Tara Brach - Part 1: Happiness

Episode Date: October 11, 2013

2013-10-09 - Part 1: Happiness - This 2-part series explores conditioned and unconditioned happiness: What blocks us from experiencing true well-being, and the skillful means that allow this natural expression of our being to shine through. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

As many of you know on Monday, we had a launching of a pilot program at Walt Whitman High School on mindfulness. And Congressman Tim Ryan and I did some talks, and there were about 900 people that showed up. It was quite a crowd. So beforehand, I was putting together a talk, you know, to talk about, you know, the value of mindfulness for teens. And I called my son, who was a graduate of Walt Women High School. and told him what I was doing, and he himself has been very interested in mindfulness, done some research on it, and it's kind of involved with it in grad school. And after I told him how I was going to talk about how mindfulness could relieve stress

and relieve anxiety and improve executive function and emotional intelligence, I told him my spiel. He said, well, if I was doing it, I would ask them, when's the last time that you really enjoyed the food you are? eating. He said, when's the last time you appreciated moments of laughter with a friend? Once the last time you paused and it was raining and you really listened when you consciously savored the moment. So he said, I'd let them know that mindfulness strengthens our capacity to relax and enjoy our moments to be happy. So hence you've got what we're going to talk about tonight here. Thank you, Narayan. But it's a it's a

real misunderstanding of Buddhism and of spiritual practices that there's this focus on suffering. And now, just to say, suffering's part of reality and this is a path to wake up to reality, but part of reality is we have built into us a capacity for joy and wonder and deep peace and contentment. And so the inquiry is really what gets in the way. the Buddha said I would not be teaching this if genuine happiness and freedom were not possible

so that's a confirmation so say it amen so we'll talk about this tonight and next week really what's the nature of true happiness and you might substitute the word well-being

or whatever there's different words we can use what blocks it and what's the pathway to waking it up to nourishing happiness. And it's an opportunity to really investigate in your own life. You know, is there a kind of mood or a set of moods that you get stuck in and you've not really opened yourself to other possibilities? Because we get habituated. So that the opening inquiry, and I invite you, unless you're listening on a podcast and driving to close your eyes right now. And this is a reflection on your own happiness, based on your understanding of happiness and well-being. And just to ask yourself,

do I experience happiness much? You know, in the last few days today, and when you're feeling well-being, are you aware of it? Is it something that you're mindful of? And do you have a sense of what gives rise to happiness when you're feeling it? And I'll give you some possibilities that are taken from positive psychology of what might be the cause for you. For some people, it's sense pleasures, and you may be a bunch of them for you, but sense pleasure. We get happy when food does taste good, or when sex feels good, or when we see beauty and feel a sense of wonder.

Another way we get happiness or well-being is when we're really immersed in experience, when there's real engagement or flow for someone. For some of us it's when we feel relatedness with others. For some of us we feel happy when there's a sense of meaning in our lives. There's perhaps serving or belonging to something larger. For some when there's a sense of accomplishment or mastery. What's your sense for yourself? When you're happy, what is it that is the grounds of it?

You can keep considering this and I'll keep going and if you'd like you can open your eyes. So the Buddha described two kinds of happiness, and I think you'll find they, if you don't know them, they'll make good sense to you. And one is a worldly kind of happiness. The polyword is pomoja. And it's a happiness that is correlated with life going our way in some way. So it's, as I mentioned before, it might be happiness because of some, it's passing because of some pleasure that's going on or some sense of gratification through the senses,

or it might be being with a certain person, or it might be, or happy because something we've really been wanting to accomplish, we pulled it off. So that's called Pomoda. That's the worldly happiness. It comes, it goes. And as we might imagine, you know, it can be very wholesome, or it might not be so wholesome.

The second kind of happiness, the polyword sukkha, and it's unconditional happiness. Think of it as happiness with no cause, happy for no reason. That's one of the best phrases in the world. Happy for no reason. And that's considered a place of freedom. So we'll start by looking at the first, at Pomoja, this happiness that has cause because it can be wholesome.

