A friend recently posed this question to me: if I had to live on a deserted island for one year with no possibility of escape or rescue, what five things, other than basic survival things like food, water, and shelter would I want to have with me.
Here’s my list:
The Tao te Ching (unless there is electricity, then my Kindle, but that seems like cheating)
Paper
Pens
A watercolor kit with paint and brushes
A camera—I know, the electricity thing again, but we won’t be super-strict with the rules.
As I thought about this, I realized I could have fun and stay really absorbed. And that alone is a happy thought. I’d keep a journal, of course, and then write all the things I never get around to, teach myself to paint, and take lots of interesting pictures. My island, as I imagine it, has interesting shells and rocks and birds and plants and driftwood for creative inspiration.
Through it all, I’d read the Tao to keep inspired. Maybe I’d understand it better at the end of the year.
After doing this little exercise, these questions came to mind:
What possessions really add to our happiness?
What do we really need for entertainment, for inner growth, for self-expression?
What would we be willing to give up if resources were really limited?
What would you bring along with you? And how would it be to be alone with yourself? Post your answers in the comments section.
2. Creativity is associated with positive emotions such as happiness, joy, and love. Contrary to popular myth, the negative emotions of fear, sadness, and anxiety stifle creativity. Don’t believe it? Read this.
3. It’s useful. When you need to solve a problem, you have more options to choose from if you can access creative solutions.
4. It helps you access all of you. Creativity uses both right brain, wholisitc and image based brain processes as well as left brain, logical, verbal, sequential thinking.
5. It requires you to take risks, which develops courage and confidence, and courage and confidence are handy things to have.
6. It develops efficiency. When you are comfortable thinking outside the box, you can get to new solutions more easily.
7. It encourages you to experience “flow,” where you are so fully immersed in what you are doing, that you effortlessly lose your sense of time.
A study at Harvard Medical School released in December found that happiness spreads through social networks in amazing ways. One happy person can trigger a happy reaction in a friend who can trigger a happy reaction in another friend, who can trigger another happy reaction in another friend, who (you guessed it) can trigger another happy reaction in yet another friend. In all, this chain reaction can spread three degrees away from the original happy person.
The influence is not only on friends. Family members and even neighbors catch it, too. And what’s even more amazing is that this joyous effect can last up to one whole year!
Here’s another finding of the study: unhappiness is not as powerful as happiness. Sad feelings do not spread as efficiently as joyful ones.
The study analyzed data from nearly 5,000 people and found that friends, families, and even neighbors can influence each other in ways that spread to indirect relationships-your happiness can influence your neighbor and her friends, her friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends.
What are some practical implications for those of us who seek to maximize our happiness? That’s right, hang out with happy people and their friends. And be aware that your mood can influence others far removed from you.
We may be separated by six degrees, but we are connected by our happiness through three degrees!
What am I feeling? Excited, happy, with a tinge of dread.
What hurts? A heavy place on the left side of my heart.
What is the painful story I am telling myself? Don’t get too excited. Don’t count on it. Don’t believe it until you see it. People change their minds. This might not happen. Don’t get your hopes up.
Can I be sure this painful story is true? No. Quite the opposite. This painful story is completely unverifiable and speculative.
Is my painful story working? Nope. In fact, it is dampening my excitement and joy.
Can I think of another story that might work better? Yep. Something fantastic happened and I am going to enjoy it to the max. I am going to let myself get really excited and feel my happiness. It is safe to be happy.
Compassion: I understand these thoughts are trying to protect me from disappointment, trying to keep me safer. So I’m going to understand, with tenderness and compassion, that they are the thoughts of little girl disappointment, trying to protect me now, and inadvertently creating unnecessary joy-robbing disappointment when everything is going wonderfully well.
After my daily dose of nothing, today’s truth exploration:
1. What am I feeling? A little anxiety.
2. What hurts? It is a fluttering sensation in my belly. I crave a snack even though I am not hungry. I want food to bury this sensation.
3. What is the painful story I’m telling? This afternoon is going to be miserable because I have to finalize paperwork for my appointment with the accountant tomorrow morning to finish my 2007 income taxes. I hate doing this. It’s not fair. It’s not creative. I shouldn’t have to do this.
4. Is this painful story true? Well.., no, this story is full of dirty pain.
5. Is this story working? No. I feel upset and I want to avoid this afternoon’s task, which is why I missed the April 15 deadline.
