Safe Happiness
January 18, 2024

Close your eyes, and focus on your breath. Watch it as it comes in, as it goes out. Feel it as it comes in, as it goes out. Notice where you feel it and ask yourself: “Does it feel comfortable?” You can try longer breathing or shorter breathing—faster, slower; heavier, lighter; deeper, more shallow. Experiment for a while to see what rhythm of breathing feels best for the body right now: energizing when you’re feeling tired, relaxing when you’re feeling tense. The breath can do a lot for the body if you pay attention to it. If you don’t pay attention to it, it just keeps you alive, and that’s about it.

We find that we tend to tense up in areas of the body when we’re thinking about things. If you have a lot of things to worry about, a lot of things to think about, there’s a lot of tension in the body. So drop those thoughts right now and breathe through the tension. Think of the breath going through all the nerves of the body down to the tips of the fingers, the tips of the toes—all around—and giving the mind a good place to settle down. If the present moment is not comfortable, it’s not going to want to stay.

It’s like living in a house where the child is beaten all the time. The child is going to run away. Or the child is neglected, it’s going to run away. So you want to pay attention to your child and train your child. They talk about listening to your inner child; well, your inner child has lots of strange ideas. You want to train your inner child so that it’s more mature, so that all the voices inside your mind are mature voices, and they get along with one another.

If there are just children, they squabble all the time. So you want to train them. Remind them that if you want happiness, you want a happiness that’s long-lasting, and if it’s going to be long-lasting, it has to harm nobody at all. If your happiness harms other people, they’re not going to stand for it. They’re going to do what they can to destroy it. So you try to find a happiness inside that’s safe.

I was just reading a passage commenting on how monks who get a lot of alms, get a lot of honor, create enemies for themselves. In other words, there are going to be people jealous of them, because they can see the sources of their happiness.

But if you’ve got a happiness that comes from within, nobody can see the source of your happiness, so it doesn’t create any jealousy at all. That’s the kind of happiness that’s safe. You can take it with you wherever you go.

So try to develop these potentials you have inside. You’ve got the breath and the body that you can change. You’ve got the qualities of the mind itself. You can either be mindful or mindless. Alert or un-alert. You can be earnest in putting forth effort—ardent in putting forth effort—or lazy. You’ve got the choice, so why not make the good choice? Take advantage of the good qualities in the body and the good qualities in the mind. They’re there for you to develop.

That’s what meditation means: to develop good qualities inside. And these become our refuge. When we take refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha it’s because the Buddha pointed out to us that our actions have power—that we can make a difference. That’s the protection he provides.

You hear people say that you have no choice, that everything you do is determined by your genetics or determined by other outside forces. They’re harming you. They’re trying to deny you the fact that you have choices. So take advantage of the fact that you really do have choices. You’ve got the Buddha against the rest of these other people who say you have no protection. He’s providing you with protection. Who are you going to choose?