It can be a helpful thing. It can create an atmosphere for more of that unconditioned happiness if we hold it lightly. Often we don't. But when it's fleeting, but it can be wholesome, where we really do enjoy that taste, or a great massage, or a perfectly placed compliment, like, really, you don't look 60?

You only look 58, you know, that kind of thing. Or when our team wins the Olympics or the Super Bowl, and they've measured for men, in particular, great surge in the happy, biochemistry you know really happens and sometimes it's a bit longer live like the happiness and an accomplishment or for hiking in a beautiful wilderness area immersed in a creative project or happiness when we see our children happy one of my favorite examples of pomoja this this passing happiness was

told by Maurice Sendeck who you know is the illustrator of children's books he wrote that one day a little boy I sent a charming card with a little little drawing and he loved it. So he answers all his mail, he says. But this one, sometimes it's hastily, but he said, I lingered over this one. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a wild thing on it. I wrote, Dear Jim, I loved your card. Then I got a letter back from his mother. She said, Jim liked your card so much, he ate it. This to me was one of the highest compliments I'd ever received. He didn't care of that it was an original morgue. He didn't care of that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it. He loved it. He ate it. So as I'm mentioning,

when happiness comes from these different causes, it can be a very wholesome, wholesome experience, and we'll explore next week how it's really important to savor them. But here's where the difficulty comes in, and that is that we have a very strong conditioning to fixate to certain vehicles that deliver that pleasure and of this passing happiness a certain person our money, our health, that

we have to keep it, we need to get more of it. So that undermines happiness when we fixate, when we have to have. As soon as we have to have the world be a certain way

and often it's different than it is, we start suffering. because we're arguing with reality. It's when the conditions that we like, when we don't have those conditions to be happy, we're in trouble because we're dependent on it being a certain way. So there's an inquiry for you again in this, which is to observe today and you might check it out.

And just to ask yourself, In any moment did you feel a sense of enough that the moment was fine just as it was? Were you aware at any time today of enough just as it is, not wanting anything different? Or do you notice that during the day you were pretty much on your way somewhere else, preparing for something, trying to solve a problem, figure something out, get something else done. So often we're trying to get more comfortable or remove something that's uncomfortable. So another inquiry for you is to ask, what really is between me and happiness? Just find out. You might think of a relationship. What's between me and really just being happy, contented,

feeling well-being in this relationship. Or maybe you ask that about your body. What's between me and well-being my body, just as it is? What's between me and happiness or well-being at work? Really get interested. What is between me and happiness in these different domains of my life? And notice if what you find is that whatever you're considering,

there's a sense that in some way, way you're wanting it different. You want something more, something different. That there's a sense that something's missing. It's so interesting. As we begin to investigate well-being, we start seeing how the ego works. We start seeing the ego or the space suit self, as I sometimes call it, that feels separate and is wired. It's really part of our survival wiring to pursue gratification and to avoid threat. And even when we've got some gratification, there's some sense of not enough, some fear it's going to be taken away because inevitably it will go. And to the degree that historically we had unmet needs, to that degree, our energy

gets very occupied with constantly controlling and trying to get more and avoid bad things. that means we never sense enough. Just ask yourself right this moment. Can you close your eyes? Can you feel the life that's right here in your body? And can you sense nothing is missing? Nothing is wrong. The core teaching of the Buddha

is that the source of suffering is that we want it different. Can you sense how that is true for you? So it goes in a few different directions. One is that our nervous system is pretty biased towards what's wrong. It's looking for possibilities of things going wrong. And it's part of our survival equipment. Anything that's happened in the past that's caused us, difficulty, pain, injury, rejection, we're scanning for it.

And we're just looking for problems. I remember hearing about a group of high school students in the Midwest that pulled this prank where they released these goats, these three goats into the school, and they put numbers on them. They put one, three, and four. They canceled school that day because the staff was so busy looking for number three. But you see what happens? We fixate on something, but we assume a problem. We're rigged to pursue also what will enhance. and there's a sense of never enough and the more wounds, the more deprivation,

we look for substitutes, for love, for safety and we get addicted to them. So there's if only mind, some of you are familiar with. And it's the delusion that if only I got this, this partner, or my body, I lost this amount of weight, or I got this amount of money, this raise, or this position, then I'd be happy. if only mind is a really important one to be aware of. Most of us have something and then we have a smaller if only mind. Like if only I could get past this big demanding stretch of time in my life,

then I'd be happy, you know. Or if only this person would cooperate and be the way I want them to be, then I'd be happy. Ram Dass tells the story. He says one of the greatest things that happened in my relationship with my father was when he was approaching death. I finally allowed him to be who he was instead of trying to make him into who I thought he should be.

