Sustainable Happiness Quotes

“This therapeutic approach translated directly into the Buddha’s empathic art of teaching. Instead of pronouncing one doctrine supposed to fit all, he responded differently to each of his students, and was renowned for tailoring his insights and advice to their particular inclinations and needs. So the great Sage was said to listen to each student as his only child, and offer various teachings (symbolically numbered at 84,000) like so many medicines for the different forms of suffering that ail people of all kinds. This interpersonal way of teaching is embodied in the very idea of what it means to belong to the Buddha’s community, in his day and in ours. Entry into the Buddha’s care is said to begin with the act of personally asking for his guidance and advice, an act known as “taking refuge.”
― Joe Loizzo, Sustainable Happiness: The Mind Science of Well-Being, Altruism, and Inspiration

“Enhanced by our powerful brains, something as artificial and arbitrary as a deadline can easily be mistaken for a death-threat, triggering our traumatic memories of childhood helplessness, which in turn trigger the mindless reflex of the stress-response.”
― Joe Loizzo, Sustainable Happiness: The Mind Science of Well-Being, Altruism, and Inspiration

“We now know that the overwhelming majority of the harm done by stress is not directly caused by external events, but by the internal cascade of responses those events can trigger in our minds and bodies.”
― Joe Loizzo, Sustainable Happiness: The Mind Science of Well-Being, Altruism, and Inspiration

“In my clinical experience, this perspective on human development adds a whole new dimension to psychotherapy, empowering people to see healing their own childhood trauma more clearly and objectively—as part of a heroic, multi-life struggle with the ingrained forces of instinct and habit that threaten all of us from within.”
― Joe Loizzo, Sustainable Happiness: The Mind Science of Well-Being, Altruism, and Inspiration

“the mental causality of karma is hidden, it must be hidden in plain sight. It must be as humble and commonplace as the birth of an infant or a child’s acquisition of language. And it must be as natural as the song of the birds and the dance of the bees. I see karma at work in the kind of causality people struggle with every day in psychotherapy: patterns of action handed down across generations, incorporated into a “new” personality and perpetuating themselves through the force of repetition and habit. And I believe that this stream of mental heredity, conserved and transformed by learning within and across lives, is a natural bridge linking the theory of karma with what Freud called “the reincarnation of ego structures” and contemporary family-systems therapists call “the intergenerational transmission of character.”
― Joe Loizzo, Sustainable Happiness: The Mind Science of Well-Being, Altruism, and Inspiration

“In so doing, he encouraged people to bring their unmet childhood wishes and needs into the therapy-bond, transferring them onto the person of the therapist. The challenge of the therapist is to respond to these with greater insight and empathic awareness than the parents, helping the client to overcome childhood traumas and to model a more mature way of being in the world. The way psychotherapy does this is by combining emotional support through the healing bond with two factors that open and challenge the mind: a shared, contemplative state that expands and heightens awareness; and the empathic analysis and insights of the therapist, which challenge the client’s self-limiting thoughts, emotions, and actions.”
― Joe Loizzo, Sustainable Happiness: The Mind Science of Well-Being, Altruism, and Inspiration

“the global solutions we need today must begin and end with solutions on the human scale: one mind, one heart, one life at a time.”
― Joe Loizzo, Sustainable Happiness: The Mind Science of Well-Being, Altruism, and Inspiration