A Monk's Guide To Happiness

How can meditation help humans in the 21st century?

This book, which came in 2019, tells us how we can free ourselves from the problems of our life and how we can achieve peace. In this book, we will be able to learn well about meditation with the help of the author's 25 years of experience.

Who is this book for?

- This book is for those people who are fed up with the daily problems of their life.

- This book is for those social media users who are fed up with Facebook and Instagram.

- This book is also for those who want to know about mindfulness.

About the Author.

Gelong Thubten is a person who follows Buddhism and performs meditation. He studied at Oxford University. He has also worked as an actor in London and New York. By the age of 21, he was fed up with his daily party lifestyle and then he started following Buddhism. Since then he has been performing meditation.

Happiness means feeling freedom in the present moment.

Just imagine, if you had the option to have any superpower, which superpower would you choose? People always answer this question that I would like to have the superpower to disappear or I would like to have the power to fly. You might have never thought about why we never have the super power to achieve happiness. This super power may not seem that attractive to you but it is a very powerful thing. In this book we will try to know how we can achieve this superpower. In this summary we will know why we try to find happiness in the wrong place? How can we train our mind to generate happiness? And what can you do to acquire happiness?

So let's get started!

Man always tries to know how to remain happy. But he forgets the most fundamental question. The most fundamental question that arises is what is the meaning of happiness? Perhaps you might be thinking that we will tell you some philosophy related things about happiness. But if you try to understand carefully, then happiness directly means how we are implementing things in our life.

When you try to find something, you should know what you are finding. Because if you do not know what you are looking for then it is impossible to find it. The first question is how happiness is generated in one's life? Happiness can actually be broken down into three components.

The first component is fullness. When a person feels happy from within then he does not find anything missing in life. When any person is happy, he enjoys the present moment completely. When you see any happy person, his happiness means that he does not desire to get anything that he does not have. In an atmosphere of happiness, a person feels completely satisfied with the things he has and he tries to enjoy the present moment completely.

The second component of happiness is the feeling of leading the present movement. If you want to be happy in the present moment, then it is very important that you do not get carried away by emotions about your past or your future. When any person remembers the painful memories of his past, then those memories also spoil the present moment of the person. If we want to fully enjoy our happiness in the present, then it is very important that we experience that moment completely.
Along with happiness, a sense of freedom is also generated within us. And this is also the third component of happiness. When we are happy, we are trying to remove negative emotions from ourselves. In an environment of happiness, we do not anticipate our future, that is, we do not try to guess anything about the future. Rather, we want things to continue the way they are. While feeling happy, we distance ourselves from all those things which take our happiness away from us.

When we try to find happiness not within ourselves but in external things, then a feeling of unhappiness develops within us.

If happiness means enjoying the present moment and feeling freedom, then the meaning of unhappiness is its complete opposite. When we are unhappy we feel incomplete. We feel as if there is some emptiness in our life and there is something that we do not have.

Let us try to understand the nature of unhappiness better. After all, when do we feel incomplete? The feeling of incompleteness comes in anyone when that person wants something and he does not have it but he feels that he should have that thing.

For example, imagine that a person has performed very well in his job and feels that he should be promoted. The person feels that when he gets promotion he will feel very good and will feel happy. This desire of that person will develop a feeling of incompleteness in him. If the person feels that he does not have promotion then you also do not have happiness. In his mind, promotion becomes like a missing piece that he feels is blocking happiness.

If we try to understand about this thing, we will realize that we are trying to find our happiness in things which are not in our hands. We think that if we achieve something then we will feel happy but in reality it does not happen. If we feel like this then we are blocking our own happiness. Therefore, it is very important that you keep your happiness in your own hands. As we told you in the example that the person was feeling unhappy due to not getting the promotion. Suppose if he is lucky and gets a promotion, then how and for how long will this promotion make him feel good? Such happiness is for very short term. Once you achieve one thing, you will start desiring for something else. You will feel that now you want that second thing, only then will you feel happiness.

This is the nature of humans. Until he gets what he wants, he feels as if something is missing in his life and because of the lack of that thing, there is unhappiness in his life.

