How can I find happiness if life won’t let me?

Hi Andy — I just wondered where all this “happiness and kindness” is supposed to come from? What if we don’t feel particularly happy or kind? Work, life pressures, and other people don’t always make it easy for one to be happy. It’s also not easy to understand that, like the blue sky, happiness is always there. Is it? Easy to say, but not always to believe.

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When we are not experiencing strong feelings of happiness or kindness it is very difficult to believe that they are always there—especially if we do not have much experience in meditation. But there are two separate parts to your question, so let’s take a look at them both.

While it’s quite understandable to say we are all very busy and that this prevents us from experiencing happiness or kindness, if we look deeply, we see it isn’t quite as black and white as that. There are some days when we are very busy and yet we feel energized and enthused. On the flipside, we might take some time off work and have all the time in the world, but actually feel a bit depressed and unproductive. That’s not to negate the difficulties of life—life is quite simply very difficult sometimes, and meditation embraces that fact.

It’s simply to recognize that our perception plays a role in that experience. I’m reminded of a Tibetan prisoner who spent 27 years in a Chinese POW camp. He eventually escaped and traveled over the Himalayas to India. There, he met the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama asked him how he managed to survive so many years of torture, of being stuck in a place of such misery. He said, “Did you not fear for your life?” The man replied, “The only thing I feared was losing my compassion, my sense of kindness toward others.”