Jedi Mind Training 101

Who can forget the epic scenes in Star Wars of Luke undergoing his training to become a Jedi?

Through his training, he learns that controlling his mind is the route to making a positive impact on the world; today, you’re going to learn the same thing! We’ll take a different path (unfortunately, there are no light sabers) but with the exact same goal: what are the steps you can take within you to help make the world a better place?

True flourishing, based on my research, comes from the conscious cultivation of one’s self into a loving, wise being, and from the application of that self to doing good in the world. Without the fulfillment of both sides, we are incomplete.

Part of the struggle I have with the online happiness conversation is that it is so overweighted towards the first part: there is a constant chorus of ‘me, me, me’, with most people chiming in about even more ways to focus on your self. And of course, the self does matter, and our journey to true flourishing often starts there. But to me, the self matters mostly because of what it is capable of: making a positive impact on the world. A focus on our self is correlated with fluctuating happiness that rises and falls based up on pleasures being handed to you; not sustainable, in my opinion.

Society is obsessed with one part of the equation: the ‘feeling good’ part. We’re missing the 'doing well’ part. And we’ve forgotten that the best way to feel good is to do well!

This week, I want to teach you how to cultivate yourself and specifically, your mental state, to help you move closer to a state of flourishing.

The Great Myth of External Happiness

Have you ever had a moment in your life where you’ve gotten exactly what you wanted or worked very hard to achieve, and slowly looked around the room in what should be a celebratory moment, and realized that there was a hollow feeling inside of you, and had the dawning realization that this thing wouldn’t fix you or make you happy?

Me too.

We absorb society’s ideas about success, and particularly the ones that are magnified through our media, and we adopt them for our own. Subsequently, we invest enormous amounts of our precious energy into pursuing them, only to end up in the aforementioned spot, wondering why we’re not suddenly permanently, ecstatically happy having achieved what we were told would fix us and make us whole. And then usually, we decide that the goal wasn’t big enough, and find another one to fixate on… and so the endless treadmill runs on.

Part of what I want The New Happy to do is to challenge us to make our own definitions of success, to really critically prod the ones we’ve inherited, and create better ones, ones that work for us and for the world around us.

We mistakenly believe that an optimal existence in the world will make us happy forever, so we invest all our energy into making the circumstances of our external life fit our preferences. But it doesn’t work.

Many studies have shown that we believe that positive events in our life will make us happier than they actually do.

As the Dalai Lama once said, “If a man who has just moved into a luxury apartment on the hundredth floor of a brand new building is deeply unhappy, the only thing he’ll look for is a window to jump out of.”

Here’s the truth: happiness is only in very small part dependent on the external circumstances of our lives, accounting for approximately 10% of the variance in overall happiness. What does matter most? The intentional choices we make, including the choice we make of how we see the world.

(On top of this truth, we’re notoriously bad at predicting what will make us happy and what will make us unhappy. For example, when people are offered the chance at either cash or a shorter commute, they choose cash; when offered cash or a paid vacation, they choose cash; when offered cash or more free time, they choose cash. Unfortunately, shorter commutes, paid vacation, and free time are far, far likelier to make you happy than cash in hand.)

Taking Control of Your Consciousness

Your mental state is so important because it is the filter through which you see everything that happens to you.

Everything that happens to you in your life is processed through your consciousness. You can think of your consciousness like a filter overlaying on top of every single thought, feeling, experience, and moment in your life, influencing the way you perceive it.

Consciousness gives us the power to dream, imagine, create, innovate. If you’ve ever dreamed up a future for yourself, you know how to manage your consciousness. It also reflects reality back to us - though that reflection is not usually accurate.

It’s more like a funhouse mirror, distorting parts of the picture, making it clear enough to seem real enough to us, even though it’s not.

But the beautiful thing is that we can consciously change that filter. We just haven’t been taught how to do it.

One of the most important truths about happiness to learn is:

Control of consciousness determines quality of life.

The person who is controlled by the unpredictable flow of life cannot guarantee that they will flourish; but the person who controls their consciousness can, no matter what happens to them. The truth is that illness, suffering, loss, and despair will come for us all (if they haven’t already), and unless we are consciously training ourselves, we are not prepared for that moment. We allow society to tell us what rewards we should and should not pursue, and we build our lives around them, and when they fail to fulfill us, we don’t question what we’ve been told and instead strive for even more. While not all goals that society tells us to want are bad or unproductive, we must consciously choose the ones that work for us and that will contribute to our flourishing and the flourishing of other people around the world.

Choosing to take control of your consciousness is the path to power, fulfillment and freedom. Just like a Jedi.

“If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them.

And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.”

Marcus Aurelius

Train Your Consciousness

You can start right now.

There are so many pathways to training your consciousness, some of which you might have tried or even be ardent fans of: yoga, meditation, breathing, art, creation, sports, other immersive hobbies, religious devotion… the list goes on. We all must find the paths that work best for ourselves.

What I’ll be teaching you today is how to train your consciousness to be happy, to release yourself from the tyranny of external levers and rewards.

First, let’s start by examining the two major mental states that you are deeply familiar with. There are positive mental states (when you are feeling good) and negative mental states (when you are feeling bad.)

Positive mental states involve emotions like love, compassion, empathy, joy, curiosity, or interest.

