Reading from Awakening to the Sacred by Lama Surya Das
“The Practice of Joy”
Spirit means joy! Awakening is joyful. Life is a miracle to be celebrated and loved.
It’s important for all of us to find ourselves and follow our “joy path.” When we are joyful, when we are happy, we spontaneously share love. So think about what makes your heart sing. What do you do to make yourself happy? What feeds your spirit and vivifies the love in your heart? Remember that the spiritual life is vibrant, not dull; ecstatic, not static. Finding ways to bring more joy into your life helps spread it around.
Not only does joy light up our faces, it heals our ills….The path of joy is the path of open-heartedness—the path of a heart filled with love. So smile. Make somebody happy. Make yourself happy. Learn to love. Spread love. Be love. You’ll love it. (pp. 150-151)
“Prayer of Intent ”
Spirit of Love and Life
I am intending to awaken to my deep self
I am intending to bless the world and open myself to be blessed
I am intending to be free
I am intending to be joyful
I am intending to be loving and to be loved
I am intending to make a difference
I am intending to serve with gladness
I am intending to be rich with resources
I am intending to be wise
I am intending to be healthy
I am intending to spread peace and light
I am intending to be grateful for the gifts in my life and their richness
I am intending to be grateful for the family, friends, and communities that enrich my life
We will each speak into the silence our individual intending or we will just Be or Listen…….[Bell for 1 minute]
AMEN
This prayer inspired by one in Jose Luis Stevens’ book Praying with Power, London: Watkins Publishing, 2005, pp 66-67. It is well worth owning this book.
At the end of a prayer, it is good to remain silent and just be or listen. This advice comes to us from spiritual teachers ancient and modern.
Sermon
Are you happy? You would probably need a definition of happiness to answer that question! It used to be that hundreds of studies were done on depression because psychologists were interested in understanding how to help their clients. Now there are hundreds of studies done a year on happiness because the American Psychological Association is now interested in the “enabling conditions that make human beings flourish” (Claudia Wallis article, Time Mag.)
Psychologists define happiness as a general sense of satisfaction and well being. Dr. Edward Diener gives us a set of five statements which are now used all over the world to measure happiness, and which we are asked to rank from 1 to 7. Here are the statements. You might like to add up your score:
1. In most ways my life is close to my ideal.
2. The conditions of my life are excellent.
3. I am satisfied with my life.
4. So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.
5. If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.
How did you score? (31-35, extremely satisfied, 26-30, very satisfied, 21-25, slightly satisfied, 20 is the neutral point, below that—let’s not go there!) I just squeaked into the “extremely satisfied” category! (Dear Reader, If you did score below 20, I do so hope you will engage with friends and/or a counselor to help increase your enjoyment of your life—even a clergy person would be a good start.)
Studies that ask people about the number one thing that makes them happy gives a skewed idea about the person’s level of happiness because they could be very happy about one thing and yet not have an overall sense of satisfaction and well being.
Now, pop psychologists want to give you quick solutions to how you can improve your happiness score. Many studies show that these eight steps can improve your level of happiness:
1. Count your blessings once a week and write them down.
2. Practice random acts of kindness.
3. Savor life’s small joys, like your garden or your pet.
4. Thank a mentor or someone to whom you are grateful for moving your life along in a positive direction.
5. Learn to forgive (or let go).
6. Invest time and energy in friends and family.
7. Take care of your body. Getting exercise not only improves your health, it increases your joy through increased endorphins.
8. Develop strategies for coping with stress and hardships. Make up sayings like, “This too shall pass” or "That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger!”
I would add to this, “Join a Small Group Ministry at this church!” They discussed the topic of happiness in their small groups a few weeks ago and they were very happy! Seriously though, if you’d like to know more about our small groups, please ask me. There are also brochures about them on the Information Table in the hallway.
Interestingly, more money does not increase happiness once basic needs are met, which is generally at $35,000 a year. One thing that can stand in the way of happiness is never being satisfied with what we have. Counting our blessings in earnest can help counter dissatisfaction. In countries that have greater income equality, there is a far greater satisfaction rate than in countries like the U.S. where income disparities are very great indeed.
This is all very nice information and perhaps it is well known, but we want to look more deeply. Psychologist Martin Seligman, who has written a book called Authentic Happiness, has identified three components of happiness. The first is pleasure. This is the superficial level expressed by the consumerism in our society. It cannot satisfy us for long. This is the eating chocolate, going shopping, having a cocktail, and so on kind. Of course, these can add to deeper levels of happiness but they cannot substitute for it. The second level is depth of engagement with family, friends, work, church, and so on. At this level, we exchange relationship and effort and open ourselves up to creativity and vulnerability. The third level is meaning where we turn our lives towards greater purpose and meaning—serving others. Cultivating happiness is enhanced at the levels of engagement and meaning. But we should remind ourselves that loss of a life partner or loss of a job or a business are called “happiness robbers.” Grief can go on for eight or more years to come, long after a person has gotten another job or has remarried. These are devastating losses and the glass can seem to be only half empty, not half full. Let us remember that community and friend support can be critical at these times.