6. Can I think of another story that might work better? Yes. Actually, my disorganization was much less in 2007 than it has been in the past. I’m improving. This year, I hired an assistant instead. She organized everything. My involvement has been minimal this year. I only have about two hours of work to do today. After tomorrow’s appointment, I will be totally finished with this. I plan to have the assistant organize 2008 now, and keep at it monthly, so next year will be easy.
I see that I’ve had a lot of dirty pain around this. I did the loving kindness meditation for a few seconds. My assistant should arrive in a few minutes, and by this time tomorrow, the whole project will be over.
This truth exercise took less than five minutes. Pretty good. I’m going to reward myself with some silliness. Enjoy.
The Joy Diet class for Martha Beck is starting Tuesday, and I’m thinking a lot about the joy practices we’ll explore. Truthfully, what I’m thinking most about is the stillness practice we’ll do. Lots of us are challenged by the notion of doing nothing. I’ve never quite gotten the hang of it. Or, the why bother of it.
Last night, after watching the presidential debates, I caught an ad for Microsoft Windows. The ad, a flashing series of testimonials by celebs and ordinary mortals, glamorizes Microsoft as modern and hip, like iPhones and Macs. You can see it here.
The superstar of the commercial is Deepak Chopra, who sits in a handsome office lined with rich woods, books, objets d’art, and of course, his PC. In a seriously sly voice, he deliciously intones, “I am a PC and I am a human being. Not a human doing. Not a human thinking. A human being.”
With that, I think I began to get it. Right there, in the most ludicrously unlikely place, a silly, flashy TV commercial, I began to understand stillness.
I am not a human thinking. Byron Katie and Eckhart Tolle have taught me that I am not my thoughts. I’m most certainly not those funny and frequently pesky things. I’m way more than my thoughts.
I’m not a human doing, either. I am not my roles or my activities—coach, mother, writer, yoga class attendee, former lawyer, procrastinator. I’m way more than those things too.
A human “BEing.” Is that what the mystery of stillness is all about? The me apart from my thinking or doing? Not a human thinking, feeling, doing, buying, eating, suffering, talking on the phone, or playing sudoko. I am a human being, a wondrous be-ing, who has that simple truth to come back to, over and over, especially when the going gets tough.
Thanks, Deepak. I’m getting it. But I’m still sticking with my Mac.
Unless you’re a bazillionairre, if you live in New York City, you ride the subway. Suzanne, New Yorker I coach, absolutely despised her commute. She complained bitterly about the griminess, the overcrowding, the behavior of the other riders. It was absolutely intolerable, she told me.
Her commute took 45 minutes each way. That’s more than 32 hours every month, a long stretch of misery in a life. She considered moving closer to work, even changing jobs, but couldn’t come up with a practical solution to the problem.
I had an idea. “Begin looking for beauty on the subway,” I suggested. Suzanne laughed cynically and patiently explained to me—a non-New Yorker—what was patently obvious to anyone with two eyes, a nose, and a brain: the New York subway is a human cesspool during weekday rush hour. It was impossible to appreciate anything about it, and there was certainly no beauty to be found there, she assured me.
But I insisted. “Send me an email every day, telling me of the glorious, beautiful, amazing things you find on the subway.” Suzanne left our session muttering that I’d given her an impossible assignment.
But she gamely began looking. With Suzanne’s permission, here are some of the things she found in the next few days:
“We went over the Manhattan Bridge, over the East River. Out in the distance, beyond the Brooklyn Bridge, three aircraft were buzzing around each other in the air. They were blimps, and they looked like giant honeybees drunk on pollen, bobbling to and fro over the water.”
“A kid had a little glass jar between his feet. It was strangely shaped, like it had contained an exotic food item purchased at an ethnic market in Brooklyn. It was filled with beautiful, thick, cloudy pink juice. Guava? Papaya-passion fruit?”
“The woman across the train had enormous boobs and beautiful deep black skin. The whites of her eyes were so bright in comparison to her skin they looked like keyholes of light in the door of a dark room.”
“This morning I couldn’t count the people wearing shades on the train! I guess when you’re cool you’ve always got the sun in your face.”
“A garish McDonald’s ad greets me and encourages me to ‘Think Good Thoughts….’”