And he stopped trying to make me into who he thought I should be and we became friends. You might really sense that in your life. Like what the relationships are like when on some level you're wanting somebody to be different. There's no possibility of real closeness real intimacy, real sense of happiness together, when there's that agenda. So you might take a moment, let's reflect again, I'm going to ask you to keep doing this here and there.

This inquiry now is about if only mind. What are you waiting for? What are you linking future happiness to? Specific, as I mentioned, to get past a difficult period or for someone to change. Maybe you're waiting for more financial security or for your health to get better. Maybe your if only has to do with recognition in some way or feeling you've given something to the world. Maybe your if only is the perfect partner or that a loved one that's having trouble works

it out. Then I can relax. Then I can be happy. See if you can physically sense if only mine. Can you sense how when you're really wanting something and you're waiting for it, there's a kind of leaning forward that now is not enough? It's kind of like you're skipping over now because you're waiting. And then to ask, is it really true that if I got what I'm wanting, that I'd be happy?

Is it really true? If we're in the habit of wanting, we keep on wanting even after we get it. So here's the challenge with if only mind that there's an illusion that we think we're going to be happy and it doesn't work. We're regularly wrong. And there's some really interesting research now. They followed 13 lottery winners, you know, and found that winners are ultimately no happier than non-winners. They found that paraplegics, paraplegics usually become as get tent as people who can walk, that we anticipate good things happening will make us happier than we actually get and the bad things will make us more miserable.

We're not good at predicting, and we organize our life around how we think things are going to be. Some of you might remember the story of a young man who asked God how long a million years was to him. And he said, God says, a million years to me, it's just like a second to you. Then the young man said, God, what's a million dollars like for you? God says a million dollars to me, it's just like a penny to you. Then the young man got up his courage and said, God, could I have one of your pennies?

And God smiled and said, certainly, just a second. So many of you might know we have a biochemical set point for mood. And that mood doesn't change over time even if we get what we thought we wanted. We find the partner the perfect job or something bad happens. You know, a dear one, we lose a deer one or whatever. whatever, whether it's good or bad, we go back to our set point in about five months. It's kind of interesting. So that's one reason that if only mind doesn't work, that it just doesn't deliver.

The other reason is that while we're in if only mind, we're not here. We've left the one place, and the moments we're wanting things to be a certain way, or trying to get away from things being wrong. We've left the one place, presence, where if we could learn to really be, we could touch really the depth of what brings happiness. In the moments of seeking something, we're leaving the place where true gratification is sourced.

There's a little story of two goldfish swimming in the ocean and one says to the other, so what is it that your heart really desires? And the response is, oh, I'd love to have the fish, bowl, colored gravel, plastic plants, a little castle, you know, the whole deal. Anyway, that's the whole story. But I thought it was kind of telling that, you know, not only do we fix it on substitutes, what we want is actually already here. And that's the message. And that's the biggest, what the Buddhist call ignorance, source of ignorance, is that we think what we want is down the road or

someplace else and it's always and already here. It's here, this vast ocean of our own awareness. But we have to learn how to sit back and discover that. So this is the next part of what we'll explore is what changes our set point. You know, what is it that really opens us to this sukkha, this unconditional happiness? I have a little cartoon at home of two robots and one's dancing around joyously saying, you know, I'm free, I'm free, I've overridden my manual button or I've found my manual button, I've overridden my conditioning or whatever it is, but freedom, you know, we override the conditioning in some way. And that's, I'd say the best description of meditation.

