The pursuit of happiness for its own sake is a fool’s errand. As a goal it is frivolous and unrealistic—frivolous because happiness is a transient state dependent on many conditions, and unrealistic because life is unpredictable and pain may arise at any time.
All suffering comes from wanting your own happiness.
Complete awakening arises from the intention to help others.
Therefore, exchange completely your happiness
For the suffering of others—this is the practice of a bodhisattva.Forget about being happy. Put it right out of your mind. When you say to yourself, “I want to be happy,” you are telling yourself that you are not happy, and you start looking for something that will make you feel happy… The harder you try to be happy, the more you reinforce that belief that you are not happy…
If you were to let go of the pursuit of happiness, what would you do? To put it a bit more dramatically, suppose you were told that no matter what you did, you would never be happy. Never. What would you do with your life?
You might pay more attention to others. You might accept them just as they are, rather than looking for ways to get them to conform to your idea of how they should be. You might start relating to life itself, rather than looking to what you get out of it. You might be more willing to engage with what life brings you, with all its ups and downs, rather than always wanting it to be other than it is.
Ken McLeod “Forget Happiness”
Success can only be measured
by the extent that you have inner peace and mental control
that enable you to be happy
in all circumstances.
— Yogananda
This talk was exactly what I needed to hear as I navigate a career change. My main takeaways are below, but the biggest learning is the quote above which I took liberty to turn into a poem.
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We can either meet life with tension and drama and difficulty and a sense of problem, or with ease and graciousness and fluidity.
Regular practice (I do kriya yoga meditation twice a day) helps. I am on a more even keel these days. But patterns are still running and triggers are still in operation.
Having found myself in an unnecessary and completely self-created drama vortex once again, I signed up for Your Life Is Your Practice course with Martin Aylward and Tricycle. It’s a great daily reminder of what’s what. I might need to keep doing and redoing it daily 😊
The quote above is from the course and explains our choices at any moment in time. Hope you remember to choose ease/peace.
I am reading a wonderful book The Heart Aroused by David Whyte, a half Scottish, half Irish poet living in America. The whole book is a gem — full of poetic and philosophic reflections on what 9-5 corporate work does to our souls. In chapter 7, Whyte talks about Rilke’s views on chaos and order. I’ve summarised them above. It rhyming was an unexpected bonus ☺️
Rilke finds a marvellous rested simplicity by living out what we normally call ‘the balancing act’, but he would see it more truly in terms of a vibrant tension between opposites. His life is neither the notes nor the silence between the notes but the music that arises out of sound and silence felt as a living whole. Stop choosing, he says, between chaos and order, and live at the boundary between them, where rest and action move together. You can never eliminate the process of chaos from existence, but equally, you cannot completely cover over the calmness that lies at the centre of everything. Embrace reality by embracing both. Stop choosing!
Shunmyō Masuno is a Zen Buddhist priest who wrote How to let things go (the quote above is from it). I needed to let go of some righteous anger so bought Masuno’s book. I love the affirmation above. I used it for anger and negative emotions in general. It works.
May my heart turn to practice
May practice become a path
May this path dissolve confusion
May confusion become wisdom
—Ken McLeod
When we stayed in Sicily, our flat had 3 layer windows – a blackout part, a glass window and a mosquito net. For the duration of our stay, I complained that the flat was stuffy and opening windows did not help. Little did I know—and only realised at the end of our stay—that I was opening only the blackout part thinking I opened a window and so not letting air in.
This realisation made me wonder—how many more “windows” in my life I did not open correctly? How many “windows” have an unusual design and layers to them that require stopping and thinking and seeing them without the familiar assumptions of how “windows” work?
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It is all about remembering and acting from the right place rather than reacting. Of course, the trick is to remember to breathe in in the first place 😂 It’s a whole practice on its own.
I went to this exhibition end of last year. It was an experience! It’s still on until end of February 2025 (find out more here). A must for anyone who is into plant medicines, mind exploration or Alex Grey’s psychedelic art. A terrific idea and well done to the organisers, I hope they will be back soon with a new, bigger installation featuring psychedelic art from many more artists! A tip if you go – you can buy a glass of wine before venturing into mind- and reality-bending installation rooms 😀
Loved this affirmation by Michael Singer which I heard on his podcast. He was talking about how we repress emotions that we can’t process instead of staying with them, facing them and letting them flow through us without causing a reaction and dragging us down energetically. Ever been stuck for days or even years ruminating about, emotionally reacting to something? Some of these difficult emotions we repress as children because we don’t have capacity to process them. This becomes something we need to work on as we become older. As an adult, when you are facing a situation which you think you can’t deal with, remind yourself — I can handle this.
Ken McLeod is a U.S.-based teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. He has a talent to explain complex Buddhist concepts in a simple, fun and profound way. I’ve listened to his six-part talk on the Diamond Sutra and highly recommend it. You can walk, wash dishes, do grocery shopping while listening to the talks. I read the sutra alongside the talks, you can easily find it online by searching for its name (Ken recommends Red Pine translation). Please note, one of the talks is not there due to a technical issue. My key three takeaways and the prayers Ken uses will follow in future posts.
Nomad of the Universe 