Due to modern culture, desire for things arises in humans.

Just now we told you that the biggest reason for unhappiness in any person is his desire. Human desire never ends. He always keeps feeling incomplete about something or the other in his life. Why does this happen?

In fact, in today's time, we are so surrounded by advertisements that we keep thinking about some thing or the other that we have to achieve that thing. Whether you are spending time on social media or watching TV, you will see advertisements everywhere. Advertisements try to tell us that if we buy the product shown in that advertisement, our life will become more beautiful and more efficient. Advertisements try to put it in our mind that we are unhappy due to the absence of that product in our lives.

In exactly the same way, when you see on Facebook or Instagram that some people are roaming outside and enjoying, then you feel that there is a lot of comfort in their life and looking at them, you realize that you are very different from them. Are behind. Through all these things, the message is sent in our life that our life is incomplete, whether it is social media, TV or advertisement.

Every effort is made from every side to make a person feel incomplete. And after feeling this incompleteness, a person realizes that there is a lack of happiness in his life. All these things create a desire in us to achieve something. When we achieve something, other advertisements show us other types of things and again the desire arises within us. This cycle will continue forever. You have to try to avoid this.

If we try to find happiness in external things, we will only get unhappiness.

Due to modern culture, misconceptions about happiness have formed in our minds. But it is not right to blame culture alone. When a person starts depending on external sources, unhappiness is created in his life. It is not necessary that there be something that you do not have and because of that you feel unhappy. Many times it happens that we feel unhappy because of our emotions.

Romantic relationships or the feeling of not having any friends also provide us with unhappy feelings. One thing we should always keep in our mind is that the end of everything is certain. Be it a romantic relationship or anything else. One day or the other it has to end.

When we try to generate happiness from outside sources, we are stretching our mental habits so much that it generates unhappiness. We develop continuous dissatisfaction within ourselves. Even if we find what we are looking for, then our efforts start to find something else which is missing in our life.

We become a person who is looking for someone at a party who can talk to him. We become like a person who is never satisfied with what he has and always jumps from one disappointing thing to another. Due to this compulsive habit of ours, instead of enjoying our present movement, we feel unhappiness about other things and then we start trying to get such things which are not within our reach and this is the life of someone. This is the most fundamental reason for unhappiness. Unhappiness comes only when a person tries to gain experiences or tries to distance them from himself.

Till now we have tried to understand how it is not right to depend on external things for our happiness. However, sometimes those things which we do not want in our life also take us away from our happiness. Like there are some people, some places and some situations that we avoid. We don't want to experience them. And when they come in front of us, we want to get rid of them as soon as possible and we can get them away from us.

For example, imagine that you are having a headache. Having pain is a different thing, but when you try to control that pain, you feel the pain more. You want to tell your pain to "get away from me." But just imagine what would happen if you stop thinking about your headache or how to eliminate it? You will have a headache but the feeling of trying to stop it will disappear from within you. You will start feeling neutral. And then that headache will not disturb you much. We should adopt this method for everything that we desire in our life. If we stop trying to achieve things, we will probably be able to distance ourselves from unhappiness. Here we are talking about those things which are not under our control, but we start desiring those things.

Another very important thing that we have to understand is that our pain is never caused by the things that we want to bring closer and then take away from ourselves. Unhappiness comes in our life when we try to bring something closer to us or try to remove something from ourselves which is not under our control. Therefore, a very simple solution is to leave things as they are. This is very easy to say but difficult to do. Therefore, if you want happiness in your life then you should try to leave things as they are.

If we want to avoid achieving things or distancing ourselves from them, then we have to learn to observe them neutrally.

If you have to train the muscles of your body, what do you do? The very simple answer is that you work out. Do some training and target the muscles you want to develop.Have been. This is exactly what you should do when you want to strengthen your mind's capacity. Strengthening the capacity of the mind means strengthening your mental muscles. If you want to allow things in your life to remain as they are, then it is very important to train your mind in such a way that you can observe things neutrally. And if you want to do this then there is a simple exercise for this and that is meditation. You may have heard about it before and you may have even tried it. People have been talking about it for a long time. Gautam Buddha also tried to explain this to people.