We're undoing our conditioning to fight and flee in a way that doesn't serve us. We're undoing. It's not like we're trying to get somewhere. Meditation is not another doing, it's an undoing. And so the, when the robot's saying, I found the button, you know, the magic button to override, the button is a mindful presence. It's what we practice here. It's really the heart of all of the path. Is this capacity to recognize, oh, I've gone in, you into some kind of a trance. You know, I'm judging, I'm down on myself, I'm fantasizing about something, I'm constantly trying to get away from some sort of emotional pain. We start catching on. And there's some wisdom in us that knows that the only freedom will be if

we can learn to come back right here and be with this life. So that's really the process that wakes us up from this egoic space suit self that's constantly trying to manage things and going after stuff and avoiding stuff and coming back to a quality of being and it's rare these being quality where there's truly a sense of how it is right now I could die right now this is just this is it this is it this moment I've shared at sometimes that my husband and I have a a kind of game we play. Sometimes we'll go for a walk and we'll see something really beautiful. And Jonathan will stop and he'll say, this is it, this moment. And I'll go, no, no, no, no, this is it. This is it. This moment. No, no, no. The idea is to stay. Don't just race through things.

This is it. Given the strength of the trance, the conditioning that we've got to be constantly on our way somewhere else, It takes a real purposefulness to come to presence and to a place of real appreciation and contentment. It takes real purposefulness. There's a woman, a friend of mine, that did a training out on the West Coast, a year-long training and meditation for people of color, and one woman in it, a real dynamo. She's a community activist. had experienced a childhood of poverty and trauma,

and she was facing a lot of illness, she had faced divorce, racism, single parenting of two children. She had really been through a lot. And so during the year, she talked of the different struggle to educate herself and stand up for her beliefs and how she had fought for become radical and fought for justice and local and national politics. She had been really grimly determined.

But at the last meeting of the group, This is what she announced. She said, after all the struggles and troubles I've lived through, I've decided to do something really radical. I'm going to be happy. She decided on happiness. Decided on happiness. Rumi says, when you go to a garden, do you look at the thorns or the flowers? Spend more time with the roses and jasmine. And the point isn't to pretend the thorns aren't there. This woman needed to face major challenges still does. But there's a liberating attitude that in the midst we can find refuge in presence, in open-heartedness. We can touch into our love for life.

A deep contentment in the midst. So there's research on happiness now, a lot of it. Tons of the top books on Amazon have to do with happiness or joy. One piece of research said that people that are happy intend. to find well-being. There's an intentionality. And it's not a kind of striving after happiness. It's got a different energetic feeling. It's a sense that, wow, this is part of our potential. Why not open to it? As the Buddha said, I wouldn't have taught you this path in this practice if it wasn't possible to be happy and free. So this intentionality is one of saying,

wow, this is part of my potential. Why not? There's a wonderful story that Marty Seligman, who's the father of positive psychology, tells about his waking up to this. And he says, when my daughter, Nikki and I were gardening, she was just five. He said, I should confess that when I garden, I'm goal-directed, time-urgent. Nicky was throwing weeds in the air and dancing around, and I yelled at her. She came back to me and said, Daddy? Do you remember before I was five? I whined all the time. I wind every day. Did you notice it since my fifth birthday? I haven't whined at all? I said, yes, Nikki. Well, Daddy? That was because on my birthday I decided I wasn't going to whine anymore. It's the hardest thing I've ever done. And if I can stop winding, you can stop being so grumpy. So he writes, in a flash, I saw that she was right about me. I really was a nimbus, and probably any success I had in life was not due to being a grouch but in spite of it.

He writes, I realized that my profession, psychology, was half-baked, that the big part was about suffering, but the unbaked part was about positive emotion and virtue and positive institutions. In that moment, in a classical religious sense, I acquired a mission. So that's part one, is there's something in us that says, wait a minute, this is part of our intrinsic capacity, this appreciation, this joy, the sense of enough, this is it. It's part of what we have within us.

