in to help me create this art. And then, at the end because Big Man’s descent was so low, so deep, when he found art, when he heard positive feedback, when he saw beauty and he saw hope, then he started to dedicate his life to making mosaics and putting his life together. And because he had suffered so much, he had such immense understanding and sympathy for other people who were struggling or who were in the dark. That’s when I understood about compassion.   We all want happiness, but I think with happiness, we need to understand passion—you know, the passion of Christ, the suffering of Christ. Compassion in Chinese Buddhist translation is “great sorrow a... posted on Feb 22 2015 (25,073 reads)

and fun! Learning about the parts of the brain helps students understand how they learn, and why they may feel a certain way. Students feel empowered when they are able to make these connections. More importantly, it helps to create and build positive feelings with each other. Simultaneously, our community embraces the important seven precepts known as the 7 Habits of Happy Kids, created by Sean Covey. I bring in a lot of research and current news that justify why and how we can pursue happiness. In addition, we evaluate and analyze different models of happiness and compassion. Last year, we read the article, “I am Malala”. This courageous and inspiring story of a... posted on Feb 27 2015 (19,136 reads)

deal life's challenges, we need resources. Rick Hanson explains how to find the ones that lie inside yourself. We're pleased to bring you another installment of Rick Hanson's Just One Thing (JOT) newsletter, which each week offers a simple practice designed to bring you more joy and more fulfilling relationships. We all have issues—including demands upon us, stresses, illnesses, losses, vulnerabilities, and pain. (As Alan Watts put it: “Life is wiggly.”) Of course, many of our issues—in the broad sense I’m using the word here—are related to important sources of fulfillment, such as starting a business or raising a f... posted on May 20 2015 (16,248 reads)

it takes to live wide rather than long. Over the two millennia between his age and ours — one in which, caught in the cult of productivity, we continually forget that “how we spend our days is … how we spend our lives” — we’ve continued to tussle with the eternal question of how to fill life with more aliveness. And in a world awash with information but increasingly vacant of wisdom, navigating the maze of the human experience in the hope of arriving at happiness is proving more and more disorienting. How to orient ourselves toward buoyant aliveness is what Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) examines in a beautiful essay title... posted on Aug 3 2015 (1,554 reads)

it takes to live wide rather than long. Over the two millennia between his age and ours — one in which, caught in the cult of productivity, we continually forget that “how we spend our days is … how we spend our lives” — we’ve continued to tussle with the eternal question of how to fill life with more aliveness. And in a world awash with information but increasingly vacant of wisdom, navigating the maze of the human experience in the hope of arriving at happiness is proving more and more disorienting. How to orient ourselves toward buoyant aliveness is what Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) examines in a beautiful essay title... posted on Aug 3 2015 (12,355 reads)

The single most personally rewarding facet of my involvement with the Grant Study has been the chance to interview these men over four decades. I’ve found that no single interview, no single questionnaire is ever adequate to reveal the complete man, but the mosaic of interviews produced over many years can be most revealing. This was certainly the case with Camille, whose life illuminates two of the most important lessons from the 75-year, 20-million-dollar Grant Study. One is that happiness is love. Virgil, of course, needed only three words to say the same thing, and he said it a very long time ago—Omnia vincit amor, or “love conquers all”—but unfortuna... posted on Oct 25 2015 (29,258 reads)

to the present moment, because that would be something automatic. But it is a chosen... MS. TIPPETT: It’s a choice, yes. BR. STEINDL-RAST: ...response. It’s a real response to every moment. MS. TIPPETT: And I love — I think when you say, not just to what’s happened, but to the opportunity that you can discern, that has been presented. BR. STEINDL-RAST: And that is why it really secures the kind of joy that us human beings look for. I always say joy is the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens. And, usually, we have the idea, well, when something nice happens, then I’m happy, and when something bad happens, of course I’m unhapp... posted on Feb 9 2016 (20,419 reads)

have the confidence to say that I wanted to follow them, to support their work. I was so afraid that I was not good enough to help them, I feared that if I took on their work I might accidentally crush everything that they had given their lives to create. That was a really scary thought for me Then I lost my grandfather to cancer when I was 15 years old. I witnessed the pain and suffering that he had to go through, and I struggled with it. The birth of a child is associated with such happiness and joy. In my heart I felt that the process of death should be similar to that birthing process. It shouldn't be filled with such fear and dark associations. I didn't want my parent... posted on Apr 23 2016 (17,547 reads)

making it a commodity of class, status, or taste. He writes: Objects that were in the past valid and significant because of their place in the life of a community now function in isolation from the conditions of their origin. By that fact they are also set apart from common experience, and serve as insignia of taste and certificates of special culture. […] [This is] deeply affecting the practice of living, driving away esthetic preconceptions that are necessary ingredients of happiness, or reducing them to the level of compensating transient pleasurable excitations. Art by Shaun Tan for a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales Art in its proper ... posted on Jun 26 2016 (11,976 reads)

It is very difficult. If I say yes to one family I am saying no to 10 others. At present we don’t have enough accommodation or resources to take any new kids. Finally, what is your practice? My main practice is always based on my training to generate more compassion, stabilize myself, remain focused, and practice on patience and perseverance. Human beings—rich or poor, East or West, educated or uneducated, man or woman—all have one thing in common: we all want joy and happiness in our life. I feel lucky that I found something in my life where there’s so much happiness and joy doing something useful and meaningful. That is what I feel. I am so lucky. I pray... posted on Oct 18 2018 (122,608 reads)

