If you knew how to be happy would you do it? - Jane Hanford
/If you knew how to be happy would you do it?
Firstly, let’s do away with the argument that focusing on your own happiness is selfish. Being happy doesn’t make you blasé and uncaring. It makes it easier to be with other people, including your kids, in an open and caring way, entering their worlds more wholeheartedly than you can when you are unhappy and stressed.
Your happiness is important both to you and to those you love.
Happiness is a State of Mind
God knows this has been a year like no other, marked for many by fear, anxiety and loss. For others it has been a welcome reprieve from the stress of school runs and commuting. But life will always throw things our way, good follows bad follows good. If you allow your happiness to blow about like a feather on the winds of circumstance you will be happy when things are going well and you will suffer when you face difficulties. You may believe that this is just how things are but consider this. Happiness is a state of mind. Your mind. Your mind inside your head. Shouldn’t you have a say in this?
Happiness is a Trained Mind
According to Buddhism ‘A trained mind is a happy mind’ so can Buddhism teach us how to train our minds to be happy? I have studied Buddhist Psychology for 5 years and I love the way it dovetails into modern psychology and neuropsychology, even though it predates them by 2,500 years! I found that the teachings are still relevant to our modern society, maybe now more than ever. And you don’t have to become a monk to benefit from the teachings and the practices. Like everything that is important, the ideas are simple yet profound, requiring little from you except that you do a little every day – even 10 minutes will do - and you don’t stop trying.
Practice calm
To be calm you have to settle your mind and stop your thoughts. You might already know how difficult it is to stop your thoughts from intruding on the calm space. The most common way to do this is to focus closely on the breath, which is ever present and ever changing. In Buddhism this training is called Samatha meditation which trains the mind to focus and be clear and helps to calm the whole system. You can simply take a few minutes to focus on the breath, counting it in and out and feeling the breath as it flows through the body.
Practice kindness
Secondly, you have to set an intention of kindness. This is critical because you are overcoming the natural negativity bias which sets our default mode to fear. Kindness is a loving, unconditional acceptance of yourself and others, a balanced openness towards things as they are and a predisposition to see the good in yourself and others. You can find many versions of the loving-kindness meditation on the web to get your practice going.
Grow self-awareness and self-mastery
As you establish your foundation - your calm space and your intention of loving kindness - you can start the work of growing awareness of your inner world. This is called vipassana meditation and this is where change happens. You turn inwards to your inner experience and explore what is working for you and what is not. You observe, note and gently explore these feelings and sensations, using curiosity to guide you but staying grounded and safe in calmness and kindness. You don’t get drawn into the stories, you don’t predict or draw conclusions but stay with the experience as an observer.
You will start to see how thoughts and feelings arise and fall away again. You start to gain a little distance between you and your thoughts, and in that distance is the space where you start to gain control of your mind.
As you practice you start to maintain this calmness throughout your day and you start to become able to control your natural reactivity. In a nutshell, things out there lose their ability to make you feel bad.
And this is how you train yourself to be happy.
Bio:
Having studied psychology my whole life, and more recently as I mentioned, Buddhist Psychology, I used my time off during lockdown to write the most useful and practical lessons in a book called Happy Anyway, which is available as a paperback or ebook on Amazon.
You can see more of Jane over at:
Find your further dose of self care in the Positive Wellbeing Zine for Mums here
Would you like to write for us? Submit a pitch about self-care, wellbeing or motherhood. Find out more here.
