I recently attended a professional training seminar on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) which, coupled with a recent article in the NY Times titled A New Gauge To See What’s Beyond Happiness, got me to thinking about the concept of happiness. It seems we live in a society that emphasizes happiness, but what does happiness really mean, and is it even something that is achievable on a long-term basis?

The NY Times article features the work of psychologist Martin Seligman, famous for founding the positive psychology movement and author of the 2002 book “Authentic Happiness”. Seligman now says that he regrets the title and that he’s refining his understanding of happiness. Now, under the rubric of positive psychology, Seligman is including concepts of positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment instead of his previous focus on the concept of happiness. This constellation of states and circumstances should lead to what he’s now calling “well-being” instead of happiness.

Happiness implies smiles, good feelings, lightness, joy, giggles, rainbows, and hugs. Whose life can encompass such things at all times? Does yours? It further implies no negativity, no problems, no negative emotions, no worries, no losses, and no pain. Whose life is devoid of such things? Mine certainly isn’t.

The ACT training I attended emphasized the importance of accepting what is often referred to as the unpleasant aspects of ones life. For example, negative emotional states arise, sometimes as a product of a difficult life history, and sometimes because of present day circumstances. Regardless of where they come from, ACT teaches the importance of simply accepting that emotions come and go, and that the very act of trying to make them go away only serves to make them worse (for example, a favorite saying that I use with clients is “what you resist persists”). The same idea can be applied to unpleasant or negative thoughts.

When people come in to my office looking for “happiness”, what they are often asking for is to have a life without any negativity, no painful emotions, no difficult or challenging thoughts. This is entirely unrealistic. The first of the Four Noble Truth’s the Buddha taught was that “life is suffering”. To expect that we can live a life without pain or difficulty sets us up for disappointment and despair.

Instead, I believe that we can lead a life filled with contentment. Contentment isn’t about happiness. Contentment means that we’re ok with life just as it is, especially in those difficult moments, trusting that they will pass just like everything passes. Thoughts, feelings, circumstances come and go, like day and night, or like the seasons. They might not be pleasant when they’re here, but fighting what is inevitable and unavoidable only makes things worse. Being “contented with what is” is achievable because contentment isn’t dependent on the content of any given moment. So, yes, happiness is delightful when we’re happy, but as a life goal, it’s highly overrated because it is unachievable as a constant state. Better to shoot for contentment. May you find contentment in this very moment and for all time.

New research published in the January 30th issue of “Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging” reported that meditation for 30 minutes a day for eight weeks changes gray-matter density in areas of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress.

The research involved 16 individuals with no past experience with meditation. They received MRI scans both before and after the eight weeks of meditation practice. The research participant’s brains were compared with a control group who did not practice meditation. The scans show increases in brain matter in the meditation practitioners and no differences with the control group.

So why is this important?

When research can materially demonstrate changes in the brains from a very brief period of meditation practice in the areas that control learning and memory processing, emotional regulation, self-referential processing and perspective taking, that is a good endorsement for a daily practice. To have more neural hardware for learning and memory, to manage ones emotions, to take perspective, and to process the “self” seems like a very good thing to me indeed.

But more to the point, anything that science can do to take the benefits of meditation out of a mystical, spiritual realm and plant it firmly in objective, measureable phenomenon seems valuable if it opens meditation up to more people. I know of no other practice that is as valuable for the development of a healthy self.

And just think about the changes that accrue to long-term meditators. So please don’t delay, and start meditating today. Every little bit helps!

Happy New Year to everyone who reads this blog! May the new year be filled with health and peace and lots and lots of love for you.

A client of mine brought to my attention a recent research study about placebos that utterly intrigued me. The gist of the research was that patients with chronic irritable bowel syndrome (or IBS—a nasty stress-related ailment involving abdominal bloating, cramps, and diarrhea alternating sometimes with constipation) were knowingly given a placebo—nothing more that a sugar pill—yet they reported statistically significant improvement in their symptoms over those patients who received no treatment at all.

