Is happiness a skill? Modern neuroscientific research and the wisdom of ancient contemplative traditions converge in suggesting that happiness is the product of skills that can be enhanced through training and such training exemplifies how transforming the mind can change the brain.
Kent Berridge, Richie Davidson, and Daniel Gilbert speak at the Aspen Ideas Festival
The email from the boy began: “Did anything inspire you
to create Hallelujah?"
Later that same winter day the reply arrived: “I wanted to stand with those who clearly see God’s holy broken world
for what it is, and still find the courage or the heart to praise it.
You don’t always get what you want. You’re not always up for the
challenge. But in this case — it was given to me. For which I am deeply
grateful.”
The
question came from the author's son, who was preparing to present the hymn to his fifth-grade class. The boy required a
clarification about its meaning. The answer came from the author of the
song, Leonard Cohen.
Cohen lived in a weather of wisdom, which he created by seeking it rather
than by finding it. He swam in beauty, because in its transience he
aspired to discern a glimpse of eternity.
There was always a trace of
philosophy in his sensuality.
He managed to combine a sense of absurdity
with a sense of significance, a genuine feat.
He was a friend
of melancholy but an enemy of gloom, and a
renegade enamored of tradition.
Leonard
was, above all, in his music and in his poems and in his tone of life,
the lyrical advocate of the finite and the flawed.
Leonard
sang always as a sinner. He refused to describe sin as a failure or a
disqualification. Sin was a condition of life.
“Even though it all went wrong/
I’ll stand before the Lord of song/ With nothing on my tongue but
Hallelujah!”
The
singer’s faults do not expel him from the divine presence. Instead they
confer a mortal integrity upon his exclamation of praise.
He is the
inadequate man, the lowly man, the hurt man who has given hurt,
insisting modestly but stubbornly upon his right to a sacred exaltation.
“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
He once
told an interviewer that those words were the closest he came to a
credo.
The teaching could not be more plain: fix the crack, lose the
light.
Here is a passage on frivolity by a great rabbi
in Prague at the end of the 16th century:
“Man was born for toil, since
his perfection is always being actualized but is never actual,” he
observed in an essay on frivolity. “And insofar as he attains
perfection, something is missing in him. In
such a being, perfection is a shortcoming and a lack.”
Leonard Cohen
was the poet laureate of the lack, the psalmist of the privation, who
made imperfection gorgeous.
A sense of purpose in life also gives you this considerable advantage:
"People with a sense of purpose in life have a lower risk of death and cardiovascular disease."
The conclusions come from over 136,000 people who took part in 10 different studies.
Participants in the studies were mostly from the US and Japan.
The US studies asked people:
how useful they felt to others,
about their sense of purpose, and
the meaning they got out of life.
The Japanese studies asked people about ‘ikigai’ or whether their life was worth living. The participants, whose average age was 67, were tracked for around 7 years.
During that time almost 20,000 died. But, amongst those with a strong sense of purpose or high ‘ikigai’, the risk of death was one-fifth lower.
Despite the link between sense of purpose and health being so intuitive, scientists are not sure of the mechanism.
Sense of purpose is likely to improve health by strengthening the body against stress.
It is also likely to be linked to healthier behaviours.
Dr. Alan Rozanski, one of the study’s authors, said:
“Of note, having a strong sense of life purpose has long
been postulated to be an important dimension of life, providing people
with a sense of vitality motivation and resilience.
Nevertheless, the medical implications of living with a high or low
sense of life purpose have only recently caught the attention of
investigators.
The current findings are important because they may open up new
potential interventions for helping people to promote their health and
sense of well-being.”
Take a moment to think about how you treat yourself when you make a
mistake or fail to reach a goal. If you tend to beat yourself up when
things go wrong, you, like most people, can use a little more
self-compassion in your life. Forgiving and nurturing yourself seem to have benefits in their own
right. They can even set the stage for better health, relationships, and
general well-being. So far, research has revealed a number of benefits
of self-compassion. Lower levels of anxiety and depression have been
observed in people with higher self-compassion. Self-compassionate
people recognize when they are suffering and are kind to themselves at
these times, thereby lowering their own levels of related anxiety and
depression.
Learn to have self-compassion
Some people come by self-compassion naturally, but not everyone does.
Luckily, self-compassion is a skill you can learn. Several methods have been proposed,
and training programs are being developed, to help people discover and
cultivate their own self-compassion. Here are four ways to give your self-compassion skills a quick boost:
Comfort your body. Eat something healthy. Lie down and
rest. Massage your own neck, feet, or hands. Take a walk. Anything you
can do to improve how you feel physically gives you a dose of
self-compassion.
Write a letter to yourself. Think of a situation that
caused you to feel pain (a breakup with a lover, a job loss, a poorly
received presentation). Write a letter to yourself describing the
situation, but without blaming anyone — including yourself. Use this
exercise to nurture your feelings.
Give yourself encouragement. Think of
what you would say to a good friend if he or she was facing a difficult
or stressful situation. Then, when you find yourself in this kind of
situation, direct these compassionate responses toward yourself.
Practice mindfulness. Even a quick exercise, such as
meditating for a few minutes, can be a great way to nurture and accept
ourselves while we're in pain.
For more ways to draw on your strengths and find the positive meaning in your life,purchase Positive Psychology, a Special Health Report from Harvard Medical School.
