Happiness is all in your mind

So today, I want to start off with a few questions.

The questions I'm going to ask you are very simple.

And I promise you'll be able to answer these.

Alright, ready to go?

For your first one?

Okay. Your first question is: Are you having a good day?

Okay, got your answer? Alright. My second question for you is: Why?

If you're having a good day, why are you having a good day? Or if you're having a bad day, what is making you have a bad day?

So I have one more question for you...

This will be the most wonderful question of all.

My last question is: Tomorrow, would you rather have a good day, or would you rather have a bad one?

Do you have your answer for that one? What about the day after tomorrow?

What about Saturday?

What about Sunday?

How about Monday?

Would you like to have a good day or a bad day on Monday?

Tuesday?

Wednesday?

Thursday?

Friday?

This time next week? A good day or a bad one?

So that last question, like I said, is likely the easiest one for us to answer because we know the answer to that, don't we?

We want to have a good day, every day. Did anyone answer, "Yes, I want to have a bad stint on Monday"?

Of course not. We all want to have a good day every day. So this is really questioning you about the type of happiness that everyone is are hoping for in our heart of hearts. We have a good day when we're happy, and we want to be happy every day. There's never a day when we don't want to be happy. But whether or not we have good days or bad days actually depends upon how we answered the second question.

Do you recollect the second question?

What was the second question?

"Why?"

Why am I having a good day? Why am I having a bad day?

So one thing that my teacher says Geshe Kelsang Gyatso) is, "Much of the time our mind is like a balloon in the wind, blown here and there by external circumstances.."

Do you know that feeling?

He says when things are going well, when they're going our way, we feel happy. But then if something goes wrong, for example, he says if we're forced to work with a person we detest, or if something doesn't go our way, then our happy demeanor disappears.

So as long as our answer to the question "why am I having a good day? ", or "why am I having a bad patch? "

Because you are familiar with, this is a question people often ask us like, perhaps when you get home today, someone  will ask, " "Did you have a good day? "

And we'll say, "Yeah, I did." "There's this lady, and she talked to us about how it is necessary to compassionate towards former inpatients, and there's this musician who did this awesome beat-boxing thing with his mouth, you know, such person or persons, and that person."

As long as our reasons for why we had a good day are a roll of external preconditions, then we're not going to have this stable happiness that everyone desires. Does that make sense to you?

Because if that's what our happiness is are dependent upon,  we cannot control people and circumstances every single moment, so then our happiness will be in the hands of others, won't it?

It'll be at the whimsy of our circumstances. So if you wish to have a good day every day, we've got two things we need to do.

So the first thing that we need to do is we need to stop outsourcing our happiness and blaming our unhappiness on other people in the world and stop our happiness being controlled by circumstances. In other terms, we need to stop attributing our happiness to what's going on externally, and we need to stop blaming others, especially accusing others for our unhappiness.

So for as long as we do that, as long as we're making it the job of people and circumstances to build our happiness, or as long as we're making it their fault when we're unhappy, our happiness will be very unstable, and illusive.

Our second undertaking is to actively cultivate a source of peace, calm and happiness coming from inside our own psyche.

So here's something I crave you to commit to memory. Are you ready?

This is another quote from one of my teacher's journals, where he says, "Happiness and unhappiness are states of mind and therefore their real causes cannot be found outside the mind"

So if we have a peaceful state of mind, we will be happy regardless of people and circumstances. If our brain is unpeaceful or agitated, then even if we have very good situations, we'll find it impossible to be happy. So, in other words, it's not what is happening that is making us happy or unhappy; it is how we are responding to those things that determines whether we're happy or unhappy.

It is what our state of mind is like that defines our happiness or unhappiness.

How are we going fix this?

Let's understand this intellectually. It's not rocket science, is it?

It's not hard to understand.

And maybe, to a certain extent, as I tell you these things, you're like, "Yeah, I knew that already." "I knew that already."

But how do we really do it? How do we really foster this stable peace of mind that we can rely upon, regardless of the external circumstances?

So this is really where meditation comes into play. And I would say I would need a whole other post in order to really do this subject any justice. But for our purposes today, we can say that meditation is a mental action. It's the mental activity of concentrating on a peaceful positive state of mind. If we do that, we concentrate on a peaceful positive state of mind, then we can say we're mulling, whether that's like this, right?

Actually, you don't know if I'm meditating or not, because I could be thinking about my grocery list.

It's only meditation if I'm actually focusing on a positive peaceful state of mind. But the trick is, I can do it just like that. This is called formal meditation.

But we can also learn to do this all the time in our everyday lives.

Now is a perfect opportunity.

We concentrate on filling our mind with patience.

We're not disturbed, not unhappy. So why don't we try it now?

Are you up for it?

Just a short meditation.

But let's actually try it, let's to try to tap into our own potential for a peaceful positive state of mind. So now, I'll ask you to simply sit comfortably, and place your feet flat on the floor, and your hands on your lap.

And then you can lightly close your eyes and become aware of the sensation of your breath, at the tip of your nose.

And as you breathe out, you can imagine you're breathing out any anger, any mental business, any annoyance or unhappiness in their own lives. Breathing it all out, like dark smoke.

And as you breathe in, you can imagine and believe that you're breathing in a clear, bright light, which is the very nature of inner serenity.

And you can imagine that this clear, bright brightness fills your entire torso and mind.

And for a few seconds, simply enjoy this inner glow coming from within.

And now, as we finish,  be determined to bring this inner peace with you into the rest of your day to help yourself and others.

Namaste

(Adapted from: Happiness is all in your mind: Gen Kelsang Nyema at TEDxGreenville 2014 as this work is in the Creative Commons)  

As found on Youtube

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