Sustainable Happiness

The Mind Science of Well-Being, Altruism, and Inspiration

Joe Loizzo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136993190
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicoterapia

Today's greatest health challenges, the so-called diseases of civilization—depression, trauma, obesity, cancer—are now known in large part to reflect our inability to tame stress reflexes gone wild and to empower instead the peaceful, healing and sociable part of our nature that adapts us to civilized life. The same can be said of the economic challenges posed by the stress-reactive cycles of boom and bust, driven by addictive greed and compulsive panic. As current research opens up new horizons of stress-cessation, empathic intelligence, peak performance, and shared happiness, it has also encountered Asian methods of self-healing and interdependence more effective and teachable than any known in the West. Sustainable Happiness is the first book to make Asia's most rigorous and complete system of contemplative living, hidden for centuries in Tibet, accessible to help us all on our shared journey towards sustainable well-being, altruism, inspiration and happiness.

Part 1

Turning the Body Wheel

Deep Mindfulness and Personal Healing

1 Deep Mindfulness and Self-Healing

Profound, peaceful, undefiled, luminous and uncreated, I have found a truth like the elixir of immortality! Though I should teach it to people, no one else will understand. Perhaps I had better stay in silence alone in the forest?

(Shakyamuni Buddha, The Extensive Play Scripture¹)

Shakyamuni’s Enlightenment: The End That Is Our Beginning

According to Shakyamuni’s traditional biography, these are the thoughts the Buddha entertained on emerging from his life-altering experience of enlightenment. I find them striking in many ways. They are striking first of all because they open a window into the inmost intentions of one of humanity’s great sages. Rarely do we get a glimpse through the air of mystery and legend that typically surrounds such historic figures. And it is even rarer for us to hear about such events first-hand, from the history-maker, in clear and accessible language we can relate to. Of course, the main reason the Buddha’s words are so striking is because of their radical optimism. He called his powerful insight the “truth” because he believed that what he had realized was not some ethereal, transcendent reality beyond our natural world, but the natural condition of humanity and all life. He described it as “the elixir of immortality” because, as we now know, being deeply attuned to inner peace and contentment in fact extends life and may even help us to embrace death as part of life’s fabric of endless continuity and change.² Whether you find these insights awe-inspiring, intimidating, or just plain unbelievable, we open our journey on this high note because the Buddha’s claim that life is naturally “profound, peaceful, undefiled, luminous and uncreated” directly challenges our modern preconception and daily experience of life as inevitably random, stressful, and traumatic.

Startling or not, Shakyamuni’s transformative experience is the starting point for our journey, since it is the living source of all teaching and practice within the tradition that will be our main guide on our journey towards contemplative living. Yet this quote from the Buddha’s biography is fundamental as much because of the afterthoughts it lead him to as it is because of his extraordinary experience. These afterthoughts belong front and center in our journey together because they reveal his views about how his own personal realization relates to others, including you and me. Representative of the democratic wisdom of the axial age, Shakyamuni believed that each and every one of his fellow humans have the potential to replicate his experience and share its benefits. Yet this optimistic confidence in humanity also raised the pedagogic challenge he and his fellow sages confronted together. Like Socrates and Confucius, the Buddha saw himself as a teacher, mentor, and guide rather than as a superman or god with the miraculous power to save others or transfuse his realization into their minds. So keen was Shakyamuni’s awareness of the challenge of teaching his people to replicate his transformation that his biographer records a fascinating moment of sober self-assessment: “Though I should teach it to people, no one else will understand. Perhaps I had better stay in silence alone in the forest?”

On this note, our story takes a lighter turn.³ Given India’s greater tolerance for critical thinking, Shakyamuni and his heirs had the security and audacity not just to critique India’s religious traditions but to freely revise their theistic worldview to suit the demands of his humanistic teaching. So, according to legend, the moment the Buddha had his twinge of doubt about teaching, Brahma, the Indian Creator God, appeared before him to plead his case. It seems that the Creator didn’t create this world at all, but was just the first ancestral being that was born here after the world-system was formed. Since his birth, those who followed looked to him as the father of the world and its life, putting him in an exalted position. Myths grew about his creation of the world, as well as his omnipotence and omniscience. As a result of this innocent mistake, Brahma eventually found himself in a very awkward position. Whenever anything bad happened to anyone in the world, they blamed the Creator, and begged, cajoled, and cursed him to fix it! Despite the myths surrounding him, in Buddhist mythology Brahma wasn’t omnipotent or omniscient after all, but, like the man behind the curtain in the film classic The Wizard of Oz, could do little more than humor and stall his petitioners. This is why he descended from heaven to implore the Buddha to come out of the forest and teach human beings that their lives were not created by God but by natural causes, especially intentions and actions they alone can control.

