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#4173 - Wednesday, February
23, 2011 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
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Dustin LindenSmith sends today's contribution.
Ezra Bayda on "What Blocks Happiness"
An exclusive excerpt from Ezra Bayda's new book, Beyond
Happiness: The Zen Way to True Contentment:
The real question we need to ask ourselves is: why do we continue
to follow behaviors that don't bring us real happiness? The
answer lies in the basic human condition: that is, we are born
with the innate craving for safety, security, and control—this
is an integral part of our survival mechanism. We are also born
with an aversion to discomfort and a natural desire for comfort
and pleasure. Given these basic human predispositions, it makes
sense that our learned strategies of behavior are geared to
ensure that our cravings and desires are met.
On the surface, there's nothing wrong with trying to be safe or
comfortable. The problem begins when our survival mode takes over
and becomes our main motivation. When that happens, our other
natural urges—curiosity, appreciation, and living from our
true openhearted nature—are pushed aside, and consequently,
our lives become narrower and increasingly less satisfying.
Paradoxically, we continue to believe that our survival-based
control strategies will make us happy, so we keep on trying
harder or seeking approval; yet these very behaviors often bring
us the most dissatisfaction.
Opening our eyes to what we're doing is not always easy. Our
habits of behavior, like trying harder and seeking approval, can
become so deeply conditioned that we can hardly see them. Even
when our behaviors don't make us happy, we often don't notice
because we so firmly believe that they will! One very effective
way to cut through our usual blindness is to ask the following
questions: "Am I truly happy right now?" and "What
blocks happiness?" To reflect on these two questions only
takes a few moments, and if you do it several times a day, over a
period of time you will begin to observe, very specifically, all
the behaviors that directly block genuine happiness.
Trying harder and seeking approval are two of the most widespread
conditioned behaviors for achieving happiness.. Almost equally
common are our many addictive behaviors, starting with our
addictions to pleasure and diversions. In themselves, pleasure
and diversions are fine, and they can certainly make us feel
good. But whenever we have addictive behaviors—whether to
food, alcohol, sex, or working out—we are driven by the
compulsion to keep returning to whatever we're addicted to, in
the promise that it will continue to make us feel good.
Pursuing our addictive behaviors highlights the very essence of
the human tendency to misunderstand happiness. We follow these
seductive behaviors because they seem to promise us happiness.
And to some degree, they fulfill their promise, in that we feel
personally happy when we experience sensual pleasure or the hit
of endorphins. But the fulfillment of that promise is always
temporary, and it is always based on a temporarily benevolent
external environment. As long as the environment doesn't turn
against us, we think our life is okay, and we don't do anything
to change the situation. Nor do we address the underlying unease
out of which the addictive behaviors arise: why upset the
applecart when things seem to be okay? Thus, we remain on the
treadmill of personal happiness/unhappiness. When we don't feel
so good, we find a fix, and then we think we are happy again. The
cycle goes on and on; meanwhile, genuine happiness eludes us.
We will continue to pursue the conditioned strategies of behavior
that we hope will bring us happiness as long as we believe they
are working. And because they sometimes do bring us some degree
of personal happiness, these behaviors can get reinforced for a
long time. That's how people get caught on the treadmill of their
attachments and routines for a lifetime without making any effort
to change. Paradoxically, we're actually fortunate if life
occasionally serves us a big dose of disappointment, because it
forces us to question whether our attachments and strategies
really serve us. When we truly see that what we've been doing
simply isn't effective in bringing us genuine happiness, we may
be motivated enough to take the next step.
Each of us has to examine where and how we get in our own way,
observing all the ways we block fundamental happiness.
Specifically, we need to look at all of our conditioned behaviors—our
strategies of control and our addictive tendencies. We've spent
our whole life believing these things would give us happiness,
when in fact if we look deeply, they've done just the opposite.
But until we see this clearly—until we've seen the many
things we do to get in our own way—we won't be motivated to
go beyond our small measures of personal happiness, toward
cultivating the roots of true contentment.
~ ~ ~
Ezra Bayda lives and teaches at the Zen Center of San Diego. He
is the author of Being Zen, At Home in the Muddy Water, Saying
Yes to Life (Even the Hard Parts), and Zen Heart. Initially
trained in the Gurdjieff tradition, Ezra has practiced Zen
meditation since 1970 and has been teaching Zen since 1995. He is
also the founder of the Santa Rosa Zen Group in Santa Rosa,
California. For more information, please visit www.zencentersandiego.org .