Easiest Meditation Practice Ever

This video deserves its own blog.
It is grounded into Western life and just very helpful.
Please enjoy!

Warmly, Andrea

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvsmBwOWozI&sns=fb

Laughter

So, I have not blogged for a while as I had to work with the editors of "The Unified Theory of Happiness: An East-Meets-West to fully Loving Your Life."

It is done. Good.

So much has happened in the meantime. I have founded the Los Angeles Center of Zen Psychology (www.andreapolard.com) and have had my first official interview about my book. I will let you know when "Amazing Mind," an Internet TV show, will be shown.

Work, problems in the world, personal problems...when is there time for happiness?

I cannot tell you how often I reminded myself to smell the flowers, to enjoy my kids, my husband, just sitting. It takes more effort to center ourselves during tough times, well-worth effort though.

The greatest remedy: LAUGHTER.

Laughter comes easy to me usually, but now I had to consciously make sure that laughter can rise up from my belly. Remove obstacles! For example, I limited the time I was going to talk about my problems and work load. Sharing is good until it is no longer, so I made space for laughter. I picked up some funny movies, laughed deliberately with my kids, told jokes, laughed at old ones such as:

How many psychologist does it take to change a light bulb?
One, but the light bulb has to really wanna change.

I made light of the worst shock that we had to endure as a family....

Laughter remains the best medicine...take it frequently.

Warmly, Andrea

Chasing Happiness

"Shall we chase happiness? Is wanting happiness really a good goal?" are the rhetorical questions most frequently asked by those weary of happiness.

And of course the answer of those in favor of fostering happiness is predictable too, "No. Happiness is as elusive as a rainbow. There is no point in chasing it. However, what we can do is remove obstacles to happiness and give ourselves permission to enjoy it when it comes along."

I shall add to this interchange only one thought:

We should not chase happiness as we should not chase beauty, love, and excellence either. Clinging to any form that our mind fancies is in itself an obstacle to happiness. But that does not mean we ought not to look in the mirror in the morning; to date and build relationship skills; to work hard to acquire a sense of mastery. It just means we ought not to be obsessed or identify with what we deem a worthy goal.

If we dream up how we want to participate in life, acquire and apply the right skills in order to fulfill that dream, and then turn it over, surrender, and be content with what is, if we breathe in and breathe out, dream up and let go, we do a lot more than just remove obstacles: we begin to love life and enjoy all it can be as it comes.


"He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise."
---WILLIAM BLAKE

Monkey Business

This planet needs every form of kindness it can get; I shall not complain about reciprocal giving: I scratch your back -- you scratch my back. It makes for an efficient way of giving. It works. We only have so much time. If we did not watch over our interest and gave without expecting something in return, we would undoubtedly become exploited, burned out, bankrupted. No, I like good monkeys and the way they handle social needs within the group. I like us doing monkey business.

But it is not fulfilling our human potential. To be a Mensch, we must go beyond looking out for ourselves and our precious genes. Because we are more than gene-driven monkeys, because we can choose to give without getting back, because we are capable of altruism that reaches into uncharted, unknown, unpopular territory, we must act accordingly. Kindness without EGO reflects how much inner space we have, and, at the same time, widens that space.

Happiness needs Goodness

The thief can feel excitement and even joy when he brings home his stolen goods, but he lacks the tranquility needed for the All. If he was tranquil, he would notice that he was robbed and that he was now poorer for it. Most intuitively agree: we must be good to be happy.

The problem is that we cannot all get a medal for goodness. Those few who are identified for their goodness get all the honors. We praise the Dalai Lama, Mother Theresa, Buddha, Jesus, Moses, saints, celebrities, rich philanthropists, famous freedom fighters; their graves or birthplaces we pilgrimage to. And we know about their contributions without which we would not like to live. We are grateful to them, as much, at least, as envy and other forms of blindness let us.

The rest of us, the vast majority, is asked to be good without honors. We are even asked to be good while being maltreated and despised. Billions of mothers are supposed to give without acknowledgement. Soldiers die in the dirt, forgotten and trampled upon. The good man is punished for his honesty and overlooked when it's time for a promotion. The good kid is often called a nerd, a weirdo, a little mouse.

So, we need the big good guys to come in and change big unfair circumstances. "Life is unfair" will not do to better the world. We need action.

After making this demand and holding the big guys responsible, what are we left with? What is our reward? I could not say it better than George Eliot in his novel "Middlemarch". In it he describes Dorothea, having started out with youthful enthusiasm about doing good, but ending up with little to show for.

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

And having a deep understanding about our incalculably diffusive effect, about our good karma, helps make us feel our part in the All to which we belong.

Unconditional Connection and Happiness

It makes immediate sense that our happiness depends on our ability to connect; we are most unhappy when we feel isolated. But it takes skill to connect, skill we often lack.

It takes more skill to connect with human beings than with dogs, not only because dogs are simple and always happy when we arrive, but because we do not see them as competitors. They may kill our neighbor's puppy, piss on the carpet, run away and cause an accident that costs us dearly, but we love them anyway. We know that they don't know any better. We don't expect too much. We do not cling. We can forgive.

