A Happiness That’s Safe

Close your eyes. Watch your breath for a while—watch it as it comes in, watch it as it goes out. Try to stay steadily with the breath. The steadier your gaze as you watch the breath, the smoother it’s going to be. If you’re jumping around, the breath gets erratic because the mind is erratic. But when the mind settles down, it’s smoother right here; then the breath smooths out. It becomes a good place to stay.

It’s a good place to learn how to find some happiness, to appreciate the well-being that comes when the mind is still with the breath. The breath energy feels good in the body. It’s not too long, not too short, not too heavy, not too light. You can experiment for a while to see what kind of breathing feels best right now and maintain it. You build a sense of well-being inside that doesn’t have any of the outside problems that come with looking for happiness outside.

The Buddha tells you that there are many different ways you can find happiness. He points out the different ways. By being generous, you develop wealth. By being virtuous, you’re more and more likely to be reborn in a higher realm, like the human realm or above. And when you meditate, you develop some wisdom. And it’s the wisdom that makes the other two things safe, because when you get wealth but you don’t have wisdom, it can destroy you.

The same with having a human birth: You look at all the human beings around us—all kinds of people. The less wisdom they have, the more damage they can do, both to themselves and to other people. It’s through the wisdom that you learn how to be safe.

How do you develop wisdom? Well, one, you get the mind still so that it can watch itself. When you understand what’s coming up in the mind, then you realize that certain thoughts, if you follow them, are going to take you in a bad place—and you can say, No. It’s good to say No right from the very beginning, and not wait until they get really strong. When they’re strong, they’re hard to fight off. If you have a little bit of a thought that would go after something that you shouldn’t be going after or is angry about something that’s not pleasing to you, you can ask yourself, “What is that going to do to me?” It is true that there are things in the world that need to be changed, but anger is not the best way to change them. They’re best changed by using your discernment, using your mindfulness.

So you want to develop those qualities so that, whatever comes up, you’ll be safe. So many kinds of happiness in the world are not safe at all. The safety that comes from wisdom, the happiness that comes from wisdom, that’s genuinely safe.

So. Look after it. Try to make sure that you train your mind every day, so that it doesn’t look for its happiness solely in material things or the things in the world—because what does the world have to offer? It has material gain, but it also has loss. It has status, loss of status; praise and criticism; pleasure and pain. A lot of people who gain the good things don’t know where they came from or how to protect them. They start doing foolish things to protect them, and it drags them down.

But you realize that the good things in the world come from the goodness of your mind. You take care of the goodness of your mind, and the world will pretty much take care of itself. Whatever you do, make sure that your intentions are good—not only good, but also skillful—because we can go through life meaning well, but if we don’t pay real attention to the results of our actions, we can do a lot of damage.

But if you pay attention—say, “I act on a good intention, but the results didn’t come out well”—look more carefully into your intention. Look more carefully into the situation, and you’ll come to see things that you didn’t see before because you’re willing to learn. You realize that you have to be wise in your search for happiness because otherwise happiness is dangerous. As we see all around us, people with power start doing unskillful things to maintain their power. People with wealth do unskillful things to maintain their wealth. Instead of really protecting themselves, they drag themselves down and cause a lot of harm in the world.

So you want a happiness that’s really yours, a happiness that comes from within, that’s really safe—doesn’t cause any damage to anybody. That kind of happiness is possible, too.

Think of the Buddha’s teachings as a buffet table, offering different kinds of happiness. He recommends the ones that are most lasting. Of course, it’s up to you to choose, but try to be wise in your choice. You’ll benefit, and the people around you will benefit as well.