A Monk's Guide To Happiness

A Monk’s Guide To Happiness will help you find more joy in life by identifying the mental pitfalls you fall into that make it so hard to have and how to shatter the shackles of suffering to finally find inner peace.

I love to reflect on the past so that I can learn from it. I also enjoy planning ahead for the future so I can use that knowledge to improve my life and the lives of those around me.

This is why the following quote by Lao Tzu worried me when I first heard it:

“But isn’t it important to learn from the past and prepare for the future?” I thought. Only by recognizing the importance of the present, however, did I learn how to connect the important lessons of the past and the opportunities of the future together.

The keyword in the quote is living in the present, which is the sweet spot where happiness exists.

Thubten teaches us that there are three components to happiness now:

Fullness Anchoring to the present Freedom

When we recognize that we don’t need anything to be content, we feel fullness, which makes us happy. It’s a feeling of contentment with who we are and what we have, right now.

Getting an anchor to the present involves staying focused on the here and now. We don’t need to get caught up in past failures or future worries.

And last is freedom, or the feeling of liberation from every source of unhappiness. This involves not letting our negative emotions hold us hostage.

It may seem counterintuitive to learn how to be happy by learning about unhappiness. But whenever we uncover the roadblocks in our way to something we want, we set ourselves up for success. And looking back to our first lesson, it’s easy to see that whenever we’re feeling down, it’s because of three mentalities: Incompleteness Being mentally removed from the present Confinement These attitudes come from wanting things that we don’t have but that we think we can’t be happy without. Let’s say you’re looking to get a promotion at work, for example. You don’t have it yet, but you somehow think that getting it will make you happy. This gives you a feeling of incompleteness. This comes from the incorrect assumption that you can find happiness outside of yourself and in some future occurrence instead of now. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to get something material or an experience or achievement, wanting what you don’t have makes you unhappy. It’s also a problem because it locks your happiness up by putting it in the hands of circumstances that you have no control over. In the case of your promotion,…