How to make yourself really (Un)happy!
My topic today is the twin arts of happiness and unhappiness.
I will focus on how we make ourselves (and others) happy or unhappy. I am not going to address the causes of (un) happiness that are important but outside ourselves:
the weather, unjust governments, luck, genes, etc. The key is not what happens to us, but what we make of it. Some of these insights come from my friend Rev. Calvin Dame who I have known since the first week of seminary. Many insights come from almost 40 years as a UU minister.
A.
The Shady Side of the Street:
How to Make Yourself and Others Really UNhappy
1. Make someone or something else responsible for your happiness.*
This is time-honored strategy because it works almost every time. Why? Because the first move is to give away our power to someone else or something else. As long as we can find someone else to blame for our unhappiness or someone that is totally responsible for our happiness, we give away leverage to make our lives better. If happiness is a state of reflective or non-reflective joy that illumines our heart, mind and body, how can we access it by focusing all our attention in the wrong place?
2. Hold onto negative feelings, negative memories, negative self-talk.
This insight comes from Old Buddha and a growing array of western psychologists. Have you ever found yourself or someone dear to you, holding on to old feelings or memories for weeks, months, years? Holding on to old feelings, bad memories or hateful ideas keeps us stewing in a vat of toxic emotions. It undermines our immune system. It can make us overlook what is good and beautiful in our lives. It chains us to the wheel of suffering. When individuals hold grudges they become bitter—full of fear, remorse, hatred and anger.
When nations hold grudges, they create centuries-long feuds and unholy wars. Consider the Middle East or visit the Fear Mongers Shop —aka Fox News.
3. Set unrealistic goals and then punish yourself relentlessly for not achieving them.
A third crucial principle for securing a seat in the House of the Unhappy: constantly compare yourself with others who appear, at a safe distance, to be “perfect.” If you paint, compare yourself to Picasso or Georgia O'Keefe. If you write poetry, compare yourself to Mary Oliver or Wendell Berry.
If you you preach, compare yourself to Dr. King or Alan Watts. And if you worry about your looks, compare yourself to anorexic models half your age. And by the way, those models don't really look like that either—they have been artfully enhanced by Photoshop or plastic surgery so that their human imperfections have been removed.
And the most beautiful people on the outside are often miserable—worrying about their “real self,” fretting that they are not loved for their “real self” but only for their air-brushed or surgically enhanced exterior.
4. Marry somebody that does not “like Ya”.
This is my own contribution to making yourself unhappy, influenced by Freud's insight that what makes adults happy is success in love and work. I have done extensive research on this topic and, like many of my friends and family, have married the wrong person more than once.
The key phrase is “like.” I'm not talking about 'head-over-heels' romantic love. I'm talking about a more basic and humble sense of liking, delighting in the everyday and imperfect art of being human together: sharing body-warmth at night, waking up with a good cup of tea or coffee and conversation, liking ourselves better when we are with our beloved than when we are without them.
Based on my own tenure at the Heart-break Hotel, there is nothing so effective in making life unhappy as marrying someone who does not “like ya.” What could compete with a built-in source of dislike that is always ready to remind of us our merely human faults and foibles?
5. Follow a career for which you have no real talent, calling or gifts.
This principle is the unhappy twin of the last one. Imagine how unhappy is the round peg who keeps trying to fit into the square hole! Every day the hammer, every day splinters, every day the stress and sorrow of not fitting in!
If you're highly intuitive, trying accounting!
If you love being with people, work alone at night!
If you need lots of quiet time, become a social worker or therapist!
When you dread going to work each day, seek relief through intoxication on weekends or yearn to “retire” and have nothing to do with your old work life, it may be a sign that you’ve picked a career for which you are ill-suited. Are you ready for a change?
B.
The Sunny Side of the Street:
How to make yourself and Others really Happy!
1. Do what you love, repeatedly, every day!
This point is so important, I'm going to repeat it: Do what you love, repeatedly, every day! If you've grown up in a a troubled or addicted family, you should probably add a qualifier: “as long as it does no harm to self or others”. One key word in this proverb is “do.” It's not enough to think about it, or develop large feelings about; embodied action, repeated many times, is required. And once is not enough!
