It’s important to remember that your mind is going to stray. When this happens, you simply need to recognize it without judgment.

You can feel that it is based on thousands of years of religious history, but it is free of jargon. If we imagine someone in a perfect situation where they feel completely happy, and we examine what they are feeling, we can identify a state of mind where “complete” is the crucial term. That person has freedom. Those feelings of completeness, peace, no more striving, no fear, are mental states. As we’ve seen, we normally think “things” will make us happy, but if it’s an experience of the mind, why not simply “cut out the middleman” and go straight for the actual happiness? If there is one thing Gelong Thubten, a Buddhist monk from the UK, can’t understand, it is the extent to which the concept of happiness is misunderstood and misinterpreted by the majority of people. In ancient texts on meditation one often finds metaphors in which the mind is compared to the sky, and our thoughts and emotions to the clouds. The sky is limitless, vast, and without center or edges. Within the sky there are all kinds of clouds—heavy storm clouds, cotton wool–like clouds, thin, wispy cirrus clouds, and so on. These are all a natural part of the sky, but the sky is bigger. In a similar way, meditation teachings describe the pristine openness and spaciousness of the mind’s awareness, which is greater than the comings and goings of the thoughts and emotions. A myth we have believed throughout our lives is that we have to “get” happiness, and if we can just get the external details of our lives right, we will be happy. This is not happiness, it is a form of enslavement.His new book, A Handbook for Hard Times: A Monk’s Guide to Fearless Living, draws on what he’s learned over the past 30 years. Its premise is that we can embrace life’s difficulties as opportunities for personal transformation, using hard times to cultivate resilience, kindness, and happiness. And we feel that the above pretty much wraps up all the theory you need. Now, it’s time you start practicing meditation and, well, being happy. Gelong Thubten, a Buddhist monk who has worked with everyone from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to Ruby Wax and Benedict Cumberbatch, explores the theme of happiness in his debut book and explains how to bring meditation into our busy 21st century lives with simple exercises. The reason is called hedonic adaptation, which, in layman’s terms, means that your brain takes the good things that happen to you for granted, and the bad states as aberrations. In other words, it only notices when something is bad. Unhappiness involves a sense of incompleteness, which arises from desire and seeking happiness outside of ourselves.

The easiest way to practice the first step is to anchor your mind to your breath. I learned from the Headspace app that it helps to count the breaths up to 10, then start over. PDF / EPUB File Name: A_Monks_Guide_to_Happiness_-_Gelong_Thubten.pdf, A_Monks_Guide_to_Happiness_-_Gelong_Thubten.epub Gelong Thubten's wonderful book provides a bracing challenge to our search for instant gratification and "instant" happiness, and a lucid, practical, step-by-step path to contentment and a genuine and lasting peace of mind.' Scientists have recently coined the term “neuroplasticity” to describe this phenomenon, which simply means the potential for mental change through training, such as meditation, leading to the creation of new neural pathways. We can imprint a multitude of new habits, unlearn negative ones, and achieve lasting benefits.

In HANDBOOK FOR HARD TIMES Sunday Times bestselling author of A Monk's Guide to Happiness Gelong Thubten teaches us to understand that happiness, kindness and resilience can be cultivated through reframing life's difficulties as opportunities for transformation. Meditation and mindfulness practices help us to access deep reserves of inner strength as we learn how to 'lean into' our suffering. Thubten suggests how we can find meaning in pain and discomfort, transforming deeply ingrained patterns of fear and resistance.