Sustainable Happiness

Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about happiness. I want to talk about happiness in the context of sustaining a deeper form of happiness. In my experience, and this will be echoed throughout the millennia from different contemplative practitioners, the only sustainable form of happiness is the happiness of not trying to sustain happiness. A mind that is attached to temporary moments of feeling good is a mind that ends up tight.

It's fragile. It's frustrated. It's constantly grasping at needing this moment to stay a certain way or pushing away moments that it doesn't like. A mind that has permission to live the full human experience is a mind that is light, that's free, that is content. This doesn't mean we don't give ourselves permission to linger in positive experiences when they're there, but there's a difference between grasping onto an experience versus needing an experience to stay here in order to be okay.

And a lot of us take the latter orientation to positive experiences when they arise, especially if they're seldom. And so this is I guess a plug for the work that you're already doing here at Mindfulness.com. Meditation aims to cultivate a certain quality of happiness that is separate from needing to sustain happiness. If trying to sustain happiness worked. And we just go, oh, give me this.

I'm going to hold onto it. And that led to happiness forever. I'd say, go for it. I'm very logically oriented when it comes to that, very algorithmic. I think that's one of the things that drew me to meditation.

But it doesn't take long of looking at your own experience to realize that prescription doesn't actually work. And since we live in the realm of impermanence, where emotions are coming and going, thoughts are coming and going, sensations are coming and going, sensory experiences are coming and going, there's no amount of grasping at it that is going to give us a permanent refuge. Instead, we have to learn to bend with it, meet this moment as it is without creating so much extra tension from the pushing, the pushing and pulling relationship to experience. So something to continue to bring into your own orientation of bringing mindfulness into your life and also your meditation practice. Thank you for that practice.

And let's settle in for today's meditation.