“The art of happiness is also the art of suffering well”

You wouldn’t think that a book about suffering is also, intrinsically, a book about happiness, but such is the case with No Mud, No Lotus.

I read it some years ago, but its central ideas have stuck with me, and in times of trouble I find myself thinking back to the lessons it contains.

Here’s what I highlighted:

When you love someone, you have to offer that person the best you have. The best thing we can offer another person is our true presence.

The main affliction of our modern civilization is that we don’t know how to handle the suffering inside us and we try to cover it up with all kinds of consumption.

Part of the art of suffering well is learning not to magnify our pain by getting carried away in fear, anger, and despair. We build and maintain our energy reserves to handle the big sufferings; the little sufferings we can let go.

Happiness is not an individual matter; it has the nature of interbeing. When you are able to make one friend smile, her happiness will nourish you also. When you find ways to foster peace, joy, and happiness, you do it for everyone.

Happiness is impermanent, like everything else. In order for happiness to be extended and renewed, you have to learn how to feed your happiness. Nothing can survive without food, including happiness; your happiness can die if you don’t know how to nourish it.

Being able to enjoy happiness doesn’t require that we have zero suffering. In fact, the art of happiness is also the art of suffering well. When we learn to acknowledge, embrace, and understand our suffering, we suffer much less. Not only that, but we’re also able to go further and transform our suffering into understanding, compassion, and joy for ourselves and for others.

To love is, first of all, to accept ourselves as we actually are. That is why in this love meditation, “Know thyself” is the first practice of love. When we practice this, we see the conditions that have caused us to be the way we are. This makes it easy for us to accept ourselves, including our suffering and our happiness at the same time.

If there is anything to be aware of, it’s that an emotion is only an emotion, and that you are much more than one emotion. You are body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. The territory of your being is large. One emotion is very little. An emotion is something that comes and stays for a while and eventually goes away. If during the time of the emotion, you have that insight, that insight will save you.

Walking in walking meditation is walking just to enjoy walking. You don’t have any desire to arrive anywhere. Walking and not arriving, that is the technique. And you enjoy every step you make. Every step brings you home to the here and the now. Your true home is the here and the now, because only in this moment, in this place, called the here and the now, is life possible. Every step you take should bring you back to peace, to the present moment.

When you look at a tree in a storm, if you focus your attention on the top of the tree, you’ll see the leaves and branches blowing wildly in the wind, and the tree will look so vulnerable, as though it could be broken at any time. But when you direct your attention down to the trunk of the tree, there’s not so much movement. You see the stability of the tree, and you see that the tree is deeply rooted in the soil and can withstand the storm.

We don’t understand ourselves. In our body there are conflicts and tensions, and we can’t resolve them. Instead of stopping and looking deeply, we are running as far away as possible from the loneliness, grief, sadness, anger, and emptiness that we feel we can’t bear. If we’re in this situation and we find ourselves unable to communicate well with others, that’s normal. They aren’t communicating with themselves, and we aren’t communicating with ourselves, so is it any wonder we have difficulty communicating with each other?