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If you are not essentially happy with yourself and your way with life, you need to transform your relationship with the way things are. If you think you are not happy enough, think that you ought to be more happy than you are, spend time thinking about your level of unhappiness and your desire to be happier, you need to transform your relationship with the way things are. If you are thinking that no one could be happy in a stinking old life like yours is, living where you do, with chances that alternate between fat and slim, and prospects that are even worse than that, you need to transform your relationship with the way things are. Specifically, you need to stop thinking that your happiness is dependent upon and flows from the way things are, and start thinking that your happiness is dependent upon and flows from the way you think about the way things are. Change your way of thinking and you improve your happiness quotient just like that (snaps fingers). Step #1 is to stop thinking at all. In order to do that, we first have to slow our thinking down. We do that by thinking about our thinking. Sit still. Be quiet. Watch your thoughts. Count the thoughts you have over a span of sixty seconds. This will be your reference marker. Continue to watch your thoughts and categorize them-- and as you categorize them, notice what emotions are connected with them. Which categories of thought create, or come with what emotions attached to? Notice the instantaneous connection between thoughts and emotions. Become curious about that. About the relationship between thoughts and emotions. What are your predominant emotions throughout each day? What thoughts generate those emotions? Take up the work of separating thoughts from emotions. Practice having thoughts with no emotions attached. Notice how changing your thoughts changes your emotions. Think of your breathing-- count your breaths to ten, and start over if you think about something else, and notice how your emotions change just by focusing on your breathing, paying attention to your breath, and counting the breaths you take. Notice how when you are not in the grip of emotions, when your emotional level drops to nothing, the default, residual, emotion is peace. Peace is the absence of emotion, and the foundation of happiness. And it is strictly dependent upon the type of thinking you do. Step #2 is to think without judgment or opinion. Think about the things that stir you to intense emotion. And think about separating your thoughts from your emotions. Think the thoughts without judgment or opinion. Do not judge or form opinions about having the thoughts. Think them with no judgment or opinion at all, on any level. Take up the practice of thinking without judgment or opinion. Think neutrally. Think without taking sides. Think without being shanghaied, kidnapped and held hostage by your thoughts. Think without judgment or opinion. And let peace like a river carry you away from the intensity of emotional involvement with your thoughts to the blessed place of having thoughts without emotions attached. The more you practice separating your thoughts from emotions, the more peace you will experience and the happier you will be. The more you give yourself over to emotional thinking, the less peace you will have and the more unhappy you will be. The Jon Kabat-Zinn YouTube videos (Shortest ones first) on Mindfulness Based Stress Reductiopn are excellent sources for learning to distance yourself from your thinking and from the emotions your thinking arouse. At this point in the program, I turn you over to you.
