Happiness Article

[Fran]

Hello Everybody

I found this article in one of my sister's magazines, that I really enjoyed reading and which made a lot of sense to me. Yeah, sure there are bits that I may not agree with completely, but that doesn't mean I have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. So, I thought I'd share it with you all

The Lost Art of Being Happy.

If you think you can only be content when all your worries have disappeared, you’re wrong. Tony Wilkinson explains how you can learn to be happy now.

Are you the happiest person you know? Not necessarily the riches, or most successful just the happiest? If not, why not? Most people will reel off their current worries – the job, the kids, the car the price of fish. I don’t’ mean to sweep these aside, problems need to be solved if possible, or waited out until they disappear. But as far as living happily is concerned, you have to face a crucial fact. If you can only live happily after all your problems are solved, you are never going to live happily, because when today’s problems are gone and forgotten others will take their place. So either living happily is just impossible or you have to do it in spite of your problems.

I worked for twenty years as an investment specialist among some very rich and powerful people. They had all the playthings they could wish for, but surprisingly few seemed any happier than less fortunate folk. Why?

When I left this was my starting point for what proved to be a long enquiry. I’m working on a book called Spirituality for Sceptics (published by Findhorn Press next summer), which picks up the idea that cultivating the inner life amounts to spirituality and whether or not you believe in a religion, it leads to happiness. Six years of philosophy at university (I like to think of myself as a freelance philosopher) and a lifelong interest in different religions shaped my approach. The explanation I found runs like a thread through centuries of thinking about happiness, though often obscured by other concerns.

Happiness is based on skills and therefore can be learned. The implications for the way we live are significant. We could learn to be happier and teach our children to be happy. Happiness doesn’t depend on external circumstances, happiness depends on your inner life. Happiness is about how you react inwardly to events, what you think and what you believe, how you feel, how problems affect you. It may sound obvious but like most obvious things it is often forgotten when it matters most. We focus almost exclusively on getting and spending and having fun, and then wonder why we are not happy. But it’s when our inner lives are tranquil that we are happiest and we call this inner peace.

Yoga and philosophy can help, but only if they have a positive impact on your inner life. The difficulty is that inner life is based on patterns and habits – some you were born with, most you have acquired. You don’t choose occasion by occasion how you respond inside to events. This happens and you feel angry; that happens and you feel sad; you pass the patisserie and you feel hungry; you hear a tune or smell a certain scent and it reminds you of a particular time or person… Things produce a response without you thinking about it or choosing how you feel, and they don’t necessarily leave you with inner peace. So the trick is to break the pattern. You can’t completely avoid problems, but you can change how you react to them by acquiring new habits that provoke peaceful inner responses.

There are four basic reasons why our inner lives can stop us living happily; habits of thought, belief, emotion and desire. Take, for example an emotion such as anger. It’s hard to be angry and happy at the same time, so whenever you are angry you are not happy. Thus training yourself to get angry less often would really help. It’s not a matter of biting back anger, but of gradually training yourself not to get angry so easily.

Most people are unhappy because of preconceptions that they hold about themselves or others, such as, ‘I could never do that’ (even though you might with practice) and ‘Everyone’s more confident than me’ (or perhaps just better bluffing than you). If we had the skills to change these assumptions we would be much happier.

Training your inner life into different habits requires learning skills of thinking, feeling and managing your beliefs and desires. Think of them as skills rather than virtues, you benefit from an important and liberating shift.

Instead of, “I must become a better person, you can think ‘I would live more happily if I worked on my skills.’ So the change in attitude becomes a choice, not a duty. And I’ve added an extra set of enjoyment skills. It’s not something you can do overnight – it’s a whole new way of life, but the reward is what we all want most -happiness. There are five main skills you need to cultivate.

Mindfulness. Borrowed from Buddhism, this involves developing your ability to focus your thoughts in the present. The problem most of us with thought is having too much of it – the worrying and non-stop mental ‘chattering’ our minds are prone to. Concentrating on your breathing is one way to practise – observing it closely is enough, although surprisingly hard. But many people achieve the same focus through activities such as yoga, sport dance or martial arts. I have a friend who does it by racing bikes down mountains; slightly mad, perhaps, but he mind doesn’t get a chance to wander.

Mindfulness is a key inner skill because as it gets stronger, it lets you focus on your own inner life and catch your habits in the act. Once you can see how you are ruled by them, the change you are seeking often happens of its own accord.