So we commit to nourishing it. Many of you know this quote, know that joy is rare, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation. obligation. And again the word obligation for me is it's an expression of our wholeness that when we're not fixated on something is missing right now, something is wrong. When we're

not fixated like that, there's an openness where this life starts just flowing through and there's a quality of appreciating and celebrating what flows through that space. one then. Committing. So let's just again reflect together, okay? Closing your eyes. So what happens to you when you let yourself say, I want to feel happy? I want to feel content, that well-being of enough. I'm going to pose that. Just sense your own longing or intention towards well-being and then notice what happens as you express it inwardly. What do you notice? Do you have a sense of a doubt of what's possible or a question about deserving or maybe an excitement at the possibility? If we can begin to wake up

that intention towards more wholeness, towards more joy, it energizes a presence. You know, happiness can be imagined in the future, but it can only be lived right here. There's a Eskimo quote. It says, yesterday is ashes, tomorrow would. Only today does the fire burn brightly. So we each have a wisdom that guides us to be here for our life. We each have a wisdom that knows that if we're at the end of our life, we're at the end of our life looking back, we wouldn't have wanted to have been sensed that we're always on our way somewhere else. We would want to have arrived. So the training and mindful presence, and you can open your eyes if you'd like, it's very, very simple and not easy because

in a very basic way the training is saying relax and come back here and our nervous system is habituated, I sometimes describe it like a bicycle, we're kind of pedaling away from the present moment. And the more stress we get, the faster we pedal. So we're, as I said, deconditioning that and saying, okay, you're stressed, but come here and just feel what's right here anyway. And it takes an intention and a choosing and a kind of courage, you know, courage, a greatness of heart, to be willing to say, okay, I'm going to hang out with this uncomfortable, edge queasy, in between, not quite at ease feeling and just be here. So the promise is this, that as we cultivate a mindful presence, as the researchers tell us,

we are directly activating the prefrontal cortex that's correlated with positive emotions. And we're quieting down the sympathetic nervous system that keeps you. keeps us read. So there's all sorts of research saying if you keep at it with this mindfulness practice that you actually will have more access to positive emotions. And here's truth-telling. As you begin to practice mindfulness and come into presence, that doesn't happen necessarily right away. You might have moments of collecting and feeling peaceful but you also start getting in touch with the layers of what you were running away from. Makes sense? All that unlive life. So we start

getting in touch with it. It's asking for attention. I notice for myself, part of my ritual in the mornings is the very first thing. I get up around six and I go and I immediately go outside with my dog and we go for a walk and I walk down to the river and I often, if it's nice out, I'll do my meditation down there. But I watch my own mind moving from kind of the habitual thoughts that are moving through and being kind of lost inside them and sometimes going way into a wormhole and being really lost to more and more, oh yeah, birds, breeze, you know, smells coming back to earth. And when I know I've really begun to arrive is when I first feel a kind of clench of, it's almost like existential clutch of anxiety.

It's a kind of organismous thing of, oh, what's around the corner that I'm kind of nervous about, that I've been holding my body, but my thoughts and my occupations have kept me from really sitting down into it. It used to be that when I'd feel that clutch, I'd go, oh no, okay, let's practice with it, breathe, with it, da-da-da-da. Now it's like, oh, this means I'm more here. And it's appreciating the heerness and the more I just keep staying and the more presence there is, it doesn't matter the content. Whether there's sadness or a clutch of

anxiety or whether there's, you know, something comes up in a feeling of irritation or discomfort as I'm walking, our beauty, sounds of the river, you know, seeing a bird I haven't seen, whichever way it goes, it's the fact that the presence is there that actually is creating the well-being. So it's not right away as we we come into presence that there's actual a real sense of ease because first we have these layers to be with and keep discovering more of a sense of the space that makes room for them. So this is Suka. This is the pathway to this unconditional happiness which is where we choose presence.

Where it's like no matter whether it's pleasant or unpleasant we are more interested in presence than any trance that we take ourselves into. And we trust presence that because the more we rest in it, the more we are the space that has room for whatever is playing through us. This is the happiness that changes our set point. Story for you that really inspired me. A woman shared her experience. She was in a mid-level security prison and some friends of friends of friends.

of mine were teaching there and after a meditation course she wrote a little bit about her experience. She wrote how through that course she said they taught me how to just be, how to listen to the way my body feels, how to breathe without feeling I was going to drown. That took a lot of effort. Who would have guessed a person needs breathing lessons? Finally I got that down and I learned how to be still, really still. I learned where peace of mind lives. And then when I thought I couldn't get any better, I learned how I could move in the stillness. There's always one more skillful thing to learn. Mindfulness works wherever a person lives, however a person lives.

