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May 4 - May 18, 2023
5 A 1996 study involving twins suggests that roughly half of our happiness is associated with our genetic makeup.6 None of the other factors studied, including socioeconomic status, education, family income, marital status, or religiosity could account for more than 3 percent of the difference in people’s happiness.
The mental equivalent of physical exercise is meditation. Meditation is another word for mind training.
We have a mind condition that makes us itch for two types of pleasure: pleasure of the senses and pleasure of the ego. When our senses are pleasantly stimulated, as when we eat something tasty, or our ego is pleasantly stimulated, as when we are praised for something we did, we feel joy, which is good. What is even better is if we can feel joy independent of sense or ego pleasure.
The first skill we need in support of joy on demand is resting the mind to put it into a state of ease. When the mind is at ease, joy becomes more accessible,
Next, we learn to notice joy and give it our full attention. We learn where to look in order to see and appreciate joy that is already available to us, in moments that we hadn’t noticed before.
The more the mind becomes familiar with joy, the more it perceives joy, inclines toward joy, and effortlessly creates the conditions conducive to joy.
The wholesomeness of such joy benefits mental health the same way wholesome food benefits physical health. Such joy also leads the mind into a more stable, collected state because it doesn’t have to fight with anything like regret or envy.
By contrast, joy that comes from within—from a peaceful mind as a result of taking a few breaths, joy from being kind toward others (which involves other people but does not depend on them), joy from our own generosity, joy from doing the right thing—all this joy is ours to have, independent of circumstances.
Success does not lead to happiness; instead, happiness leads to success.
Happiness raises sales by 37 percent, productivity by 31 percent, and accuracy on tasks by 19 percent.
I have found wealth to be a personality multiplier.
And this is the silver lining of pain: whatever else it is, it’s an opportunity to practice getting better at working with pain.
The first, most basic and possibly most important benefit of mind training is the ability to calm the mind on demand.
The second basic benefit of mind training is clarity of mind. With calmness of mind comes clarity.
The third basic benefit of mind training is emotional resilience, especially in response to emotional pain.
Creative insights often come along with alpha waves, especially in the right hemisphere of the brain. Alpha waves are related to nonarousal. They are often associated with relaxing activities such as strolling, taking a warm shower, and yes, meditation.
Not only is the alert and relaxed mind highly conducive to creativity, but studies have shown that a joyful mind is also highly conducive to creativity.4 One study even shows that a joyful mind’s influence on creativity lasts up to two days after the positive mood was felt.
When you practice mindfulness of body and mindfulness of emotions, over time, you develop a strong self-awareness, and this self-awareness leads to the type of self-confidence that comes from knowing yourself.
With meditation, you gain some mastery of mind, and once you have that, you can gain expertise in any subject. That assurance that you can learn anything creates confidence.
looked at the audience and felt tiny because each person in the audience knew ten times more Buddhism than I did with one hand tied behind their back. However, I also felt tiny in a wholesome way: I was there entirely to serve this group of people, so my own ego and needs were totally irrelevant.
One aspect of confidence arising from resilience is the ability to recover: knowing that when things fail, I can always eventually recover.
Another aspect of confidence arising from resilience is more powerful than all the other aspects of confidence we have talked about, possibly powerful enough that even if you master only this one aspect alone, you can live your entire life with impeccable confidence. This is the willingness to bear witness to our own pain and failure.
However, I checked in on my values and decided that while I liked writing code, what really gave me purpose was scaling inner peace, inner joy, and compassion worldwide, and People Operations would provide me the opportunity to do so.
people around you will wonder why you are so frequently in the right place at the right time. In fact, you probably don’t get any more opportunities than they do—the difference is you can and do take advantage of the ones you get. The skills you need to do this are the self-awareness that gives you clarity of purpose, the self-confidence to know you are capable of learning anything at any age, the resilience to do outstanding work even in unpleasant situations, and the courage to “fly between trapezes” and put yourself in uncomfortable situations. Every one of these skills can be improved with
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The skillful trainer doesn’t work the trainee too hard at first because this tends to provoke psychological resistance to the training, but at the same time, the training cannot be so easy that it has no meaningful impact. The trainer must understand the minimum effective dose of exercise and train at an intensity that is slightly higher but not too much higher than the minimum effective dose. This makes training both easy and effective at the beginning; the trainee eases into the exercise and gradually ramps up.
A 2007 study by Chinese scientist Y. Y. Tang showed that a hundred minutes of meditation training is sufficient to effect measurable changes.
students who practiced mindfulness meditation for ten minutes a day for two weeks, a total of 140 minutes, had measurably improved GRE scores.
Another 2013 study shows that a mere fifteen minutes of mindfulness meditation can measurably improve your decision making by reducing your vulnerability to something called the sunk-cost bias, which contributes to bad decisions
when experienced meditators spent eight hours in intensive mindfulness practice, their gene expression started to change.4 Specifically, there was a reduction in the expression of pro-inflammatory genes, which correlates with faster physical recovery from a stressful situation.
Bushnell’s Law states, “All the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master.”
breaths taken mindfully tend to be slow and deep, and taking slow, deep breaths stimulates the vagus nerve, which in turn activates the parasympathetic nervous system.
To feel regretful, you need to be in the past, and to worry, you need to be in the future. Hence, when you are fully in the present, you are temporarily free from regret and worry.
Here is an important general rule: if, for whatever reason, you can only choose one, always choose gentleness over intensity.
INFORMAL PRACTICE: CREATING A HABIT OF TAKING MINDFUL BREATHS
the joy of ease is always available when the mind is both alert and relaxed at the same
The fruits of meditation practice are like free coins, they are available to all who want them, and have been for the past thousands of years. The only thing one has to do is to get them.
A key aspect of meditation is the skillful combination of wise effort and letting go.
The more the mind is in contact with any mental quality (such as calm or joy), the more familiar it becomes with it, and the more familiar the mind becomes with that mental quality, the more quickly and easily it gets it.
No, meditation is not about suppressing thoughts. Instead, meditation is about allowing the mind to settle on its own terms, in its own time, which includes allowing thoughts to arise as and when they want to.
Simply put, skillfully managing energy in meditation boils down to balancing three mental factors: mental relaxation, mental energy, and equanimous watching.
FORMAL PRACTICE: PUPPY DOG MEDITATION
Relaxation is the basic competency in meditation that enables all the others.
After a while, relaxation became a skill for me.
Mental training requires a skillful balance of disciplined effort and joyful relaxation, which means the more joyful relaxation you can already count on, the more disciplined effort you can commit, and the more of both you have, the faster you can establish attentional stability.
when the mind is inclined in a certain way, thoughts and emotions happen effortlessly according to the nature of its inclination. If the mind is inclined toward joy, for example, then joyful thoughts and feelings tend to occur effortlessly.
the skillful way to train the mind is not to exert forceful control over the mind itself, but to change its inclination so that thoughts and emotions occur effortlessly in the direction one intends.
The more the mind becomes familiar with joy, the more it perceives joy, inclines toward joy, and effortlessly creates the conditions conducive to joy.
The more you notice these thin slices of joy, the more they appear to be everywhere, because they have always been there.
One of the ultimate goals of mind training is to completely understand four things: the nature of suffering, the causes of suffering, the nature of freedom from suffering, and causes of freedom from suffering. Complete understanding relies on clear seeing. Buddhist texts semi-cryptically refer to it as “seeing things as they are.”
FORMAL PRACTICE: NOTICING JOY IN ONE BREATH
