wellbeing – Page 110 – Mindfulbalance

Noticing, naming …gratefulness and happiness

July 31, 2012July 31, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

It may sound corny, but the research clearly demonstrates that you would be happier if you cultivated an “attitude of gratitude.” Gratitude helps us thwart hedonic adaptation. Hedonic adaptation is illustrated by our remarkable capacity rapidly to adjust to any new circumstance or event. This is extremely adaptive when the new event is unpleasant, but not when a new event is positive. So, when you gain something good in your life – a romantic partner, a genial officemate, recovery from illness, a brand-new car – there is an immediate boost in happiness and contentment. Unfortunately, because of hedonic adaptation, that boost is usually short-lived. As I’ve argued, adaptation to all things positive is essentially the enemy of happiness, and one of the keys to becoming happier lies in combating its effects, which gratitude does quite nicely. By preventing people from taking the good things in their lives for granted – from adapting to their positive life circumstances – the practice of gratitude can directly counteract the effects of hedonic adaptation.

Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness

Non-productive patterns of thought

July 27, 2012July 24, 2012 Karl Duffy3 Comments

When we sit and try to quieten the mind, the first thing we usually notice is how many thoughts we have. For those who are beginning meditation this is what strikes first. However, even those who have practiced meditation for some time can still have times when the thinking mind is very busy One way of working with that busyness is to broadly label the thoughts, thus allowing them pass through and reducing the amount of weight which we give to them. This has the effect of turning down the amount of energy associated with them and creating more space and calm in the mind. In other words, rather than getting caught up, we step out of the stream:

If you label your disruptive thoughts, you will get an idea of your habitual thought patterns. We use one descriptive word such as ‘future,’ ‘past,’ ‘planning’, ‘remembering’, ‘wanting’, ‘rejecting’, ‘resisting’, ‘bored’, ‘disinterest’, ‘nonsense’, ‘fantasy’, ‘dream’. It doesn’t matter which word comes to mind first. Eventually you can see a pattern, for example that you are constantly planning. When you notice your thought patterns in this way, you can see they are non-productive and drop them.

Ayya Khema

Some things will be imperfect today

July 26, 2012July 23, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

Don’t think peace of mind only comes when you have fixed up all your problems and finished all your business. All your worrying, all your striving and struggling, has it ever got you where you really want to be? You can’t control the world and change it the way you would like it. Therefore you can only find peace of mind and achieve the meaning of life when by embracing the imperfections of life. How do you do that? By knowing that imperfection is in the nature of the world. So make peace with imperfection.

Ajahn Brahm

Some thoughts on fear…

July 24, 2012July 23, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Very early we all begin our attempt to protect ourselves against the threatening occurrences that pop up regularly. In the fear caused by them, we begin to contract. And the open, spacious character of our young life feels pushed through a funnel into a bottleneck of fear. Once we begin to use language the rapidity of this contracting increases. And particularly as our intelligence grows, the process becomes really speedy: now we not only try to handle the threat by storing it in every cell of our body, but (using memory) we relate each new threat to all of the previous ones – and so the process compounds itself.

Charlotte Joko Beck

…and letting go of an idea of perfection

July 23, 2012July 21, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

When we seek happiness through accumulation, either outside of ourselves–from other people, relationships, or material goods–or from our own self-development, we are missing the essential point. In either case we are trying to find completion. But according to Buddhism, such a strategy is doomed. Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.

Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

Noticing our sense of entitlement

July 22, 2012July 20, 2012 Karl Duffy2 Comments

Learning to live from genuine happiness requires first seeing what blocks it. One of the major blocks is our deeply rooted sense of entitlement. In fact, this is a big part of the “problem” of happiness: we firmly believe that we should be happy. We think it’s our right, and consequently, we feel entitled to it, even if we’re not clear what happiness is, except to feel good. This expectation can have many faces. For example, we often feel entitled to good health, expecting that we can and should be able to stay youthful and physically fit. When life comes along to greet us with illness or injury we can easily sink into a stupor of frustration and even despair. Sometimes just getting a cold will trigger our anxieties over losing control and feeling powerless. This sense of entitlement — which basically says that life should go the way we want and expect it to go — even tells us we shouldn’t have to experience discomfort. Then, when we do experience discomfort, we feel that something is wrong; we might get angry and feel it’s unfair, or we may feel sorry for ourselves.