DISCOVERING JOY AND HAPPINESS WITHIN

Week of Monday, August 1, 2022

Where are joy and happiness to be found? 

Inside, the Buddha said. 

This is our practice theme and aim of the week: to look for joy and happiness on the inside.  

We should pause for just a moment here, simply to notice that looking for joy and happiness on the inside is not where we usually look.

Normally, we seek joy and happiness from outside of ourselves, such as in the food we eat, the items we buy to surround us in our homes, in other people we like or love, and in activities that make our hearts race if we’re seeking excitement, or that calm us down if we want to relax. 

There are pills and liquids for excitement or calm, too. 

It would be fair to say that the main reason why many, if not most, people come to meditation is because they at last realize they have gathered and stocked their lives with all the objects they thought they needed for joy and pleasure all the time—and still there is discomfort and stress.  

Often more than ever! 

It was the Buddha’s central insight, not that joy and pleasure are bad things, but only that if we seek them from external sources, we will be severely disappointed sooner or later, and probably sooner. 

Happiness, he discovered, is an inside job.

This is our practice this week, to find joy and happiness inside ourselves.  

The Buddha tells a beautiful story about discovering joy internally. His story can inspire us, because it  encourages us to remember when we were young, and experience joy internally, easier than in later years.

As the Buddha tells it, he was in the final stretch after six years of arduous spiritual seeking, sitting under the Bodhi tree and now only hours from his enlightenment. He was emaciated from fasting and other austerities by which he’d tried, using supreme willpower, to deny every last pleasure of the mind and body, and by this means to awaken. 

But suddenly a memory came to the Buddha’s mind, of when he was a young boy sitting quietly under a rose-apple tree. At that time, the Buddha recalled, his consciousness spontaneously shifted to a tremendous sense of joy and happiness, that clearly did not endanger him spiritually at all. In fact, this mental state seemed to the Buddha as not only pleasurable, but also full of a spacious, relaxed and healthy energy which filled his consciousness as a young boy—and could, perhaps, do so again.

“Could this be the path to awakening?” the Buddha asked himself.  

So, instead of turning away from this intensely pleasurable mental state, the Buddha allowed himself to abide in that state as he sat under the Bodhi tree, and to evaluate the thoughts that followed. One of those thoughts was to go ahead and eat a bit of rice and porridge, in order to gain some physical strength. So he did that, and he got stronger. 

In the hours that followed, the Buddha experienced wave after wave of pleasure, each of which was followed by insights leading to his awakening. After each wave of pleasure, the Buddha noticed that the intensity of each wave faded and disappeared, and that with each such fading the clarity and stillness of his mind increased.  

“The pleasant feeling that arose did not invade my mind or remain,” he told his monks, again and again. Instead, as each wave came, it soon melted into a quieter sense of stillness and contentment, with its energy then transforming naturally into insight, wisdom, and finally, awwakening. 

Contemplating this story as a part of our weekly practice, we can take away this nugget: that experiencing pleasure in meditation—the right kind of pleasure—is not only a bonus, it’s an absolute necessity. This pleasure puts us on the path to awakening and keeps us there. If we pay skillful attention at each step, each of these successive waves of pleasure will fade and transform every time into insights, wisdom, and freedom. 

“Those who practice meditation should know how to nourish themselves with joy and happiness in order to reach real maturity, and to help the world,” says Thich Nhat Hanh.

“Joy is a positive psychological and physiological state,” he says. “Joy helps our blood circulate through our bodies, which makes us feel more alive. When we feel joyful, concentration is easy. When we do not feel joyful, it can be difficult to concentrate. When we are concentrated, we see more clearly and have a deeper understanding of things.”

Noticing internal joy came at the beginning of the Buddha’s awakening meditation, setting off a series of internal events that proceeded quite like waves coming into shore, or like dominoes falling one after another. 

As we can start our own practice this week, whether in formal sitting or daily life, we can proceed in the same way. We can first notice joy, then breathe into it, and enjoy it, and “ride it” as far as each wave of joy will take us. Then we simply let it go and, as it fades, notice what arises. 

Later in his life, the Buddha taught the exact steps that he practiced on the night of his awakening, in a series of steps that he called “anapanasati,” or “the full awareness of breathing.” He taught these 16 steps so that anyone could work with their own consciousness exactly as he did on the night of his awakening, and likewise achieve, if not the full awakening that he did, at least a great measure of freedom. 

It’s vital, as I’ve mentioned before, not to get intimidated by the “16 steps,” which the mind all-too-easily interprets as “That’s too much to memorize, I’m not interested!” It would be a terrible pity if this is where we left the full awareness of breathing, dead on the doorstep, swept aside because of “too many steps to remember.” 

These steps lead to the end of suffering, which is surely a far-more-than-fair price for such a freedom. 

