Zen Productivity Blog

I read “The Art of Happiness,” the collaboration between the Dalai Lama and an American psychiatrist, Howard Cutler a while back and it struck me as an indispensable guide to living a happier and more meaningful life. I found the lessons to really resonate with me and as I was reading it, I was thinking about how much I would benefit from putting these philosophies and practices to work. However, after I was done reading it, I had all these new ideas in my head as to how I could change my state of mind and train myself to be happier, but they just remained ideas and they weren’t put to work to fulfill their potential.

There is nothing that I would change about this book, but the second time I read it, I decided to glean from each chapter, the ideas that I thought were most important to my personal growth and write them down so that I could easily review them whenever I wanted to. Taking the GTD (Getting Things Done) approach, I wanted to take this book of ideas and make it more actionable to me.

The following is the list I came up with. Please note, however, that these notes came out of the points which I thought would be beneficial to me and I felt I needed to work on. As such, there are certain lessons which would undoubtedly be helpful to other people but which I didn’t take note of because I felt that I didn’t need help in that area. An example is the sections on self-worth; I don’t feel like arrogance or poor self esteem is something that I suffer from, so I didn’t jot it down. Furthermore, all of the following ideas are extremely simplified from the way that they’re presented in the book and in some cases the note I took serves the main purpose of reminding me of the larger lesson. In such cases, these notes may seem a little cryptic.

I’m not sure if people will find my posting of this to be beneficial, but I figured that at least it would be a good experiment and perhaps people can think of this as a springboard for their own summaries. For those who haven’t read the book, it will probably be difficult to grasp the lessons just from this outline.

Part 1 – The purpose of life

Chapter 1 – The right to happiness

• Happiness is the purpose of life
• People have the right to be happy

Chapter 2 – The sources of happiness

• External events affect short-term happiness, but then happiness levels return to a baseline
• Feelings of happiness are generally how we perceive our situation; how satisfied we are with what we have
• Our feelings of contentment are strongly influenced by our tendency to compare
• Use inner contentment to fight greed
• Pleasure (i.e. sex), which may provide a temporary sense of happiness is not sustainable

Chapter 3 – Training the mind for happiness

• Once basic human needs are met, no other worldly items are needed to achieve complete happiness
• Negative emotions and behaviors are harmful, whereas positive ones are helpful in achieving happiness
• Motivate yourself for each day and try to assess progress each day before going to bed
• The proper utilization of our intelligence and knowledge is to effect changes from within to develop a good heart

Chapter 4 – Reclaiming our innate state of happiness

• All people are naturally compassionate

Part 2 – Human warmth and compassion

Chapter 5 – A new model for intimacy

• Intimacy and reliance on other people is important

Chapter 6 – Deepening our connection to others

• Empathizing with people’s suffering is a good exercise
• When meeting someone new, think of what you have in common

Chapter 7 – The value and benefits of compassion

Part 3 – Transforming suffering

Chapter 8 – Facing suffering

• No one is without suffering – it is natural and normal
• Face problems head on – don’t push them aside
• One can be prepared by familiarizing oneself with the types of suffering that can occur to people

Chapter 9 – Self created suffering

• In large part, whether you suffer depends on how you respond to a given situation. Dwelling on a painful event, guilt or regret magnifies the suffering
• Don’t personalize pain – it happens to everyone
• Accept the changes that are inevitable in life (i.e. people get older and changes are associated with that)

Chapter 10 – Shifting perspective

• There is a tendency of seeing someone who has wronged you as 100% bad. Try to think of the positive qualities of that person
• Hatred can be the biggest stumbling block to developing compassion and happiness
• Enemies can be great teachers – they can serve as practice for developing patience and tolerance

Chapter 11 – Finding meaning in pain and suffering

• Finding meaning in suffering helps us cope. Example: you can take the stance that your suffering can be used to help other people who are suffering from the same thing

Part 4 – Overcoming obstacles

Chapter 12 – Bringing about change

• Remind yourself of the destructive effects of negative behavior
• Challenge yourself to combat anger and hatred – there is an exercise for this
• Patience and tolerance are antidotes to anger and hatred
• During depression, collect evidence that contradicts the negative emotions (i.e. I’m not a failure because I’ve done XYZ and that makes me not a failure)

Chapter 13 – Dealing with anger and hatred

• Anger and hatred are our biggest enemies
• When anger and hatred come about, analyze the cause of them and combat them with cultivation of patience and tolerance

Chapter 14 – Dealing with anxiety and building self-esteem

• Cognitive intervention – this is done the same way as with anger and hatred: replace anxiety causing thoughts with well-reasoned positive thoughts and attitudes
• If there is no solution to a given problem, there is no sense in worrying about it
• The closer one gets to being motivated by altruism, the more fearless one becomes in the face of even extremely anxiety-provoking circumstances

Additionally, here are the exercises that the Dalai Lama provides us with:

• Meditation on the purpose of life
• Meditation on compassion
• The practice of Tong-Len
• Meditation on Anger: Exercise 1
• Meditation on Anger: Exercise 2
• Meditation on the nature of the mind