All this fuss about happiness. Treatises on the topic replicating like bunnies. A whole school of psychology springing into existence. The latest and greatest research published in blogs on a daily basis.

People consider me a positive, even exuberant person. Yet I can’t help but wonder: Is happiness what it’s really all about?

Extreme examples: F. Scott Fitzgerald wasn’t always happy as he drank himself to death writing the great American novel. Mozart wasn’t necessarily happy as he composed the music that still makes so many of our souls fly. Van Gogh sure didn’t seem happy as he painted works of art that make me feel as though I’m conversing with the angels.

Hyperbole and oversimplification aside, I’ve found that my most intense and powerful growth has come from moments of unhappiness. At my first job, when I was posted to an oil and gas plant in rural Canada and told to “make people redundant.” After my divorce five years ago, when I felt like an utter failure. Now, facing 40 without the family I’d imagined I’d have.

These challenges have led me deeper into my spiritual practices: yoga, meditation, reading poetry, and serving the planet. With greater compassion for my own flaws, I’ve simultaneously developed more tolerance for the foibles of others. Thanks to unhappiness, I’ve truly accepted that I’m not perfect and can’t be the best at everything, in spite of having had an extraordinarily blessed life.

So these days, I seek peace. I make an effort to love every single person, from the woman who cuts me off on the freeway, to the guy at the checkout counter, to my parents and friends. I shine my light on them. I practice gratitude daily: for my family, home, city, work, heck, even my car (I am in love with my Mini!). I find utter joy in a few minutes of blissed out dancing at a club. In gazing at the flowers that deck my garden walk. In entering the flow of writing or swimming.

Then something jars me—a neck ache, a difficult conversation, a rejection from a potential lover. And I breathe. I find my smile. I recite my mantra, “Love more, fear less.”

What I have, as a result, is greater connectedness to all beings and to the Earth, and confidence that I’m okay, no, that I’m more than enough. And that’s not happiness. It’s something subtler. I call it wellbeing.

As the year draws to a close and the days grow short, we tend to turn inwards. Most of us spend time reflecting on our achievements and challenges of the year past. If we set New Year’s resolutions last January, we might dig them up. Regardless, many of us conduct a mental review, considering the question, “How did I do?”

As a trained psychotherapist and writer of self-help books, I am a strong believer in setting milestones. Fixing our sights on attainable as well as stretch goals can help us to stay focused, prioritize, commit, and get things done. At the end of the day, when we do reach our goals, we feel a well-deserved sense of satisfaction.

And yet, this practice of evaluating and assessing the year as a stand-alone, 12-month chunk concerns me. What happens when we don’t reach our goals within that narrow time frame? (And many of us don’t. In fact, research indicates that 80% of people have broken their New Year’s resolutions by Valentine’s Day.) We are prone to judging ourselves harshly. We can fall prey to calling ourselves losers, lazy, unworthy of success, and a host of other derogatory names.

In 2009, I didn’t finish my memoir. Nor did I start a family. These were my two highest priorities for the year. So I guess you might say that I failed. I did, however, unexpectedly spend four months having fantastic adventures on Expedition: Blue Planet, traveling to India, Botswana, and the Middle East. I served the planet by raising awareness of critical environmental issues. I added to my skill set by learning how to write documentary films. I edited a memoir, and co-authored an entire book about inspirational women over forty. I spent precious time with my family in China. I learned more about who I am and what I want in a life partner, how to hold myself during lonely times, how to push myself to my physical limits, and how to let go of my anxiety.

Patty Ivey, a yoga instructor and studio owner in Washington, DC whom I admire greatly, recently told me, “When people come into yoga and ask me for a pose to fix their aching back, I tell them there’s no such thing. We do yoga for the entire body. You’ll only fix the part by working the whole.” So it is with our lives, Patty then pointed out. It can be dangerous to break our lives down into pieces, causing us to lose sight of the bigger picture.

And so, during this time of reflection, we can fixate on what we did or didn’t get done this past year. We can feel elation at certain achievements and transformations, disappointment at so-called failures, and sadness at losses that occurred within the past 12 months. But the question to ask ourselves is not simply, “Did I meet my goals for the year?” The more valuable question is, “How did this year fit into the greater story of my life?”

[Note: This is my latest contribution to the Stanford Alumni Association's Living Well blog.)

Caveman

Reposting my latest contribution to the Stanford Alumni “Living Well” blog:

I’m typing up a blog posting. You’re reading it online. It’s unlikely that either of us is outside doing a physical activity at this moment. According to University of Kansas psychology professor Dr. Stephen Ilardi, we’re breaking the rules for beating depression—we are not living like cavemen.

My mom sent me a care package the other day. (Yes, I am 36 years old and my mother still sends me care packages. Aside from newspaper and magazine clippings, they are likely to contain random objects like Corn Nuts. It’s adorable.)

