The Key to Happiness
The pursuit of happiness. Something that is inherently wrong in this statement is that it relies on the belief that there is something external or someone out there that you need to find, for your own happiness. You may look for it in external sources like, you’ll be happy when you get that promotion, or when you buy those shoes. Alternatively, you may give the responsibility of your happiness to others — your partner, your family, or even your boss needs to make you happy. This is when we’re bound to be disappointed and keep the “pursuit” on to find the next thing.
The truth is a lot simpler:
The source of your own happiness lies within you.
Let’s consider a scenario: You are driving on the freeway, when a rash driver suddenly swerves into your lane, cutting you off, and then speeding away.
A common reaction to this would be “What the hell is wrong with that person? Some people just don’t know how to drive. I can’t believe how some people are. This world is going to shit!” along with an expletive-laden rant directed at the rash driver.
Now, this anger and hate could potentially stay with you, where it ends up ruining your entire day. It could spill over into dinner with your partner, or family time with your kids, where you end up being a little bit more irritable or a little bit more on the edge than normal.
Now consider an alternate reaction.
As the driver cuts you off, you look at that and say “It seems like that driver is having a really bad day. I hope the rest of his day goes better than it is going at the moment.”
Which of these 2 reactions would lead to you having a better day?
1. Compassion
The paradox is that:
When you are compassionate towards others, the primary person that benefits from that is you.
Whether the driver deserves your compassion is not the point. The point is understanding which of these 2 reactions is better for your own happiness?
The driver is not a part of the equation in both scenarios. He’s cut you off and sped away. He is not subjected to your angry rant and neither to your compassion. Both are emotions that brew within you as a reaction to an event, and this reaction is what has a direct effect on your happiness — not the driver’s actions.
Why does compassion work this way?
A simple way to think about it is: our entire existence on the planet is dependent on our environment. We continuously take material and energy from the environment in the form of air, water, and food. What was not a part of us yesterday, becomes a part of us today. On the other hand, what was a part of us today will stop being a part of us tomorrow and the cycle repeats.
As a result, our physical beings are very closely interconnected with the environment and all living beings around us. This is also the reason why being in nature has a more profound impact on your happiness than being in a cubicle in a Manhattan high-rise.
The friction, or unhappiness, happens when our minds are not in sync with this physical interconnectedness. When we are hateful and angry with other living beings in the environment, this leads to our own unhappiness.
Compassion is one of the most direct ways of being in sync with the interconnectedness of the environment and as a result it ends up being essential for our own happiness.
Happiness is a choice (compassion) and with practice (meditation), you can be in control of it.
2. Meditation
There are several forms of meditation, however, there are 2 primary methods you can use to take control of your own happiness. The first one is a mental (mind) meditation, and the second one is a physical (body) meditation.
i. The Mind: Breath-work Meditation
Say, you want to make your body stronger, so you go to the gym. There, you proceed to lift weights and do 10–20–30 reps (or repetitions) of a particular exercise.
Repetition of motion — this is the basis for all training, whether weight-lifting, or doing ballet. The same is true for the mind as well.
The way breath-work meditation works is:
You close your eyes and focus on your breath. Observe the quality, temperature, and texture of the inhaled air, and then observe the same in the exhaled air. Repeat. Now, this is inherently boring — which is the point. While doing this, your mind will tend to wander and start thinking about the weekend, or that thing your colleague said, or something that happened 3 years ago. Eventually you will realize that your mind has wandered, so you bring it back to your breath. It will then wander again, and when you realize that, you bring it back again. This is the exercise. Bringing the wandering mind back to the breath again and again is breath-work meditation.
Why are you trying to do this?
Simply put, the purpose of this meditation is to get you in control of your thoughts rather than your thoughts being in control of you.
So, say, you get angry when the rash driver cuts you off. With enough breath-work meditation practice, you will be able to catch that anger, and bring your thoughts back to a center, steady state much quicker. This will prevent anger from festering and ruining the rest of your day, or your dinner with your partner, or your family time with your kids.
