Inside Yoga 142 (21/9/15)

This week the Dalai Lama gave his blessing to courses run by an organisation called Action for Happiness which aims to make participants happier and the world a better place.

Happiness is something we all want, and it’s a “something” that many of us find hard to find. It is elusive and hard to grasp, in fact grasping happiness is the wrong way of approaching it. Imagine that happiness is a flower petal which we want to hold in our hand, but a breeze threatens to blow it away. If we hold the petal in a clenched fist, the petal will be crushed, and if we hold our hand flat the breeze will blow the petal away. We need to hold the hand in a gentle cup that retains but gives the petal space. We approach our happiness in the same way, taking action to do what we can to be happy (as opposed to doing nothing in the flat hand image) while at the same time not grasping and crushing any hope of happiness surviving.
We want to find ways of cultivating a sense of happiness which grows within us and remains. It is said that if we remove all unwanted thoughts and all unwanted feelings, what is left at our core is a sense of contentment and peace – in other words, happiness.
The practices of yoga asanas (postures), pranayamas (breathing exercises) and meditation are used to remove what we do not need in our life, and thereby leaving space for us to fill it with what we want in life, and for many this is happiness.
For example, prior to a yoga practice we might feel unsettled, restless, or perhaps worse than that, we feel angry, frustrated, sad, and simply not all happy. Yet after the yoga practice those negative thoughts and feelings have gone, as if this “rucksack of burden” had been taken off and left on the yoga mat.
We might not see how this happened, for example, which posture did the trick, yet as if by magic we have rid ourselves of what we don’t want in our lives. Of course, not every session does the trick of removing every unwanted feeling, but this is why we keep the practice going, because yoga has a cumulative effect by building up its benefits. By practicing we are learning to cleanse ourselves of negativity (physical and emotional), and this can vary day to day in terms of success and we learn to work with these fluctuations in mood.
Our feelings and thoughts are similar to the ocean’s waves because they are changeable, from slight ripples to large waves, they keep coming, and like a surfer who learns to not only ride the waves but learns to see the waves coming, we learn to not only ride our thoughts we learn to see them coming and cope with them – we learn to ride them until they are gone.
Yoga is a practice which helps us to return to happiness – or to put it more accurately, this is a practice which helps remove the negative so that happiness can fill the space. After all, we do not like vacuums, so something has to fill it – let it be happiness.
Like the surfer who has fallen off the board and gets back on as soon possible to catch more waves, we get back on our mat (or meditation cushion) and keep practicing.
To see more about Action for Happiness see the news story, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34292274
Or see http://www.actionforhappine ss.org/

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