“Ikea’s yellow flags wave in the distance on the waterfront. I bought a carpet there on Saturday night, and the water this morning is the exact same color of that carpet, gorgeous peacock blue.”
“There is a comfy, casual feeling on the train this morning… many wearing their Friday office attire. One woman looks so comfortable in her outfit I want her to take it off and let me put it on!”
“The faces of buildings and all of the bridges, walls, boats, water, cable lines, roads, signs are layered upon each other like a box of toys thrown around a room during a child’s tantrum.”
“Without anyone speaking, I know I am in the midst of various exotic tongues; Spanish, Polish, Korean, Russian, Israeli, Vietnamese, Czech, Yiddish, Mandarin, Hebrew.…”
“What a gift to be able to look at humanity up close and personal, to look at all of our differences, beauty, ethnicities, blemishes, scars… where else would I be able to notice the super-fine quality of a stranger’s hair follicles, the way his hair grows out of his head in the same direction, the tone of the skin on his scalp, eight inches from my face on this packed train?”
Within two weeks, the subway had transformed. Suzanne no longer rides in a cesspool teeming with the worst examples of humanity. Her last email about the subway ended with these words, “Everywhere I turn, there is opportunity for joy.”
As Marcel Proust wrote, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes.”
How about you? Is there anything ugly, disgusting, intolerable in your life? Can you see it with new eyes?
This morning, I was coaching very smart client. She’s an academic at a renowned university, and feeling a little sheepish about the possibility that she could actually be happy. She has a brilliant, highly-trained mind, and like so many in academia, tends to be suspicious of mooshy concepts like joy and happiness. Especially her personal joy and happiness.
Another client, a genius with two PhDs, spent years as an academic. For a while, he resisted some of the more imaginative exercises I gave him. Even when they helped him stop procrastinating, the issue he’d been paralyzed by and sought coaching for, he feared that, without empirical proof that the techniques worked, he was somehow being stupid for relying on them. It seemed better to hang onto his dysfunction than to risk doing something that was potentially hocus-pocus. Better to be a brilliant procrastinator than a productive dupe, I guess.
I’ve done my own time in academia, as a law professor, which carries not only the general fear of academia (the worst fate in life is that others will find out I’m not smart), but also the pessimism of legal thinking (if something can go wrong, it probably will, so I have to be prepared for every possible negative contingency). I spent a long time rejecting the possibility that I could be happy, even when I began to feel happy. I felt sheepish about it. It seemed so, well, unlikely and foolish.
Ultimately, I got over it. With practice and a bit of self-compassion my client can, too.
With The Joy Diet Group Dieting Adventure telecourse coming up, I’m thinking a lot about happiness and our resistance to it. Isn’t is crazy? A smart person can justify staying miserable or dysfunctional, because if others find out we’re happy, they might think we’re not so smart. Sometimes the smartest people do the silliest things, in the name of intelligence.
After years of weight-loss dieting, I’ve discovered a huge secret–what goes inside my head is much more important than what goes into my mouth. The whole point of being thin is to be happy, right? Why not skip the middleman and go straight for happiness? Whether or not I ever fit into my skinniest pair of jeans, I intend to be ecstatically, deliriously, divinely, serenely happy.
There’s actually good science behind this idea. Research shows that we’re born with a happiness “set point,” which is in our genetic makeup. But this only controls about half of our happiness. Scientists in the field of positive psychology, the study of “what goes right with the human psyche,” have discovered that intentional practices to lift our spirits can increase our happiness significantly. As much as forty percent of our overall happiness is within our control, and we can boost it with our thoughts and actions. That’s a humongous bunch of happy.
So, I’m going for my forty percent upgrade. I’m going to follow a daily joy program for ten weeks, based on Martha Beck’s bestseller, The Joy Diet. If you don’t know Martha, pick up an O magazine—where she writes a monthly column, or one of her New York Times bestsellers. Her writing is inspiring, intelligent, and hilarious, just like she is.
My joy project is actually part of an eleven week telecourse I’m teaching for Martha, exploring the ten essential ingredients of joy she writes about in The Joy Diet. And you are invited to participate. We’ll have a one hour class each week, beginning Tuesday, September 30. Each class, we’ll talk about one ingredient of joy, and then we’ll practice it for a few minutes a day for a week. The next week we’ll add another component.