Now, just like at the gym, as you go and exercise more frequently, you are able to lift heavier weights that you were unable to do earlier. The same way, with enough practice of breath-work meditation, you will be able to recover from deeper and more destructive emotional states to bring you back to a steady center.
The Mind-Body Connect
Western medicine has cured many diseases and has been one of the most effective forms of medicine any civilization has had access to till date. That said, one of the very reasons it has worked so well is also one of its biggest shortcomings: Western medicine has its roots in Newtonian physics, where it treats the body like a machine. If there is a skin rash on your hand, then that means that the problem is isolated only to the skin on that particular part of the hand and the rest of the body or mind has no connection to it. A doctor will then proceed to prescribe an ointment that treats the symptoms of the rash only. The prescription would ignore the fact that you may have been super stressed out for the past week, and that stress has manifested itself in the form of a skin rash.
The point is that the mind and body are very closely linked and influence one another at a core level. Issues in your body affect your mind, and issues in your mind will show up in your body.
This is true with all emotions as well. When we get angry, jealous, fearful, sad, happy, etc., we tend to think of these emotions primarily being mental or in the mind. However, for each emotion there is also an accompanying range of physical sensations that you can feel.
A simple way to experience it is: Close your eyes and think of the last time you were angry. Put yourself in that situation and really feel the emotion. Then, instead of focusing on your mind or on your thoughts, focus on the physical sensations that the anger has triggered inside your body. Is there a tightness in your chest, a tingling in your hands, an agitation in your forehead, a pulling feeling in your stomach?
Exploring and eventually dissipating these physical sensations is what the second type of meditation focuses on. Once the physical sensation has been released, it releases the accompanied negative mental emotions automatically.
ii. The Body: Body-Scan Meditation
Stress, hate, anger, resentment and other related emotions in the mind are analogous to the role of fat in the physical body. While fats have a role in a well-balanced diet, if your diet consists primarily of unhealthy fats, they start to deposit in the physical body with harmful effects on your physical well-being. Similarly, while the emotions of stress, hate, anger, and resentment, all have a role to play in the survival of our species, if you start holding onto and revisiting an unhealthy amount of these emotions, they start accumulating within the body to your detriment.
The same way cardio gets rid of fat deposits, the body-scan meditation gets rid of the negative emotional deposits in your body.
The way it works is:
Sit comfortably and close your eyes. Slowly start scanning your body, looking out for any physical sensations you can feel as you go through your head, shoulders, neck, arms, torso, hips, legs, ankles and toes. These could be any feelings of tightness, and pulling sensations, any agitation, tiredness, or tension or anything that feels like it’s calling out to you. Once you arrive at a particular spot, simply observe it as a neutral third party. Can you stay and feel the intensity, the quality, and the nature of the sensation. If it subsides automatically, well and good, but if it does not, then try to see if it is trying to tell you something. Maybe it is too intense, in which case you will need to keep revisiting it in subsequent meditations to keep softening it. Ask the question, while this sensation had a purpose in the past, does it still serve me now? Maybe the tightness in your stomach after being cut off by the rash driver was important to hit the brakes in that moment, but does that feeling still serve you at night before bed, 3 hours after it has happened? If you realize that this does not serve you anymore, you should feel the physical sensation dissipate or at least soften, and with it you’ll also feel your mind become lighter, having released that emotion.
Try to do this every night before bed, and specifically when you’re feeling particularly anxious, panicked, or stressed. Eventually your body will get used to releasing emotions that do not serve you anymore, and you’ll be able to let go of these negative emotions much more easily as a habit.
The body-scan meditation is one way to do a physical meditation, another well known and popular form of body meditation is — yoga.
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The physical body is kept healthy with a well-balanced diet and regular exercise.
The mental body is kept healthy with compassion towards others and meditation.
If both physical and mental bodies are healthy, you will be happy. That’s all there is!