Compassion. Most religions rightly stress compassion, but ‘goodness’ isn’t the point here. As well as being a virtue in its own right it is a practical skill that counteracts negative emotions such as anger and hatred, which are terrible wreckers of happiness. Try it the next time someone annoys you: put yourself in their place and ask yourself what they might be thinking and feeling to behave like that. Even ‘bad’ people let alone people who just mildly annoy you, often have a warped or mistaken view of the world that makes them do what they do. Wars are started or minorities are persecuted because someone decides its what God wants, or that the minority is somehow a threat. It doesn’t mean that they should get away with their actions, but if you can get into the habit of thinking more tolerantly – by understanding that actions are also ruled by inner habits – you’ll find that you can react with less anger. And less anger means more happiness for you: it’s not about them. And as a bonus, you might find you can react to provocation more effectively, maybe persuade the other person to behave differently, because you won’t be undermined with negative emotions.

Story Skills. These are very useful for problems with your inner belief system, as they let you stand back and explore alternative versions of reality. Beliefs have great power over your life because beliefs are something that you take as fact. Start to think of your beliefs as stories, and it is easier to accept that other things might be true as well, or even instead of. True stories only select the little bit of reality we are focusing on at that moment: no one story is the whole truth about any situation. From a different point of view we would see another story, sometimes as a whole different world. This is not about make-believe, it’s about reframing situations to look at them from a different perspective. If I break my leg it’s no use pretending I haven’t, but what else is true? What opportunities does it bring? Maybe I need to learn to accept help, or catch up on whatever usually gets crowded out of my life, whether it’s family time or the reading I meant to do. The skill of looking for different perspectives and stories is the basis of some very successful therapies, and it is also powerful in everyday life.

Letting Go Techniques. These are particularly helpful when we are unhappy or not getting what we want. Generally, we are encouraged – by advertising for example – to keep wanting and to think that more will make us happier, whether it’s clothes or cars or even love. But wanting is a treadmill: as long as you have unsatisfied desires you won’t be at peace, so to be happy you either have to satisfy all your desires (unlikely), or let go of some of them. One of the best ways to practice letting go is to do without for short periods: many religions have times of fasting partly for this reason. If the need for something is making you unhappy, work on letting go of that need. Letting-go skills also include forgiveness, which helps hugely if you think you want revenge.

Enjoyment skills. [Focus on what is right rather than what is wrong. Be optimistic.] This last group includes skills such as patience, humour and especially gratitude. You don’t have to be grateful to someone, it’s enough to cultivate gratitude for things. Our minds naturally scan our environment for dangers and resources, a useful mechanism when we were hunter-gatherers. But it can make us unnecessarily pessimistic – focusing on the ten per cent we lack rather than the 90 per cent we have. Cultivating enjoyment skills will help redress the balance. The plain fact is that you will get stuck in queues, you will get aches and pains and you will get older. Bad stuff happens. If you dwell on how bad it is you only compound the problem: the skill is to look instead for enjoyment in that moment, however well hidden. For example, when you are stuck in traffic breathe deeply and slowly and enjoy the sensation of just breathing, of being alive. Look around and find one thing that’s beautiful, one that’s funny and one that touches you. It puts your impatience into perspective.

Acquiring all these skills takes time and effort. If I listed all the strokes in tennis, you would not expect to win Wimbledon by learning that list. The important thing is to proactive them until they operate without you thinking about them. Your practice routine will be very individual, because everyone needs to prioritise different skills that are holding them back from being happy, but keep the skills in mind and you constantly find new ways to try them out. This way of living is sa path between religion and materialism. You don’t have to give up your existing path to tread the path, but you don’t’ have to adopt a new faith either.

Spirituality for Sceptics by Tony Wilkinson, published by Findhorn Press in 2007.

Taken from You magazine, 15 October 2006, pages 53-57. I couldn't see anything about copyright.

[L W HALL]

Fran,

This was a good article to post, and although I don't necessarily agree with all of it, I do agree with the premise that happiness is mostly a mind set which emanates from within us rather than a thing which we acquire from outer sources. The key to the problem if we are unhappy, and live in a country where we enjoy freedoms of choice, is to start changing the way we think by focusing on and understading how negative thoughts directly influence our everyday lives.

L W

[Judith]

Hi, Fran --

Good article. It's always good to see articles encouraging people to think about raising their level of consciousness and not taking for granted that there's nothing they can do about their level of happiness!

Judith