There's stress in every life. The trick is to see the life around the stress. I look out my slit of a window and see the prettiest stars I've ever seen, because I can really see now. Why was I here for 15 years before I realized that I couldn't detect yellow flowers under the low pressure sodium lamps in the courtyard? That's easy. I never bothered to slow down and pay attention. To be mindful, to realize that it's still okay.

I am still okay. Even if my best laid plans fall through, it is hard here to not make plans for when I go home. It is harder to face the realization that when I go home might not actually ever get here. Those days make me have to be okay with today. As a Christian I know, I was never promised tomorrow. As a mindful person, I can see that this sky is pretty. This grass is green. If this is the only sidewalk I will ever get to walk on, I'm at a place where I can appreciate.

not always such a bad sidewalk. I have joy in pointing out Orion the Hunter when I leave my meditation group on Wednesday night. So that's Sukha. That's that unconditional happiness that comes from a presence that's really timeless, it's vast, and when we're resting in it, we appreciate the life that's here. Nietzsche says, for happiness, how little suffices for happiness, the least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a whisk, an eye glance, little maketh up the best happiness. Be still. I wonder how many of you have noticed that what really makes you happy are very simple things. The deepest things, it's not the thing, it may be that we think we're happy,

because of the look of the leaves as they've fallen on the path in this fall that we're in. Are the beauty of the clouds moving through the sky or the sounds of a child's laughter? We might think that's what's making me happy. Playing in the ocean, yeah. But what's actually allowing us to be happy is the background space of awareness, of presence. Investigate this. When you're having a sense of beauty or kindness or recognition, or the goodness of the simple things in your life, when you're feeling that, when you're

sensing that well-being, notice what's really going on. Notice the background of presence inside yourself. They go together. Okay. So the pathway home that we're exploring tonight and we'll continue this in the next class is to decide on happiness. In other words, commit to that as part of becoming more whole, more awake. And then out of that decision, you're really committing to presence to be aware of what's between me in happiness and with a friendliness and an interest, just that presence with will actually allow you to recognize that presence is what you are. When we're truly happy, there's a shift in our sense of really who we are. We've gone from a person.

that's enjoying something that's happened to get lucky, that is the good fortune to be enjoying beauty or a pleasurable sense, sensation or whatever, we shift from that personhood to this quality of beingness where there's just simply a sense of an awake space that's tender and appreciative. Her identity is no longer confined. There's a freedom in that. So we'll end with a very brief little meditation and then we'll close. And as you come into stillness and feel a pause right now, you might feel your intention to explore this open presence we've been talking about, this presence that's inclusive of the joys and the sorrows.

Just allow yourself to begin noticing what's it like right now? What's it like in this moment? Because this is it. This is it right now. These sensations, can you feel these sensations and relax with them? Just let them be exactly how they are? Can you feel the sensations and feelings of the heart and truly allow them to be just as they are? This is a profound yes to the experience of the moment.

Can you sense the space around you? sounds and just relax back and let them wash through. This open presence doesn't oppose anything, doesn't go after anything. You might sense that smile spreading through the heart, not to cover over, but to sense the space it can create, this heart that can welcome everything, with tenderness, with friendliness,

just letting this whole world, this whole life live through you, letting your awareness be as wide as the world. Lama, Gendin, Rimpashei writes this. He says, happiness cannot be found through great effort and willpower, but is already there in relaxation and letting go. Happiness cannot be found through great effort and willpower, but is already there in relaxation and letting go. Don't strain yourself.

There's nothing to do. Let the game happen on its own, springing up and falling back, without changing anything, and all will vanish and reappear without end, waiting to grasp the ungraspable you exhaust yourself in vain. As soon as you relax this grasping, space is there. Open, inviting, and comfortable. Nothing to do, nothing to force, nothing to want. Everything happens by itself. We reach, awaken to this natural space of freedom, of loving presence, of happiness.

And may the ripples of our well-being touch and awake and heal and nourish all beings everywhere. Namaste. Thank you for your attention. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.