What can Mindfulness Meditation do for you?

One of the arms of the Buddhist Eightfold Path is "Right View."  There are many meanings to this, but one that I find under-utilized is the idea that when we set out on the path, it is useful to have a "view" to where we are going.  It's like looking at the map before we set out.  It's also useful once you've been on the path for a while, because then you can take stock of where you've been.  In this context, I want to consider some ways of thinking about what the goals of Mindfulness Meditation are.

Broadly speaking, there are two styles of meditation practice - Familiarizing and Cultivating.  Mindfulness meditation focuses primarily on the first of these.

It is important to start the journey by familiarizing yourself with your mind and emotions.  How can you change or improve something until you understand how it works?  If my car isn't running smoothly, just wishing for it to work won't help. Buying new seat covers or putting an inspirational CD in the CD player won't make it run more smoothly.  By knowing how the car works, we can focus our efforts to the place that can actually make a difference.  Similarly, we need clarity about our circumstances and ourselves to be able to make a difference, but often when things aren't going the way we want, we get caught up in blaming and feeling that it "shouldn't be this way," and then we make a bigger mess.

Mindfulness meditation starts us on the path to understanding how our minds work.  As we gain familiarity, it also begins to cultivate three properties: Tranquility, Stability, and Clarity.

Tranquility is often one of the goals people explicitly have when they begin meditating - they want to slow the mind down and have some sense of peacefulness or stress reduction.  It is worth noting that people often also have the belief that the goal is to stop thinking.  This is not correct.  The mind will always think - that's what it does.   The goal is to not be so hooked by the thoughts.

As we slow the thoughts down, we begin to be better at focusing our attention intentionally rather than being so easily distracted by the next thought.  This increased stability is sometimes called one-pointed focus.

As we gain stability and tranquility, we also begin to gain some clarity by seeing deeper into our true natures.

The classic analogy in Buddhism is if you scoop a glass of water out of a muddy river, it is undrinkable at first. There is too much sediment floating around in it, and no amount of effort will change that. You can't get the mud to settle out by shaking it hard or trying to force it to the bottom. Instead, if you let it sit quietly, the impurities will slowly settle to the bottom of the glass, leaving the water tranquil and clear.

The goal of meditation, therefore, is not to get rid of thoughts, but instead (1) to understand how our thoughts are constantly changing, impermanent, and empty, (2) to stop believing them as if they are "true," and (3) to stop believing that your thoughts are you.  These realizations lessen the control that your thoughts have over you, and opens up the way that you can begin to change.

Another way we can think about Mindfulness Meditation is that the focus is always on being present.  But what do we mean by that?

There are at least three different aspects of "being present" in Buddhist practice.  The most basic and stereotypical is a heightened state of focus.  You can test this by staring at an object or space on the wall. You may notice as you focus on it that the rest of the room may darken, blur, or get wiggly.  This one-pointed focus is ironically equally a rejection of all other things that are also present.  You can, however, learn to focus on the target yet also notice all of the things in the periphery, noticing the full environment. Therefore, heightened focus doesn't necessarily have to just be about one object (such as the breath), although it's often beneficial to start here.

The second way of being present is noticing a heightened vividness, vibrancy, clarity, and specificity of your experience.  I notice this most clearly doing walking meditations, where I am astounded by the colors, the vividness, and the detail that exists in the world.  Each leaf and blade of grass is distinct and clear and interesting.

The third way of being present is focusing on the Karmic momentum of each moment and being present in the "gap."  Ethan Nichtern describes this as "where the past is creating a tremendous momentum of feeling and impulse, but we haven't yet figured out how we're going to react to it....it's the awkward vulnerability between impulse and action."  That is, based on all of our past conditioning and all of the present causes and provocations and emotions, we experience some feeling.  We usually react to these feelings with habitual responses, but what if we didn't?  What if we instead were present with feeling the momentum of the moment?  (This is the gap between steps 7 and 8, or between 8 and 9 of the 12 Nidanas for those of you who want to be Buddhist geeks.)

So these are three more aspects we gain from Mindfulness Meditation.

