Happiness and How it Happens

When you make friends with the present moment, you feel at home no matter where you are. When you don’t feel at home in the now, no matter where you go, you will carry unease with you.

F WE ARE PRESENT, WE CAN BE CURIOUS; if we’re curious, it helps keep us present. By curiosity I mean being interested in what’s happening in the body and noticing our thoughts. The question really is – are we interested in what’s going on?

So if you want to know whether you are doing it right, just look at your life and your relationships with other people.

Don’t try to find the time, make the time.

So long as there is a belief in the existence of a separate self inside us, we will strive anxiously to get life right.

True meditation is about seeing the truth of this, seeing that there is no ‘doer of the deed’ to be found; that there is nobody at central control running the show, and there never has been. This is the truth of no-self, the essence of meditation practice. Our experience is that ‘I’m running the show’, but when this is seen or even glimpsed to be just a story (thoughts) then we can relax and let life just happen – it does anyway. It is then seen that what we are is Pure Awareness itself, that we are whole and complete as we are, which is true happiness

s. As we practise meditation, we learn that we are really a flow of ever-changing moods, feelings, emotions and thoughts and that ‘behind’ or ‘beyond’ thoughts and feelings there is aware

. It is this ability to witness, irrespective of what is witnessed, that is the crux of meditation

Meditation is not about who we can become, but about who we are. It’s not about changing ourselves into a different type of person, into a perfect person (there is no such thing as a perfect person), but about having a full-blooded experience of ourselves as we are, and accepting everything, absolutely everything about ourselves. This takes courage.

We find that because we are not jumping to every command the mind makes, it quietens down, and this is the beginning of the rest and ease we have actually been striving for.