which meditation does is allow us sit more easily with the gaps in our experience without panicking or needing to fix them.
Suffering becomes a block in our sense of being when any position is taken as an identity – when how you are becomes who you are. When we wake up to how human life on this planet actually is, and stop running away or building walls in our heart, then we develop a wiser motivation in our lives.
Keeping our heart limitless
There are days when we have experiences which make us feel that it is better to close our hearts. However, all the great wisdom traditions encourage us towards a softening of the heart, toward a warm opening to others, even when that seems to be dangerous. As humans, a huge portion of our energy each day is spent dealing with anxiety and the fear of losing safety. These can arise suddenly and take all our attention, encouraging us to close, to become cool, to harden arou
nd ourselves. In Buddhism, one antidote to this is to cultivate an opening toward others in “Metta” or Loving-kindness practice. Metta has the connotations of “spreading” or “expanding”. It is radiant. It reaches out. It is an active friendliness in interpersonal relationships which we cultivate. It works against the fears which make our lives narrow and dark, and the tendency to dualistically split our lives into “me” and “them”
As a mother at the risk of her own life protect her child, her only child, even so should one cultivate a limitless heart with regard to all beings. So with a heart of boundless friendliness should one cherish all living beings; radiating kindness over the entire world.
The Buddha, Sutta Nipata I, 8 b – The Metta Sutta.
Who others really are
To relate to others compassionately is a challenge. Really communicating to the heart and being there for someone else…means not shutting down on that person, which means, first of all, not shutting down on ourselves. This means allowing ourselves to feel what we feel and not pushing it away. It means accepting every aspect of ourselves, even the parts we dont like. Only in an open, non-judgmental space can we acknowledge what we are feeling. Only in an open space, where we’re not all caught up in our own version of reality, can we see and hear and feel who others really are, which allows us to be with them and communicate with them properly.
Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart
Mindfulbalance 