Entering the happiness bubble: easier done than said!
Lately, I have been ruminating on happiness and joy — a lot!
I live in Silicon Valley and work in San Francisco. I see a number of individuals in a constant state of stress and anxiety despite being paid salaries that will qualify amongst the top 1% earners in the world while living in one of the most prettiest regions in the world. There seems to be an upward tick on stressful individuals in the last couple of years.
As a side note, I often wonder if the outlook on life for these individuals would change if they see how the rest of 99% of the world lives.
I grew up in Mumbai and my recollection is of a lot more happier people living on wages that would be miserable as compared to the US.
As I tuned inward, I began an experiment to try to detect my default state of consciousness. Constant awareness of emotions is a hard job but I soon realized that I am usually in a minor state of agitation myself.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black :-).
As I dug deeper into my agitation, I found two causes:
- The first cause is my relentless drive to excel and achieve. If I recall my childhood and college years, laissez-faire is a word that would aptly describe me. Thus, the relentless drive is something that I definitely picked up once I moved to the US and the drive intensified in Silicon Valley.
- The second cause is the negative information and media diet. I wake up, check my emails and am bombarded by problems from work, then I switch to reading the news which highlights that the world is on fire driven by racism and greed. Work is something that I have signed up for but toxicity from news is something that I didn’t.
My consciousness never enjoys a smooth ride because these two causes are like minor geological tremors that keep happening under the surface.
I decided to fix the agitation and floated an “operation joy” experiment.
First, the easy part, I tuned off news and social media (mostly) — have adopted a concept called information diet (Tim Ferris made it popular). I adapted it to a version that fits me — I switched my news media from politics to technology and that took care of 90% of negativity. I do see political news but I have really turned the dial down. I turned off Facebook from my phone because it has become a place where political news finds me. Twitter is toxic and has been out of my system for a while so I had that going for me. Reddit though is proving to be a challenge.
Second, the hard part — finding joy.
Joy, Happiness, Happy — what are these exactly?
As I was meditating on achieving joy, I realized I needed to go back to first principles to truly understand what I was asking myself.
Joy a feeling of great pleasure and happiness
Generating or looking for the next “great pleasure” is not realistic. I envisioned behaving like a drug addict, looking for the next great pleasure every day.
Happiness — perhaps?
What’s happiness then?
Happiness the state of being happy.
The state of being happy…hmmm…requires me to be consistently be happy. That’s problematic for two reasons:
- requires a constant awareness of my emotions which is incredibly hard plus
- requires a mental fortitude to change the emotional state when you are not happy — harder perhaps.
Clearly, going from a state of agitation to joy seems like a great leap.
What’s happy then?
Happy feeling or showing pleasure or contentment.
The key is the discrete nature implied in the definition of happy. I don’t need to be on all the time and inducing a feeling of contentment once in a while seems achievable. No?
The path forward then, is to find something that gives me a feeling of contentment.
Meditating on what gives me contentment made me realize that I shouldn’t be searching for “something” because that would mean I am looking for the next hit again plus it means I am looking outside.
Going inwards is the key.
Insight: Finding contentment is easier done than said
I was recently reading a book from Anita Moorjani who had a near death experience (NDE) and came back miraculously healed and a completely transformed outlook in life. Her key lesson from the NDE is that we are very hard on ourselves by keeping extraordinarily high standards for ourselves and tragically for us — we don’t love ourselves much.
Well that sounds like myself — I don’t recall the last time, I appreciated myself or said good things to myself. The moment, I achieve a goal, I move onto the next one which has to be harder than the last one. I remember, completing my marathon and all I thought in the last 2 miles of the race was “26.2 mile is easy, what’s next?”.
Synchronicity! I seemed to be reading the book at the right time.
Anita’s philosophy resonated with me because my meditation practice constantly advocates loving oneself as the easiest key to higher states of consciousness. However, the lesson never clicked for me and I have avoided doing some of the meditation exercises because they seemed too easy and gentle on me.
I guess, I had to work hard to arrive at the insight myself.
So the answer seemed clear and sitting right in front of me — the key insight is that I needed to slow down, appreciate myself and love myself more.
Meditation: The happy bubble
So I built a meditation(liberally inspired by my guru) to make me happy.
I do the meditation as soon as I get up, about to fall asleep and whenever I find myself having a minute to myself.
The meditation is absolutely simple, here goes:
Imagine a giant soap bubble, the one that the 5-year-old-you would be absolutely thrilled to have.
You are about to step into the bubble but before you do so, you need the mind to stop its chatter. Thank your mind for helping you navigate the world and tell it that at this point you want it to take a break and rest. Once you have dispatched your mind away, step into the bubble.
Once in, bring back your happiest memories — experience these memories. Stay there and enjoy them. This primes the pump for the next step.
Next up — thank yourself for all the good work you do.
Look back, would the teenager-you be proud of what you have become and how you lived your life? The answer is more than likely a yes. Be proud of the work you put in yourself. You can choose whatever time frame and incidents you want. If you absolutely crushed it yesterday — think about how you crushed and feel good about it :-).
Last, thank your body for helping you navigate the world. You can thank each body part and organ if you really want to go deep. Thank your emotions — they help you experience the rich tapestry of life. Thank your mind for helping you navigate this world.
Float around in the warm bubble, soaking in a gentle sun and stay here for a while before coming back.
Over the last few months of practice, I have seen that my happy bubble meditations pop up number of times a day. The happy bubble keeps expanding beyond the meditation itself and now I see that most days I am in a state of happy which is happiness :-).
As I remain more and more in happiness, I find that I operate out of joy which is driven from something inside me and not outside.
Being joyful is a wonderful state to be in and turned out easier done than said.
