Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within

by Chade-Meng Tan

It can then perceive the self as a continuously running process,...

Recognizing this, our sense of self becomes delightfully fluid and we gain a joyful s...

Healthy sadness is sadness without despair.

Sadness without despair comes from the confidence that you have the inner resources to deal with difficulties. Where do those inner resources come from? Training the mind.

no matter how bad the pain is, no matter how horrible the situation is always, first and foremost, try to calm the mind.

“Just because you’re in pain doesn’t mean you cannot be joyful.”

The key lesson, my friends: never be afraid to experience joy in the midst of great pain.

Having experienced that realization, when one gets back to real life, identity-related problems such as being treated like I’m useless or unimportant still sting, but the mind also knows that there is zero substance to that identity anyway, so the suffering is meaningfully reduced.

For example, even if you treat your boss kindly, it doesn’t mean that she will always reciprocate in kind (no pun intended) and everything will be handy and dandy.

However, loving-kindness and compassion increase the probability of making a situation better, and sometimes, even a small increase in probability could have life-changing consequences.

The Buddha further explains that if he had strained, he would have been swept away, and if he had stopped, he would have sunk.

My friends, on your path to inner greatness, may you never stop and never strain.