The class will have the power of the group behind it, too. Just like some weight-loss diets take advantage of group support, this joy diet will be have the same kind of group support, where we’ll talk about our progress in class, and I’ll write about it here, on this blog. We’ll be able to inspire and motivate each other as we incorporate an intentional practice of joy into our lives.
The most successful approaches to reach goals, whether it’s weight-loss, success, relationships, or anthing else, always begin with bringing you to the feeling of satisfaction and happiness that the accomplishment of the goal would bring. If you want to be skinny, feel the joy of skinniness right now. If you want a relationship, walk around in love right now. If you want success in something, whether it’s a sport or a business, imagine the joy of success and live in it right now. So no matter what your goal is, this diet can help you get there.
I hope you’ll join us. It’s going to be a blast!
The Joy Diet Group Diet Adventure
Eleven Tuesday mornings, September 30 – December 16, 2008 (except Thanksgiving week)
8 am Pacific, 9 am Mountain, 10 am Central, 11 am Eastern
Can’t make that time? No problem. All class will be recorded and a downloadable mp3 will be emailed to you the same day as class (if the internet fairies cooperate.) You can listen at your convenience, on your ipod or your computer, and still participate with the group.
When you’re disappointed, does your mood plunge downward like it’s on a roller coaster? Yesterday, my new client, let’s call her Susan, had plummeted like she was on the Coney Island Cyclone. She’d sought coaching after a string of business failures. She suspected she might be doing something to attract this pattern into her life.
In a voice awash with misery and despair, she told me how she’d been incredibly happy this morning at the prospect of landing a fat new contract for her business, but a half-hour before our appointment, she received an email that the deal had fallen through. She was crushed and depressed.
“So what changed the way you feel?” I asked.
“The company changed its mind,” she stated dully.
“How would you feel right this minute if the email had gotten lost in the internet’s parallel universe, and you didn’t know about it?” I asked her.
“I’d feel great,” she said glumly, “at least until I found out.”
“So what really changed?” I asked.
With some coaching, Susan realized that her thoughts about herself had changed. When she believed she had the contract, she thought she was smart and competent and valued and felt energetic and excited about life. When she got the email, she told herself the company had rejected her and she was incompetent and useless. She became listless and empty.
As Susan discovered first-hand this morning, if we attach our happiness and self-worth to external circumstances, like a big contract, a promotion, or our children’s grades, we climb aboard life’s roller coaster. When circumstances are favorable, we are high, excited, exhilarated; when things change, we nose-dive to the bottom.
We hop on a roller coaster to take this ride when we lose touch with our true nature, what Martha Beck calls our essential self. Our essential self knows that we are always sparkling jewels, treasures of infinite value and worth. This has nothing to do with success in any external form–contracts or promotions or our kids’ grades or any other person or circumstance outside of us.
When we lose touch with that part of us, that all-knowing, peaceful, secure place deep in our hearts, we are at the mercy of life’s roller coaster. Our essential self gets buried by an avalanche of neediness and insatiable hunger for positive attention and rewards from others.
People change their minds, contracts fall through, kids fail courses, and others get selected for promotions and awards. That is the nature of life—change and unexpected circumstances are the only constants we can count on.
When we are in deep touch with our value, our worth, and the joy that lives deep inside us, we survive setbacks and challenges with peace and security. A contract can fall through, and we can put it into perspective. We remain positive and hopeful, and don’t slide into abusive or self-defeating thought patterns.
Sure, it feels good to land a big contract. But when we are in deep contact with our essential self, we never lose touch with our worth and our value, and we remain energized and hopeful. We understand that the loss of the contract could, in some as yet unfathomable way, be in our best interests. We save the roller coaster ride for fun and games at an amusement park. And, we realize that the next gift from life may be just an email away.
Questions to Ask Yourself When You’re on the Roller Coaster
1. Are you having any negative thoughts about yourself?
2. Is this an honest, factual assessment of this situation?
3. What happens to you when you hold on to these negative thoughts?
4. Imagine being in the present situation without the negative thoughts and judgments. Does anything shift for you?
5. Is there a stress-free reason to keep the negative thoughts about yourself?
6. What is an honest assessment of the situation that doesn’t include any negative or abusive thoughts about yourself or others?
Here’s my list:
1. It’s fun.
A study at Harvard Medical School