It does not take very much for us to disconnect from another human being. They may just look different from us or utter one wrong word and viola, we reject them. We expect close to perfection and cling to our every expectation. We are convinced that they know better, or could have known better. We cannot forgive them.

We cannot be a Mensch when we see only the competitor in the other. Up and foremost we are all sentient beings, made up of water and carbon. Up and foremost we are all living on this planet Earth in a universe that gave birth to us against all odds.

Pressure to Be Happy

There are many pressures in modern life: the pressure to have a job, keep a job, do well at a job, to give birth a certain way, to give birthday presents, to remember birthdays, to make an appointment, to keep an appointment, to look confident, to be confident and so on and so on.

We all know that constant pressure is unhealthy and an antidote to happiness. Still, nobody suggests that there is something inherently wrong with the idea of having a job, birthdays, appointments, confidence.

However, when it comes to happiness, we like to throw the baby out with the bathwater. How is that the mere fact that people feel pressure to be happy (in the US) is reason to declare happiness to be a very bad idea? Why kick that one? I suspect that the Puritans and other religious groups have their hands in singling out happiness.

Happiness, I want to shout, is not a sin, is not dangerous, is actually really good for you, and is pretty inexpensive too. People will not lose their morals as there is no happiness without morals. They won't be selfish as happiness cannot happen in a vacuum. They won't be superficial as that is confusing pleasure with happiness.

While there are many of us who have to relax our efforts to be happy, there are also many who have to relax when pondering happiness. Happiness is good stuff. Breathe in, breathe out...

Compassion And Inner Strength

Happiness is the umbrella experience for a number of other experiences of which connection may be most important. The "other" is support, comfort, delight, a mirror and a promoter of growth and change only if we can connect with her. This is one reason why all religions teach compassion, promote love, and charity.

When I was young, I was taught to love everybody like a brother or a sister, especially the disadvantaged. My compassion grew in accord with my awareness, but instead of this causing happiness only, it also caused unhappiness. There seemed so little I could do. I felt overwhelmed. "But there is so much you are doing," some nice people would say, "You are making a real difference. Everything has a snowball effect even when you cannot see it." That helped, I must say, until I saw another suffering being. What had gone wrong?

Caring about others takes a lot of inner strength. Before we have that inner strength, compassion can burn us out and up. That inner strength grows slowly. And only when we are recipients of compassion, have learned to be kind to ourselves, and have cultivated a sense of inner peace and tranquility, will it cause happiness. The more peaceful we grow, the greater the space for Being, no matter how Being is expressed.

Quietly we can sit, accepting the world 'as is', surrendering to what we cannot change, never becoming tired to changing what we can change. A compassionate heart needs to be held by something even greater, something we can only deeply experience when we are still, something that is always good and never lets us down, which some call God or the hand of God, and others Being, or the One to which we all belong.

Wrestling with the Word "Happiness"

Most people of the modern world take no issue with the word "happiness." Their associations are largely positive. Accordingly most people want to be happy, appear happy, and share their happy experience with their peers.

But then there are those whose emotions become stirred up almost automatically when confronted with the word, as if it was a red flag only they can see and against which the rest of us must be warned. Negative connotations of happiness are manifold, such as it being a chase, an empty, impossible dream, a sign of decadence and of a spiritual void.

Ironically, I agree with most of the warning labels that this group intents to attach to the word "happiness." I concur that many chase their own tails. I agree that many have unrealistic expectations about positive emotions, expectations manufactured by big business, enhancing greediness for pleasure, comfort, and security. And yet.

I wrote a book on happiness. I have claimed the word "happiness" for a higher purpose. I have made the word my own, or better, made it that which most thinkers intended it to be. After analyzing hundreds of explications about happiness, I have come to understand that "happiness" more often than not stands for the experience of being alive. And who in his right mind does not want that?

Fighting happiness as a worthy goal and/or path is mostly based on a semantic problem, a problem I hope to help overcome.

Is Happiness Possible in our Broken Reality?

A new book about the benefits of playing computer games makes the claim that reality is broken, explaining why we seek the unbroken virtual reality of games. This I learned recently on the radio. My first reaction was confusion. Why would anybody describe our reality as broken? It did not take me long to back-track my sense of reality when I am interrupted, distracted, obstracted, and bombarded with stimuli of a world that wants my attention. Sometimes there seems no end to the demands on me. My kids want my love; business wants my money; friends my time; schools my upmost devotion...

But is my reality broken? At best I could say that we humans are making it hard on ourselves to maintain unbroken attention. This, however, has been a long-standing problem of Homo Sapiens. In one way or the other we are standing in our own way to experience peace, our participation in this one world, our happiness.

I don't think we should blame modern times for our experience of reality. I don't think we find any answers in games or in any other escape. Living is not easy, but it is not because reality is broken, but because we dissect reality with our perception and our anxiety. Reality has always been just one interconnected whole. If we paid attention to our reality, it would not appear broken. Happiness is possible when we come from inner tranquility, regardless of outer turmoil.