A Case For Happiness

From the perspective of a participatory observer.

I had walked the path about 200 times. The path, that was a short circuit between the trees and lawns of the Vipassana meditation center on a hill in the countryside, approximately two hours from Barcelona. One round took me about 5 minutes, and since walking was the only type of exercise allowed between the meditation sessions, I had basically walked non-stop in every break over the past seven days.

Now, a thought turned up: If I was to put effort into starting a newsletter, it should give the readers some concrete value.

Thoughts are generally regarded as distractions during this type of meditation retreats, to be given at best a quick inner smile, while patiently returning to meditative focus. But this time, I chose to explore the thought a little deeper:

One valuable thing I have to give, it appeared to me, are my insigths about happiness.

But then, I wondered, how much value does one get from reading about someone else’ insights? And, the doubtful voice in me went on, there are tons of books and whole schools of thought out there with advice on how to be happy. After all, Buddha himself had taught his path to "real peace, real happiness" already 2500 years ago.

Well, my unbendable optimist voice responded, there actually is an aspect that could make my specific approach to happiness valuable to others.

Since starting my studies of philosophy, more than 20 years ago, I've been always searching for an approach that works in combination with mingling in the mess of life. That is, the type of life that people actually live, with all its imperfect decisions and mistakes, with all its unpredictable turns, may they be sometimes beautiful, sometimes sad, sometimes ugly, sometimes wild. I even wanted an approach to happiness that would work in different cultural settings and material situations, without just reducing or escaping them.

In short, I was searching for an approach to happiness that is based neither on ignoring the messiness of reality, nor on simply accepting it.

Five classic approaches to happiness

Let us start by looking at some of the most prominent approaches. Of course, the following summaries are outragingly simplified, and I'm sure the proponents of each would have many good arguments why they are unfair and incomplete. But I think they still can be useful for distinguishing the approach to happiness I am aiming at:

1. The "modern individualist approach": Happiness through achieving something, through optimizing myself and my life, through owning stuff, through having social status, physical health, security, relationships etc.

2. The "Buddhist approach": Happiness through inner balance, by finding freedom from craving and aversion, and finally overcoming the self altogether and reaching a permanent state of enlightenment.

3. The "Stoic approach": Happiness through being satisfied with what is and doing what needs to be done.

4. The “Interbeing approach": Happiness through being “one” with other (human) beings and possibly the universe.

5. And then there is the "impact approach": Happiness is not important anyways, life is about creating something, making impact, "leaving a trace".

I certainly do not want to judge these approaches. In my view, they all have strong points to them.

But for me, they were not what I was looking for. To put it again in outragingly simplified words:

2. felt like ignoring reality,

3. felt like accepting reality,

1. and 4. felt like selectively ignoring some parts of reality and accepting others,

and 5. felt like neither, but then might imply not being happy.

Again, for sure this simplified analysis does not do justice to the approaches, and for many people they may work well. But I was looking for an approach where I felt that I was sincerely facing reality, and none of them convinced me in that respect.

Finally happy

While walking around the laws and trees of the mediation center, I smiled to myself when I realized that after more than forty years of carrying a name that translates into “the happy”, I had actually reached a time in my life when my happiness felt deeply grounded and not just like a wavering raft pushed up and down by the tides of inner moods and external circumstances.

Nothing external had changed. Nothing in my status, or my income, or my relationships. I did not fall in love, I did not find a home in a community, I had invested thousands of hours of work and taken on substantial debts for my projects, but there was yet no big success to show for it. I was not even climbing better.

Besides, the world is still in a messed up state. Deeply unjust conflicts and wars bring horrible suffering to millions of people. And in my view, humanity is still heading towards a wall, harming our natural environment and extinguishing other species along the way, whilst building technologies to speed up the ride...

To be clear: I am not satisfied

There are many things I want to change. I want to put an end to the financial pressures I am facing at the moment and achieve abundance in my projects. Even more importantly, I want to find and cultivate deep connections. Most importantly, I want to successfully contribute to the global transformation of our economic and social systems that I believe is urgently needed.

I am not satisfied with things as they are, not with my life and not with the things around me.

This is not negative self-talk. This is, in my view, trying to face reality with sincere eyes. Things are not OK for me and I do not want to ignore that. I do not want to accept that neither. I am not satisfied. But I am happy.

Happiness is there

Today I am at a point where happiness seems to be at my free disposal at any moment. It almost feels like I hacked the Matrix.

One core thing I realized is that happiness is not something that happens to me. It is not even something I have to work towards. It is just there, all the time. The only thing I need to do is to stop preventing myself from being happy.

Wait a minute. To be happy, I just need to stop doing something? What about eating ice cream in the sunshine, together with my dearest people, while floating over a quiet lake on a boat moved only by a faint breeze just cool enough to make the sun perfectly agreeable?

Yes of course, there can be happy moments when things are just going well. But I am actually talking about base happiness. The happiness that we can feel when standing in a crowded bus stuck in a traffic jam. Or when we are sick with constant pain. The happiness that is there even when the circumstances are not that ideal.

So yes, I realized the only thing I need to do for being happy is to stop preventing myself from being happy. It is my own choice, at any time.

6. The "Sincerity approach"

I call this the "Sincerity Approach". For the sake of fairness, here the simplified one sentence summary: Happiness through getting in touch with ourselves and thereby accessing our capacity to love - ourselves, our dear ones, everyone, and the beauty of existence.

