A Monk's Guide to Happiness: Meditation in the 21st Century

by Gelong Thubten

There is always an “if,” “when,” or “because” to our happiness.

A myth we have believed throughout our lives is that we have to “get” happiness, and if we can just get the external details of our lives right, we will be happy. This is not happiness, it is a form of enslavement.

We think we can only be happy when our goals are completed, which means that life is always about the future rather than the present moment.

We created the “digital age” to simplify things, but we seem to have given ourselves more work and have found ourselves spinning faster in the cycle.

The people will not revolt. They will not look up from their screens long enough to notice what’s happening. —Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan, stage adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984

Until the internet age, we were comparing ourselves with the person next door, but now we are looking in minute detail at the lives of Hollywood stars across the planet from

People become addicted to “likes” on social media, and easily get wrapped up in jealousy and competition. We are losing the ability to know what we like; we have to check if other people “like” it first.

When you run after your thoughts, you’re like a dog running after a stick. But if you throw a stick for a lion, he turns around and looks at who threw it. You only throw a stick at a lion one time. Be like the lion.

Usually when we experience our thoughts, we strongly believe them, and when we encounter emotions—such as anger, sadness, or fear—we feel as if there’s something very heavy inside us, that we have to do something about. We want to escape from these things, so we either express or repress them, throw them out or push them down, or we wish someone else would come along and take them all away for us. The approach in meditation is to understand that the experience is not actually solid and so we don’t need to do anything about it; we just need to step back and observe.

Hot anger feels like we are burning; it can be a sharp stab in the heart area, or an inflamed sensation rising in our entire body. Cold anger is where we shut down and become icy; we “stare daggers.” Both are painful, and both cause trouble in our lives and for those around us.

For example, if we are anxious, it is a mixture of being attached to one particular outcome and feeling aversion toward another, as well as not knowing the true nature of things.

When we near the end of our lives we might well ask ourselves how much we were actually there for. We spent so much time living for the “next thing,” that the next thing never actually arrived—because our habit has always been to jump ahead to the “next-next” thing.

We often feel more interested in what’s happening on the other side of the world than in what’s right in front of us.

We no longer have to see happiness as a competitive process. Does my happiness need to come at the cost of yours? Does your happiness take away my own? Is happiness like a cake with a finite number of slices, not enough to go around? If we think like that, happiness becomes like a war to be won.

We have a love–hate relationship with our own thoughts and emotions. We either chase them or try to get rid of them.

I remember once walking with my teacher Akong Rinpoche in London. We were visiting our monastery’s branch there and we had a break from the teaching sessions. We took a stroll along the Thames’s South Bank. It was an exceptionally beautiful sunny day and I was in heaven, walking in the sunshine with my favorite person. When we were alone like this we would simply hang out and be casual with each other—there was no formality. I turned to Rinpoche and said, “It’s really beautiful, isn’t it?” Somehow right at the moment I finished speaking those words, we entered a dark tunnel with graffiti all over the walls and the smell of urine; I think there was even a pool of vomit on the ground, it was just hideous. Rinpoche simply said, “For me everything is beautiful.” I imagine that for somebody whose mind contains no habits of resistance or fear, everything must look and feel great. That is true happiness, and such a person is invincible.

“I’m really going to get into meditation tomorrow.” Tomorrow itself becomes a habit and so it never really comes, as we keep delaying. The remedy for this is to think more deeply about impermanence.

We tend to waste time because we think we have lots of it; we are not fully conscious of its passing. It is funny how a middle-aged person can still think like a twenty-year-old: “What shall I do when I grow up?” We feel as if we have the same length of time in front of us as we had in our twenties.

The first question to explore is: Why do I do all the things I do? What do I really want to achieve?

Everything is down to perception. Imagine you are standing at the side of a pond: you’re looking at the water and, of course, you would call that a pond. But is it really a pond? What if you were a fish inside that water? A fish swimming in the water would perceive that pond as the air that it breathes, and in fact that fish has no concept of anything outside—it’s actually its entire universe. Who is “right?” What if the fish and the human could hold a conversation? The human would say, “It’s a pond,” and the fish would say, “No, stupid, it’s the whole world.” Are we not just living in perceived realities according to our mental conditioning?

If we view things in that light, where everything is a projection of the mind, then we might have a different attitude toward happiness and suffering. It is all our minds’ perception. Everything we experience is filtered through our mental conditioning. In a sauna, for example, the same intense heat that we find oppressive outdoors on a very hot summer’s day is now something we have paid money for. Maybe we go to work every day, to the same office, with the same people; on some days it’s heaven and on other days it’s hell. In a relationship, the same person can feel different to us every day—sometimes we love them, sometimes we hate them.

Tibetan language has no word for “guilt”; as a Buddhist culture, Tibetans have grown up with a sense of original goodness rather than sin.

If we can view our practice as an opportunity rather than a duty, then diligence will arise as joyful energy rather than as a heavy burden.