Give What (You Think) You Lack
The "greater happiness" of intrinsic abundance
If, by giving up a lesser happiness,
One could experience greater happiness,
A wise person would renounce the lesser
To behold the greater.
- The Buddha, Dhammapada: 290
Hi everyone, and welcome to new subscribers.
My heart goes out today for everyone suffering the devastation of external and internal storms: those in North Carolina in shock from Helene, in Florida attempting to survive Milton, all the victims of brutal and ongoing violence in the Middle East, communities across the political spectrum who feel existentially threatened by the upcoming election, and all the private family emergencies that punctuate our human lives, no matter our circumstances.
Today I want to share some practical thoughts on how to turn feelings of lack into a source of what Buddha called “greater happiness”.
I hope this is helpful.
Paul
[Offer Note: After a few months of extensive consulting, I have several coaching slots opening up next month. If you would like to explore direct support in your braided paths of personal, professional and spiritual development, sign up for a free Discovery Session. I am working in flexible models for session frequency, term duration and cost.]
Give What (You Think) You Lack
The "greater happiness" of intrinsic abundance
When I first encountered the Buddhist teachings in my twenties, they felt like a lifeline. They fully acknowledged the challenge and pain of human existence but pointed the way toward happiness and fulfillment in its midst.
Many basic teachings of the Buddha are compiled in an early collection called the Dhammapada. For many years I carried a beat-up paperback in my jacket and would pull it out when I was feeling especially alienated or depressed (which was quite often.)
The teaching on greater and lesser happiness that I quote above seems especially relevant right now. It tells us to “give up” lesser happiness in order to get “greater happiness.”
Lesser happiness comes from momentary satisfaction. It comes from getting something we want or perceive we lack: pleasure, comfort and ego gratification, but also basic resources like money, time, attention, and information.
Dopamine and oxytocin spikes give us a sense of wellbeing. We are momentarily happy.
Greater happiness is more enduring. You find it by recognizing your life’s greater context, and by being more intimately embodied in your own experience. When you do both these things, your more wholesome and generative qualities, such as generosity, kindness, compassion and wisdom arise naturally. The exercise of these qualities brings greater happiness.
Recognizing your life’s greater context and being more intimately embodied in your own experience might seem like opposing things. And it is true that we can lose one by over-focusing on the other. We can get so wrapped up in the world’s storms that we lose touch with our own feelings, and fall into our habitual compensatory patterns. Or we can get so concerned with our own conditions, feelings or “process” that we lose the big picture.
But it is possible to do both. We recognize our life’s greater context by “zooming out” from our personal needs and satisfactions. Maintaining our awareness of those suffering acute storm conditions are a good way to “zoom out.”
We become more intimately embodied by “leaning in” to our own feelings, especially the uncomfortable ones. Working with “resource lack” is a great opportunity to do this, since most of us feel resource-constrained every day.
A professional I work with one-on-one shared a profound experience with me recently. He’s a high-powered lawyer, a defense attorney, in and out of court, making highly consequential decisions every day that deeply affect people’s lives.
His already high-stress life became even more so during COVID. Nowadays, he might be hanging on two lines simultaneously — one a phone call, the other Zoom — waiting for whichever court session begins first. (He drops the other one when it does.)
His time is highly circumscribed, and he constantly feels he is running behind, late, and not serving as fully as he would like to.
What happened: he found himself in conversation with a colleague and they had hit the end time for their meeting. His every mental instinct was to wrap up the conversation immediately and get to his next appointment. That would have given him the “lesser happiness.”
Instead, he took a breath, leaned into the moment, and asked the colleague how they were doing. He gave his colleague the gift of his own time and attention. The colleague took a few moments to respond, after which they wrapped up the conversation in a relaxed way.
In the few moments while his colleague responded, not only did my client deeply hear his colleague’s words, but his whole energy system shifted. The base level feeling of franticness dropped away and he realized that he did not need to hurry. The rest of his day was infused with this sense at a deep level.
My client struggles with making time in the morning for even 15 minutes of sitting meditation. As a result he decided to practice a momentary pause like this, and he immediately reaped the results.
I shared with him that what he did was actually a highly-regarded Buddhist meditation: it is to give to others that which you perceive you lack. He was feeling time-constrained, so he gave more time to his colleague. That entirely shifted his relationship with time.
He felt that he had plenty of time. He was intrinsically abundant with time.
In the words of Buddha, by giving up the “lesser happiness” of being on time, or sticking to his schedule, he reaped the far greater happiness of connecting more deeply with another AND releasing his own obsession with his time resource.
This also works with money, energy and attention. If you feel you do not have enough, then give what you DO have to someone else who needs it.
You will discover you have way more than you believed.
Image by Peter H from Pixabay.
This is a beautiful reminder of how intentional presence creates a space for growth, freedom, and exploration 🧡