The Happiness Trap: Why wanting happiness will make you suffer

What a bold and contrarian title, you just enjoy going against the grain…

Maybe just a little, still, I would love if the quest for happiness is “beneficial”. I don’t believe so. It seems to me that most people in the west follow in this quest.

The west? Are you saying that the quest for happiness is a western thing?

I can say that from my humble point of view, from my humble travels and from my humble interactions with people not affected by the imperialistic western culture, I would say: Yes.

Jesus, Mary & Joseph, you know you live in the west? You know you were born in the west? You know you have the western culture in you? how objective can you be criticizing western society?

I can’t, but I don’t need to be objective. It’s my blog and I CAN DO WHAT I WANT ! But to come back to what I was saying. You’re right, I was born in the west and grew up in the west. All my patterns of being are affected by what the western culture is. It makes sense thatI had to leave the west and come back to it to see the west for what it is and how it shaped me.

Are you doing a flashback? Please don’t do a flash-back.

Yes and you can’t stop me. Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India, 40°C, Midday. I’m sitting in an air conditioned restaurant. I’m eating a chicken biryani. My smartphone lays next to my bowl of biryani. My phone is flickering. As most westerners in India, I’m looking for meaning on a budget.

Why go to India? Isn’t your local church cheaper?

I just can’t separate the art from the artist. Yes, Jesus seems cool but those catholic priests-

Ok ok, no need to explain more, I get it, you’re searching for something else.

Yes, and I find it on my smartphone: The Dhamma Kalyana Vipassana Meditation Centre. They offer 10 day silent meditation retreats, you can donate as much as you want at the end of the retreat.

I heard about those, how do they work?

I’ll explain the practical things first. It’s 10 day silent retreat that aims to teach the core meditation techniques that Siddartha Gautama used, You might better know him as the buddha.

Silent means: no talking, no interacting, no eye contact, no smartphone, no taking notes, etc.

Or said another way, you are alone with yourself with no way of escaping yourself.

That sounds… boring.

It is, that’s the whole point. Here’s a schedule I found online.

I’d also like to add that when I did it, there was no English speaker present, just Hindi. So I couldn’t ask any questions. Luckily they had the Goenka videos to help me get through the retreat. The videos were played at the end of the day. It helped with the feeling of isolation.

So is this like a 10-day buddhist cult recruiting event?

Not quite, Thanks for mentioning Buddhism though. Their “ideology”, or at least how I understand it, is about ending suffering by cultivating acceptance for reality as it is. Suffering happens when you stop accepting reality as it is. The techniques that are taught and practised for 10 days help you to accept reality as it is in the moment by observing stuff impartially.

That’s what the retreat was all about, I didn’t have to read texts or venerate some type of guru or something.

Too bad, how does this tie into your supposed “happiness trap”?

According to Buddhists the roots of suffering are the avoidance of pain and the desire for pleasure.

Another Buddhist tenet is the impermanence of all things, and those two tenets would be experienced directly in those 10 days. The techniques we practiced would prove that whatever we experience in ourselves is impermanent.

I will now reveal the first technique:

… drum roll?

Observing your breath going in and out of your nose as precisely as possible.

… Seriously? For how long?

For the first three days.

Wait, wait, wait, for the first three days, all you do, is observe your breath going in and out of your nose?

Yes.

BOOOOOOOOOORRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIING !

Yes… it is. The goal of this technique is to sharpen your focus. It’s about developing your capacity to observe in a detached way. This is just preparation for the true vipassana technique for the following remaining days.

Observing the grass grow?

In a way yes. The technique is about observing the sensations in your body. To simply observe impartially any type of sensations. The task is to observe them in a neutral, relaxed, detached and focused way.

And this is where the magic happens. This is where the Buddhist teaching start to makes sense, not in a rational sense, not in a faith/meaning sense, but in a visceral, direct and undeniable experiential kind of sense.

When starting out, I’ll call it level 1, the sensations you feel are the “negative” ones, pain in your back for sitting Indian style for hours, pain in your legs, frustration, agitation/boredom, etc. You feel them viscerally. When the switch eventually happens, because it must happen in the remaining days of silent meditation, when I finally stop avoiding the pain and just observe and accept the pain and negative sensations. They transform and become neutral sensations. It’s like 95% of the “pain” leaves to become another just a simple, trivial and neutral sensation. It’s as if I was worsening those negative sensations by trying to avoid them.

Another thing I notice, if I focus hard enough, even negative thoughts can be felt in the body as a negative sensation, and if I observe them, I can remove the negative from that sensation and when I do, the negative thoughts vanish.

When this observation hits, the quest is clear: “negative sensation hunting”. To learn and to feel this in yourself, is something free.  Anyone can learn it. It’s simple. Simple, but not easy. Anyone can learn to release the negativity in their thoughts, emotions, body, instincts, trauma-

Trauma? Get out of here!

Yes, I didn’t mention the Tourettes guy. He’s always screaming in the group meditation session. As the days go by, he stops screaming profanities. At least I think it was profanities, but I don’t speak Hindi. As the days go by, the smile on his face becomes bigger and bigger. As the days go by, the more relaxed his posture and mannerisms become.

In the last day, we share. There is this old woman who shares that she finally got to forgive her rapist.

Check out this documentary. Check out testimonials. You don’t have to believe, go experience it for yourself. It’s literally free and everywhere in the world. Check out their website.

Whatever, you still haven’t spoken about the happiness trap.

Yes ! Thank you ! So at one point, I master level 1 and I become an expert “negative sensation destroyer”. Any negative sensation disappears by the awesome power of detached and focused observation. A noteworthy highlight is the moment when I’m so focused that I can feel a mosquito taking the blood from my neck. I’m so detached that when it happens that the only thing going through me are the words: “It’s just a sensation”.

