Beyond Happiness

Episode 204 of the Secular Buddhism Podcast

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast. This is episode number 204. I'm your host Noah Rasheta, and today I'm going to explore the topic of happiness.

Before jumping into today's episode, I do have a quick announcement I want to share with you. I'm excited to announce the first of its kind retreat that I'm planning for September 12 through 14th, 2025 in Colorado. This is a retreat on finding freedom and groundlessness—embracing uncertainty with Buddhist wisdom.

I'd like to invite you, if you've ever been interested in attending a mindfulness retreat, to join us. This retreat format explores the liberating power of groundlessness and the understanding that true peace doesn't come from certainty. It comes from learning to rest in the ever-changing flow of life.

The retreat will include thorough guided teachings, meditation, and group discussion. We'll explore the three doors of liberation—emptiness, signlessness, and aimlessness—along with other core Buddhist teachings. Drawing from this ancient wisdom and modern insight, we'll reframe our relationship with uncertainty. You'll leave with a deeper sense of freedom, resilience, and ease in facing life's unknowns.

If you want to learn more about the retreat, visit secularbuddhism.com. You'll see a little banner at the top, and you can click on it to learn all the details. This is something I've been working on doing for a while. I'm really excited to do our very first one this year, and I do plan to make this an annual thing.

All right. Today I want to talk about happiness, joy, and contentment. I want to talk about what these states really mean, how they differ, and how we can cultivate them more consistently in our lives despite the inevitable challenges we all face.

As always, keep in mind: you don't need to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist. You can use what you learn to simply be a better whatever you already are. Remember, Buddhist teachings and concepts often invite us to think differently about life. They challenge us to question the stories that we've come to believe about ourselves and about reality. And our understanding of happiness is certainly an area where most of us carry a lot of stories and assumptions.

What Is Happiness, Really?

I've been thinking a lot lately about a question that seems simple but gets more complex the deeper you go: What is happiness? Like really, what is happiness? And why does it often feel so elusive even when we have everything we thought would make us happy?

A few years ago, while I was still teaching powered paragliding at one of our training camps, I was sitting around the campfire talking to friends. One of them asked something to the effect of, "If you could rate your level of happiness on a scale of 1 to 10, what would that be?"

It was interesting to hear the responses from the various people sitting around the fire that night. Some gave an immediate answer like, "Oh, I'm at a six" or "I'm at an eight." Others hesitated. Others asked clarifying questions like, "Well, what do you mean? Does that mean right now? Do you mean happiness in general? Do you mean in a specific area of my life? Because it might be a different score if we're talking career versus relationships."

But here's what stood out to me: there was one person who I had assumed seemed to have it all. They had what looked like a good job, a loving family, and financial security. And this person gave himself a surprisingly low number. Meanwhile, another person who had gone through recent difficulties—they were struggling with some health issues—gave themselves a really high number. That stood out to me.

Later, on a completely separate occasion, I observed another friend. This is someone I would describe as getting upset easily. They seem to get angry in situations quickly and get angry with other people quite easily. They seem quick to judgment. From my perspective, I would have thought this person just didn't seem to be very content. They seemed to be in a bad mood all the time.

Well, one day this person said something that surprised me. She said, "I think I'm more happy than the average person." And again, that genuinely surprised me. It made me realize a couple of things.

First, how we feel and how others perceive us are two very different things. And second, our individual definition of what it means to be happy really matters. When she says she thinks she's happier than the average person, her definition of happy and my definition of happy might be very different.

This got me thinking about the general nature of happiness and how our rigid views and definitions of what happiness is—and how you obtain it—might be part of what causes us to experience a lot of unnecessary suffering. In Buddhism, this is referred to as dukkha, which is usually translated to English as "suffering." I like to use the word unsatisfactoriness instead of suffering because it seems to do a better job of capturing that subtle sense of discontent that seems to persist even when things are generally going well.

You know that feeling—that something's missing, or "Man, I would be happier if only this or that happened, if certain conditions were finally met." I think it's a feeling we're all familiar with.

