What Do We Really Want? Who ARE We?

[progressally_objectives]

THE ART OF HAPPINESS

Welcome to Week Two! Last week was a deep dive into our deepest desires– our passions, our values, our dreams, our legacy. We gathered a lot of data about the things that are important to us, and the places where our current actions and goals may be out of alignment with our deepest intentions.

In Week Two, we are going to dig into the data and start setting goals — though I like to call them intentions, as I’ll explain later — for the year ahead. We’ll sort through our HUGE LONG LISTS (if we have them) to determine the core things to focus on, or if you’re still searching for direction this year, we’ll explore the research-based practices that we know contribute to joyful living.

So that’s where we’ll start this week — JOY AND HAPPINESS. We all say we simply want to be “happy.” But what does that mean? What do researchers say REALLY makes us happy?

Happiness is certainly a worthwhile life goal, especially if by “happiness” we mean the Greek eudaimonia, which Daniel Gilbert, in Stumbling on Happiness, translates as “good spirit … human flourishing … [and] life well lived.” When I use the word “happiness,” that is what I am referring to.

And, wouldn’t you know, the number one way to be happy is to…. BE PRESENT!

In his classic work Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes, “It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.”

Happiness, or joy, if you prefer, is a byproduct of an engaged, connected, and meaningful life. 

And it can be so hard to be PRESENT, right? The research tells us we spend almost HALF of our time with a wandering mind, with our thoughts drifting away from our current task.

That means we are not present for half of every day! We are literally missing out on half of our life.

And the consequences of mind-wandering are not just careless mistakes and misplaced objects and lost productivity. This distraction impacts our happiness, our thriving.

Researchers tell us that we are happiest when what we are doing is what we are thinking about. In fact, Matthew Killingworth and Daniel Gilbert titled their famous study about our distracted minds “A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind.” You are better off, according to the data, if you do the dishes and think about doing the dishes, than if you do the dishes and think about being in Mexico. Even in January.

This research confirms what many religious and philosophical traditions have claimed for millennia: we experience our greatest joy when we are present and attentive. Happiness is HERE. Happiness is NOW.

With mindfulness, we practice returning to the present. Again and again and again. Because being present, like most other things in life, is a practice. We have to work at it, or we will continue to fall into our well-worn patterns of distraction and worry, which ultimately get in the way of our happiness.

We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain — and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running…. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. Mindfulness is a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one’s mind or body — thoughts, sensations, moods — without grasping at the pleasant or recoiling from the unpleasant…. we pay close attention to the flow of experience in each moment.”

Sam Harris

“If you’re happy and you know it— WAIT! Do you even know WHO YOU ARE in the first place????”

Ah, forgive me a bit of Buddhist, “no-self” humor 😄.

But in all seriousness, if we’re talking about personal happiness and goals and intentions…. we should probably talk about the person who’s going to be doing all that merry-making and intention-setting.

First of all, let me clarify a bit about what Buddhists and some secular mindfulness teachers mean when they talk about “no-self.” They do NOT mean that you do not exist as a living, breathing organism– because, um, you’re here! What they really mean is that there isn’t an “I”: a solid, stable, unchanging identity. You are a mixture of thoughts, feelings, sensations, actions, and matter, constantly changing and evolving (as we talked about last week). The problem is, we tend to identify with whatever experience is happening to us in the moment: “I am angry, I am tired….,” as if we’ve become our experience, we’ve become anger itself. And then we lose all perspective and clarity on the situation.

With mindfulness, we become aware of “selfing” — we notice how our perception of “I am” arises. Mindfulness teacher Shinzen Young says we do this through awareness of mental images, mental talk, and bodily emotions. We notice how we label and describe our experience and take it as FACT when it’s really just INTERPRETATION. He uses this helpful analogy: if someone were holding a white thread and a red thread, and they twisted them together, we would look at it from a few feet away and see one single pink thread. But upon closer observation, we would simply see the white and red strands. The pink was a perception — it was a real experience, but the pink string didn’t actually exist as a coherent thing. Just as the pink was an interpretation, so is the self.

But Young asserts that ‘just because the sense of self as a thing goes away does not for a minute imply that the activity of personality goes away.” The self is simply our attachment to the stories and ideas about ourselves. We can still act and achieve and laugh and play … we just try to disentangle ourselves from… our selves as we do it!