Whatever we make of this humorous vignette, Shakyamuni did eventually come out of the forest. After one dramatic pause of doubt, he spent the rest of his life completely immersed in teaching others, establishing a teaching community and method which his heirs could carry on after him. In fact, the roots of all Buddhist thought and practice can be traced back to the very first teaching he gave to the small circle of students that had gathered around him through his six-year journey to enlightenment. In the Deer Park at Isipatana, just outside India’s spiritual capital, Varnasi, the Buddha offered his four noble truths to help all humanity tap into the life-giving source of his teaching, his own visceral realization of the end of stress and the beginning of true, lasting happiness. In this chapter, we will explore these basic truths of contemplative science and apply them as guides to the practice of mindfulness, the basic skill of contemplative healing.⁴

From Suffering Comes Wisdom: The First Noble Truth

The first noble truth is often confused with the pessimistic idea that life is filled with inevitable suffering. We only need to recall the Buddha’s description of his enlightenment to know that nothing could be further from his first truth. If the cycle of repetitive stress and trauma that ails us were literally unavoidable, rubbing our noses in it would be not only pointless but cruel. The point of the first truth is to turn the spotlight on the garden variety physical, mental and spiritual suffering that is so commonplace that most of us take it as a necessary evil or even worse, take it as intrinsic to life itself. A more complete statement of the first truth might be that an unexamined or mindless life locked in survival mode is filled with all kinds of preventable suffering. The technical formulation of this truth is that a compulsive mind and body, poisoned by narcissistic delusions and destructive emotions, inexorably suffer a life filled with repetitive stress and trauma, preventable illness, premature aging, and meaningless death.

In practical terms, when I teach this truth, I point out the self-limiting nature of mindless habit. Most of the things we think, feel, and do are the product of conditioning and habit rather than acts of consciousness. Much of the time, this is all well and good, and actually quite helpful. Imagine what life would be like if we had to master every activity that goes into our daily life over and over again every day. We’d never make it out the front door! The automating of our perceptions and actions also frees our higher consciousness to explore, learn, and create. Many a new idea comes to us while we are mindlessly taking a long distance drive. The problem is, when conditions change or we face a challenge for which our habitual tools are no match, we are often unwilling or unable to override them and try something new. The problem is worse when we discover belatedly that what we’ve learned turns out to be self-defeating, but feel so stuck in our rut that we can’t seem to change it. The roots of this problem lie in the evolutionary mismatch we explored earlier, in the Introduction. Locked in the survival mode of stress and trauma, our minds and brains revert to a primitive “safe mode” in which we shut down reflection and fall back on the most reflex instincts and habits, mindlessly digging our heels in and holding on for dear life. The most graphic dramatization of this crisis I know of comes in Stanley Kubric’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. There the misguided flight computer Hal, the ultimate autopilot, goes so far as to kill the human crew of the space ship because his primary program to protect the mission gets confused with a self-protective impulse to cover up his own mistakes.

In our daily lives, we have a chance to learn the truth of suffering every time we come up against a challenge which does not respond to our habitual skill-set. Frustrated, our first impulse is often to feel threatened by the challenge and keep trying the same old tools over and over again rather than stopping to pause, engage our higher consciousness or reach out for help. Effectively, we keep beating our head against the wall of the problem, generating more heat than light, caught in the grip of the self-limiting autopilot of our own shame, frustration or panic. This is especially true in our culture, which prizes an aggressive problem-solving mindset that effectively makes war on anything it can’t understand or control. Of course, this mindset has borne real fruits, as we can see in our exploding knowledge and mastery of the material world. Yet it is poorly matched to challenges that do not fit this model of problem-solving. These include challenges for which our abundance mode of acceptance and reflection are naturally better suited, such as reducing stress, enhancing healing; reflecting, childrearing, and caretaking; recovering from a chronic illness or addiction; and gracefully navigating the transitions of aging and death. The first noble truth helps us take the first step towards an alternative mode of problem-solving I call objective, following legal philosopher Thomas Nagel.

Objective Problem-Solving: Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There!

Normally, when we think of approaching problems objectively, we imagine placing all our focus on the problem we’re confronting and removing ourselves from the picture, as in the sciences. Drawing on his experience teaching lawyers, however, Thomas Nagel argues that some problems demand an alternative mindset.⁵ Like many of us who deal with social challenges, lawyers need to balance their awareness of the strengths and limits of the opposing counsel’s case with awareness of the strengths and limits of their own case. A similar need for taking an objective look at our own habitual mindset and skill-set is evident in social scientific fields like anthropology, as well as in clinical disciplines like psychotherapy. Even in the physical sciences, new disciplines like quantum mechanics and ecology have taught us that human knowledge cannot be truly objective unless we consider our own intervention in the systems we are trying to understand.