What takes our mindfulness away?  Strong emotions and habits -- the momentum of the past and all of our conditioning and the present causes.  As discussed in a previous post, we tend to react to each new stimulus with either grasping, pushing it away, or ignoring it.  These are the Three Poisons of greed, aggression, and ignorance.  Every time we act based on one of these feelings, we strengthen our habitual responses, so we can no longer see the gap between feeling and our habitual reaction to the feeling.

Once triggered, emotions have strong energy.  One technique that Buddhism teaches to help us deal with these emotions is that of antidotes.  For each of the afflictive emotions, there is a series of things one can meditate on to counter them (see here, for example). Note that the core assumption underlying this approach is one of change.  We are trying to break the powerful link of our habits.

Once we have achieved some level of tranquility, stability, and clarity, we can begin to work with our minds and our habit energies, but Mindfulness Meditation isn't really designed to change them.

We usually enter a spiritual pathway and practice in order to change something about ourselves.  We want to reduce our suffering, to find ease in the midst of turmoil, to be of more benefit to others, etc.  Yet, Mindfulness Meditation doesn't get us too far down that path, but it's the first step on the path. Other meditation techniques focus specifically on changing our habitual responses.

But there's a paradox present here.  We know that we're really just a quivering mess.  We don't want to be a quivering mess.  But to be the kind of person we wish we were, we have to stop being a quivering mess.  But since we are such a mess, we're not the kind of person we want to be.  So how can we break out of this conundrum?  The way out is to practice capacities that you already have, such as compassion, joy, and love.

This moves us into the next style of meditation technique - those that focus on cultivating rather than familiarizing.  We use these techniques to help grow something that already exists in us.  The next post will begin to examine meditation techniques on what are called the Brahma-viharas, or the four heavenly abodes.


These thoughts adapted from talks given by Ethan Nichtern and Alan Watts, among others.  Image sources: Here, here, here, and here.

Mudita and the Angry Itch

It's a real burden to want to be happy all the time.  In fact, it's such a burden that we often think others should help us to shoulder it - we look to others to "make" us happy, which is a Sisyphean task (at best). Not only that, but it's a thankless task, because we feel so entitled to be happy that when others "make" us happy, we take it for granted.  It can easily be the case that we only tell others about it when they're not making us happy - this is our angry itch.

With this mindset of expecting others to make us happy and punishing them when we're unhappy, it's no surprise that it's such a burden and that repeated scratching doesn't really ease the itch.  We become the cruel taskmasters of others' impossible tasks.

The real shame is that others can make us happy easily, without our micro-management or prodding.  All we need to do is cultivate mudita, sometimes translated as empathetic joy.  It is the opposite of schadenfreude (taking pleasure in others' suffering).  Instead, we take pleasure in others' successes, happiness, good fortune, and enjoyment.  

Parents may understand this perhaps more easily than non-parents, because we have so many opportunities to witness our child's joy in something in a way that cuts through our frustrations.  I may want to leave the park and get on with what I think I should be doing, but seeing my daughter's delight at finding a rock in the sand cuts through my preoccupations and shows me the joy in each moment.

It is significant that the four divine abodes (lovingkindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity) are considered to be antidotes to three poisons (plus one).  Cultivating lovingkindness toward others counteracts irritation and aggression. Cultivating compassion toward others counteracts indifference.  Cultivating empathetic joy counteracts greediness and jealousy.  Cultivating equanimity counteracts worry about the past and future.

At some points in our path, we can have a very selfish attitude toward the four divine abodes.  "Why should I spend so much energy trying to feel good about others when I have so much work to do on myself first?"   This attitude is misplaced selfishness - it's trying to scratch the angry itch that we can't really reach.  If we truly wanted to be successfully selfish, meditating on lovingkindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity will help us to feel better about ourselves.  Specific to mudita, if we learn to feel and share in others' joys, we then have many people helping us to feel happy, and they are doing it without our making them feel they should!  It's like the students who park outside my house to "share" my wireless internet connection (because I don't password protect it).  They get what they want just by being near someone who has it.  You can be happy just by sharing in the happiness that is going on all around you all day.  Finally, that itch can be scratched, and no one has to work to reach it!

