Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

by Chade-Meng Tan

Happiness was not something that came naturally to me—it was a skill I had to learn.

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.

Since I could now be happy with or without being

rich, and with or without “proving myself” to the world, I didn’t see why I should be so obsessed with being “successful” anymore.

In fact, the opposite is true. Success does not lead to happiness; instead, happiness leads to success.

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. Actually, no, for many beginners, with calmness of mind comes sleepiness, but once you develop the ability to remain calm

without necessarily being sleepy, then you get to abide in a delicious state of mind that is calm and clear at the same time.

As we will see in Chapter 6, emotional resilience works in three steps: attentional, affective, and cognitive.

When hit by an episode of emotional pain, first we apply an attentional strategy, temporarily redirecting attention to the breath and the body, and by doing that, calming the mind.

After a while, we may recognize that even these afflictive emotions are merely sensations in the body and that they are constantly changing, arising and ceasing over

time.

Any one of the three basic benefits of mind training—mental calm, mental clarity, and emotional resilience—is, by itself, life changing, and with practice all meditators can acquire all three.

In the meditator’s case, at first, his ability to focus worked against him, and he couldn’t solve any of the puzzles.

Then he figured out how to use his extraordinary powers of cognitive control to un-focus, to let go and let his brain make what Kounios believes were the necessary associations in the right hemisphere of the brain for the solution to occur.

One of the biggest surprise discoveries of my life is that self-confidence can be trained by putting my butt onto a meditation cushion.

Upon reflection, I realized that this confidence has three wholesome sources:

Knowledge is confidence. There are three aspects of confidence that arise from knowing.

The first aspect, which has very little to do with meditation, is knowing your stuff.

There is, however, another aspect of confidence that arises from knowing that is even more

powerful than the first, and that is knowing yourself.

Knowing yourself means strong self-awareness, both at the level of emotional awareness (discerning your emotions in your body from one moment to the next) and self-assessment (knowing y...

What if there is something you need to know but don’t know—where is the confidence in that?

There is an additional aspect of confidence that arises from knowing: knowing that you can know.

In other words, whatever you need to know, you are fully c...

How did Shinzen do it? He said three things helped.

First, he now had great power of concentration.

Second, he was able to manage the negative self-talk.

The third thing he did was apply his power of empathy to gaining insights into mathematicians as people and then internalizing a “math geek” into his own personality.

The lesson from Shinzen: 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.

The second source of confidence is confidence arising from equanimity.

This comes in part from the ability to calm the mind on demand.

More than that, he said that at his level, tennis is no longer a physical game—it is a mental game, and a key part of that mental game is the ability to stay calm whatever happens.

Because of that, they all lead to the basic meditative state, which is the state where the mind is alert and relaxed at the same time.

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.

These three factors balance each other. If there is too much mental energy, the mind may be restless; if there is too much calmness, the mind may be dull; and if there is only equanimous watching without

the other factors, there may be insufficient concentration to advance into deep wisdom.

Simply put, skillfully managing energy in meditation boils down to balancing three mental factors: mental relaxation, mental energy, and equanimous watching.

Anytime I felt stressed out, I would temporarily abandon effort and return to relaxation before reintroducing effort.

Most of us are aware of arising and presence, but we are seldom aware of ceasing. In other words, our experience

of sensory and mental events is unbalanced—we often see the coming but seldom the going.

By noticing gone, you restore perceptual balance, thus moving toward seeing th...

Second, even more important than bringing balanc...

Just Note Gone helps us clearly see impermanence ...

In every experience of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, there...

Third, and perhaps most important, is the ability to see that self is a process, not an object.

We usually experience the self as an object, as if there is such a thing called a self. To a highly trained mind, though, things are a little more nuanced. When you can perceive mental processes in sufficiently high resolution, you may find that the mind continuously creates a sense of self in reaction to sense input and thoughts that arise.

When the mind is so calm it does not react compulsively to sense input, nor does it generate any thoughts, there may be moments w...

When the mind is calm, sharp, and trained to clearly see gone, it may be able to see the moments when the sense of self has faded away, before the...