The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World

by Dalai Lama XIV

Every day is a new opportunity to begin again. Every day is your birthday.

“Discovering more joy does not, I’m sorry to say,” the Archbishop added, as we began our descent, “save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily, too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.”

for that which is not yet redeemed, for that which is not yet whole.

We create most of our suffering, so it should be logical that we also have the ability to create more joy. It simply depends on the attitudes, the perspectives, and the reactions we bring to situations and to our relationships with other people. When it comes to personal happiness there is a lot that we as individuals can do.”

What many forget—especially those who find themselves on the receiving end of his moral censure—is that the Archbishop decries any form of oppression or discrimination, wherever he might find it.

What is it, I wondered, about spiritual leaders that they are always getting up early to pray and meditate?

Think of a mother who is going to give birth. Almost all of us want to escape pain. And mothers know that they are going to have pain, the great pain of giving birth. But they accept it. And even after the most painful labor, once the baby is out, you can’t measure the mother’s joy. It is one of those incredible things that joy can come so quickly from suffering.

suggests that there are really only four fundamental emotions, three of which are so-called negative emotions: fear, anger, and sadness. The only positive one is joy or happiness.

If there’s no way to overcome the tragedy, then there is no use worrying too much.

“If something can be done about the situation, what need is there for dejection? And if nothing can be done about it, what use is there for being dejected?”

oneself and toward others, from anguish to compassion—seeing

distinction between our “feelings of pain” and “the suffering that comes as a result of our response” to the pain:

‘Wherever you have friends that’s your country, and wherever you receive love, that’s your home.’”

But as you grow in the spiritual life, whether as a Buddhist or a Christian or any other tradition, you are able to accept anything that happens to you.

There are going to be frustrations in life. The question is not: How do I escape? It is: How can I use this as something positive?

“And I hope we can convey to God’s children out there how deeply they are loved. How deeply, deeply precious they are to this God.

You open, you blossom, really because of other people. And I think some suffering, maybe even intense suffering, is a necessary ingredient for life, certainly for developing compassion.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission to try to find a peaceful way to confront the atrocities of apartheid and pioneer a new future without revenge and retribution.

It is painful, and you have to acknowledge that it is painful. But actually, even in the midst of that pain, you can recognize the gentleness of the nurse who is looking after you. You can see the skill of the surgeon who is going to be performing the operation on you. Yet sometimes the pain can be so intense that you do not have even the capacity to do that.

“Too much self-centered thinking is the source of suffering. A compassionate concern for others’ well-being is the source of happiness.

By simply shifting my focus to another person, which is what compassion does, my own pain was much less intense. This is how compassion works even at the physical level.

oneself: “All dharma teachings agree on one point—lessening one’s self-absorption.”

According to Lyubomirsky, the three factors that seem to have the greatest influence on increasing our happiness are our ability to reframe our situation more positively, our ability to experience gratitude, and our choice to be kind and generous.

could not help thinking of how we try so hard, with our natural parental instinct, to save our children from pain and suffering, but when we do, we rob them of their ability to grow and learn from adversity.

They kept waiting for others to come save them, and when no one came, they gave up. They had not learned how to save themselves.

your family members, your teachers, and your enemies.

attachment, anger, and delusion,

nonattachment, compassion, and wisdom.”

suffering can either embitter us or ennoble us and that the difference lies in whether we are able to find meaning in our suffering.

Deep down we grow in kindness when our kindness is tested.”

that the greatest danger for this man had been the risk of losing his compassion, losing his heart, losing his humanity.

We often feel that suffering will engulf us, or that the suffering will never end, but if we can realize that it, too, will pass, or as the Buddhists say, that it is impermanent, we can survive them more easily, and perhaps appreciate what we have to learn from them, find the meaning in them, so that we come out the other side, not embittered but ennobled.

Oh, no, not at all. It’s all part of my curriculum.”