Life Dancing

If all your actions are based on the pursuit of happiness, why is it that so many things you do yield anything but happiness?

By Phillip Moffitt

I am conducting an interview at a meditation retreat. Seated across from me is a woman in her mid-30s, smart and articulate, but agitated from her experiences on the cushion. Knowing nothing else about her, can you tell me the inner yearning that possesses her and shapes her behavior moment by moment—the one thing that will be most useful to me in helping her deepen her meditation practice? It's so simple, so obvious, yet it's usually overlooked. Like all human beings, she just wants to be happy.

Certainly happiness for her might mean something that would never bring you joy. But however you define it, each of us wants a happy life. Many people, myself included, find the word "happiness" inadequate for conveying what it is that motivates them. We often substitute different terms—a meaningful or spiritually fulfilling life, one that is peaceful or useful, or a life filled with inner freedom, love, family, creativity, or authenticity. But no matter what term we use, we really mean the same thing—an inner experience that is deeply satisfying. This was one of the insights that the Buddha taught as a cornerstone for understanding why things unfold as they do in each person's life.

The woman in the interview knew she was dissatisfied, but she could not understand why she was unhappy when she was so successful in her life. Sitting in meditation provided her with her first opportunity to actually feel her frustration and had given rise to a question. Maybe her question is the same as yours: If all your actions are based on the pursuit of happiness, why is it that so many things you do seem to yield anything but happiness?

The Buddha spoke to this question in many ways during the 40 years he wandered around India teaching, but his core message was that of clinging and nonclinging. If something good happens, you have a reflexive tendency to try to hold on to it, and if something bad happens, you have a tendency to push it away. Likewise, if you see something you like, you move towards it; or if something is distasteful, you pull away. This clinging response is inevitable if you believe yourself to be the same as or the "owner of" all the desires and fears that arise in you. You become trapped in an endless web of tension and contraction.

The Buddha taught that for most people life is just this way: The good things either go away, lose their appeal, or never happen, while the bad things come despite your best efforts. So when you try to manage your life by clinging and aversion, you are left dissatisfied, uneasy, or without a sense of meaning or wholeness. Moreover, being identified with the clinging Self and its endless wants and fears means that even when things are going well, there is no room to breathe, to experience the spontaneous joy that is the basis of happiness. Every day becomes a tally sheet of gains and losses; the bountiful mind shrinks, reduced to being an inner bookkeeper huddled over an account ledger of what is to be held and what is to be discarded.

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