The Pursuit of Happiness

It’s hard to know where to begin on this one. After a 10-day silent Buddhist Meditation Retreat, there is a lot to unpack and digest.  

Beginning with the silence seems like an obvious place to start.  I was never worried about it from the get-go. I like not talking.  And after traveling the world solo for 16+ months now, I am used to being alone and not talking.  For me, it turned out be a really cool social experiment in communicating with just your eyes, facial expressions, and body language.  We were around the same 134 people all day every day, so you got used to seeing the same faces at meal time, break time, in the meditation hall, and during our karma yoga jobs.  Eye contact and smiles spoke volumes.  You could feel an immediate connection with some people, and little to no connection with others.  It’s interesting how you know right away who your people are without even speaking a word.  And it was also interesting how the curiosity about the ones you did feel a connection with grew each day.  By the end, I was so excited to learn certain people’s names, and hear their voices, and have a real conversation; but strangely (or maybe not so strangely), once we could speak, it was almost as if we already knew each other so well.

Next, the Buddhism classes/lectures.  We had about three to four hours of Buddhism lectures per day.  Everything from Buddhist history, to philosophy, to key concepts and finally practical application into our modern-day lives.  It is A LOT to digest and a lot to wrap your head around.  Some very complex topics that could have been near impossible to understand if it wasn’t for our extremely adept, knowledgeable, and super cool monk/professor, Venerable Wangdu.  Thank God for him.  He was outstanding.  A younger monk, newly ordained, but practicing for a while, who was able to educate us through everyday life applications with a little bit of humor sprinkled in here and there. 

Third, it is important to mention our meditation practice.  We got a lot of it.  Especially during the last two days where we had no lectures and just back to back meditations all day.  If I understood the lectures correctly, the meditation practice is the key to developing your wisdom, which is the key to spreading love and compassion throughout the world, which in turn, is the key to your happiness.  So meditation is important.  I won’t bore you with the details of how to meditate; you can read tons of books on that yourself, but the key takeaways for me were the following:

• Make it a part of your daily routine.
• Apply it to your daily life. Be practical and make it useful.
• Keep it simple.

So what did we learn?  Here are the overall takeaways for me:

• Buddhism is not a religion.  It is a science of the mind.  It is not a cult.  It is something that is extremely personal, and in fact, on the last day, Venerable Wangdu warned us not to go out into the real world and try to change, encourage, or recruit people.  He also reiterated how you can take as much or as little from the concepts as you want.  You don’t have to believe in everything, and you don’t have to become a Buddhist.  The goal is just to live the happiest and most compassionate life that you can and to spread that joy and help others to feel free from suffering as well.  
• Meditation is not just a relaxation technique or something that we do to escape our problems.  It is a series of practical psychological techniques used to heal and cultivate the mind.  It is a way to train our minds to think healthier.  
• Actual happiness is genuine inner satisfaction, and a lasting well-being that is not stimulus based.  Actual happiness derives from what we bring TO the world, not what we take FROM it.
• Finally, we learned so much about attachment, ignorance, anger, the ego, emptiness, suffering, karma, death, rebirth, and love, compassion, and wisdom.  It is just too much to go into here, but when you really dive in, it truly does make sense and is now something that I plan to work on patiently and diligently everyday in my own life and my own meditation practice. 

On a more personal level, I noted a few things:

• I’ve got some trauma buried deep down inside of me.  Everyone always tells me how strong I am, and I do believe that I am.  But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have pain too. I just think that I am better at hiding it than most.  I have discovered that I am so good at hiding it that I can even hide it from myself.  It’s buried so deep that I was beginning to wonder if I was devoid of all feeling.  But nope!  It’s there.  I have found pieces of it over these past few months, and I am well aware that I am only scratching the surface and that there is still so much more hard work to be done.
• Forgiveness of both myself and others is hard, but necessary.
• I like the way that I feel and the way that I am on this spiritual path.  Once we were finally able to talk, many of my new friends shared their perceptions of me before we spoke.  Most said that I had a calming presence and a good energy.  I get that a lot, actually, and it makes me feel so good.  I can feel that positive energy within myself and it is something new that I don’t ever want to lose.
• Meditation is SO necessary for clarity.  Since I began meditating about one year ago, there have been a few instances (and two during this retreat) where I have felt that amazing feeling that some people talk about when they talk about meditation.  It’s not enlightenment, of course.  But it is that crisp, super clear feeling like you are floating effortlessly through the air.  Almost like you are weightless.  And for me, it doesn’t happen during my meditations, it happens suddenly, in my everyday, real life – when it is supposed to.  And it is magical.  Those are the times when I feel like I can do anything!  It’s such a wonderfully powerful feeling, like you are truly in control of your own destiny and everything is just as it should be.  I want more of that in my life.
• Finally, being without my electronic devices for 10 days (no phone, laptop, social media, internet) was not as hard as I thought it was going to be.  In fact, it was refreshing and I recommend it to everyone.  I think it is truly the only way to get out of mainstream society and into your own mind.  I had to think really, really hard, but since cell phones were invented, I don’t think that I have ever gone 10 days without it in my life.  The max I could come up with was maybe 3-4 days on a camping trip out in the backwoods where there was no reception and it was not necessarily a voluntary decision.  That was a shocking revelation to me.  It actually sounds dangerous.  On Day 10 when we were able to get our devices back, many of us commented on how we were actually a bit anxious about it.  Just the thought of getting our phones back was creating anxiety. It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots between personal well-being and technology here…

So that is the black and white of it.  There was absolutely a lot of gray too and that is harder to explain; but overall I laughed, I cried, I let go of some more of those massive fortified walls built up around my heart, and I learned so much about myself and about my mind in particular.  I made new friends, I became more aware of everything, and I left feeling…different.  But better different…Like I have a new understanding about the unknown path ahead of me.  I still don’t know exactly where I am going or what is going to happen, but that’s okay.  I see the path ahead as one with less attachments, fewer expectations, more clarity, more joy, less suffering, and ultimately, more happiness…the most happiness.  It’s not going to happen overnight.  It is going to take time, practice, and patience, but I now have the tools to make my best and most authentic life a reality.  And I wish that for everyone reading this, and for those not reading this as well.  No one should go through life feeling caged.

One final note – There was a day that we discussed death in pretty great detail, and on that day, Venerable Wangdu shared the Top 5 Regrets at the Time of Death from a hospice nurse who wrote a book about her experiences post-retirement.  They resonated with me on such a high level, that I found myself tearing up, and I feel compelled to share them with you here.  Here they are in order from #1 to #5:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to me, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish I had let myself be happy.

#1 especially kills me.  But honestly, they all do.  I can’t bear the thought of this happening to even one person.  And if there is anything that I can do to help people avoid these sentiments on their death bed, then I am making a promise right now that I am going to find a way to do it.  It’s not just about me anymore.  It’s about every sentient being out there.  May we all find happiness and be free from suffering…forever.

“There is no path to happiness: happiness is the path.” – Lord Buddha