Because it’s precisely the pursuit of happiness that keeps us trapped in cycles of dissatisfaction and suffering.
Bayda offers Zen insights and practices that point readers toward the true sources of lasting happiness: mindfulness, compassion, gratitude, and generosity.
This is a book about genuine happiness. In the spirit of the topic I’ve included a number of jokes, based on my view that it’s worthwhile to poke little holes in the often-held view that Zen practice and spiritual awakening must be somber and serious activities. In the face of life’s difficulties, it’s always good to find something to brighten our spirits. Cultivating a sense of humor is actually essential to living from the lightened heart of true contentment. This is particularly true when we acknowledge how easy it is to take ourselves too seriously. Most of the jokes I tell in this book have been adapted from the book Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar . . . by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, a book I highly recommend to anyone who wishes to lighten up.
Thanks to the people at Shambhala Publications for their continuing support, specifically to Dave O’Neal, who initially encouraged me to write this book, and to Eden Steinberg, who gently and skillfully helped in clarifying my message.
Thanks to my daughter Jenessa, who has edited all five of my books, always with a perceptive eye for nuance. And finally, I am continuously thankful to my wife and fellow teacher, Elizabeth, not only for her keen insight as an editor but also for her unwavering support and irrepressible good cheer.
Many books and articles have been published in the last several years on happiness, most of them promising quick fixes—guarantees to take away our anxiety and depression and replace them with a cheerful outlook. But evidence suggests that since this happiness “boom” began, our levels of anxiety and dis-ease have actually increased. The sense of entitlement that comes with the belief that happiness is our birthright, and the typically Western belief in the quick fix, seems to have led to an even greater sense of disconnectedness.Is the purpose of human life to be happy? But perhaps we should first ask: What do we mean by happiness?Often, when we’re young, we equate happiness with pleasure and sensual enjoyment. As we get older, we may equate it more with security and control—having things like money and good health. We might also equate it with our accomplishments. Or we could equate it with the connection we feel in particular relationships. It’s important to realize that all of these aspects or levels of happiness are based, in part, on the external circumstances of our lives. Yet perhaps external circumstances play a smaller role in our happiness than we might believe.There is no doubt that external conditions can have some effect within this limited range, but because the range is somewhat fixed, changing our external conditions will not change our degree of happiness all that much. So seeking happiness based solely on externals does not work all that well, as perhaps you have already found out. Besides, even to the degree that externals can, in fact, make us happier, the externals can always change—we can lose our job, or our wealth, or our relationships, or our health. Eventually we have to accept that relying on externals is like building a foundation on sand. This may not be easy to accept, and it may take many disappointments to realize the truth that we can’t rely on externals for happiness. But if externals are not the source of happiness, we might wonder, is there anything that can help us become happier?How about spiritual practice? Can spiritual practice actually make us happier? There’s a study in which participants were asked to listen to a piece of classical music. Half were told to just listen; the other half were told to try to feel happy while listening to the music. The results were quite interesting—the participants who were trying to be happy reported being much less so than those who were just listening. Why? Because in trying to be happy they were caught in their heads, whereas simply being present with the music allowed the other participants to experience the genuine happiness of “just being there,” not trying to be or to feel different.So instead of trying to stamp out behaviors we don’t like, the path to true happiness requires our openhearted attention to the very things that seem to block our way to it—especially to all the things we are most inclined to run from, reject, change, or be rid of. Thus, when we’re unhappy, rather than making happiness our goal, we must try instead to see that whatever is on our plate is our opportunity to work with and free ourselves from what gets in the way of happiness.It’s presumptuous to assume there is an easy formula to attain happiness. If there were some easy formula it would have been discovered by now.
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.Unfortunately we can’t be happy just because we want to be. Nor can we just act happy—say, by smiling—and expect to be happy, except in the most superficial way.
The one thing all of our “if onlies” have in common is an underlying unwillingness to actually be with the present-moment circumstances of our life. Instead, we choose to live in endorphin-producing fantasies about the future. From one point of view this is understandable, in that it’s certainly more comfortable to hold onto our expectations of a different and better reality than it is to be with what is. Yet, where does this leave us? It leaves us living a life that is neither real nor satisfying.This deeply held belief, that practice will take away our suffering, can take many forms—the longing for comfort, calmness, freedom from fear, or some vague notion of enlightenment. These longings may motivate us for many years; after all, don’t all of us want to be free of the anxious quiver of being at our core? But ironically, it’s only as we see what practice is not that we can begin to see what practice actually is. And if we’re fortunate, we may begin to see through our illusions of entitleme
Seeing through our own particular version of this is part of the process of waking up. Again, the essence of this entitlement is the assumption that we can make ourselves, and life, be the way we want them to be. But this can only bring disappointment. Why? Because no matter what we do, there’s no way that we can guarantee a life that is free of problems.Part of the path toward genuine happiness is recognizing where we live out of illusions, especially about ourselves. Being honest with ourselves means acknowledging where we hold onto false pictures of who we are. Just like our sense of entitlement, which demands that life be other than it is, our false self-images also deny reality. But facing what is, as it is, is a direct step toward the deeper reality that we aspire to. The man in this story had the opportunity to look right in the mirror of reality, and in clearly seeing his unwillingness to pay the price of a life of service, he would no longer be stuck in having to maintain a false ideal of who he was supposed to be. The possibility for a more genuine life, a life of increasing happiness, opens as we look honestly at our deeply embedded beliefs, especially our entitlement and our illusions.The point in seeing through these entitled beliefs about how things should be is not to become cynical. After all, cynical beliefs like “life is cruel” or “people can’t be trusted” are also just beliefs, arising from disappointments that remain unhealed. The point is to cease living out of any sense of entitlement, because every entitlement we hold to, every mental picture we have of how life is supposed to be, blocks our ability to be truly present with what is.As I surrendered to the experience—sore throat and all—the experience was one of a deep and quiet joy, despite not feeling well.What was required was two things: first, seeing that I was caught in my mental picture of how life was supposed to be; and second, being able to surrender into the very specific physical experience of the present moment. This is a key point that will be emphasized over and over—getting out of the head and into the body. Awareness, and the appreciation and happiness that can come with awareness, doesn’t often happen without the intention to be more awake. Awareness allows us to see where we’re stuck, where we’re holding onto beliefs or feelings of entitlement. Seeing these blockages is the first step in finding the way to true contentment, of moving beyond the smaller, ephemeral experience of personal happiness.