This post originally appeared on the Inderdependence Project blog.

The Biggest Easy - The Flip-Side of Suffering

For the past few posts, we've been discussing the Four Noble Truths, which (in an overly simplistic manner) are that suffering exists in our lives, that we cause much of it ourselves through our attachments, aversions, and ignorance, that we don't have to suffer, and that there is a path to freedom from suffering.  This is often perceived as being somewhat dismal.  I'd like to suggest a different way to frame it, however (based on a talk given by Gil Fronsdal).

Although the goal of the Buddhist path is liberation from suffering, we don't usually talk about what happens after we achieve that goal.  What does Nirvana look like?  There are good reasons why there is very little written about what the goal should look or feel like.  First, there is not necessarily only one way to experience it, so anything I could describe would not be accurate for many people.  Second, once described, it creates an ideal that people would cling to, and this clinging would prevent them from achieving it.  Nonetheless, it is possible to give a better sense of what the goal is if we reframe the Four Noble Truths from the positive side.

Nothing exists without its opposite, and the flip side of suffering is ease.  As we've noted before (here and here), happiness isn't actually the opposite - the way most Americans think about happiness is actually a form of suffering!  We really want to be able to experience the richness of our lives (the joys, the sorrows, the frustrations, the challenges) with a sense of ease, slipping through each experience with a sense of ease.  We could, therefore, repackage the Four Noble Truths from this perspective.

First Noble Truth:  The possibility of ease exists.
Second Noble Truth:  It is possible to lose the ease.
Third Noble Truth: It is possible to regain the ease.
Fourth Noble Truth: There is a path by which we can regain and maintain the ease.

Personally, I find this to be a really motivating approach, partly because it fits with where I am in my practice.    This wasn't always the case, however.  There have been times when my suffering was so intense that I needed to do something about it, and that was the total focus of my motivation.  Whether we are motivated to practice because of a focus on the suffering or a focus on the lightness and ease doesn't really matter much.  The focus on suffering may be a more realistic spiritual path, because it's grounded in what's actually happened in your experience, rather than a focus on an ideal of peace in the future.

Nonetheless, there often comes a time when people have an experience of ease that is personal, direct, and visceral, and then the ease no longer functions as some idealized state, but one that you have some experience with.  Ease now can become the teacher, as Gil Fronsdal says, particularly when you argue with it.

The argument question is, for what is it worth sacrificing my ease?

We often cling to our suffering, as if it were important.  Some people even seem to base their sense of self on worrying or complaining.

I know several people who always complain about everything, as if somehow that makes them feel better - yet, they never stop complaining, so it clearly isn't working. All that practicing has made us expert at complaining, so it becomes automatic.  Sometimes we believe it is important to worry or to plan, and sometimes it is.  So this is the question - is now one of those times?  Will I really perform some task better if I sacrifice feeling comfortable and at peace and instead worry, plan, and complain?

Once we find this sense of ease, we can practice it until it becomes automatic too.  It can become the default.  It is important to realize that this is not the same as indifference, which is a state of being closed off to the world.  On the contrary, it is becoming open to every possibility, able to work with whatever arises in each situation.  It becomes a stable platform from which we can see clearly in all directions, and therefore be of much greater help to everyone around you (as well as yourself).

I should probably end this post here, but in the interest of providing the whole truth it is worth noting an obstacle on this journey.  We began this series of posts looking at why people may be afraid to meditate, and there is at least one more reason that is relevant here.  Buddhist meditation forces us to confront how we have acted unskillfully, harming ourselves and others in the process.  This honest appraisal allows us to have the motivation necessary to change the patterns.  Nevertheless, some people stop meditating precisely because it makes us confront these uncomfortable feelings of how we have been injured and how we have contributed to the injuries.  If you believed that meditation was just a stress reliever, then facing this will be disheartening, and many people stop here.  Yet, if we can go through this, learning from the insights that arise, we can get to a place of ease that is profoundly different from where we normally live.

Why Be Afraid of Meditation?

