If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” ~ His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.
Stop feeling sorry for yourself, it doesn't work. Follow the advice of His Holiness and practice compassion. The only thing feeling sorry for yourself changes about your life is that it makes it worse.
The question of what makes us happy is likely as old as human cognition itself and has occupied the minds of philosophers, prophets and scientists for millennia. In The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, psychology professor Jonathan Haidt unearths ten great theories of happiness discovered by the thinkers of the past, from Plato to Jesus to Buddha, to reveal a surprising abundance of common tangents. (For example, from Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” From Buddha: “Our life is the creation of our mind.”)
Stop feeling sorry for yourself, it doesn't work. Follow the advice of His Holiness and practice compassion. The only thing feeling sorry for yourself changes about your life is that it makes it worse.
The question of what makes us happy is likely as old as human cognition itself and has occupied the minds of philosophers, prophets and scientists for millennia. In The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, psychology professor Jonathan Haidt unearths ten great theories of happiness discovered by the thinkers of the past, from Plato to Jesus to Buddha, to reveal a surprising abundance of common tangents. (For example, from Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” From Buddha: “Our life is the creation of our mind.”)
No matter how you look at it, you involve yourself with whatever you think about, the mind is a powerful tool, as Daniel Gilbert says "We have within us the capacity to manufacture the very quality we are constantly chasing.”
Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert published Stumbling On Happiness four years ago. To this day, it remains the best-researched yet captivatingly digestible book on the art and science of happiness, exposing with equal parts wit and scientific rigor the many misconceptions we have about happiness, the tricks our minds play on us in its pursuit and how the limitations of our imagination get in the way of the grand quest.
The only thing that grows from cultivating any dark seed of sorrow is more bitter fruit. So rather that cultivate sorrow, it is perhaps better to cultivate love. In Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill, French scientist-turned-Buddhist-monk Matthieu Ricard distills 25 centuries of Buddhist spiritual tradition alongside bleeding-edge neuroscience and the most compelling findings of Western cognitive psychology — an intelligent and refreshing vision for fusing the life of the mind and the life of the heart into a path of genuine psychoemotional fulfillment.
Feeling sorry for those who want you to feel sorry for them is like giving an alcoholic a gift certificate to a liquor store. So rather than feel sorry for someone, give them the gift of love as writer Gretchen Rubin did when se found herself having one of those inevitable carpe diem epiphanies about the fleeting nature of life and the importance of savoring the moment. Instead of shrugging it off as a contrived truism, however, Rubin decided to turn it into an experiment: She set out to test humanity’s ample arsenal of theories about what makes us happy, from ancient philosophies to pop culture prescriptions to the latest scientific studies. She chronicled the experience on her blog and eventually adapted it in The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun — an enlightening and entertaining record of her journey through awkward moments and surprising successes that together weave a rich mesh of existential insight.
Anytime you embrace a dark inner state, you increase the size of its stake on your heart and mind. Feeling sorry for yourself is a slow acting poison; it first corrupts, and then consumes the heart…choking it with dark and useless emotions. Dr. Martin Seligman, father of the thriving positive psychology movement — a potent antidote to the traditional “disease model” of psychology, which focuses on how to relieve suffering rather than how to amplify well-being.Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment offers a toolkit for harnessing our core strengths to make everyday interactions more fulfilling, complete with a range of assessment tools and self-tests rooted in cognitive science and behavioral psychology research. "Relieving the states that make life miserable… has made building the states that make life worth living less of a priority. The time has finally arrived for a science that seeks to understand positive emotion, build strength and virtue, and provide guideposts for finding what Aristotle called the ‘good life.’” ~ Martin Seligman
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