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

Rinpoche (www.kagyu.com if you’re curious to know about him. Tibetan Buddhist like the Dalai Lama!). He’s been my meditation teacher for over 25 years. The way he teaches is, in a way, the opposite of emulation, though he is very inspiring himself (funny, I first wrote that as “inspiriting”). It’s more like he’s trying to free me to be myself, in a deep down positive way.
     
    I know this is weird, but I’m going with Dan Savage (the sex advice columnist). He’s not so much a spiritual master as an ethical one. And yes, he’s a self-admitted potty-mouth, but he also advocates honesty, love, and respect. And he’s just so quotable, i.e., “it’s a relationship, not a deposition.” As you always say, we don’t choose what we like to do, only what we do…and I might not have chosen to elevate Dan to that level, but it’s how I genuinely feel about him.
     
    Henry David Thoreau sprang immediately to mind. Also, Nature. This quote from Saint Bernard says it well: “You will find something more inwoods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.” Perhaps I should research Saint Bernard…
     
    Hermann Hesse. While I never thought about him as a spiritual guide I suppose he is, as I have a collection of all his books, memoirs and poetry. A quote from him I think you’d find interesting is “Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object.”
     
    Mother Teresa and Gloria Steinem!
     
    St Francis of Assisi has taught me so much about accepting things that might appear as my enemy. Instead of hating, I can reframe a situation. For example, instead of hating mosquitoes, I remind myself how they feed the birds and they too have a purpose. I still dislike them, but I don’t hate them like I used to. I love many things about St Francis and try to emulate him.
     
    I work with people who—among other things—are seeking happiness. However, rather than encouraging them to model themselves on someone—a spiritual someone—I ask them to consider several persons of their own gender whom they admire. It could be a figure from history, literature, the cinema, or someone they personally know, a figure from politics, a mentor, a family member, a celebrity. It really makes no difference who it is, as long as these two or three persons are individuals that they admire.
    Once they have named those people, I ask them to identify specifically those characteristics that they admire (not their looks, please!).
    Then I tell them this (very Jungian, but very useful to know): whatever it is that they admire in these individuals (and generally the characteristics tend to coincide for all the people they have mentioned) is something that is nascent in themselves, but that they have not yet brought into being.
    That—the fact that it is still in the nascent and unrecognized stage in themselves—is the real reason why they admire it in the others. Once they have begun to bring these characteristics forth in themselves, they will begin to admire something different in others, in order to continue the cycle of growth into inner freedom and happiness.
    Knowing what you admire in others is a wonderful mirror into your deepest, as yet unborn, self.
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    These suggestions were intriguing, and I was reading stacks of books about various figures, but I didn’t feel a particular affinity for anyone until I came across Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. I’d become interested in Saint Thérèse after I saw her praised in Thomas Merton’s memoir The Seven Storey Mountain . I’d been so surprised to see the cranky, monkish Merton write reverently about the sappily named “Little Flower” that I was curious to read her spiritual memoir, Story of a Soul. That book fascinated me so much that, without quite realizing it, I developed a mini-obsession with Saint Thérèse. I bought one book about her, and then another, and then another. I reread Story of a Soul several times.
    One day, as he saw me trying to cram my latest Saint Thérèse biography onto the shelf (between The Hidden Face of St. Thérèse and Two Portraits of St. Thérèse ), Jamie asked with a note of disbelief in his voice, “How many books about Saint Thérèse are you going to buy?” There are few topics that would interest Jamie less than the life of a Catholic saint.
    I looked with surprise at the shelf and counted the biographies, histories, and analyses of Saint Thérèse. I’d bought seventeen, and I’d