I sometimes help to lead a mindfulness and meditation group, although I am not a formally trained meditation instructor.  We are currently going through a six-week introductory session about Buddhist basics, and it seemed like it might be of benefit to a broader audience to post some of the issues here.

Why are you interested in meditating?  What made you start?  People in our group had answers such as wishing to connect the mind and body, to gain peace and calm, to connect with the subconscious, to lessen the hold that thoughts have on us, and to cope with suffering.  It interests me that each of these answers has an aspect of noticing that the "normal" state of being can be unsatisfactory, and that there is an aspiration to work with that (as well as a belief that Buddhist meditation may provide a helpful path).  With such noble goals, why do we often fear meditation?

One of my teachers, Ethan Nichtern, says that in his experience, people are really glad that he meditates.  We want to have meditated, but we often feel discomfort about actually sitting down to do it.

I certainly felt this at one point in my practice about seven years ago.  I had just gone through a difficult divorce, and although I knew that participating in the local sangha that was just beginning would help me, I also was terrified.  I went to one of the leaders (a Unitarian minister) to try to understand.  There wasn't a good way to explain in words the terror I felt, but I knew that meditation would bring me into contact with what might be an endless pit of pain.  He assured me that it would, but that it wouldn't be anything I couldn't withstand and ultimately work with.  He was right. Nonetheless, for that first year or so, most sessions I sat there with tears streaming quietly down my face for reasons I couldn't explain.  So I certainly understand that although we may want to have meditated, there is often resistance to doing it.

Some of this resistance can come from our own misperceptions.  Some common ones include:

1. The belief that there is a "right" way to meditate.  There are many postures and many styles of meditation, each of which has a function.  We're often (especially as beginners) too worried about getting it wrong. 
2. The belief that the goal of meditation is to empty your mind.  It is clear when one first sits in meditation trying to count breaths that we can hardly stop our minds for even four breaths.  But in fact, the goal is not to stop thinking.  There are different methods of meditation, only one of which focuses on trying to settle the mind.  Other methods actually use the mind actively.  The ultimate goal is not to stop thinking, but to stop believing that our thoughts are the same as reality.  They are thoughts about reality, not reality itself.
3. The belief that the goal is to get rid of something we dislike, such as our temper, our sadness, our addictions, or our ex-partners (I suppose moving to a monastery might actually be successful at that last one...).  In fact, the goal is to learn to become skillful with all parts of our lives - to become skillful with what is, and not with the story we tell ourselves about it.

These misconceptions can hamper our enthusiasm to meditate, because if we expect them to be accurate, we can't help but be disappointed when we try to achieve them.

Beyond misconceptions, however, meditating is difficult.  Why?  It should be simple.  There are really only three steps to a basic breathing meditation.  (1) Sit.  Easy enough for most of us.  (2) Breathe.  Good, you're already doing that.  Two-thirds of the way there!  (3) Now, do nothing else.

...That third one is always the tricky bit.   

Meditation goes against our conditioning in many ways.  

• First, we tend to spend most of the day in our heads, telling ourselves stories about what just happened, what we want to happen, how we should feel about something, and planning for how to make it happen.  Meditation tries to get us to step back from the story, because the story is not really what's right there in front of us.  
• Second, we spend the day feeling like we should multi-task, and we often get rewarded for doing it.  Meditation tries to get us to focus on only one one thing for an extended period of time, without constant distractions.  
• Third, we generally seek excitement and stimulation and avoid discomfort, which is like closing off part of who we are.  Meditation tries to get us to see all of who we are and learn to be comfortable with it. 
•  Finally, many of us spend a lot of the day trying not to really feel our emotions.  Meditation tries to get us to be in touch with what is really happening in our lives, including our feelings about it.

Stephen Batchelor is quoted as saying: 

The Buddha described his teaching as "going against the stream." The unflinching light of mindful awareness reveals the extent to which we are tossed along in the stream of past conditioning and habit. The moment we decide to stop and look at what is going on (like a swimmer suddenly changing course to swim upstream instead of downstream), we find ourselves battered by powerful currents we had never even suspected - precisely because until that moment we were largely living at their command.