If you want to bring happiness in your life then it is very important that you take out some time and meditate. There are many people who do not try to understand the point of meditation. Many people consider meditation as a way to release stress. When we remove all the unnecessary things from our life for 15 minutes a day and focus only on our mind, our body and our sensations, then we get the power to face the problems of our life again. But if you think that the only purpose of meditation is to make you feel good and get the strength to fight your problems, then you are wrong.

The real goal of doing meditation is that with its help you develop the ability to be happy. Sometimes it happens that while meditating, when a person avoids the things around him, tension and focuses only on his body, then he feels happy. But when he goes away from meditation, he again starts seeing problems in his life. The purpose of doing meditation is that when you wake up after meditating, you still have the energy and ability to give yourself a feeling of happiness. By practicing mindfulness in daily situations, we can make it our habit. Meditation is a very good way for mental exercise. With the help of meditation, we can observe our emotions, our sensations and our experiences in a neutral manner. The things that a person does during meditation are very important to apply in daily life. Here a question arises that what do we actually do during meditation?

Generally speaking, there are 3 steps in the exercise of meditation. The first step is to focus on our mind and observe the present movement. People who do meditation for the first time or are in the initial stages of meditation, for this they focus on their breath or on some part of their body. In such times, the main objective of a person is to experience something which is not judgmental.

In this situation, we neither try to get anything nor try to remove anything from ourselves. We simply try to accept our experience. Sometimes it happens that our mind starts feeling some other sensation and this is where the second step starts. During meditation, we should notice the point when our mind starts diverting somewhere else.

In the third step we have to bring our mind back to the same point where we are focusing. And this cycle keeps repeating during meditation. It is not at all necessary that to meditate you have to focus on your breathing or your body. You can do meditation anytime. Even while you are brushing your teeth, having lunch or climbing stairs, you can divert your attention from other things by focusing your mind on one point and perform meditation.

For example, when you brush, feel the sensation of that work. How toothpaste gets mixed inside your mouth, how you rub the brush on your teeth, but if during this time your mind gets diverted somewhere, then in a simple way bring it back to the same point where you can focus. Were staying. The more you practice meditation or rather mindfulness, the more adept you will become in it.

For mindfulness meditation, it is important to have a full mind.

The first step is to focus your mind on some point. The second step is to notice the time when your mind gets diverted somewhere and the third step is to bring it back to the point of focus. Keep repeating this cycle during meditation. Meditation sounds quite simple and yet it is simple. But if you ask someone who has performed meditation, he will tell you how difficult it is to do meditation.

The second step is the most difficult when the person's mind gets diverted. He feels that now he has spoiled his meditation process and then he leaves the meditation midway. You don't have to do this. If your mind gets diverted somewhere then again you have to focus it on the same point where you were doing it. You should not develop this feeling in your mind that your meditation has failed. Meditation means that you practice all three steps together and develop the abilities of your mind.

When you lose focus, that's a great point to learn from the experience and seize growth opportunities. When you apply mindfulness in different areas of your life, it is very important for you to develop the attitude that you do not pay too much attention to your failures.

Last but not least, we would like to tell you that do not play any music or close your eyes while meditating. Maybe these things will help you focus. But remember that you are not doing meditation so that you can keep your mind calm during meditation, rather you are doing meditation so that you can focus your mind all the time in life. And only when you do this, happiness will come in your life.

overall

Happiness means feeling freedom and completeness whereas unhappiness means its complete opposite. Unhappiness is generated in the life of any person when his desire increases. When a person tries to find happiness in external things, he only gets unhappiness. In today's time, advertising and social media are the main reasons for human unhappiness. If we want happiness in our life then it is important that we try to observe things neutrally. Only by observing things in a neutral way does a person feel complete.

What to do

When you do the exercise of mind fullness for 30 days, then after that you try to extend yourself and try to do some kind of meditation whenever you get a chance. And for this you can practice micro moment of mindfulness. This is a short period exercise. In this exercise, you can achieve mindfulness by focusing on the work you are doing throughout the day. You can do this exercise anywhere in traffic or waiting area.

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