A few days ago I visited our local library and checked out a few books on the subject of “happiness”. First, I wanted to grasp a better understanding of happiness and secondly I wanted to increase my own happiness. I found Matthieu Ricard’s “A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill—Happiness” particularly interesting. In one example, he describes how we can prevent the perpetual reemergence of disturbing thoughts, but I believe there was a lack of detail concerning the problem. He claimed that one should meditate to free the mind or determine the root causes and wait until the thoughts settle down and disappear, then find out where they went (to contemplate its nature). Right, whatever that means.
The real problem is controlling the mind, to block negative thoughts from reoccurring. Is this even possible?Frankly, we cannot simply erase our memory. I believe we should deal with negative thoughts as they come along, and then find a solution. The first thing I would question is whether change is possible. In my situation I had difficulty communicating with certain people (for whatever reason). Over time, I felt the negative thoughts were robbing me of my happiness. I really wanted the negative thoughts to stop. I focused on finding solutions to the problem and discovered the negative thoughts gradually disappeared. Therefore, I focused on solutions, rather than the reemergence of negative thoughts. I know this may be a lame example, but it did seem to temporarily work. Another solution would be to talk to other people with similar thoughts or problems to find an answer. But, what happens when we experience thoughts that are attributed to severe events such as death or abuse (physical or verbal)?
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