We routinely practice dissatisfaction and distraction, all day long (really, how much do you think negative thoughts and complain about your job, partner, body aches, friends, co-workers, and other annoyances in a day?).  Basic meditation can help to begin to break these habits, and some types of meditations actually work to give practice with joy, comfort, compassion, and ease.

Live in joy, 

In love, 

Even among those who hate. 

Live in joy,

In health,

Even among the afflicted. 

Live in joy,

In peace,

Even among the troubled. 

Look within.

Be still.

Free from fear and attachment,

Know the sweet joy of the way.

from the Dhammapada, translated by Thomas Byrom

Healing the Mind for Lasting Happiness

The last two posts have discussed where we mistakenly seek happiness (outside ourselves), and how we often seek types of happiness that can't last, to which we cling which ultimately causes more suffering.  Yet, happiness is possible even if we can't change our outside circumstances or have previously been traumatized.

Consider how fragile the body is.  You can get a simple paper cut, and if it isn't cared for properly, it can get infected and you can die from it.  You can sprain or break your ankle and end up with a permanent disability.  Although true, the body is also remarkably resilient.  If properly cleaned and cared for, such as putting a splint on the ankle, the body can heal the most horrible wounds.

Does the mind have a similar ability to heal its wounds?  It can certainly be injured.

The sprained ankle keeps getting worse even while it is trying to heal itself if you don’t splint it and you keep repeating the actions that damaged it.  Similarly, the mind can’t heal properly if you keep doing the same things over and over.  Unfortunately, this is what we usually do.  

Have you noticed how problems seem to repeat in your lives, especially with our families and the relationships we care the most about?  We maintain the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that keep us locked into an unhealthy pattern, continually re-injuring ourselves.  We can either practice these thoughts, feelings, and reactions, and therefore strengthen the bad habits, or we can practice with them and gain insight, wisdom, and ease.

Meditation is the splint for our injured minds – it helps to clean the wound.  It provides support for changing the habits, which gives the mind the rest, the time, and the stability it needs to begin to fully heal.  But just like a sprained ankle, the mind does not heal immediately.  It can be re-injured easily.  Like the ankle, even after it is healed, it may always be weaker in one direction.  By knowing that, however, you can take steps to keep it from getting re-injured in that direction.  

We spend a lot of our time practicing dissatisfaction, so it's no surprise we have gotten so good at it.  Meditation not only can help to break that pattern, but to retrain new positive patterns.  It is important for new meditators to realize that there are many types of meditation, and there is a progression that can be followed.  At first, we usually focus on breathing or calming meditations (sometimes called shamatha or mindfulness meditations).  These can certainly help us to reduce our feelings of stress.  But ultimately that's not really enough.  We really want to get to a place where we don't get stressed out but feel a sense of calm and ease even when stressors are present.  Mindfulness is just the first step to that goal, although it is a necessary one because it helps us to achieve the clarity and stability to go to the next steps.  Contemplative meditations (sometimes called vipassana or insight meditations) help us to retrain our habitual reactions.  Meditation, however, is still only one third of the Buddhist path, which also includes ethics and philosophical/psychological practices.

Deep down, we know that seeking happiness outside ourselves will never be fully successful.  Buddhism has many techniques, practices, and paths to help us find the ability to live with ease through all of our stresses.  The goal becomes having a deep sense of well-being even as we experience the full range of human emotions, rather than trying to reject "negative" feelings and grasp after ecstatic feelings.  Not every approach will be right for everyone, but that's one of the great things about Buddhism - you are encouraged not to believe in anything until you try it to see if it works for you.

What is happiness?

In the last post, I discussed how we evolved to look outside ourselves for danger and opportunity, and how this creates a bias when we're looking for happiness.  But we bypassed a more fundamental question - what is happiness?  It seems like we should know what we're looking for if we want to have any hope of finding it.

