Happy for Others

Be on the lookout as the simple act of noticing and recognizing is the most important part of this exercise.

Even the subtlest recognition is good practice. While we might think that a neutral or kind of autopilot state is the default mode of most people, contained even in those states is often a detectable baseline level of happiness.

However, no need to be too precise. Find easy targets!

As always with Living Meditations there is a good “chunk” of story and thought and life situation involved, but we can incline the attention to the more basic levels.

So somebody might have won a prize, and that person is someone in particular to you, and that is all going to be wrapped up in the happiness. But it’s really the happiness that is the target of today’s Living Meditation.

The story is part of it, but we just want to recognize the currents of happiness that are around us in all the other beings.

Of course, there is unhappiness too. We’re not ignoring that or blocking that out. We’re simply noticing and recognizing the happiness as our Living Meditation practice exercise.

Tips and Tricks:

1. Definitely go for the easy targets, but mix that in and notice the more subtle things. It can be surprising.

2. Facial expressions of people being nice in social situations is not really it, but someone might enjoy putting on that mask, and so it is it!

In fact it’s all around to see.

3. If thoughts revert to your story in a negative way, like, I wish I could run through the field without back pain, etc., don’t get caught up in that. That’s just stuff happening. We’re not doing an exercise in rooting that stuff out. It’s not the focus. Lots of stuff is happening in the universe right now and at every moment, just like lots of thoughts and feelings are happening all the time in the stream of our body-mind.

For this meditation practice exercise, we’re focusing on being happy for where there is happiness in others, so we’re just focusing on that, just like we might focus on the breath when there are plenty of other sensations in the body.

Remember we are not here to gather evidence for our self-evaluation.

4. Enjoy the simplicity, ease, and power of this meditation by dedicating yourself to it a bit on this day! Sometimes easy things are hard to stick with.