Meditation for Happiness

OLLI

Fall 2024

Day 3

Sympathetic Joy

Breathe.

Agenda

• Review Loving Kindness and Compassion
• Discussion/Questions
• Buddhist Philosophy
• Sympathetic Joy
• What it is
• What it isn’t/barriers/difficulties
• Short Practice
• Strategies
• Questions/Discussion
• Guided Meditation

Loving Kindness

• Genuine feeling of love, warmth, and kindness extended to yourself and all beings.
• Summon that feeling.
• Spread it out to the world through short phrases.

May you/I/we be safe.

May we be happy.

May we be healthy.

May we live with ease.

Compassion

• When Loving Kindness meets suffering and we want to help.
• We naturally want to lessen the suffering.
• A sign of our natural goodness, our original good heartedness.
• We are all interconnected; we are all human. We are not separate from each other.

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Discussion

How’d your practice go?

Guidelines

• Speak about yourself only.
• Don’t give each other advice. Practice mindful listening.
• Recognize there are only a few people in the room, but many more online. Further, the recording of this session will be available in a library.
• Take home learning, but don’t identify anyone when you talk about it later. Observe the confidentiality of our space.
• We are all growing. Celebrate the victories.

Compassion Discussion

• How’s your practice going?
• Did you find the key to unlock metta? Find compassion?
• What difficulties did you have?
• What feelings came up?
• What went well?
• Would you continue to try it out?
• What questions arose for you?

Buddhist Philosophy

Buddhist Philosophy

• Impermanence: the only thing that is constant in this world is change. Nothing stays. We are constantly changing and so is the world.
• There is no self – nothing we can point to, hold onto, grasp, that stays permanent. We had a thought – when did it start/end? We had a feeling, but… We had an experience, but it is already over…
• We are a flowing consciousness.
• We are a process, not a thing.

• Dependent Origination
• Everything we call the “self” depends on something else.
• Our present self depends on the actions our past selves have made. There is a “continuity of consciousness.”
• Our present self depends on other people:
• The language we speak,
• The inventions we depend on,
• We were born from two other people,
• Think about your breakfast this morning: how many beings came together to bring that breakfast to you?

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Buddhist Philosophy: What is joy and happiness?

• Our normal way of seeking comfort, pleasure, and happiness is to find security, certainty, and predictability.
• This is not possible, due to impermanence and the basic reality that suffering exists.
• “The nature of life is changing, shifting, unpredictable, dynamic, alive, creative, impermanent…”
• But we still struggle against these realities, because we find them threatening and uncomfortable. We don’t know anything and that’s really hard to deal with.
• So we suffer.
• Struggle = suffering.

Buddhist Philosophy: What is joy and happiness?

• If we can relax with this basic reality of life, this basic uncertainty, insecurity, and unpredictability, then…
• In our Not Knowing, we can observe with fresh eyes and see the world anew, apart from our preconceived notions.
• We can appreciate every moment and all living things.

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• We can find comfort, pleasure, and happiness in that appreciation.

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• Happiness = acceptance of and relaxing into…life.

Mudita: Sympathetic Joy

• When loving-kindness meets the beautiful, wonderful, joyful, it becomes sympathetic joy.
• Delight in other’s success and happiness.
• The joy of others, of noticing beauty, joy of things going well, of all beings
• Natural quality of the heart is to resonate with others
• Interconnected hearts

Mudita: Sympathetic Joy

• Far Enemy/Opposite: envy and cynicism
• Near Enemy: frivolous joy – temporary high or hedonism; attachment, self-centeredness
• Foreboding Joy: fear that arises when we feel joy
• Remedy: Loving Kindness – an abiding wish for the joy to continue.

"Live your life in such a way that you create a beautiful past.”

Mudita: Difficulties

• This is often the most difficult due to our comparing mind.
• We feel jealousy. Envy.
• Compare = Despair
• “Comparing is the last thing that leaves us before enlightenment.”
• 3 afflictions of suffering based on being a separate self:
• Feeling inferior
• Feeling superior
• Feeling as good as

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• It’s zero sum. Joy combats this. It is infinite. We can give it away and it never diminishes.

Short Practice

Working with Jealousy

Working with Jealousy

• Meditate on the goodness of what they have that you want.
• Dwell on how it is helpful to them and others.
• Feel the goodness.
• Think about the difficulties they have, too. Focus on our shared humanity.
• Having this thing doesn’t make their life perfect.
• Rejoice in their joy in this one thing.

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• "Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine." ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” – Rumi 

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Mudita: Sympathetic Joy

• Practices
• Gratitude – appreciating what’s going well, challenging our negativity bias
• Awe – put yourself in nature or other places where we feel awe
• Adjust your metta phrases to promote joy: May your beauty continue; May your wealth multiply…
• Savoring, slow down, pause

Mudita: Strategies

• Celebrate the successes of others.
• Visualize the good deeds that will happen as the result of their success.
• Think about how we will all benefit when one person does well.
• Virtuous Cycle: Everyone does better when everyone does better.

Shawn Achor Ted Talk

Walking Your Why

Walking Your Why

At his father’s state funeral, former President George W. Bush said this about his father,

“In his Inaugural Address, the 41st President of the United States said this: ‘We cannot hope only to leave our children a bigger car, a bigger bank account. We must hope to give them a sense of what it means to be a loyal friend, a loving parent, a citizen who leaves his home, his neighborhood and town better than he found it. What do we want the men and women who work with us to say when we are no longer there? That we were more driven to succeed than anyone around us? Or that we stopped to ask if a sick child had gotten better, and stayed a moment there to trade a word of friendship?’”

Walking Your Why

Visit far away places; live by the sea; �and �make the world more beautiful.

A Splendid Torch

Practices

• Working on your personal relationships with specific strategies.

MAGIC RATIO

For every negative or difficult interaction, couples need to experience 5 more positive and supportive interactions.

HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS

• Active Constructive Response
• How do you react to good news when someone shares it with you?
• Behaviors:
• You stop what you are doing and engage fully with them.
• Eye contact
• Lots of questions
• Match their level of excitement
• Follow up the next day – say something to bring back the memory and good feeling.

HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS

• Other (less effective or actually damaging) options:
• Passive Constructive
• Nice but no real attention (“That’s great, dear.”)
• Active Destructive
• Disagrees or one-ups (“What? That’s stupid.”)
• Passive Destructive
• Acknowledged but dismissive (“Oh great. When’s dinner?)

HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS

• ACR leads to greater connection.
• Any of the others serve to sever connection over time.
• Warning: If you’ve never acted this way before, expect people to be suspicious at first. It has to be genuine, even if it feels awkward at first.

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• Meditation cultivates your capacity to pay attention and stay with one thing.

“We all want to feel seen and heard. The key is to keep dating each other, learning, and growing together through intentional moments of intimacy.”

Not Forced…

• There’s an idea out there called “toxic positivity.”
• We are not denying the negative. We acknowledge the whole buffet of life.
• At times, when we are able or when we want to, we choose to focus on the joyful, positive, good stuff as an antidote to the crazy.
• Focusing on the joy in this moment helps us cope with the insecurity, discomfort, and unpredictability of life.

Discussion

Meditation Rx

• Continue to practice metta and compassion.
• Try to find things that bring you joy and deliberately incorporate them into your day or week.
• Start keeping a gratitude journal?
• When you bump into difficulties, give yourself some compassion. We all struggle, remember?

Practice

Counting our Blessings