I have the belief that Americans have a lot of trouble recognizing happiness, for several reasons.  As children, we recognize that getting what you want is more fun than not getting what you want.  There is a wisdom in this, actually.  We recognize enjoyment and beauty partly because they are often healthy for us. But as we grow, we are bombarded with advertisements that work to subvert this natural wisdom into something unhealthy - we are told that happiness comes from a bottle, a car, a lifestyle.  The programs between the commercials are little better - they teach us that happiness comes from how we look, "getting" the girl/boy, and how they look.  These reinforce our bias that we should look outside ourselves for a way to be happy, but they also teach us (1) to consume as the method for becoming happy, and (2) that having consumed, we need more, because happiness doesn't last.

This has at least two additional consequences.  It trains us to believe that happiness is a special kind of reaction to something, and that happiness is a very strong joyous feeling, like winning the Superbowl.

This is perhaps the most insidious of all the ways our natural wisdom is subverted.  We forget that there are many other things that happiness can mean.  It can mean comfort,  bliss, calmness, contentment, and enjoyment, but we tend to focus only on the more extreme side of elation, ecstasy, and euphoria.  By focusing on the extreme version of happiness, which we know can never last (partly because it is extreme), we set up an impossible goal for ourselves.  In fact, what strikes me as I see my children buying into this world view, is that getting what you want isn't happiness - it's actually a form of suffering!

When we look outside ourselves for something that will make us happy, what happens when we get it?  I don't deny that at the time of receiving it, we feel happiness.  We definitely do.  If we get that Ferrari we've always wanted, we'll be really happy about it for at least several days.   But we also know it will get scratched if we drive it around town.  We know some day it will break and cost us a lot to fix it.  We worry that others might envy us for it.  And after we've had it for a while, we become bored and start looking for something else that can make us feel as excited and happy as we once were with this.

Because the idea of happiness has been so co-opted by Hallmark, Disney, and movies like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, we haven't even questioned if part of the reason we feel unfulfilled so much of the time is because we are looking for the wrong thing.

Let me suggest a different definition of happiness, and see if you agree with me that it is both worth pursuing and more attainable than the ever-shifting definition that happiness is getting the right product/experience/person.  As I have grown in my practice, I have come to believe that what we really mean when we say we want to be happy is that we want "ease."  We want to be able to move through our days, our work, our challenges, our difficulties, our bodies, and our relationships with ease.  We want to have harmony with our minds, feelings, actions.  We want to be "in tune" with our friends, spouses, children, bosses, students, etc.  We actually don't want to sit on a beach all day every day sipping fruity drinks with paper umbrellas.  Sure, that's fun for a while, but most of us would probably start feeling unproductive, disconnected, and out of sync with others.  We want to be involved in all the parts of our lives, but we want to be able to go through them with ease.  When we are successful at this, we feel a great sense of contentment, achievement, and some joy -- namely, happiness.  When we are frustrated in our goals, have arguments with our family or co-workers, we feel ill at ease.  When our bodies get out of sync, we have dis-ease.  In fact, when we're not sick or injured, we're at such ease that we don't even usually notice how remarkable the sense of ease is - our bodies just do what we want easily.

As long as we continue to believe the lie that happiness comes from getting the "right" thing, we will never be able to achieve lasting happiness.  We are constantly changing, therefore the thing/person that we feel is "right" at this point in time, will not feel the same way in the future.  But if our goal is to feel at ease with ourselves, our partners, and our lives, then when we change, that peaceful easy feeling can go with us.

Of course, even if you accept this as a better definition for what we really mean when we say we just want to be happy, it doesn't tell us how to achieve it.  Here is where Buddhist practice can really help, as it has many methods to train us in how to become at ease with ourselves and our lives.  I'll talk about some in future posts.

Where does happiness come from?

It's hard to see our own biases and assumptions.  Sometimes they're right under our noses.  Sometimes they are our noses.

We all want to be happy, and we all want to avoid suffering.  It's a pretty simple goal.  Yet, most of us have a very hard time achieving it for more than a few days.  Why is it so difficult to be happy?

Consider your senses - sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing.  Do you notice what they all have in common?  They are all directed outwards toward the environment.

Although this sounds simplistic, consider how profoundly it affects you.  Because all of our senses are directed outward, it creates an assumption that we should focus outward for the important things, including happiness and suffering.

