Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (And World Peace)

by Chade-Meng Tan

That is why Search Inside Yourself has the compelling features of being scientifically grounded, highly practical, and expressed in a language that even I can understand.

the context of the work environment, emotional intelligence enables three important skill sets: stellar work performance, outstanding leadership, and the ability to create the conditions for happiness.

Matthieu Ricard defines happiness as “a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind . . . not a mere pleasurable feeling, a fleeting emotion, or a mood, but an optimal state of being.”8 And that optimal state of being is “a profound emotional balance struck by a subtle understanding of how the mind functions.”

Emotional skillfulness frees us from emotional compulsion. We create problems when we are compelled by emotions to act one way or another, but if we become so skillful with our emotions that we are no longer compelled, we can act in rational ways that are best for ourselves and everybody else.

a strong, stable, and perceptive attention that affords you calmness and clarity is the foundation upon which emotional intelligence is built.

“response flexibility,” which is a fancy name for the ability to pause before you act.

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.” What a mind of calmness and clarity does is to increase that space for us.

Mindfulness is defined by Jon Kabat-Zinn as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”

Every emotional experience is not just a psychological experience; it is also a physiological experience.

Essentially, because emotion has such a strong physiological component, we cannot develop emotional intelligence unless we operate at the level of physiology. That is why we direct our mindfulness there.

There is nothing mysterious about meditation. It’s really just mental training.

When your meta-attention becomes strong, you will be able to recover a wandering attention quickly and often, and if you recover attention quickly and often enough, you create the effect of continuous attention, which is concentration.

When the mind becomes highly relaxed and alert at the same time, three wonderful qualities of mind naturally emerge: calmness, clarity, and happiness.

When the mind is calm and clear at the same time, happiness spontaneously arises. The mind becomes spontaneously and naturally joyful!

happiness is the default state of mind.

happiness is not something that you pursue; it is something you allow. Happiness is just being.

Meditation is exercise for the mind.

The implication of this insight is that there is no such thing as a bad meditation. For many of us, when we meditate, we find our attention wanders away from our breath a lot, and we keep having to bring it back, and then we think we’re doing it all wrong. In fact, this is a good exercise because every time we bring a wandering attention back, we are giving our muscles of attention an opportunity for growth.

The more we are able to create space between stimulus and reaction, the more control we will have over our emotional lives.

Breathing as if your life depends on it

The keyword is practice. Mindfulness is like exercise—it is not sufficient to just understand the topic; you can only benefit from it with practice.

Happily, the difficulty of sustaining a mindfulness practice often lasts only a few months. It is like starting an exercise regime. The first few months are usually really hard—you probably have to discipline yourself into exercising regularly, but after a few months, you find your quality of life changing dramatically. You have more energy, you suffer fewer sick days, you can get more stuff done, and you look better in the mirror. You feel great about yourself. Once you reach that point, you just cannot not do it anymore. The upgrade in quality of life is just too compelling. From that point on, your exercise regime becomes self-sustaining. Yes, you probably still have to cajole yourself into the gym every now and then, but it becomes fairly easy.

“Have expectations before meditation, but have no expectation during meditation.”

meditations require a balance of effort and relaxation. In either case, too much effort makes it tiring and unsustainable, while too little effort causes you to lose your grip on your attention. The classical analogy for this balance is having just the right tension on the strings of a sitar. If the strings are too tight, they break easily, but if they are too loose, they cannot produce beautiful notes. So the strings need to be in the “Goldilocks zone” of being not too tight and not too loose.

I think the lesson to be learned is to avoid feeling discouraged when your meditation does not seem to be progressing. If you understand the process, you may understand that when change does come, it will come suddenly, and every moment of effort brings you a little closer to that point. The classical analogy is ice breaking up on a frozen lake. To a casual observer, the breakup seems like a sudden phenomenon, but it is actually due to a long period of gradual melting of the underlying ice structure. In Zen, we call it gradual effort and sudden enlightenment.

Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally. —Jon Kabat-Zinn

The key is to let go of two things: grasping and aversion. Grasping is when the mind desperately holds on to something and refuses to let it go. Aversion is when the mind desperately keeps something away and refuses to let it come. These two qualities are flip sides of each other. Grasping and aversion together account for a huge percentage of the suffering we experience, perhaps 90 percent, maybe even 100 percent.

The first important opportunity is the possibility of experiencing pain without suffering. The theory is that aversion, not the pain itself, is the actual cause of suffering; the pain is just a sensation that creates that aversion.

“Think of happiness as a deep ocean. The surface may be choppy, but the bottom is always calm. Similarly, there are days when a deeply happy person may feel sad—for example, he sees people suffering—but underneath that sadness, there is a large depth of unwavering happiness.”

What distinguishes successful people is their attitude toward failure, and specifically, how they explain their own failures to themselves.

When an optimist suffers a major disappointment, he responds by figuring out how he can do it better the next time. In contrast, a pessimist assumes there is nothing he can do about the problem and gives up.

Ironically enough, optimism starts with being realistic and objective.

Empathy does not necessarily mean agreeing. It is possible to understand another person at both an intellectual and a visceral level with kindness, and still respectfully disagree. Aristotle said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Disagreeing with empathy is a lot like that.

Whatever one frequently thinks and ponders upon, that will become the inclination of his mind

kindness is a sustainable source of happiness—

Your Brain at Work, David Rock

SCARF model, which stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness.

Love them. Understand them. Forgive them. Grow with them.

With that combination of relaxation and alertness, three wonderful qualities of mind naturally emerge: calmness, clarity, and happiness.

We can train and develop the mind to create inner peace, happiness, and compassion. The best part of this training is that we do not even have to force ourselves to have those qualities; they are all naturally already within each of us, and all we need to do is create the conditions for them to emerge, grow, and flourish.

In 1927, a group of scientists started the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory (HFL) to study the physiology of fatigue. Their pioneering work created the field of exercise physiology. One of their most important findings was that a fit person becomes physiologically different from an unfit person. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see that their work has changed the world.

happiness is “a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind . . . not a mere pleasurable feeling, a fleeting emotion, or a mood, but an optimal state of being.”

Joy, in contrast, is a pleasurable feeling. It is an emotion. It is in the moment, while happiness is more of a net effect, over time, of mental health and fitness and personal flourishing. Joy is a building block of happiness. A happy life is made up of many moments of joy. While happiness doesn’t mean every moment is pure joy, there is no such thing as a joyless path to happiness. The ability to access joy on demand enabled me to build a happy life. In this sense, joy leads to happiness.