Three Perspectives on Happiness

I've been exploring three perspectives on the topic of happiness that have really transformed my understanding of it. These come from three different books: The Book of Joy by the Dalai Lama, Happiness by Matthieu Ricard, and a recent one I picked up called The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins. That one doesn't have anything to do with Buddhism, but it has a lot of relevant information.

Today, I want to share my thoughts on how these perspectives might help us develop a more flexible and joyful approach to life. But first, we need to clarify what we mean by happiness.

In our modern Western culture, happiness is usually understood as a feeling of pleasure—a satisfaction that comes from achieving goals, acquiring things, or experiencing pleasant circumstances. It's what we feel when we finally get the thing we wanted, right? It could be the job, the promotion, the shiny thing we've been saving up for. It's that feeling of booking flights to go on the vacation we've been dreaming of. We all know that feeling. That's happiness.

But this kind of happiness—where it's just an emotional state—is wonderful, but it's also inherently unstable. It depends on things going our way. And as we all know, life doesn't always go our way. Life doesn't always cooperate with our plans. In the Tetris game of life, we don't always get the pieces that we were hoping to get.

Beyond Pleasure: Joy and Contentment

So here's the thing. Buddhism distinguishes between different dimensions of well-being. It's not just about pleasure. There are actually three dimensions worth exploring: happiness, joy, and contentment.

Happiness in the Buddhist sense is more like the joy that arises from meaningful activities or from positive experiences. It's connected to our values and to what we find meaningful in life.

Joy is something a bit different. Joy is the capacity to appreciate beauty and goodness wherever it's found. It's the capacity to delight in life, even amid challenges. It's not dependent on things always going well. Joy is more like an underlying sense of appreciation for being alive.

And then there's contentment. Contentment is a deep sense of okayness with how things are right now. It's accepting life as it unfolds, even when it's not going according to our preferences.

These three dimensions are quite different from the pleasure-based understanding of happiness that our culture emphasizes. And here's the good news: unlike the pleasure-based happiness that depends so much on external circumstances, these other dimensions—joy and contentment—can actually be cultivated.

The Role of Perspective

The Dalai Lama and Matthieu Ricard both emphasize something that I find really powerful: our capacity for happiness, joy, and contentment is much more dependent on our perspective and our mental habits than it is on external circumstances.

The Dalai Lama talks about how we can develop compassion deliberately. Matthieu Ricard discusses how meditation and certain mental practices can reshape our brain's default state toward what he calls "inner peace" or "inner contentment." The idea here is that happiness isn't just something that happens to us. It's something we can actively cultivate.

Mel Robbins, in The Let Them Theory, explores something really interesting. She talks about how much of our suffering comes from our resistance to things being the way they are. She encourages us to "let them" be—let people be who they are, let circumstances be what they are, and let ourselves be who we are.

What I'm taking from all three of these perspectives is this: our relationship with what we're experiencing matters far more than the experiences themselves.

Four Practices for Developing Happiness, Joy, and Contentment

So with that understanding, I want to share four practices that can help us develop these capacities. These are practical things we can do to shift our perspective and to cultivate a deeper, more stable sense of well-being.

Practice One: Cultivating Compassion

The first practice is about cultivating compassion, both for others and for ourselves. The Dalai Lama says something really powerful: "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion."

When we practice compassion, we're shifting our perspective away from self-centeredness toward connection with others. We're recognizing the shared humanity of everyone around us—their struggles, their hopes, their desire to be happy and to avoid suffering, just like us.

This doesn't have to be complicated. It can be as simple as, when you encounter someone, genuinely wishing them well. It can be noticing the suffering in others and responding with kindness. And equally important, it's extending that compassion to yourself when you're struggling or when you've made mistakes.

Practice Two: Mindfulness and Meditation

The second practice is meditation and mindfulness. This is the tool that Matthieu Ricard emphasizes as foundational. He's done a lot of research on how meditation literally changes our brains. It helps to develop neural pathways that support contentment and well-being.

Meditation doesn't have to be about achieving some special state. It's really about training your mind to be present and to observe your thoughts and emotions without judgment. Even twenty minutes a day of consistent meditation practice can make a real difference in your baseline sense of well-being.

