The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness

Compassion, in Tibetan terms, is a spontaneous feeling of connection with all living things. What you feel, I feel; what I feel, you feel. There’s no difference between us.

Like most people, I brought so much judgment to my experience. I believed that thoughts of anger, anxiety, fear, and so on that came and went throughout the day were bad or counterproductive—or at the very least inconsistent with natural peace! The teachings of the Buddha—and the lesson inherent in this exercise in non-meditation—is that if we allo

The basic instruction is simply not to follow after these thoughts and emotions, but merely to be aware of everything that passes through your awareness as it is. Whatever passes through your mind, don’t focus on it and don’t try to suppress it. Just observe it as it comes and goes.

It’s so easy to think that we’re the only ones who suffer, while other people are somehow immune to pain, as though they’d been born with some kind of special knowledge about being happy that, through some cosmic accident, we never received. Thinking in this way, we make our own problems seem much bigger than they really are.

Meditation is really a process of nonjudgmental awareness. When we meditate, we adopt the objective perspective of a scientist toward our own subjective experience. This might not be easy at first. Most of us are trained to believe that if we think something is good, it is good, and if we think something is bad, it is bad. But as we practice simply

The mind is always active, always generating thoughts, just as the ocean constantly generates waves. We can’t stop our thoughts any more than we can stop waves in the ocean. Resting the mind in its natural state is very different from trying to stop thoughts altogether. Buddhist meditation does not in any way involve attempting to make the mind a b

The Tibetan word for meditation, gom, literally means “becoming familiar with,” and Buddhist meditation practice is really about becoming familiar with the nature of your own mind—a bit like getting to know a friend on deeper and deeper levels.

Compassion is the spontaneous wisdom of the heart. It’s always with us. It always has been, and always will be. When it arises in us, we’ve simply learned to see how strong and safe we really are.

One of the things I learned early on, however, is that keeping the eyes closed makes it easier to become attached to an artificial sense of tranquillity. So, eventually, after a few days of practice, it’s better to keep your eyes open when you meditate, so that you can stay alert, clear, and mindful. This doesn’t mean glaring straight ahead without

If you find yourself struggling with a lot of distractions, you can use every distraction as an object of meditation. Then they cease to be distractions and become supports for your meditation practice.”