Street or in a hospital or as a lawyer for a few years, but you make that career shift and follow something else that you have a love for. Duckworth: The most successful people in life are following something that they could say, “I love what I do.” Most people can’t say, “Oh, I love what I do because I make a lot of money or I love what I do because there are free snacks in the kitchen.” Free snacks are great. But loving what you do is a special kind of happiness. “I define talent as the rate at which you get better at something when you try.” Knowledge@Wharton: You say in your book about when you were teaching in New York ... posted on Nov 26 2016 (14,812 reads)

journey. Three common life themes Studying stories is not easy, since every person’s life is so unique. In their quest to categorize and correlate, researchers have come up with different ways to analyze life stories, and one of those ways is by theme. A theme is a common motivational thread or pattern that runs through a life story. The three themes detailed below—communion, agency, and redemption—have all been linked to well-being. If you want to cultivate happiness in the coming year, organizing your goals and your life story around one of these themes could help the pieces fall into place.  1. Communion. Stories that emphasize connection,... posted on Jan 1 2017 (20,458 reads)

cooperation, and kindness. One illustrative study found that people who simply viewed 10 slides of really beautiful nature (as opposed to less beautiful nature) gave more money to a stranger in an economic game widely used to measure trust. All of these findings raise the intriguing possibility that, by increasing positive emotions, experiencing nature even in brief doses leads to more kind and altruistic behavior. How nature helps our health Besides boosting happiness, positive emotion, and kindness, exposure to nature may also have physical and mental health benefits. The benefits of nature on health and well-being have been well-documented in diffe... posted on Dec 7 2017 (15,949 reads)

the meanings and values handed down from previous generations. As a youth, my grandfather questioned the “orthodoxies” of his day.  His life was challenging. But he never gave up on life. Or on himself. He said that it was our responsibility to find the meaning in what we face. “We all have a will to meaning in us.” He said that the “will to pleasure” (Freud) and the “will to power” (Adler) do not define the human being. They do not bring happiness or fulfillment. If you try to pursue happiness for its own sake, it will elude you. Happiness “ensues” when you fulfill something that is meaningful to you. It is through that se... posted on Apr 14 2017 (57,137 reads)

woman they were sharing lives with. So I became very interested in what people were doing in this last stage of their lives, and I found that it was dismal. There is only so much golf and so much bridge that people can take. So I began looking into creating a life skills program for At-Risk Adults ages 60 and over. I spent a little over two years analyzing and amassing material, and we now have over a thousand topics that can be used in targeted group sessions. These include topics like happiness, gratitude, memory improvement, positive steps for dealing with worry, and the importance of napping. Napping is really an issue, and also such a delight. Then there’s balance, conquer... posted on Nov 1 2017 (8,029 reads)

by the the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley showcased the newest and hottest findings in the science and practice of gratitude. Impressive as the advances were, not one speaker (myself included) grappled with what may be the single biggest question that stands in the way of making the basic science useful for practical applications: What must be overcome as a culture or as individuals in order for gratitude flourish? We live in a nation where everyone is on the pursuit of happiness. Each individual has his or her own path this journey takes. For some, the search begins in books; for others it comes through service. But perhaps the most popular form of seeking happin... posted on Feb 7 2018 (16,418 reads)

the word "disillusion" sounds negative but it also could be interpreted as a freeing from illusion—dis-illusion. So, one of the reasons, Tami, that I ended up exploring as much as I did is I was sensitive to this process of disillusion. I was fortunate enough to come from a very stable environment as a youth and I had a measure of success in the sports arena and did fine in school and so on. My life seemed to be going well, and yet I noticed nothing seemed to last—happiness, satisfaction, fulfillment [were] just until the next thing—which is not a bad thing as I look back on it. But at the time, I started exploring, "Where is happiness, fulfillmen... posted on Jul 13 2018 (13,327 reads)

peer-reviewed findings from the science of a meaningful life that were most provocative, powerful, and influential this year. We narrowed down the nominations from there, considering how the research is viewed today and how it fits into our coverage of the field over the past 15 years. Here are our top choices. Emotional experience is much richer than we thought How many different human emotions are there? Psychology once assumed that most of our feelings fall within the categories of happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust. But a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that there are at least 27 different b... posted on Jun 21 2018 (18,636 reads)

Brown is a professor of economics and director of the Center for Work, Technology, and Society at the University of California, Berkeley. Her recent book, Buddhist Economics: An Enlightened Approach to the Dismal Science (Bloomsbury), draws upon simple Buddhist ideas to argue for an economic system based on environmental stewardship, shared prosperity, and care for the human spirit. Brown measures economic progress by the well-being of all people, not Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or average national income. She advocates creating an economy that recognizes the interdependence of people with each other and the planet, and works toward achieving the goals of reduci... posted on Jun 22 2018 (8,835 reads)

and alcohol. That oxytocin should have so many health benefits is not so surprising when we recall its central role in stimulating uterine contractions during birth, the letdown of milk during lactation, the pleasure associated with orgasm and pair bonding. Acts of generosity and compassion also appear to be good for mood. A2010 study showed that while people with money tend to be somewhat happier than those without it, people who spend money on others report even greater levels of happiness, an effect that can be detected even in toddlers. When people give money to others, areas of the brain associated with pleasure are activated, and this response is greater when the... posted on Jul 19 2018 (20,381 reads)