Perhaps there is someone you work with whom you find annoying - you probably spend time alert to the external world to try to pay attention to when he/she will appear.  If you see this person, you may change what you're doing to avoid what you expect will be an unpleasant encounter.  You spot the potential for suffering in the environment, and adapt to avoid it.  Similarly, when we feel bad, we usually look for some stimulus on the outside to make us happy.  This might be chocolate, a person, a TV show or video game, a shower, new shoes, etc.

We carry with us a core assumption that our happiness/suffering is due to external stimuli.  When we get the thing we want, we feel happy (but only for a little while).  When we get something we don't want, we suffer and try to remove it from our immediate environment.  We have practiced this approach for our whole lives. We should be experts at it by now.  So why doesn't it seem to work for more than a day or two?

The reason, of course, is because happiness doesn't come from the external environment.  We have all seen this in children.  They believe that a new toy will make them happy.  When they get it they are delighted.  But that ecstatic joy fades within minutes despite the object still being in their environment.  Even the general happiness they have from owning it goes away within weeks (often days!), and they now want something different.  Of course, the media work to perpetuate this myth that owning/getting things makes us happy, makes us attractive, and makes us have good relationships.  In fact, under this assumption that external stimuli make us happy, even people are commodities - we "get" the girl, we "have" a husband, we "break up" our relationships.  We believe that having a relationship with a specific person (or type of person) will fulfill us and make us happy.  Yet, although relationships are definitely fulfilling, we still worry about what else we need to get or want to avoid.

If having things actually made us happier, then it should be easy to document that through research.  People with more money should be happier - not only should they have less stress about survival, they can afford more things.  Yet, national studies of happiness demonstrate that although Americans' buying power has tripled since the 1950s, their happiness hasn't changed at all.

Actually, America - the richest country on earth - doesn't even get into the top 10 for happiest countries!  We are tied for 13th behind the Phillipines.  This was out of 50 countries surveyed.  If the survey had measured all 200-some countries, we would have likely dropped even farther in the list.

TV ownership and happiness by country

Cell phones and happiness

Go ask some people what makes them happy.  Many of the things you will hear about will be external stimuli, like TV, iPhones, roller coasters, music, etc.  If external stimuli and experiences made us happier, then America should be top of the happiness list.  We are number one in roller coasters (with 624 in the US, compared to number two Japan at 240, who is 19th in happiness, by the way).  We are number one in the amount of time watching television each week (pathetic, but true...we're almost double the amount of daily TV viewing over number two Turkey, who is 20th in happiness).

Beer consumption and happiness

There is no correlation between the number of TVs owned and happiness.  There is no correlation between the number of cell phones owned and happiness.  Heck, there isn't even a strong correlation between the amount of beer consumed and happiness (although it's not zero - See graph to the left...).

Ultimately, all happiness that comes from external stimuli is unstable and temporary.  As soon as the stimulus is gone (eaten, breaks, leaves us, etc.), we lose that happiness.  Not only that, often we suffer because we worry about losing the external stimulus that we think causes our happiness.  So we can't really enjoy it even while we have it!  This strikes me as not truly being happiness.

So we have to stop believing advertising's basic message, which is that when you feel bad you should go shopping.  We even have to stop believing what we see, smell, taste, feel, and hear.  Happiness doesn't come from outside ourselves.  You know this.  You know people who "have it all" and yet aren't happy.  You probably also know people who have very little or have had terrible things happen to them but who are happy most of the time.

You probably expect that I'm going to say that happiness comes from looking inside, and you're already probably dissatisfied with that answer.  Why?  I think because we've been trained by our senses, our culture, and our beliefs that happiness should appear suddenly, like when you get a gift or when you get what you've been craving.  Our insides don't seem able to make us suddenly happy.

Whether happiness comes from inside or outside is really beside the point (and is a false dichotomy).

Here's the important point - Happiness is trainable.  
Here's even better news - Happiness is attainable.

We can talk about how to attain it in a future post.

