There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.
—Henry David Thoreau
A while back, a dear friend in India asked me a delicious question: How do you define happiness?
Now, this question can be taken in two ways: How do I define happiness, personally, or how do you define happiness, as in, “one” or the general world at large. Maybe it makes sense to start out by remembering what we talked about in a previous post: That since we are all sparks of the universe, coming from the same energetic collision (i.e., the big bang), carrying the mystery of creation within us, I suppose happiness then would be remembering that all the time. Happiness would be knowing that the universe has your back and that you are the universe and that everything is working in conjunction together.
But that’s much easier said than done.
So how do we bring happiness to our ordinary lives? And as I'm saying that phrase I’m envisioning that most of us think of new cars and houses and no credit card debt and making enough money so your family can go on vacation and still give to charities and give back to the world…and it occurs to me that this happiness thing is much bigger than that. Possessions and a sense of general accomplishment contributes more to what we might call satisfaction, which we’ll talk about later. If you could know that you are already working in conjunction with the universe, the smaller things like possessions wouldn't be as important. That realization might be what we could call happiness.
Let’s Talk Psychology First
Let’s take the concept of baseline happiness: We all have one. It’s our go-to or set-state of happiness. No matter what happens, we return to that baseline level of contentment. You win $500 from a scratch-off ticket and that’s amazing and you smile and jump and treat your pals to dinner. But you’re not still jumping and footing the bill a week later. That’s because you’ve returned to your baseline. Everyone’s baseline is different.
I can hear some of you saying, “My baseline is in the basement. I don’t even remember the last time I was happy.”
This is where we begin to define what happiness actually means to us. We talked about redefining labels and roles in an early post. The same goes for life qualifiers like happiness. What does happiness mean to you, personally? Not the general sense of what makes someone happy, but you—your unique self, your true and highest self. The core of YOU. What is happiness? Is it money and clothing and vacations? Is it a sense of peace in your life? Maybe you don’t know yet. That’s okay, too. That’s part of the adventure of being alive. We get to figure these things out when we’re ready.
Innate Happiness
His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama has a book about all this called The Art of Happiness. In it, he posits that we all have within us a gentle quality. This innate gentleness is also called “Buddha nature.” Since it’s innate, we don’t need to be a Buddhist or belong to any particular religion to achieve Buddha nature; it is part of our human condition.
Now, there is also balance in the universe, so necessarily, with gentleness, we also have hostility and anger. The Dalai Lama says, “anger, violence, and aggression may certainly arise, but I think it’s on a secondary or more superficial level; in a sense, they arise when we are frustrated in our efforts to achieve love and affection” (p. 54–55).
Although this darker side—anger and hostility—occurs naturally as a balance within us, our fundamental nature is gentleness. That makes sense since we come from creation. We are open-hearted, soulful beings who get deposited into this meat suit, as my spiritual advisor likes to call it. The meat suit is really important to our gentle soul-beings, but we’ll get back to that in a minute.
Now let’s look at happiness versus satisfaction.
Happiness vs. Satisfaction
Simply put, happiness is a state of bliss, it’s an emotion. Satisfaction is a state of contentment, where there are no needs or wants. Happiness may diminish with loss of something you had while satisfaction can diminish if you do not achieve something you desire.
You can certainly have both happiness and satisfaction in your life. And you can certainly have one without the other. It’s all in how you approach each. You can be satisfied and content even if you have very little. If you decide not to need or want you can achieve happiness. You can be satisfied with your life exactly as it is, with whatever you have, which breeds happiness. So how do we reach that balance?
Connectedness
In order to practice connectedness and create more happiness and satisfaction in your life, find your tribe. Find the people who hold you. It doesn’t mean you have to be in synch all the time—there will be arguments and sadness sometimes; that’s the human condition. But finding your tribe means you find those who honor you for who you are. This serves as a salve on your soul as well. When those around you elevate your soul, you feel lifted and, well, happy.
But even if you don’t find your tribe, you can still find happiness through connectedness. We talked previously about releasing automatic negative thoughts by looking at the bigger picture. If you are getting in your own way—the voices in your head telling you you can’t do something—you can move past yourself as the focus and ask who might you assist with your endeavors. This thinking about others is known as—no surprise—compassion. Giving back to our world family. Let’s return to the Dalai Lama and The Art of Happiness:
Reaching out to help others may be as fundamental to our nature as communication…
[Humans are] programmed with the capacity and purpose of
bringing pleasure and joy to others.
—His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama
When we look at it in this way, we can achieve happiness by reaching a state of calm, and peace with ourselves and with others. The Dalai Lama talks about creating a positive atmosphere. We’ve heard that sentiment before “creating a positive atmosphere,” but this concept is also science, which we’ll discuss in a second. A positive atmosphere gives our lives meaning, which leads to overall happiness. We create that positive atmosphere through compassion and connectedness with others.
