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

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The easiest way to practice the first step is to anchor your mind to your breath. I learned from the Headspace app that it helps to count the breaths up to 10, then start over. The state of happiness isn’t something ephemeral—isn’t a hit of dopamine in the brain. The state of happiness, he says, is an enduring state of completeness, a state of peace, a state of no more striving and no more fear. Thubten showed me how simple it is to bring meditation into my life, clearing up the many misunderstandings and misleading information, and the endless possibilities for peace of mind and happiness that I would otherwise miss out on due to being the uptight worrier that I currently am. Taking away all the bell and whistles, breaking down the fundamental and important aspects of mediation and guiding me in steps about how to introduce such behaviour steadily into my daily routine. Yes you could argue that this is a self help book but upon finishing it, it is simpler than that and much more informative. Most of us don’t think of happiness as a skill we can learn, but as a state we should obtain. We don’t think of happiness as something asking for our expertise and personal commitment (i.e., something similar to, say, math or sculpting), but as something which is the direct result of external circumstances, something that can only come from the outside. I too now have a smartphone and I travel for around three hundred days per year. I’m very much embedded in the fast pace of life, and if I didn’t meditate every day, I don’t know how I would manage. But more than that, meditation has helped me to understand something about happiness.

If it’s the case that two or more people don’t always find that the same things make them happy or unhappy,” reminds us Thubten, “then it means we’re talking about a mental experience within us, not the things around us.”

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In this profound and inspiring book, Gelong Thubten shares a practical and sustainable approach to happiness. Thubten, a Buddhist monk and meditation expert who has worked with everyone from school kids to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Benedict Cumberbatch, explains how meditation and mindfulness can create a direct path to happiness.

You can feel that it is based on thousands of years of religious history, but it is free of jargon. Now that you understand the nature of happiness and unhappiness, it’s time for some concrete actions you can take to have more joy. And the big secret is, all it takes is learning how to meditate properly. Tranquility comes from learning to be mindful, which we can practice in every experience we have throughout each day.As we discover how hard times can enhance the development of mindfulness, compassion and forgiveness, we can develop a fearless outlook on life and lasting, unshakeable happiness. And even if you do end up getting it, your satisfaction won’t last long. Soon you’ll be habitually looking to the next thing that you think will make you happy. Lesson 3: Meditation is the pathway to inner peace and contentment, and you can develop it with daily practice in any situation. 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.

A Monk’s Guide to Happiness explores the nature of happiness and helps bust the myth that our lives and minds are too busy for meditation. The book can show you how to: However, it is important to note that we don’t experience any of these thoughts or emotions 100 percent of the time; there is an everchanging flow, in fact many thousands of changes per day. From the point of view of meditation, this is encouraging, as we can learn methods which help us consciously direct this flow. Our thoughts and emotions are really just habits, and so we can build new, positive ones and become less habituated to those that are negative. 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. I think many people see meditation as simply a way to reduce stress, but it is actually a method for connecting with our essence, which is complete freedom and happiness. One of the Tibetan words for meditation is “ gom,” which literally means “to become familiar with,” and so we are making friends with our awareness, that ability to observe.In June 2009 I emerged from a meditation retreat that had lasted four years. It was an intensive programme alongside 20 other monks, in a remote old farmhouse on the Isle of Arran in Scotland. We were completely cut off from the outside world, with no phones, Internet or newspapers. Food was brought in by a caretaker who lived outside the walls of the retreat and we had a strict schedule of between 12 and 14 hours’ meditation per day, mostly practised alone in our rooms. This programme went on in the same way every day for four years. We were allowed to talk a little to each other at mealtimes or in the short breaks between sessions, but things intensified in the second year, when we took a vow of silence for five months.

Scientists have recently coined the term “neuroplasticity” to describe this phenomenon, which simply means the potential for mental change through training, such as meditation, leading to the creation of new neural pathways. We can imprint a multitude of new habits, unlearn negative ones, and achieve lasting benefits. Book Genre: Buddhism, Health, Mental Health, Nonfiction, Personal Development, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, Self Help, Spirituality A Monk’s Guide to Happiness is a book about turning within, a manual on how one can find the source of happiness inside himself. In HANDBOOK FOR HARD TIMES Sunday Times bestselling author of A Monk's Guide to Happiness Gelong Thubten teaches us to understand that happiness, kindness and resilience can be cultivated through reframing life's difficulties as opportunities for transformation. Meditation and mindfulness practices help us to access deep reserves of inner strength as we learn how to 'lean into' our suffering. Thubten suggests how we can find meaning in pain and discomfort, transforming deeply ingrained patterns of fear and resistance. 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.”

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Add a couple of non-Buddhist based books about happiness (Mo Gawdat, e.g.), awareness etc... and you could say that I have a fair understanding of the matter. We begin our conversation talking about distraction and addiction, two states that are very closely linked. When we distract ourselves by scrolling, overeating, or drinking for example, says Thubten, we’re pushing away emotional pain or discomfort – even if we may not realise it. But the discomfort is really in the pushing. If we can learn instead to sit with what’s making us uncomfortable, those emotions start to transform. If there is one thing Gelong Thubten, a Buddhist monk from the UK, can’t understand, it is the extent to which the concept of happiness is misunderstood and misinterpreted by the majority of people. Simply put,” writes Thubten, “when we are walking in a park on a glorious sunny day, and we have a toothache, we take the sunshine and beauty for granted, but tend to focus on the painful tooth. We are primed to notice what’s wrong, as it feels like an intrusion into our natural state.” Meditation is the Key to Happiness This book provides readers with a philosophically insightful and practically useful manual on how to break free of suffering and achieve inner peace.