Disturbing Meditation Biases

I had an interesting American Buddhist experience last night.  I am currently in Singapore, and went to a New Kadampa Tradition meditation center (or centre, in Singaporean spelling).  I had been there once for a day retreat, but this was just a normal evening meditation session, with two guided meditations and a talk on the purpose of meditation in-between.  Perhaps I was just jet-lagged, but I found the discussion to be quite disturbing.

The discussion focused on the five stages of meditation, which include preparatory practices, contemplation (or analytic meditation), single-pointed concentration meditation, dedication of merit, and subsequent practice.  I am not going to describe all of these steps (unless someone requests it), but these are traditional (at least within some Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions).  What I was disturbed by wasn't the meditation approach itself, but the cultural framework around it.

For example, here is some of the language used:

• The preparatory practices "prepare us for successful meditation by purifying hindrances caused by our previous negative actions, by accumulating merit (or good fortune), and by enabling us to receive the blessings of enlightened beings."   
• "Meditation is a mind that concentrates on a virtuous object, and that is the main cause of mental peace....When our mind is peaceful, we are free from worries and mental discomfort, and we experience true happiness."
• "If we train our mind to become peaceful we will be happy all the time, even in the most adverse conditions....Then day and night, in life after life, we will experience only peace and happiness."  (All quotes from The New Meditation Handbook, by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso)

As an American Buddhist not specifically tied to any one tradition, I have a hard time with some of the assumptions underlying these statements.  

First, Buddha made it clear that we should examine each proposition carefully and test its utility for ourselves, partly because everyone's path is unique.  "As the wise test gold by burning, cutting and rubbing it (on a piece of touchstone), so are you to accept my words after examining them and not merely out of regard for me," says Buddha in Jnanasara-samuccaya [Bht 285]. Therefore, I have a hard time with concepts that were discussed such as multiple lives, good fortune, good luck, and blessings of holy beings. These feel too much like superstition to me. I am not interested in getting more money, luck, or angels. Whether there are holy beings capable of bestowing blessings on me seems like exactly the kind of question that Buddha refused to answer in the Kalama Sutra (aka the Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta, Majjhima Nikaya, Sutta 63).  Whether or not such things exist are "not connected to the goal" of liberation from suffering, and therefore are distractions.

Second, I am uncomfortable with claiming that the goal of meditation is to be "happy all the time." I also dislike when someone says can experience "true" happiness with one approach, as if all of the happiness you normally experience isn't real and that only they have the "truth."  These ways of describing the goal seem to reinforce dualistic thinking - that things are good or bad, right or wrong, happy or distressing.  I don't want to be happy all the time!  Clinging to that goal will only cause me to suffer more.  If we believe the goal is to find some state of "true" happiness and to maintain it, then we will be greatly disappointed.  If we believe that only one person/religion/political party has Truth, we will enhance our suffering.

Ultimately, this approach to considering the benefits of meditation feels very selfish to me.  We want more blessings, more merit, more fortune, more happiness, etc.  These are just more of the same selfish goals that keep us unhappy!

I was quite aware, however, as I was having these uncomfortable feelings with the way meditation was being taught that my reaction demonstrated my own biases and limitations.  Why was I being so judgmental?  What are my assumptions that were being pushed against?  If I accepted what was being said rather than fighting it, could it give me a new insight?

I don't pretend to have any answers here.  The Buddha himself gave his teachings in what seem to be contradictory ways, based largely on understanding who his audience was.  Maybe we need to lure people into a regular meditation practice with thoughts of being happy all the time, because that's what will motivate them.  Maybe this approach was skillfully designed, because telling them that happiness and sadness are the same thing isn't really motivating.

Let's return to the question about what is American Buddhism?  In this case, it seems that my viewpoint has real trouble with things I can't see or test for myself (such as receiving blessings from enlightened extra-terrestrials), and that I don't want to escape from my situation to be in a state of constant bliss (there are drugs for that).  I don't want to be saved and I don't want my life to be different from how it is. Instead, I just want to accept it, feel it, and enjoy it (including the bad parts).  Nonetheless, I recognize that my biases are my biases, and they do not in any way diminish the validity of someone else's approach.

Ultimately, my discomfort with the meditation approach made it much more valuable.  I'll be going back.