Practice Three: Intentional Observation of Joy

The third practice is what I call intentional observation of joy. This is about deliberately pausing to notice the moments of beauty and goodness that are constantly available to us, even amid challenges.

It might be the warmth of the sun on your face. It might be a kind word from a friend. It might be the taste of your morning coffee. It might be noticing the way light filters through the trees. The world is full of these moments. The practice is simply to pause and let yourself genuinely appreciate them rather than rushing past them.

When we practice this deliberately, we're training our attention to notice what's good, what's beautiful, what's worth appreciating. And this fundamentally shifts our default mood and our general sense of contentment.

Practice Four: Examining and Loosening Rigid Views

The fourth practice addresses our attachment to rigid views. This is a neat exercise that you can do.

Pick a specific view or belief that you hold strongly. This could be a view you have about yourself, about another person, or about life in general. Write it down. Then challenge yourself to write three possible alternative perspectives that could also be true. Try to make these alternatives genuinely plausible.

For example, if I have the belief that my coworker is lazy and doesn't care about work, that's my belief, right? The alternatives might be: maybe my coworker is struggling with personal issues that I don't know about. Or perhaps my coworker just has different priorities and working styles than mine. Or maybe my coworker is saving all their energy for something more important happening in their life right now—maybe something at home.

So now I've got these alternative views. Here's the important part: the goal isn't to evaluate and decide which one is right or which one is true. That's not the goal. The goal is to practice holding multiple perspectives simultaneously—to develop cognitive flexibility rather than cognitive rigidity.

You start to entertain the possibility that any of those could be true. "I don't know for sure which one is true, but I'm going to get more comfortable with the uncertainty. It seems like maybe they're lazy, but maybe there's more to it." You're just holding more space for alternate scenarios.

When you do this, notice how that mental flexibility creates space for possible new understandings. But more importantly, it reduces the unnecessary suffering that's caused by our attachment to a single interpretation having to be true.

If I believe they're lazy and they don't care about work, then everything I do with that person is now filtered through that narrative. And it's my attachment to the truthfulness of that one view that causes a lot of unnecessary suffering. By practicing this exercise, I'm training myself to hold space for other possible scenarios.

The Way Forward

So now, to wrap things up on today's exploration of happiness, joy, and contentment, I do want to emphasize this: these aren't destinations that we arrive at once and for all. It's not like, "Okay, now I've arrived at joy." Rather, consider these as skills that we develop through consistent practice, moment by moment, day by day.

Remember, the Buddhist approach to happiness isn't about achieving a state where we never experience difficulty or negative emotions. That's not realistic. Life entails difficulty. That's the first of the Four Noble Truths. In life, we will continue to experience difficulties. We're going to continue getting Tetris pieces that we didn't want or weren't expecting.

This is about developing a mind that is capable of holding all of life's experiences—the pleasant and the painful, the beautiful and the challenging—and holding these with greater equanimity, greater perspective, and greater compassion.

Remember this: joy and contentment aren't the absence of difficulty. They're the presence of a more skillful and wise relationship with whatever it is that we're experiencing. That's echoed over and over in these teachings. We're not trying to change our emotions. We're trying to change our relationship with our emotions.

And I'll leave you with that quote from the Dalai Lama that captures the essence of what I'm trying to convey today: "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion."

Think about that.

Your Invitation This Week

This week, I invite you to notice the moments of joy that are available even amid difficulty. Notice when you're causing yourself unnecessary suffering because of your rigid expectations or your attempts to control what cannot be controlled.

Remember that your capacity for joy and contentment isn't dependent on external circumstances. It's a skill that you can cultivate regardless of what life brings your way.

That's all I have to share with you today. Thank you for joining me in this exploration.

If you found value in today's topic, consider sharing this episode with someone who might benefit from it. If you want to learn more about our community or how you can support the work I'm doing with the podcast, visit secularbuddhism.com to learn more.

As always, thank you for listening. Until next time.

For more about the Secular Buddhism Podcast and Noah Rasheta's work, visit secularbuddhism.com