Mindfulness: The Ultimate Key To Happiness
What is it that every human being, regardless of gender, race, religion or sexual orientation truly want? I’d assume is to be happy.
Being happy is an aspiration that every one of us pursue not only on the emotional sense, but also at the most primitive level. While amoebas recede from what causes them discomfort and move towards food, us humans need significantly more. Happiness arises from a complex state of physical, psychological and emotional ease and comfort, yet our orientation towards it doesn’t seem to differ as much as that of amoebas toward food. The greatest understanding of happiness is the one which lingers on to the longest term and at the largest scale. Thus, it includes the happiness of others.
Although this might be a new concept and as such takes great effort to comprehend, happiness is a scaleable feeling. The happiness originated from smoking something is lesser than the happiness from eating a burger. The happiness of eating a burger is lesser than that of meeting with a date for dinner which in turn is lesser than that of getting a promotion or the dream job. Likewise, the happiness of getting a promotion or the dream job is lesser than that of looking back over our lives and contemplating the satisfaction that we made the most out of our opportunities and did right by our loved ones. Looking back over our lives doesn’t have to be done when we’re 127 years old laying on bed and waiting for our fate to take us elsewhere. It can and should be done as regularly as possible. As a matter of fact, the more we look back over past experiences and gauge whether we’re doing the right thing or not, the more we bring ourselves to the reality of the present moment. In other words, the more mindful we live.
Changes in our lives can and will naturally occur upon clearly seeing what leads to a greater level of happiness in the present moment. If, for whatever reason, we are unable to reconcile our present reality and the greatest levels of happiness when making decisions, we are also deeming ourselves unable to take care of our lives and of those we love. Although bringing our awareness to the present moment doesn’t provide us with better answers, it has the potential to increase our ability to find them. In order to find more suitable answers that lead to happiness, we must obviously ask better questions, but we must first learn something much more humbling: descend below the level of ordinary understanding, accepting that we are far more likely to not know than otherwise and experiencing things directly. Our lives consist of so much more than a dozen of definitions, judgements and categories. Our lives involve a full body-mind experience that includes visions, sounds, fragrances, tastes and touches. In order to enrich our experiences even further, we can add intuition, intimacy, energy and spontaneity.
Extraordinary lives start off with our ability to make sense of such plethora of internal and external sensory input in order to effectively and authentically create such extraordinary life far deeper within us than our thinking mind. Every time our thinking mind wanders, our perspective diminishes and we resign our ability to see things clearly. Our ability to create feelings out of thoughts about what isn’t right in front of us is a decisive cognitive achievement that has a potential for a great emotional cost. Recent studies on brain plasticity show that everything we do, including thinking, has a corresponding neurological network associated with it. As novel experiences cause a certain level of discomfort due to the physical requirements to create new neurological pathways that simply didn’t exist before, the more we practice an activity, the more our brain strengthens such networks to be more energy efficient. Hence, by turning our focused awareness or attention to something that is happening right now repeatedly can quite literally change the physical structure of our brains. In other words, change the default mode of our thinking mind.
As mentioned before, the first step to learning something new or developing a new habit is admitting that we don’t know. If we have troubles admitting we don’t know, learning becomes a heck of a challenge. Moreover, getting used to not knowing is quite liberating. It doesn’t only open our minds up for growth of knowledge and expansion of character, but it also prevents us from limiting ourselves within our current ways of thinking. Not knowing warmly invites us to engage with everything in the present moment with the curiosity and naivety of that child we once were (or as a matter of fact, still are and will always be). The “don’t know mindset” isn’t an admission of inadequacy or weakness, but it’s the purest manifestation of true intelligence and responsibility.
As long as we fear and reject whatever is in front of us, we are very unlikely to see reality for what it really is. Fear makes us agitated and knocks us out of balance at cellular levels. When we perceive fear, our brain and body engage in the most primitive instinctual fashion in order to get us away from danger. Operating from such primitive mode of being creates a hostil environment which is neither time nor place to create happiness, after all, in this very moment happiness is remaining alive. And that’s what we focus on. On the other hand, lack of fear or feeling safe leave us comfortable to enjoy wonderful places such as our own bodies and minds. Getting comfortable within ourselves is being comfortable with our true reality. We don’t need to see, hear, create or experience something externally to ease the pain we feel or compensate what we lack inside. The most important question of all is: are we ready, willing and able to make peace with the part of us that’s fearful or is rejecting what’s unfolding right in front of us? Living mindfully is rewarding in and of itself.