I know this is heady, heavy stuff, but I think it sets an important context for thinking about happiness. Often our most memorable, pleasurable experiences come from times when we’ve lost a sense of self — when we feel connected to the vastness of nature and the universe, when we “lose ourselves” in a pleasant hobby or activity, or when we experience physical and spiritual states of ecstasy (not surprisingly, the word “ecstasy” comes from the Greek word for “stepping out” — it’s a literal stepping outside of self).

Our task in mindful, intentional living is finding the balance between pursuing our real-world goals without becoming attached to the real-world outcomes.

Perhaps it’s helpful to look at how psychologists and therapists consider “the self;” in fact, this type of work is common in many therapeutic modalities, including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, from which many of the explanations below are drawn.

Psychologists who study the “self” identify three distinct components that make up what we call the self:

1. The Conceptualized Self

This is what you typically think of as “you.” It’s everything you would complete the statement “I am…” with. “I am a wife, a sister, a mother. I am smart. I am impatient. I am unlovable. I am a failure. I am successful. I am terrified of snakes,” ad nauseum.

The conceptualized self is all about content and story — the story you have crafted, mostly unconsciously, about your life. There’s a whole set of facts about you — you’re married, you’re single, you have kids, you don’t have kids, you are a teacher, you are an architect, etc. — and then there’s the story you’ve told yourself to make sense of the facts. “We fell in love in college, I always loved building with Legos as a kid…”

These stories are incredibly powerful and helpful as we make sense of our lives and craft a life of purpose and meaning. But they can also be dangerous. Because the story usually isn’t the WHOLE story — we’ve selected certain facts and events to focus on (the time we got a promotion, the time we messed up a big presentation in front of our co-workers) and we’ve left out others. Our story could be completely different based on the facts we choose to highlight and the narrative we create out of them.

So these stories can be dangerous if we’ve crafted a narrative that says we usually fail in new endeavors, we don’t keep our resolutions, and no matter what, we won’t like our job. But the flip side of all of this is that new narratives and stories about ourselves can be written. We can change how we interpret and make sense of the events of our lives.

2. The Present Self

If our conceptualized self is our past (story) and our future (predictions), our present self is our on-going self-awareness in the present moment. This is a much more fluid self; it is descriptive, non-evaluative, and simply reflects what is happening right now. It’s everything you could complete the statement “Now I am…” with. “Now I am making dinner. Now I am tired. Now I am chopping onions. Now my eyes are tearing. Now I smell the onion…”

The power of recognizing this level of self is that we may notice things that don’t fit with our conceptualized self. For example, if our story is “I am a failure,” but right now “I am making dinner, I am eating homemade pizza, I am enjoying the taste of the pizza, I am hearing my husband say how delicious this pizza is…,” then we have evidence that contradicts our failure narrative.

In this sense, our self is an ongoing process of awareness — constantly shifting as we make direct contact with the present moment. We realize that our “self” is not hard and solid, but fluid and malleable.

3. The Observing Self

There is the self, and then there is the self that KNOWS it’s a self. As far as we know, humans are the only creature capable of metacognition — the ability to think about our thinking.

The observing self is the place from which observations are made — when you are observing your breath, when you know that you are breathing, this is the observing self… which begs the question then of who is breathing! In some traditions, this is considered the spiritual self, the transcendent self, or even nothing (no-thing).

Without getting too metaphysical with all of this, this self is essentially awareness. WE are essentially awareness itself! We are the container for all of our experiences — our thoughts, our emotions, our sensations, our judgments, our actions, our “selfing.” When we access the observing self, often in meditation or prayer or contemplation, we usually experience calm and peacefulness. It is this state that facilitates presence.

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It’s not that one kind of self is “bad” and the others are “good” — we must have a narrative self in which we project ourselves into the past and into the future so that we have a sense of continuity, mission, and purpose (imagine how lost you would feel without this self!) We also need to have a clear awareness of the state of our mind and body in the present, and we can experience deep peace, joy, and even transcendence when we contact the observing self.

I share all of this with you in this course as a way for you to understand how your mindfulness practice supports your intentions and your happiness. With mindfulness, we cultivate the self-awareness to interrupt our negative stories, to identify our habits and patterns, and approach our lives with clarity and wisdom. We become more aware of all aspects of self, and this is where the process of self-development and self-transformation can begin.

Whew! My head hurts (is that selfing?)

This week’s guided practice is called “Resting in Awareness” — there’s a bit of instruction in the audio, so the total running time is about 7:30, but the actual practice is about 5-6 minutes.

Leave a comment or question on any of this!