Anyway, this particular package included an article about Dr. Ilardi’s happiness research, which my mother had torn out of the AARP magazine. Dr. Ilardi ran a pilot program for combating depression that involved returning to our pre-modern roots. The rules were: get outside, be physically active, socialize a lot, take omega-3 supplements (due to generally poor nutrition), and sleep enough. The results were impressive: 76% of the participants demonstrated a reduction in depressive symptoms, as opposed to just 27% in the control group, which received medication and/or psychotherapy.

I buy this prescription for happiness. It makes sense intuitively that if we’re outdoors breathing fresh air and feeling the sun shine on our faces, we’re treating our bodies well, we’re interacting with others, and we’re spending less time thinking and more time doing, we’ll be less depressed. Taking these steps consistently gets my serotonin pumping, that I know.

In fact, I spent Friday night at my 15-year Stanford Reunion class party. I’d been feeling a bit down and was concerned that I might feel drained by the evening. But the opposite was true. Connecting to old friends whom I hadn’t seen since we were 22, and meeting other fascinating people for the first time, was a fantastic mood-booster. The room buzzed with energy and enthusaism–it was contagious. When the lights finally came on and the organizers asked us to leave, I floated off on a cloud of wellbeing.

What works for you?

I’m now posting every other week to the Stanford Alumni Association’s “Living Well” blog, which you can view here:

http://pgnet.stanford.edu/get/page/blogs/blog/?ciid=117

However, I’ll also be reposting those entries onto my own blog. Here is the first one. It’s an introduction to me, in case you don’t know me already

What makes you feel in love with life?

-    Going for a run, the crisp, cold air burning your lungs and ears.
-    Reading a passage from a book that resonates so deeply you feel the author must know you personally.
-    Laughing to tears with your children.
-    Discovering a new friend, or reconnecting with an old one, and remembering that we’re all more similar than we are different.
-    Working on a project that lights your soul on fire.
-    Music. Art.

I prefer the term “wellness” to “happiness.” Happiness seems like something you have to chase after, a butterfly darting away before you can catch it in your net. Wellness, on the other hand, is a state of being. You might feel happy at times, you might feel sad. You recognize that those feelings are transient, and you connect with a deeper sense of calm that sustains you.

We’ll be exploring ways to access wellness in this blog. To me, this means enjoying moments of small delight on a daily basis. It means focusing on building trust in yourself and your life path. It means finding ways to connect with compassion, love, and generosity with other people. I invite you to comment, send in your own views, and suggest topics for future blogs. I’d like this to be an interactive experience, as I’m certain that we can learn more from one another than you can learn just by listening to me.

A little bit about me. I have a BA and MA (’94, ’95) from Stanford in psychology, where I thoroughly enjoyed being able to study with many of the top minds in the field. I’ll never forget Philip Zimbardo, creator of the revolutionary Stanford Prison Experiment, blasting rock music every time we entered his “Psychology of Mind Control” classroom. Or Robert Sapolski’s revelations about the destructive impact on our bodies and minds of our human reaction to stress. Or Amos Tversky’s Nobel prize-winning research on the surprisingly irrational way in which people make decisions.
Since graduating, I’ve spent ten years co-authoring, freelance editing, and ghostwriting non-fiction books on health and wellness, spirituality, and psychology. I feel that each project has been a mini-thesis, providing me with the opportunity to dive deeply into the subject matter. And I’ve taken on much of what I’ve written about as part of my lifestyle. For instance, after editing two books on Buddhism (professor of Buddhism at Columbia University Robert Thurman’s “Infinite Life;” His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler’s “The Art of Happiness in a Troubled Word”), I began practicing meditation. I have since completed two ten-day silent Vipassana meditation retreats. Co-authoring “Sexual Fitness,” which focused on improving your overall health in order to enhance sexual function, got me to take my eating and exercise habits more seriously. I began doing yoga, and have since become a yoga instructor.

In addition to writing and teaching yoga, I work as a life coach. Around the time of my divorce in 2005, I entered an intensely dark period during which I called into question all my inherited, subconscious ideas of who I am and what it means to be successful. This journey led me to pursue a MA in counseling psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, a small school that is home to Joseph Campbell’s library. And so I bring an understanding of depth psychology, archetypes, and mythology to my reflections on wellness, as well.

I look forward to exploring with you.

As of Oct 10, 2009, I’m joining Stanford Alumni Association’s new blog about health and wellness issues, called “Living Well.” Several alumni will be contributing, including an MD who also has trained in alternative Chinese medicine and reiki, and an alumn in her 80s who will talk about longevity and happiness. Please take a look!

https://pgnet22.stanford.edu/get/page/blogs/blog/?ciid=117