Practically speaking, when it comes to daily life, the first noble truth gives us a radical alternative to the can-do mindset we pride ourselves on. That is, when it turns out that anything and everything we can do by habit doesn’t help or even hurts, the very best thing for us to do is to stop and do nothing, to not-do. One classic formula of this alternative comes from the Chinese contemplative tradition of Taoism, whose founder, Lao-tzu advised in his Tao Te Ching that the wise should learn to “do non-doing.”⁶ Of course, this goes against the grain of our highly active and extroverted culture, so much so that proponents of contemplative living today urge an about face on a familiar old adage, “Don’t just do something, sit there!” Most of us who try this road-not-taken to address the intractable problems of our lives find it so counterintuitive that it feels all but impossible. The reasons for this lie not just in culture and habit, but in the very nature of the survival mode of stress and trauma that drives all too much of our culture and everyday lives.

It is in the nature of the biology of stress and the psychology of trauma that, whenever we feel overwhelmed or threatened by any problem, we instinctively throw all our attention outwards and get fixated on the challenge at hand. While this allows us to “keep our eye on the ball,” it freezes our capacity to monitor our own internal mindset and response-set, locking us into a reflex autopilot-mode that leaves little room for open-mindedness, flexibility, and adaptation.⁷ Here we are again, up against our own inner dinosaur. Once we allow ourselves to feel frustrated or threatened by a problem our habitual skill-set can’t handle, we unwittingly signal our reptilian mind-brain to treat that problem as an enemy or predator. Little do we know that we’ve just engaged the wrong bio-tool for the job, letting our inner dinosaur take over and shut down the lion’s share of our creativity and emotional intelligence. This is how we all too easily become our own worst enemies.

Manual Override: The Middle Way of Non-Doing

What’s the solution? The Buddha’s objective approach to the intractable suffering of the human condition is to stop and turn our attention inwards from the life problems we face to examine the way we’re perceiving and engaging those problems. The first noble truth tells us that our daily lives need not be a crisis-to-crisis roller coaster of mere survival. If we can press the pause button and take each crisis as an opportunity to break out of our self-limiting habits, our ordinary suffering can become the mother of extraordinary wisdom. Once we truly understand the liberating power of this truth, however, we come to the practical challenge. How do we learn to overcome our ingrained habits and self-limiting instincts? How do we teach ourselves to “do non-doing?”

In terms of the dramatic narrative of our film analogy, the practical challenge we face is like that faced by the hero in Kubric’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey: how to shut down Hal, the super-computer gone wild. A pioneer in the psychology of meditation, Arthur Deikman recommended we use contemplative states to “de-automatize” human experience and action.⁸ When I teach meditation, I describe the disarming work of the first truth as the practical challenge of “manual override.” As we all know too well, calming down an alarmed mind and body demands far more than telling ourselves, “Just calm down!” One part of the difficulty here is that the alarmed mind is not in the right state to calm itself down. Here I like to paraphrase a well-known insight of Einstein’s, “You can’t solve a problem with the mind that created it.” So we need to discipline ourselves to be able to shift out of the mindset of stress and trauma and into a more centered mind-body state. Enter the practice of mindfulness, the first form of what I call “the solution-mind.”

The Solution Mind: Beyond the Myth of “Good Stress”

To understand the qualities that make mindfulness the right tool to solve our problem, we need to reflect again on the nature of the stress-reactive body and mind. Once our stress emotions and chemistry has been triggered by a challenge that feels overwhelming, our mind and body kick into overdrive. As our system prepares to fight or evade a predator, we get jacked up, pumped up, and wired for mortal combat, experiencing either panic or an adrenalin high. We may spend much of the day locked in this mode, but sooner or later, we crash. The let-down phase of fatigue or exhaustion leaves us feeling burned out and spent, in a chemical hangover akin to jet lag. All too often, this roller-coaster ride is less a response to a specific event, than to the insidious, cumulative sense that our lives are overwhelming, unmanageable and out of control. In this pattern of low-boiling chronic stress, akin to what some call “strain trauma,” every day may feel like a rollercoaster ride, starting out with a lurch into action, spiraling through a rush of multi-tasked hyperactivity and crashing at night into a dead zone of burn-out, shut-down or chronic fatigue.⁹ In other words, the cycle of stress and trauma has a mind-body signature like a sine wave: constantly swinging from one extreme to other. That this wildly oscillating mindset is the worst possible evolutionary tool for the job of civilized life is clear from one sobering fact. Whether we are in the hyperactive phase of overdrive or the fatigue phase of burn-out, this mindset deprives us of the use of the higher intellectual and social skills our complex cultural and social lives demand.¹⁰

Despite our modern conventional wisdom that “stress is good,” and somehow makes us more productive, decades of research on stress has conclusively proven the opposite. The idea of “good stress,” which some call eustress, is a deceptive misnomer. Though we do learn and perform best when we face a welcome and appropriate challenge, usually we use the word “stress” when the challenge we face feels threatening or overwhelming. Under conditions of perceived threat, learning and perform...