In fact, one patient who was quoted in a follow up article—who had initially expressed doubts about the efficacy of taking a sugar pill—was asking for more after she ran out because they worked so well. When she couldn’t get any more sugar pills from the study because the research had concluded, she went out and bought her own placebo in the form of an herbal supplement. She got rid of 70 percent of her IBS symptoms that way.

While the researchers have no idea how any of this works, it does point to the powers of the mind over the body. That’s why the research population wasn’t entirely surprising to me, given that IBS is considered to be a stress related malady, with stress having a significant psychological component. I suspect that a placebo would be mostly ineffective in mending a broken bone. But since so much of the problems an average doctor sees in his or her office has a psychological component, I’m glad this area of research is getting more attention.

I was not altogether surprised to see a recent news item showing that new research has concluded that alcohol is a worse drug than crack or heroin.  The measures used to determine this included not only the harm to the individual, but also to society at large.  The study was conducted in Europe and seems credible, having been published in the Lancet.

What’s interesting to note is the fact that of all the drugs included in the study, the two legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco, scored in the highest range, indicating that they cause as much harm as illegal substances do.  This serves to contradict the assumption by many alcoholics that because it’s legal it’s somehow more benign.

The World Health Organization estimates that alcohol leads to 2.5 million deaths a year from disease, accidents, and suicide, accounting for 3.8 percent of all deaths worldwide.  That to me is a staggering figure.

I’m guessing we will never outlaw alcohol or tobacco, though we’ve come a long way towards stigmatizing tobacco use to record lows.  But as a society we are being hypocritical to outlaw substances like marijuana and harder drugs yet continue to condone alcohol consumption when the evidence indicates that alcohol is actually more harmful.

The topic of selfishness and selflessness have been coming up in some of my clients therapy sessions lately, and a recent column published in the NY Times about altruism (Is Pure Altruism Possible? by Judith Lichtenberg, 10/19/10) have got me thinking about the topic more.  Is there such a thing as pure selflessness or pure altruism?  Is selfishness always a problem?  Is there such a thing as good selfishness?  Are we really only playing semantic games?

I’ll begin by saying I don’t want to simply play games with language.  I think there’s something to the issue of selfishness and selflessness that are worth our consideration.  I remember many years ago being interviewed by the magazine Rhode Island Monthly for my work as an AIDS Buddy volunteer.  In the interview I quoted the His Holiness the Dalai Lama about good selfishness.  The idea is that by doing good for others, good feelings accrue to the doer, and this is a form of good selfishness.  I think it’s a valid point.  So in this regard, selfishness per se isn’t a problem.

The other thing about pure selflessness versus selfishness is that nobody likes a doormat.  I think it’s vitally important to stand up for oneself, to manifest sufficient self-respect, to not allow anyone to take advantage of you.  To be “selfless” under these kinds of conditions is problematic and frankly doesn’t reflect a healthy “self” to begin with.

But all this talk of self evokes the Buddhist in me.  Buddhism has a lot to say about the self, and depending on which brand of Buddhism we’re talking about, they have slightly different things to say.  Theravada Buddhism, sometimes described as the older version of Buddhism, has a concept called Anatta, which loosely means no-self.  In Theravada’s version of enlightenment, the self and all of material existence drops away and you remain immersed in a sea of pure, blissful nothingness.  The Mahayana tradition, which came later, has a different view and rejects the concept of Anatta.  Mahayana Buddhism embraces both the relative and absolute, form and emptiness, and enlightenment in this tradition reflects a non-dual union of both.  I have embraced the latter view and my current studies are in the Mahayana cannon of scripture.

From a non dual perspective, if you do good for someone else you are literally doing good for yourself, because while there is the appearance of a self over here and the other over there, there is experientially no separation.  Thus, pure compassion arises naturally.  My meditation teacher once asked his teacher—one of the most significant modern proponents of Theravada Buddhism, Mahasi Sayadaw—about compassion, and the response was that Theravada Buddhism doesn’t account for compassion.  I prefer a Buddhism that has compassion as its foundation.

Which brings us back to selfish selflessness.  From the Mahayana Buddhist perspective, there is no contradiction whatsoever.