BUT ! As you can guess, There are also pleasant sensations. Warm feelings in the body, flowing energies going all over your body, little tinglings all over. And just like negative sensations, they can be linked to pleasant thoughts, memories, emotions, etc. like that when I was-

And I guess you’re supposed to observe them with a detached focus as well.

-What?- uh, yes. I was lost there for a moment. Yes, yes, of course. Because just as negative sensations are impermanent, positive ones are as well. But for positive sensations, your body acts differently.

IT CRAVES ! Man does it crave those positive sensations. It’s India, It’s so hot, No A/C in the meditations spaces.  At one point, I can just taste the ice cream in my mouth.

When the warm feelings come, I want so much to hold to them, but they always leave me.

I need to use all my willpower to remind myself: ”François you’re doing vipassana, not positive visualizations, this ice cream vision, where do you feel it in your body? Yes exactly, there. Are you going to observe it with detached focus? You notice that your body doesn’t want that pleasant feeling to disappear. But don’t you want to accept and observe reality as it is?”

And lo and behold, those sensations become neutral and lose all their pleasantness. Just as 95% of the negative sensations are just mind, 95% of the positive sensations are mind. I make those sensations pleasant. Each time that I choose that this sensation is better than another, I crave it more and run around trying to hold on to it. I can never accept things as they are now. Because I crave the positive sensations.

That’s the weird lesson from mastering level 2. Anything can happen in life, but I choose how I experience it. I can choose to run and flee from anything that is uncomfortable and I can choose to chase any type of thing that increases my dopamine. (For the neurologists reading this)

But there’s this other state of mind, one that I’ll call balance where anything that happens, just is.

Reaching this state is very difficult to explain. The best way I can is by comparison:

It’s about going from “I love this” to “There is a sensation of love currently in body when I perceive this”

It’s about going from “I hate that” to “A sensation of hate is coming up when I perceive this”

This is what I got from those 10 days, a new way of living life. It’s not based on good or bad things or judging everything, chasing this or that goal, avoiding this or that negative thing. But a way of life that is based on just experiencing the rides of life. It’s a way of life where you stop running from the bad and stop chasing the good. You let them happen and affect you without getting controlled by them. I wouldn’t call that happiness, I would call it balance.

This seems like a good ending… But don’t you want to add anything?

Yes, here’s another thing: I’ve started perceiving in myself and others how the link between our inner outer words doesn’t really exist. One can feel bad in great situations or one can feel great in bad situation. The inner world usually depends on how the person treats their inner world. Happier people are happier in more situations and complainers will always find a reason to complain, even if the reason might seem trivial to someone like me. Like recently when an acquaintance made a drama out of a missing notepad. I asked if it was filled with memories? No, it was empty. Was it expensive? No, just a cheap notepad bought in regular supermarket. It was the end of the world for that person, I just hope the person took my advice and bought another…

Yes… Interesting… do you want to add anything else?

Sure, this one is linked to the last point. All actions can be done with any type of attitude. You can choose to stay in the balanced state when doing stuff. When in a balanced state, anything can be done, from the most exciting to the most boring things. Having access to the balanced state will open up the capacity to do anything without the baggage that might be associated to it. Stuff like, stress, fear, excitement, sadness, will not interfere with your endeavors anymore. So I guess it’s a kind of help to have access to balance.

Also very interesting, anything else?

Sure, when going through the inner observation of my own functioning and how automatic it is, it made me realize that most of the things that happen in us, do so automatically. Our reactions, beliefs, values, identities, missions, convictions, permissions, interdictions, sabotages, etc. They are not fixed, they are automatic processes in us. I’ve become aware of most of them and I’ve been able to change the most damaging ones. It also helped me to empathize with others. As I noticed for myself how automatic my functioning is, I started to see it in others. Now, I see people as the sum of all those automatic processes instead of just a simple identities. To me, people are more than just “good” or “bad”. They’re usually 50 shades of gray.

Great point, anything else?

Not really.

So… You’re not going to mention level 3?

God no, because then I have to mention level 4 and no one in the materialistic, logical and scientific world of the west cares about the mystical stuff. I know that most of the people reading this will be from the west. If I start talking about that stuff, they’ll unconsciously discredit what I express without giving the ideas a fair chance.

The idea of text being: The quest for happiness chases impermanent positive sensations.  From my point of view, This  will cause a craving which will cause suffering.

Call to action?

Yes, here they are:

• Meditate !
  • Go for regularity, at least once a day
  • Go for quality over quantity, better to do a focused 5 minutes instead of 20 minutes where you daydream about what you’ll eat tonight
• Get some information and perspective from others on youtube, how was their experience similar or different to mine?
• Try out the 10 days vipassana retreat in the location of your choice. The website is dhamma.org… Good luck though… It is so simple that it is difficult.
• List the things you hate and yourself those questions about the things on the list
  • How are you refusing reality as it is?
  • What would you like the thing to be?
  • How is this linked to craving for something?
• List all the things you love and ask yourself those questions about the things on the list
  • How is loving them creating a craving and suffering in you?
  • How can you love without craving and suffering?
  • Are you ready to sacrifice the nice feelings for balance?
• And of the the usual call to actions
  • Comment the article, I love the feedback and it helps me improve what I do
  • Subscribe to the newsletter
  • Reach out to me and say Hi
• The other usual call to actions I say to everyone
  • Spend some time with your family
  • Read a good book
  • Meet your neighbors
  • Etc.
• Bonus: For those of you who’ve mastered level 2: Detach also from the neutral sensations, I know it’s tricky as they are so subtle. Do your best. I can guarantee you won’t expect what will happen, but It’ll be worth it. Then detach from that experience as well. I honestly don’t know what level 5 is or even if there is a level 5 but if you get there, tell me. I’m interested.