Religious communities and religious beliefs can and do help people cultivate happiness. It is well known that people who attend church are happier and healthier than those who do not. Experts say that the guidelines of religion help to narrow and simply life’s choices while also providing spiritual practices and community. However atheists and agnostics “who follow some framework of belief—be it secular humanism or pure science—can derive benefits similar to what others gain from religion” especially if they have a community of support. (Time article by Pamela Paul.) (As an aside, survey results find that people who believe in an afterlife are happier than those who do not. Protestants are happier than Catholics and Jews! I wonder why? Actually, Protestants generally believe in an afterlife and they’re all going to heaven!)
If we look to the Bible to see what it says about happiness, we will see advice, especially in the Psalms, to put your faith in the Lord—make a joyful noise unto the Lord. The idea is that if you worship, you will be happy. In the Gospels, we read the Beatitudes: Blessed are the peacemakers, Blessed are the poor, Blessed are the meek, which indicate that they will be happy but that implies that they are God-connected.
It is my humble opinion that spiritual practices add a great depth and richness to life, whether it is attending church once a week and participating in something besides at the church or a spiritual group or an individual practice. It gives us something and perhaps someone to fall back on when the slings and arrows of life are overwhelming. But what about when we want to overtly cultivate happiness because we feel we are not living fully or are a bit depressed?
Some of the practices we’ve mentioned such as counting blessings, keeping a gratitude journal, and doing random acts of kindness, are certainly helpful. How about something inward, and also something playful? The first quiet and easy thing is the “inner smile.” The Buddha demonstrates this for us. Let us say we are feeling sad, Lama Surya Das advises us to cast down our eyes but not close them, sit quietly, take some deep breaths of course, acknowledge our sadness and say to ourselves, and now I want to smile inwardly. We then smile outwardly with a smile like that of the Mona Lisa, and then wait while that smile is reflected and felt inwardly. We might like to stay in the place of being-ness for as long as possible. When we open our eyes, we can remind ourselves to smile outwardly to reflect the inward smile. Little by little our mood will change to one of quiet happiness. This is an intentional happiness prayer and practice. [Dear Reader, We act ually did this meditation of inward smile. I hope you will, too, for it is very useful.]
Now for the more playful raising of happiness. We have twice done “big belly” meditation here and I hope you remember it. But let us try something else today. Indian psychologist, Dr. Madan Kataria, developed a yoga practice called lion laugh. First, let us stand up. Think of a cute lion. Then, put spread your fingers and put them at the side of your head. Then, stick your tongue out, and laugh! Ha, ha, ha, ha…….. Now, turn to your neighbor and show them your laugh! (The idea is to laugh and laugh. When one person is able to do it, it is infectious, and soon everyone is laughing.)
If you go to the Bombay Club in the suburbs of Bombay, India, you will see groups of people gathered there at 6 am doing the lion laugh for 15 minutes and then they go off to work. I have put TIME magazine in the Parish House so you can see a group of Indian women doing what you just did. There are over 1800 groups in India and it has spread around the world from Finland to the Philippines. “Every year, on a Kataria-inspired holiday called World Laughter Day, celebrated on the first Sunday in May, 10,000 Danes gather in Copenhagen for the world’s biggest mass chortle.” (Time article by Jeffrey Kluger)
The Yoga Lion Laugh gives us many benefits as does all hearty laughing. First, it changes the body chemistry; it reduces harmful hormones; it raises our spirits; and it increases heart and respiration levels. Laughter is “like internal jogging!” (Time article by Alex Perry)
Into all this, to cultivate happiness, I would add prayer and meditation. You can take the prayer we said today and change it to something specific for yourself.
I hope you have realized by now that Life is a Dance, and the steps, twists, turns, and jumps are entirely up to us to choreograph. May we cultivate happiness with creativity and joy. (We actually sang one of our favorite hymns, Let It Be a Dance We Do. May you dance, too!)
References
The following has inspired and informed this sermon:
Das, Lama Surya. Awakening to the Sacred: Creating a Personal Spiritual Life, New York: Broadway Books, 1990
TIME Magazine, January 17, 2005. Articles cited and used: “The New Science of Happiness” by Claudia Wallis, “The Funny Thing About Laughter” by Jeffrey Kluger, “Learning the Yoga Way of Laughter” by Alex Perry, “The Power to Uplift” by Pamela Paul, “It’s a Glad, Sad, Mad World” by Walter Kern.