Solitude
Speaking of keeping peace with others and self, how do we find happiness in solitude? In solitude we can clear our minds. There is no pressure from the outside world to be or perform or live up to expectations. We can hear our inner voices distinctly. There is immense happiness that comes from that freedom. Taking a few minutes a day to check in with self reduces our stress levels, keeps our parasympathetic nervous system activated (parasympathetic is rest and digest, while sympathetic is fight or flight). This stress reduction benefits our health.
Solitude doesn’t have to mean lack of action. In solitude we can meditate, certainly. But we can also perform some meditational action that is deeply meaningful to us. It could be taking a bike ride or a hot bath. It could be writing in a journal or building and tending a small rock garden in our yard. All that matters is that you bring awareness and intention to what you are doing. I call regular, intentional time alone a solitude practice. That practice allows us to tap into our joy, our happiness, over and over again. Dedicating time to ourselves creates a sacred space of our happiness to bloom and grow.
Balance
It looks like the key here is balance. The middle way, or the middle path, as the Taoists and Buddhists teach. Balancing self and other in the world. The Sufi poet Rumi also talks about balance:
Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.
—Jalal ad-Din Rumi
Here’s another balance besides self and other: Happiness itself is not a solid state. We don’t have to be happy all the time. That’s not the goal. Carl Jung talks about the balance of light and dark, shadow and light, sadness and happiness. Happiness would mean nothing if it were not balanced by sadness or discontent.
In fact, pursuing happiness can actually bring you less of it. When we pursue happiness, it implies we don’t already have it. In fact, happiness is all around us, all the time.
One of the reasons is this: We get to live a fully human existence. We get to experience the whole range of emotions. Non-dual spirit energy cannot do that. It’s already all things at once. We’re like that energy but slowed waaaay down. Maybe by our heavy meat suit or just being in this plane of existence.
If you’ve ever seen sound waves on a screen, you can see this in action. When you’re editing audio on a screen, you can zoom in on the soundwaves and see each little blip of sound. This is like our emotions. Stretch us way out and we have minor ups and downs, little blips of feeling. But when you back up, you can see that all our emotions add up to make us fully human. A symphony of being, as it were. When we’re flowing along, feeling our emotions but not clinging to them, we get the benefit of feeling those feelings. I don’t know about you, but that makes me pretty happy. We are so lucky to be fully human! To get to feel the full range of emotions.
What’s the verdict on happiness, then?
Essentially, happiness is yours to create. It’s not what happens to you but how you react to what happens to you. Unfortunate stuff happens. Pain happens. Suffering happens. But you get to choose how you want to feel about those events. You create your own baseline of happiness. In shamanism, we talk about dreaming life into reality. That is, our way of being in the world creates the world we live in.
I can actually hear some eyes rolling. I’m getting a “yeah, but” vibe.
Yeah, but I don’t find joy in anything.
Yeah, but I can’t see anything good in my life.
Yeah, it sounds great, but I don’t know how to change the way I see life in order to make it happy.
Here’s the secret: You just do. You can use the same tools we talked about in the post about automatic negative thoughts: Ask if the thought is serving you. If not, you can recognize it as a watchdog trying to protect you from pain. Say thanks, but don’t feed it. Feed the thought that brings you joy instead. “YEAH, BUT that’s delusional, Rachel! Life is crazy and scary and messed up!”
Life is crazy and scary and messed up if that is the world you are dreaming into being.
Look this is all a wild wonderful light show we live in. There are no building blocks of matter, only quantum fields, vibrating energy. Waves and particles that bounce around and change depending on how we look at them. That’s called the “observer effect.” How we look at energy determines how it behaves.
Because we focus on only what we can physically see and touch, we think that’s all there is. But what is created had to be conceived first, through thought. Thought is energy (with a very fast vibration). We look at Einstein’s Theory of relativity which shows us that energy is the same as mass—mass is concentrated energy. Energy isn’t destroyed, it only changes form. Sometimes it becomes matter (slow vibration). We think of energy as light, airy, free-moving and matter as solid and heavy. But both of them are just energy.
What the Heck Does This Have to Do With Happiness?
Energy is vibrating all around you—sometimes in the form of a $20 bill that fell out of your pocket or a nasty comment from a friend or a lay-off from work or a rainy week on your annual holiday to the Caribbean. How you interact with that energy can either make matters (or energies) worse, or they can shift to a higher vibration and be no big deal. The lost $20 may help a less fortunate person. A nasty friend may be having a bad day, giving you the opportunity to practice compassion and love. Being laid off can open opportunities for a better career. Rain in the Caribbean is quite warm and delightful. Go run around naked in it. You’ll see what I mean.
The point is you can change your state of mind. Happiness can be created. You are the one who has the tools to do it.