One of the pioneers of this principle was the 19th century American psychologist William James. James was very interested in “psychedelic experiences” and wrote a book about them called The Varieties of Religion Experience. He also experimented with laughing gas and other amusing ways to alter waking consciousness.
But William James had two enduring problems. He taught at Harvard where there was always someone smarter within earshot and he was chronically depressed. Though he tried many ways to alleviate his depression, the most effective was very simple. He went into the Harvard chapel when it was deserted. He assumed the bodily position of prayer, even though he was not a traditional “believer.”
He held the position and, despite his doubts and disbelief, his depression would often lift after 20 or 30 minutes of practice. James' discovery forms the basis of what is sometimes called “cognitive behaviorism”: what matters more than what we think or what we feel is what we do with our bodies. Our body-postures generate new feelings, new feelings give rise to new ideas, new ideas can help shape our whole sense of self-and-world. Change often begins with embodied action.
So we need to do what we love every day, repeatedly. My list, which might be different than your list, includes the following: quality time with Kristen and Gryff, walking or working outside, cooking and eating well, pausing for meditation, t'ai chi or qigong, savoring beauty and doing at least 1 good deed.
What's on your list of activities that make you feel unreasonably happy?
2. Notice the people, places and substances that make you “unreasonably happy” and be there.
My list of beloved places includes a lot of islands: Star Island, Mallard Island, Madeline Island, Sanibel Island and anywhere on the north shore of Lake Superior. I enjoy reading books and talking with other book-people.
I've developed a persistent fondness for white and green tea and, more recently, sweet wines like Elderberry and Blackberry wine, for medicinal purposes in a single shot glass.
3. Do a good deed (Mitzvah) every day!
I owe to my Jewish friends of Duluth and the Boy Scouts the discovery of how important it is to do a good deed for someone at least once a day. Good deeds remind us that our self is social: we are deeply embedded in the matrix of human and natural communities. Last week, a financial counselor named Joy did a good deed for us. I said “thanks for the Mitzvah!” Joy smiled and asked:
“How do Unitarian Buddhists understand a Mitzvah?”
I said: “When we do a good deed it feels good because our True Nature naturally seeks wisdom, compassion and justice.”
Then I asked, “What’s the original story behind doing Mitzvahs?”
She replied: “The Kabbalah tells story that in the beginning the Creator powered Undivided Light into a vessel of Matter.
The vessel shattered, but inside each thing and event, there are shards of Light. When we do a good deed, that Light is released, that's why it feels good.” At this point, Joy and I bowed to each other and to the One Light that held us both and our traditions.
4. “Be a good neighbor, a good friend, a good citizen and thereby tend your social network”.
Tending the web, being a good friend, neighbor or citizen is not always fun. The web connects us to the victims of the latest terrorist attack and also the crazed fundamentalists who killed themselves and at least 129 Parisians who they did not know.
Sometimes being a good neighbor or a good citizen requires that we speak dis-comforting truths. As I recently told a neighbor who had once again blanketed our home with smoke and dusted our cars with ashes so they could burn leaves:
“Empathy is learned behavior. And this latest burning suggests that you haven't learned much about being a good neighbor”.
This was not polite, but for me it was true necessary to say. We have a lot of valuable books on our side of the road and Kristen has asthma. There was stunned silence and then, about an hour later there was an apology accompanied by 6 corn muffins and honey. Since then they've been more cautious about burning without advance notice— or did they just run out of leaves?
5. The most thing important this: Make your own list of what makes you unreasonably happy (and does no harm).
Post it where you can see it first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Maybe on your bathroom mirror or night-stand. And if you are very brave, entrust that list to someone who knows you well and loves you nevertheless so they can ask:
did your walk outside today?
Play some golf or garden?
Who or what did you bless?
And what did you create?
What makes you feel unreasonably happy?
Paradoxical Conclusion.
There are two ideas about the human self behind most of what I have discovered about happiness and unhappiness. One idea is that the self is solitary and that our leverage lies within ourselves. (A1, A2, A3, B1, B5)
The other idea is that the self is social and leverage for change often lies in our social networks. (A4, A5,B2, B3, B4)