A Monk's Guide to Happiness: Meditation in the 21st Century

When you run after your thoughts, you’re like a dog running after a stick. But if you throw a stick for a lion, he turns around and looks at who threw it. You only throw a stick at a lion one time. Be like the lion.

A myth we have believed throughout our lives is that we have to ‘get’ happiness, and if we can just get the external details of our lives right, we will be happy. This is not happiness, it is a form of enslavement.

but we need a bedrock of equanimity so that we can retain a sense of resilience.

I’ve found that many people seek a kind of happiness which is a fleeting sensation: a ‘high’ – an injection-like bolt of energy to the heart. Yet this never seems to last, and when they no longer experience that high, they crave it again.

monkey living inside a house. There are five windows, which represent our five senses. The monkey, which represents our consciousness, rushes around inside and keeps looking out of different windows. If you were standing outside the house, it might appear as if there were five monkeys, because the monkey flits about so fast, its face quickly appearing at each window.

Is there a difference between meditation and mindfulness? In modern times, meditation has in some way been rebranded as mindfulness to make it more accessible from a deeper perspective when, in fact, they are two important aspects of one system of training. Meditation is where we sit down to train our minds using specific techniques. Mindfulness is how we bring our minds back from distraction during the meditation session.