Negative mental states are characterized by anger, hatred, disgust, envy, despair, or apathy.

We can do a quick test on these mental states to understand how they change our way of being in the world.

How do you behave when you’re in a positive mental state?

You are generous. You are kind. You forgive people more easily. You are open to possibilities. You are joyful. You offer support. You connect. People want to be around you. You are more giving. You see other humans as like you, people who want to be happy, and you strive to help them and support them.

Positive states lead to positive real-world outcomes like connection and compassionate action.

(The opposite is true, too. Those who are in the sway of negative emotions often cause terrible harm to the world, in small and enormous ways. Reducing our negative mental states can ensure we at least do no harm.)

We have an imperative to cultivate positive states within us, and to offer them to the world.

Tending To Your Mental Garden

I’ve previously written about how to cultivate more love in your life, and this practice is similar. In case you missed it, here is the background science from that post on the power of our brains to change:

All of us possess something called a negativity bias: it is the tendency of our brains to focus on the things that are negative in life and to be excessively impacted by negative experiences of fear, anxiety, and frustration.

Negative events carry more weight in your mind than positive ones. It takes many, many successes to offset one failure; many, many gestures of kindness and love to outweigh one rejection.

When you are not doing anything in particular, your brain shifts into the ‘default network’, whose primary function is to constantly scan your environment for possible threats. This happens at a background level, of which you have no conscious awareness.

The negativity bias works hard to keep you out of the present moment: it drives you to ruminate on the past and what went wrong, and to anticipate the future challenges and losses that you might face.

Because of all of this, it fosters negative emotions like sadness, guilt, shame, anger, and depression.

Your brain’s design wants you to do two things: first, to view yourself as separate from others and the world; and second, to make you grasp for stability and solidity in a world that is always changing. These predispositions do not lead to happiness, but away from it.

That’s the bad news. However, we do have a secret weapon which we can use to battle the negativity bias.

One of the very most important research findings of all time (to me, at least!) was the discovery that our brains change frequently throughout our lives, and more importantly, that we have the ability to direct the way that they change. This is called neuroplasticity.

The mental activity that happens inside of your brain when you think and engage creates new neural structures, which then change the way that Future You thinks and engages. Neurons that fire together, wire together. For example, if you constantly see the world as a place where you are victimized, over time, it will become more and more automatic, wearing a victim ‘groove’ into your brain, until you immediately slide into a victim mindset with every thought.

If we make the decision to cultivate positive states and to minimize our negative states, and take responsibility for doing so, we can slowly but surely take control of our well-being.

There are a few practices that you can start to do, wherever you are, to maximize positive states. I want to share the easiest and most joyful one with you today.

Turn a positive moment into a positive experience

Quite often, we let positive moments pass us by, unremarked upon, and we take so much goodness for granted every day.

For example, many of us take for granted the opportunity to exercise or to go for a walk to meet a friend. My partner, who hasn’t been able to walk or exercise for six months, would do just about anything right now to be able to go for a walk.

I was mentally complaining about having to workout the other day, and suddenly remembered this practice. I stopped in my tracks, appalled about how much I was taking for granted, even with his pain as a reminder right in front of me.

Does that change how you think about your walk to work tomorrow? Will you savor in the moment, thinking about how lucky you are to be able to move? It did for me. Everything is dependent on our context.

There are always good things happening. Always. We just don’t notice them.

Here is the practice:

The first task is to pay attention and to actively look for the good things. Look at the way that the sun shines on a building, the way a dog delicately hops over puddles, the feeling of a warm bath, the taste of a home cooked meal, the way that someone smiles at you, the touch of a hand. Notice the smallest moments of happiness, connection, and joy.

Once you’ve found one (and you’ll be quickly overwhelmed by how many there are in every day), your second task is to open to it, and really let it sink in to you. Savor it deeply. Try to make the moment last for at least 10 seconds, feeling it as long as possible.

What is happening in your brain as you do this? The longer you hold something in your awareness, and the more stimulating it is to your emotions, the more neurons that fire and wire together, leading to new neural pathways that will strengthen over time, making it even easier to embody this feeling of bliss and contentment over and over again. Eventually, through this practice, you turn this from a positive state (a temporary thing) into a trait (a part of who you are.) The small daily work here makes Future You’s happiness far more effortless.

The final task in this process is to imagine this experience coming within your body. I like to use the image of a little jewel coming into my heart or sun shining on me.

The aforementioned negativity bias makes it necessary for us to do practices like these if we want to be happy and fulfilled, because we are wired to be negative and to look for threats and manifestations of fears. By increasing our positive emotions, we’re changing our way of being in the world, as well as leading to incredible benefits for ourselves. Positive emotions have been shown to lead to healthier immune systems and cardiovascular systems, increase your resilience and optimism, and help to counteract past traumas.

These practices serve to enable the way that we behave in the world, too. They help us to grow our empathy and compassion for others, widening our perspective on who deserves to be happy until we see that, truly, every person deserves to be happy, safe, and fulfilled. And once we see that, we feel called to help make it so. That’s how you move to the second part of the equation, and that’s how you feel good and do good at the same time.

Every day, the small choices that you make to take in the good can have a truly meaningful impact on your life, your relationships, your work, and the way that you give to the world.

Let me know if you give it a try and how it goes!