Living in our heads, the ground of all our judgments, fears, and limiting beliefs, creates a self-centered narrowness and is a prescription for unhappiness.Other forms of thinking are more pernicious. Blaming, in particular, is a way of poisoning our lives, and when the blaming thoughts come out of our mouths, or manifest outwardly via body language, they also poison others. Lamenting about the past and worrying about the future are also harmful, in that they tend to feed and solidify a gloomy and narrow experience of reality. We all do this to some extent, but for some it becomes almost an addiction.
Because we accept our thoughts and judgments as the unquestioned truth. How many times have you thought, “This isn’t fair,” without even questioning whether or not the thought was true? Or after making a mistake, which we can call the first arrow, we add the second-arrow thought, “I can’t do anything right.”Seeing this whole dynamic clearly allowed the anxiety to dissipate, but we should never underestimate the power of the thinking mind to undermine happiness.In fact, we rarely want to stay with any feeling that’s unpleasant; but in the end, the harder we resist, the stronger our unwanted feelings become.This is a very worthwhile process to experiment with—first labeling the thought and second staying with the feeling in the body.
Another aspect of the thinking mind, and without doubt the most pernicious, is our tendency to judge. Judgment of others undermines our genuine wish to be happy because it automatically separates us from those we judge.Our judgments of others are bad enough, but judgments about ourselves often do even more harm. In fact, one of the biggest obstacles to happiness is our relentless self-judgment, particularly the negative belief that we are essentially flawed or lacking in some way. We all live in the prison of our self-images of how we should be, and we constantly judge ourselves as not measuring up to these images we have of ourselves. As a consequence, we berate ourselves mercilessly. Our negative self-judgments have many flavors—feeling unworthy, stupid, incompetent, unappealing, or, more generically, that we’re simply not enough. Sometimes the self-judgment is even harsher—feeling like we’re no one, or even like we’re a pariah. The point is, in every case, we’re caught in the narrow, inaccurate confines of the thinking mind, believing these judgments as the absolute truth. By doing so, we perpetuate our own suffering, shooting ourselves over and over again with arrows. The cycle is vicious and relentless.Our negative self-judgments are not always on the surface of the mind. Yet they’re often at work, impacting the way we relate to the world. In a way, they’re like the background operating system programs on our computers, running continuously and inexorably behind the scene. And the one thing the various flavors of our self-judgments have in common is the basic message that “I am bad.” We may never say these exact words to ourselves, and the message may be buried in the background, but as we observe ourselves, we will become increasingly aware of its imprint on how we live.Remember, it’s a given that the mind will ceaselessly generate thoughts. With each believed thought we filter and chop up reality, and we end up living in a thought-based world that is neither real nor satisfying. But as we begin to watch the mind—not trying to stop the thinking, but just observing it and feeling how it impacts the body—it is possible to begin to experience an underlying awareness. This wordless sense of presence, which we’ll talk about in detail later, is the experience of being, or “hereness.” Just as the thinking mind is the seat of self-centeredness and often of our unhappiness, this underlying awareness is one of the sources of our fundamental happiness. But to cultivate this awareness and to live a genuinely happy life, we have to start by uncovering and working with the thoughts that block it.
Anger, fear, and depression are just the main suspects—there is also self-doubt, which makes our world small and grim; confusion, which can paralyze us; self-pity, which leaves us feeling victimized; and resentment, which hardens the heart and prevents any chance of genuine happiness.Can we acknowledge that as much as we believe we want happiness, we’re often unwilling to pay the price? We say we want to be happy, yet rarely does a day go by that we don’t indulge in these disconnecting emotions. We may make occasional efforts to overcome our anger and our fears, but much more frequently we continue feeding them. How can we reconcile our stated wish to be happy with the undeniable fact that we hold on to the very emotions that make us most unhappy?The fact is, I really believed I was in the right; and we would often rather feel like we’re right than be happy, because we like the juiciness and the false sense of power that accompany our self-righteousness. But like all of the disconnecting emotions, it leaves us with the unsatisfying feeling of being separate.
