True Happiness — Drawing the threads together so far
Wanting to be happy is a normal aspiration for all of us. That is the point of Dharma talk. to explain the Buddha’s teachings on how to be truly happy.
Understanding what happiness actually feels like is the first step in achieving that goal. realising it takes effort to learn how to be happy, and to unlearn all the habits we have acquired in our thoughts feelings and perceptions that make us unhappy.
We have two kinds of unhappiness, existential unhappiness which is the unhappiness which comes from our attitudes to life and death and the very nature of our being, and superficial unhappiness which comes from the ups and downs of a roller coaster of life. Sometimes these combine and that can feel overwhelming. Sometimes these combinations can overwhelm us and make us ill with depression and other mental issues, as they did for me with post traumatic stress disorder. The only medicine that was working to bring me back out of that darkness was my mindfulness practice, my toolkit of understanding and skills built up over years of studying the teachings of the buddhas, especially as explained by Thich Nhat Hanh. Having that toolkit ready to use got me through it and you never know when you might need it so don’t put off developing it and keeping it well oiled in your back pocket.
Understanding what makes us unhappy and why and how we can exchange that approach to life is an important learning step towards being truly happy. Also recognising the differences between short term fixes that convince us we are happy, and the longer term struggles that short term happiness gives us is not worth letting it get a hold over us. The more the short term fix approach to happiness is in our life, the harder it is to keep it going. And then we have to work even harder to get away from those short term fixes and back to understanding truly wonderful deep happiness. I am talking about the kind of happiness that never leaves us, is always there even through the hardest times as a solid deep layer of consciousness. It is there so that we can acknowledge ‘in this moment I am troubled by the death of my friend, or the stress of selling my house and moving elsewhere, or the anxiety of my son and his problems’, and know that underneath all of this difficulty or uncertainty, we are as solid as a rock with our happiness, and if we just stop for a moment we can touch it and be with it and let it soothe us through the difficulties and enable us to do our best and be our best throughout all the struggles we may have, and to be happy anyway.
True happiness requires understanding and insight, it requires effort and concentration, it requires a mental paradigm, or approach to life, that allows us to see all that is happy in our lives. It requires diligence in our mental and emotional habits, keeping them clear of negative attitudes and behaviours that create or cause unhappiness in ourselves or for others. So you can see how all these wonderful teachings enable us to be happy if we just concentrate on following them, but only we can do that for ourselves.
