And where is it?
Inside Yoga 34 (14/4/11)
This week it was reported that the “the world’s first membership organisation dedicated solely to spreading happiness has been launched in London.”
“Action for Happiness” was launched on April 12 and it is a campaign calling for positive action to promote happiness at home, at work or in the community.
This has come at the same time as the government is conducting a survey into our happiness. The Office of National Statistics has four happiness questions in this year’s annual Integrated Household Survey, which will be sent out to 200,000 British homes this month.
As David Cameron’s £2m plan to measure the nation’s happiness gets under way this month, the American psychologist whose work inspired it has said he has changed his mind about the importance of being happy.
“The word ‘happiness’ always bothered me, partly because it was scientifically unwieldy and meant a lot of different things to different people, and also because it’s subjective,” said Martin Seligman, the director of the Positive Psychology Centre at the University of Pennsylvania.
David Cameron has admitted that measuring happiness could be seen as “woolly” and “impractical” but insists he wants a gross domestic happiness scale to become as reliable an indicator of a country’s progress as its economic output.
Happiness exists but can it be measured? And how do we find it when looking for it?
In yoga philosophy one of the five niyamas – part of the ethical guidelines as described in Patanjali’s yogasutras – is santosa. This is translated from sanskrit as contentment – an unconditional sense of well-being. It is different from happiness in the sense that is seen as sustainable and balanced.
Sukha, which means happiness, is part of a dualism – with its opposite being dukha, which means suffering, pain, sorrow or sadness. In daily life we can find ourselves swinging dramatically from sukha to duhkha, and at times this can feel uncontrollable; at other times, this can just be a mild ripple.
In yoga we seek to control the swinging pendulum of sukha-dukha, so that our life feels balanced and we feel not only in control of this pendulum but also at terms with its movements. Because in life there are times when it’s hard to feel happiness is there, it might be a passing moment or it might be more serious and last a long time, but we aim to swing back to balance.
Yoga and Buddhist texts describe happiness as being within us, yet as some might ask, “if happiness is inside us, why does it feel so far away?”.
One way of answering this is to describe how this happiness, which lies within, is covered by our habits, our activities, and our tendencies. That is, we are so busy with activities including work and hobbies, so pre-occupied by our worries and stress levels, that we can often be unable to see or feel that happiness lies within.
That is why an important part of yoga and Buddhism practices is meditation. Simply stopping, being quiet and still can help us to let the noise and distraction of lives to fall quiet. In the silence, this sense of peace and quiet can be found.
And that is why we speak of yoga as a practice, as it takes time and effort to remove the veils that obscure our view of happiness. It takes perseverance to not only achieve this state but also to maintain it.
We learn to let go of what we do not need and what is left is happiness.
