A Monk's Guide to Happiness: Meditation in the 21st century

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A Monk’s Guide To Happiness is exactly what it says on the tin. Within is a guide that is pragmatic and realistic in nature that offers beneficial and satisfying advice about both meditation and mindfulness (not the same thing) that can be brought into our lives in many different ways. Thubten has 25 years experience with meditation, using it as an advantage to see the world and its many interactions in new and interesting ways. Bringing together all of his knowledge and behaviour over the years as a monk, a speaker, a teacher and at the same time openly recognising his past choices and mistakes. I wrote this book because I am passionate about helping people realize they can choose happiness, and I wanted to show how this can be learned through the power of meditation. Meditation helps us to access what feels like a deep well within, filled with nourishing water that we can drink whenever we want. It would be a certain recipe for disaster this genetic precondition of ours if you didn’t have the chance to learn to use it to your benefit. I had the good fortune to meet the author, Gelong Thubten, in person on several occassions during my time working at Google, where he gave meditation lessons and talks about awareness in the business context.

Unhappiness involves a sense of incompleteness, which arises from desire and seeking happiness outside of ourselves. Now, the reason that beginner-level meditation exercises start with anchors like the body and breath is that these are very immediate, noticeable things to focus on. But in theory, your anchor could be anything. With that in mind, you can start broadening your meditation practice by implementing mindful moments. As Buddhists have known for a couple of millennia, happiness is not just a dopamine rush in your brain: it is an enduring state of completeness and peace of mind. Add a couple of non-Buddhist based books about happiness (Mo Gawdat, e.g.), awareness etc... and you could say that I have a fair understanding of the matter. The main brain chemical involved in that kind of happiness “hit” is dopamine, and interestingly this hormone surges before we get what we want and then it drops away. When we are about to have the bite of cake, or when we’re getting ready for the party, we are caught up in the excitement of the chase, and when we actually eat the cake the dopamine drops away; and so our lives are about anticipation. Animals get a big dopamine hit when they think they are about to get fed; “about to happen” is always the exciting part. “When I am rich”; “When I meet the right person”; “When I achieve the body I want.” We never actually get there, as the anticipation leads to a habit of looking for the next thing, which means we never feel we truly arrive. There is always an “if,” “when,” or “because” to our happiness.

Normally our minds don’t feel free. Thoughts and emotions create a storm inside us, and we easily become their slaves. Moment to moment we might find ourselves in an “argument” with reality, constantly wishing things were different. Happiness involves mastering our thoughts and emotions and embracing things just as they are; it means that we relax and stop trying to manipulate our circumstances. If we can learn how to rest deeply in the present moment, even when facing difficulties, and we train our minds not to judge, we can discover within us a tremendous source of happiness and satisfaction. We might start to notice how much we usually look for nourishment from “outer” things instead. There are books by Matthieu Ricard and others that may take precedent over the less known Gelong Thubten…the former has worked as a translator for the Dalai Lama, and he had been trained as a top scientist, born in a family of respected French academics, he has taken part in some revealing experiments, that have shown how different the brain activity of those who mediate for hours each day is from the rest of us, common earthlings, and apart from the scanning of the brains, I am thinking of the test where they had the sound of a shotgun blasting near the Buddhist monks and others, Secret Service agents, police officers, used with the incredibly loud detonation…while Ricard would not move a muscle, due to his – and those who mediate like him, possible Gelong – ability to control his brain and body almost to perfection, those who train with guns could not help but move muscles in their faces and probably elsewhere… To avoid the pitfalls of grasping and pushing things away, we need to develop the skill of neutrally observing them. These attitudes come from wanting things that we don’t have but that we think we can’t be happy without.

Thubten is refreshingly authentic, sharing his own struggles with meditation and also sharing how difficult it has been for him when he has experienced longer-term meditation retreats for lengths such as 9 months and even 4 years. He's also refreshingly open about his turbulent early adulthood years, yet he doesn't so much judge himself for these years as seem to express gratitude that he found a better way to live. Simply put,” writes Thubten, “when we are walking in a park on a glorious sunny day, and we have a toothache, we take the sunshine and beauty for granted, but tend to focus on the painful tooth. We are primed to notice what’s wrong, as it feels like an intrusion into our natural state.” Meditation is the Key to HappinessHowever, it is important to note that we don’t experience any of these thoughts or emotions 100 percent of the time; there is an everchanging flow, in fact many thousands of changes per day. From the point of view of meditation, this is encouraging, as we can learn methods which help us consciously direct this flow. Our thoughts and emotions are really just habits, and so we can build new, positive ones and become less habituated to those that are negative. According to Buddhist philosophy, he reminds us, we are practically programmed to be happy: “The very reason we can be happy is that it is our true nature. This is why we feel things are in their rightful state when we’re happy: suffering feels like an intrusion into how things should be.”