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

Positive emotions—such as love, compassion, friendship, and loyalty—strengthen the mind, build our confidence, and enhance our ability to assist those in need of help.

what we call the mind emerges as a constantly shifting collision of two basic events: bare recognition (the simple awareness that something is happening) and conditioning factors (the processes that not only describe what we perceive, but also determine our responses).

Pain, sadness, fear, anxiety, and all other forms of suffering no longer disrupt your life as forcefully as they used to. Experiences that once seemed to be obstacles become opportunities for deepening your understanding of the mind’s unimpeded nature.

One of the great benefits of meditation on sound is that it gradually teaches you to detach from assigning meaning to the various sounds you hear. You learn to listen to what you hear without necessarily responding emotionally to the content. As you grow accustomed to giving bare attention to sound simply as sound, you’ll find yourself able to list

The real point of meditation is to rest in bare awareness whether anything occurs or not. Whatever comes up for you, just be open and present to it, and let it go. And if nothing occurs, or if thoughts and so on vanish before you can notice them, just rest in that natural clarity.

All you have to do is remember that whatever’s going on inside someone else’s mind is the same thing that’s going on in yours. When you remember this, you realize that there’s no reason to be frightened of anyone or anything. The only reason you’re ever scared is that you’ve failed to recognize that whomever or whatever you’re facing is just like y

Sadly, the influence of conditioning is so strong that we rarely remember that we can step back. And because our understanding is limited, we mistake the little part we do see for the whole truth.

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.”

if they’ve taken their training seriously enough, they’re shifting around, scratching, and so on mindfully—bringing their attention to the sensation of the itch, the sensation of scratching it, and the relief they feel when they’re done scratching.