In a few more words: This approach starts out by developing the courage to face things how they are. My current situation is not good and I do not want to accept it as it is. I also do not want to accept the general state of the world as it is.

But if I sincerely connect with myself, I can feel the underlying love that actually causes me to be not satisfied. And if I develop the inner strength to focus my mind on this love at any point in time, I can be happy at any point in time.

This is not about "reminding myself of the good things". Nor is it about any other thought excercise. This is about feeling and seeing. I simply see the love within me, rather than thinking about it or reminding myself about it. This requires learning to "move our inner eyes", rather than understanding or knowing something.

Once I learned this, being happy became as simple and physical as opening my eyes or touching my nose.

Like moving my toes

In fact, it reminds me of learning how to move my big toes sideways. In the beginning, I was not able to access the muscles that do this. I was sitting and staring at my toes, but they just would not move. My physio therapist encouraged me to just keep trying every day. And after a few weeks they finally started moving at my will. First almost invisibly, but then every day a little more. It was like magic. I could move my toes.

In a sense, it took me more than 15 years of daily meditation to get to the point of being really able to "move my inner eyes". But I do not think all the detours I took are necessary. After all, we are all capable of becoming more sincere by reducing external distractions and the false stories we keep telling ourselves. As small children we were all intuitively refocusing on our happiness all the time, unless we were exposed to extreme conditions.

In my case, the decisive move was taking some sessions of trauma therapy. And then following it up with a therapeutic form of holistic life coaching. I was lucky with finding a coach with who really reached me. But the core point was, I finally accepted the help of someone else.

The not so nice background story

I feel it is necessary to mention that in my case the process of getting here involved unhealthy amounts of loneliness. It involved many years of being hard on myself, both in terms of training my body, and of trying to "improve my mind". This included the deliberate abstention from socializing and entertainment for most of my twenties. I did not do this is in a monestery. I confronted myself with the temptations of "modern society" and then restricted myself with my own mental chains. I wanted to train myself "for a bigger mission". I told myself that this required "overcoming my ego" and pushed hard on trying to do that.

Today, I clearly believe this was not healthy and based on an incoherent self-image. If I could inspire anyone not to go down that road, I would be more than glad.

The self-image I had at the time was somewhat heroic, where I secretly pictured myself as someone who has been given extraordinary social and cognitive priveledges and therefore concluded that it was my responsibility to save the world, rather than to look after my own life.

Of course, this self-image was full of contradictions and ignored much of reality. More than once I ended up spending all my energy fighting windmills. And still more often, I spent my energy fighting against myself. I also affected others by not taking care of my own things properly and thereby not being as reliable as I wished myself to be.

I was reflected enough to realize the narcissism of all this. But in my idea of "self-improvement", my response to this observation was to intentionally push myself into humbling situations. I also wrote pamphlets to myself against "perfectionism" and collected notes for a self-ironic life-advisor book that I gave the title "From High Potential To Low Performer" (I actually still plan to publish it at some point ;).

Not recommended.

The path I chose turned my twenties into the hardest phase of my life so far. I made gradual improvements throughout my thirties, mostly through meditation and slowly opening up to connections. But only at the age of 42 I found what for me turned out to be the breakthrough for being happy: Which was, as I think worth mentioning again, to start accepting the help of others.

I want to emphasize I still was very lucky in my life. I had many beautiful moments in these generally painful years. Moments of friendship, moments of deep meditative bliss, moments of love for my family and all beings, moments of fun and flow when climbing or snowboarding, and fascinating moments of traveling through cultures, of learning, and building cooperative projects.

But I would not recommend my path to anyone. I forgave myself for it and I am grateful that it shaped me into who I am now. And I hope that the strength I gained from taking this detour will be useful in my work for the transition that we need.

I absolutely do not believe that everyone would have to go through more than two decades of depression and windmill-fighting to finally be happy. In fact, I am writing this text because I believe that there are pretty quick and simple ways for accessing our happiness.

And as said, by now I believe that being happy just requires us to stop preventing us from being happy.

Sincerity is not easy in our current societies

But, and this is a pretty big but, to stop preventing ourselves from being happy is not that easy. As things are today, we are likely to grow up and exist in social and economic structures that are full of pressures that are constantly distracting and corrupting us.

Accessing our happiness in such circumstances requires inner strength. And this strength involves facing ourselves and our vulnerabilities. This is an essential part of what I mean by becoming sincere. And this is particularly hard to do when facing the daily social and economic pressures our societies impose on us.

The wonderful thing is, if start working on our inner strength and thereby increase our base happiness, it actually helps us developing more inner strength in return.

So join me on this crazy journey towards embracing happiness with the inner strength of a love-stricken grizzly bear ;).

An afterthought: More than positive self-talk

I am finally publishing this text on my 44th birthday, about ten month after that moment in the meditation center. It gave me some time see, if I am actually able to live up to this "insight" consistently over time. And the answer is yes.

I am still having exhausting and painful or distracted moments. But I can reliably return to happiness at my free disposal. I am certainly not flying on an euphoric high or ceaselessly beaming with happiness. But I can face "the Dragons" LINK (my inner fights and struggles) and external disappointments and sad news, and still feel the strong ground of my happiness. If I compare it to the life I lived over the past forty years, it really feels like I finally hacked the Matrix.

Just to mention it, I also stopped drinking alcohol more than a year ago. Not that I ever drank excessively, but to me it was part of my challenge of "becoming myself". I will write about this in another text.

For now, I just want to make the case that happiness can be there at any moment of our life.

And to quote the Vipassana slogan: "Be happy".