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

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Thubten is able to explain meditation using clear language and an approach which really speaks to our modern tech-infused lives. With openness, humility and humour he delivers a deep message that will resonate in our modern culture. Compelling to read and full of profound wisdom, this book rationally describes how our mind functions and how we can cultivate the habit of happiness. Finally, he puts things into perspective. If we are not training our mind, the very fundament of our universe (because our whole world is how we perceive the world!) - what else actually IS there to do? 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.

This approachable and practical book, complete with meditations, is designed for modern times, and will be a valuable resource to anyone during times of struggle, but also during all times to encourage and build resilience and help us find inner contentment and peace. Generally speaking, meditation exercises consist of three steps. In step one, we focus our minds on an anchor in the present moment. For beginners, this is usually the breath, the body, a visual object or the sounds around us. The objective here is to be fully and non-judgmentally focused on whatever we’re experiencing in the present moment. In this state of mindfulness, we’re neither pushing nor grabbing at anything in our field of awareness. We’re simply accepting it and experiencing it as it is.

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How do we do that? That involves applying what we do when we’re meditating to everyday situations. But that raises another question – what exactly do we do when we’re meditating? Because when we are searching for happiness, “there is a sense of hunger, of incompleteness; we are wrapped up in the expectation of getting what we want and the fear of not getting it; we feel trapped by uncertainty.”

If deep down, the mind is more than just its thoughts and emotions, this signifies freedom, which is complete happiness. As we gain familiarity with that, we might begin to discover that the mind is essentially good—underneath all of our problems we are okay. That is the meaning of Buddha. Buddha means basic innate goodness, the purity within us. 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. And you can quite easily: just be mindful of it and meditate, and everything will work out fine in the end. The aim of this book is to help you create happiness through bringing meditation into the heart of your daily life—not only to reduce stress and gain greater mastery over your thoughts and emotions, but also to discover your mind’s deep potential for unconditional compassion and freedom. Happiness is inside you, waiting.In conjunction with all of this, we also feel a sense of freedom. This is the third component of happiness. We don’t become captivated by the negative emotions and disquieting desires that come with dredging up the past, anticipating the future or wishing the present were different. Instead, we feel liberated from all of these sources of unhappiness. That brings us to the second component of happiness, which is feeling anchored to the present. This means we don’t drift away into thoughts about the past or future, where we tend to get caught up in painful memories and anxiety-provoking uncertainties. For example, “I wish I hadn’t made that comment to my friend” or, “I wonder what she’ll say when I see her next.” Instead, we focus on the moment we’re experiencing. Whether it is through a new drink, a new shirt, or a new car—what all those ads you see while scrolling through Facebook or browsing through your favorite magazines are selling to you is nothing more but some mythical feeling of happiness. After collaborating with Yale neuroscientist Ash Ranpura and Ruby Wax on How to Be Human, Thubten wrote A Monk’s Guide to Happiness, his debut solo book. There is the other argument of the Buddhists, who are concerned about the notion that we keep Craving – which is the problem that keeps us from achieving Nirvana as the nec plus ultra, the ultimate Joie de Vivre – but not in the French, epicurean way, which has no problem with it, indeed, it can be the catharsis we can achieve – the position in which we do not crave for anything anymore – and even when we are – let us say humanely, transitory, as mere mortals – happy, we fear that this will go away and thus we do not enjoy the benefits of what the Buddhists know and teach us – one of them being this monk – the problem being that even the peaceful Buddhists can go astray – I was reading recently about Myanmar, former Burma, and the Buddhists that have sided with the military junta and even worse, an important number of the supposedly peace loving monks have been involved in violence against the Rohinga, Muslim minority, because of religious conflicts, perhaps a touch of nationalism too.