In addition, we should also always remember that as soon as we start practicing these steps, we realize the practice has little to do with mental memorization. That’s because the steps actually describe a natural chain of internal mental and physical experiences that, once we experience them, by their nature imprint deeply into our consciousness and senses. As a result we remember them naturally and easily, as we might remember a catchy tune that we hear on the radio, or recall a certain distinct smell, like the salt air of the seashore, or a special place we love. 

The series of internal experiences, also, are not ones that we’ve never experienced before. Being human, we’ve experienced every one of them many times in our lives. In addition, because we are human, the familiarity of these experiences is encoded in our genes, or into our karma if you prefer that term. It’s just that we have mostly overlooked these experiences and so have never consciously accorded them the supremely high value that they deserve, as tools for our own awakening. 

As a result, we have never used these natural experiences, which are native to us as human beings, consciously towards our awakening via the Full Awareness of Breathing meditation or, as I call it in my modern adaptation, The Breath of Love. This application of what is already native to us, consciously to our own awakening, is our practice.  

And, one last thing about the 16 steps. 

Because these steps describe a series of internal experiences, as described above, with one flowing naturally into another, they often tend to clump and thus one can move relatively quickly through two or three steps or more. This is especially true of the first six steps in the meditation as one settles down, relaxes, and starts to enjoy joy.  

Indeed, Thich Nhat Hanh recommended that every time one looks inward, one should start by practicing the first six steps of the Full Awareness of Breathing. In earlier weeks, we considered  the first four steps of the method in some detail—that is, breathing long, breathing short, noticing the whole body, and calming the whole body. 

This week, we’re focusing on Steps 5 and 6, which are “Noticing Joy” and “Noticing Happiness.” Together, Thich Nhat Hanh called the practice of these two steps “The Art of Happiness.”

Our new practice this week is The Art of Happiness: 

In the sequence of steps above, “joy” represents the first and relatively strong surge of pleasant experience that can come when we start to settle down, and bring awareness back from its wanderings, to the body. As we take a few full breaths, filling the whole body with breath and awareness, and dropping our daily life worries and concerns, we can feel distinctly pleasurable sensations that mark off this time of relative seclusion from the outside world.  

Different people can feel this in different ways and different degrees. Some may call it a “coming home” feeling, or like a great sigh of relief, or as actual sighs of relief. Feelings of gratitude can well up as soon as we come back to our bodies in this way, and sometimes the body will start to tingle, or feel bubbly as if filled with champagne bubbles. It can feel like the body is responding to the sudden flood of attention it is getting, and loving every moment of this attention and love. Who wouldn’t respond like this to such love?

However the joy feels or manifests for you, notice the arising of whatever pleasant sensations arise as you begin to look inward. If the sensations are subtle or faint at first, don’t slight them for that reason. 

Instead, regard those faint and subtle traces of joy as like tiny sparks which, as soon as they are nourished with your continuous caring awareness, can blaze up into a hearth fire of steady pleasure. Then, you  you can further spread that pleasure through the body with each breath. 

After a while, though, notice that the relatively intense feelings of joy that arose when you first looked inward, begin to fade a into a stabler, low-intensity pleasure that we might call “contentment,” “ease,” or as in Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation above, “happiness.” 

This shift from the flaring and sudden intensity of “joy,” into the plateau of “happiness,” is what the Buddha was describing when he said his original feelings of “rapture and pleasure born of seclusion … did not invade my mind or remain.” Rather, he said, “with the fading of rapture I remained tranquil, mindful and alert, and sensed pleasure with the body.” 

As always, it’s not the words that count, except as pointers. 

As you look inward, simply scan your experience to see if you can notice, as your awareness begins to fill the body, any sudden arising of a pleasurable feeling.  

Then, keep nourishing that feeling with your breath as you breathe in, and with your awareness as you keep it focused on the pleasurable feeling. (You might also begin to notice, although we will take this up specifically later, that your breath and your awareness seem quite magically to blend into one experience, each inseparable from the other.) 

In any case, let your breath feed, or oxygenate you could say, the feeling of pleasure for a while, without getting greedy for that pleasure or hoping to make it stay forever. Instead, as if you were stoking a hearth fire, just breathe in and let the sparks of pleasure fly for a while, knowing that in time the fire will naturally settle down, and you’ll be content then to notice and enjoy that calmer phase of pleasure. 

Staying relaxed, and with a sense of gentle caring interest, as a mother would have for a child, see if you can catch the sense of how pleasure arises internally for you, in whatever form. 

Then, notice how its intensity fades from a peak into a stabler, lower plateau of settledness, contentment and ease. It’s like how a crashing wave finally flattens into a plane of bubbly water. This is a pattern that repeats over and over, in many forms. 

The more intimate we get in noticing this pattern of awareness, like waves rising and falling, the more skill we can gain in riding these waves of energy that bear us towards what the Buddha called “the other shore” of freedom, the heart’s sure release.