Laurie Anderson "Be Happy"

Feel the sadness, don't be the sadness

I can apply the consciousness practices to this. 

And I can be the happiness. 

The logic of loving kindness

In Tibetan Buddhism loving kindness is one of the four immeasurables.  It is a quality associated with happiness and in cultivating it one prays for happiness and the source of happiness. But it is a quality that is in us, whether we realize it or not, so what we're really praying for is the constant awareness of the lovingkindness that lives in each of our hearts. From that seed of awareness it can be cultivated beyond any measurement.

The traditional loving kindness prayer is something of a sleight of mind, because happiness is there, always. Even our awareness of this desire for happiness is always there.  What we often lack is the awareness of this awareness.  To be happy in a sustainable way, first you need to know that you want to be happy. A surprising number of people don't know they have this unconscious longing, or won't admit to having it. Their lives, they say to themselves and others, are about more important things than happiness. Or they know they want happiness, but they confuse happiness with the object of happiness. They fall into the delusion that their happiness is dependent on the having a loved one, or the making that  loved one happy. This is why we say that attachment is the "near enemy" of loving kindness. Why family relationships are such a tangle, because we can't separate the healthy longing to understand ourselves better, and the unhealthy longing to have and control others.

It's the ability to remain curious and  rest in the longing for happiness that is the one most significant cause of happiness. Rest in that and happiness quite simply is.

And soon, within moments really your prayers are answered because happiness is familiarity with the healthy desire for happiness.  We have what we're asking for all along.

Hating Hatred

it's Easter Sunday. And I feel this morning like I have a whole new heart.

A few weeks back I had a meditation that was a tipping point away from the self-hatred that I've fallen victim to again and again in my life. This doesn't mean that hatred evaporated from my heart forever.  Far from it. In many ways it has merely been the start of truly being aware of the shape and texture of this hatred that has lived in my heart like so many years like a psychic tumour.

I've continued to struggle with the kind of petty obsessions, resentment and contempt that rises from heart that is locked into the habit of hatred. But I did figure out something interesting a couple of days ago.

Mattheu Ricard recommends one antidote to hatred, shifting the focus of our hatred away from people and ourselves, and toward the hatred itself.  Make hatred the object of our hatred.

When I do this here's what happens: My focus shifts away from the story that I'm telling to myself, or to the "other" person who I'm hating (who, let's face it, is often a stand in for myself), and towards the place in my heart that hatred comes from.

Hatred it turns out, it a de-iterative emotion.  Anxiety about anxiety increases anxiety.  But hatred of hatred, if you do it right, if you really wrap your hatred in itself, serves to dismantle itself.  In time the hatred disintegrates and what is left in the heart is equanimity.

Equanimity is still strange to me, and believing in the power of equanimity is still not a belief that is solid in my heart. Spend some time with this equanimity and soon enough, I'm feeling anxiety.

A trick I learned this week is that it's easier to turn anxiety into excitement than it is to turn it into calm. So when I've been playing around with feeling excited about peace.  What I feel when I do this, is very close to joy. I'm not sure yet why I hesitate to call it joy. Maybe because I want joy to be something that arises naturally in my heart, not simply a conceptual tweak.

But I know I'm close.  And it's easter.  So I will rejoice.