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just would have liked a bit more direction - a book that has been helping me is Live Like A Fruit Fly - also on amazon
Love, compassion, and empathy are positive, while hate and anger are negative.Happiness comes from having compassion and empathy for others and for yourself. For instance, suffering allows one to empathize with other people who also suffer and feel a moment of intimacy with the world. We do this by developing our positive emotions and qualities and letting go of our negative ones. For that matter, what are happiness and suffering.Happiness for the Dalai Lama is a calm, imperturbable state of mind while suffering is a disturbed state of mind.But happiness does not just happen, the mind must be trained to be happy. Everyone wants to be happy and no one wants to suffer. Many of the lessons are given in a Buddhist context but Cutler justifies every idea with results from psychiatric research. Another way to alleviate suffering is to give it meaning. Best to accept a moment of suffering and move on, but being careful not to mull over it for too long to the point where it interferes with our lives.
Most of us can walk but we'd be discouraged at the mere thought of having to walk 100 kilometers. He his an exiled Tibetan Buddhist monk, I am an unemployed Canadian banker but as different as we are we both want to be happy and we both want to avoid suffering, and because we share these two traits we can empathize with each other and with each single person on the planet. But how to achieve happiness and how to relieve oneself of suffering. Achieving happiness isn't much more complicated than that, but that doesn't make the task easy. We are all different, says the Dalai Lama. Suffering is unavoidable in life and repressing it makes it worse, for instance when mourning the loss of a loved one. Happiness is simple to achieve, but it requires repeated effort.The real author of this book is Howard Cutler but the Dalai Lama is his inspiration and the primary source of much of the material. We are left with what Cutler calls Basic Spirituality.Vincent Poirier, Tokyo
By cultivating an inner discipline, you can undergo a dramatic transformation in your outlook and approach to living, drawing on inner resources to attain a greater sense of joy and happiness in daily life. It offers concrete techniques and practices that help to overcome anxiety, depression, anger, and loneliness.
All you need is a little compassion--an idea that is at the heart of the tenth anniversary edition of //The Art Of Happiness: A Handbook for Living// by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.D.
The pursuit of true happiness is not as hard or as illusive as it seems. Cutler come together to provide a systematic approach to achieve greater happiness in real-world terms.
Updated with new material and a strategy by which to pursue it, the book continues to spread a message that genuine happiness is an achievable goal. ||Integrating the best of the East and the West--age-old Buddhist principles and practices with contemporary Eastern psychology and science--the Dalai Lama and Dr.
With a clear-eyed and accessible approach, the Dalai Lama teaches that real and lasting happiness can be obtained not by bettering one's outward circumstances, but by training the mind through daily practice and dedication. ||If Facebook's newly launched and wildly fluctuating Gross National Happiness Index is any indication (yes, they did actually launch a thing called the GNHI), it seems the updated version of //The Art Of Happiness: A Handbook for Living// (which stayed for two years on //The New York Times// bestsellers list when it was first released ten years ago) is perhaps more relevant than ever.Reviewed by Dominique James
The 10th anniversary edition of The Art of Happiness is a winner, updated with new material by the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler and offering a message that happiness is attainable. Chapters tell how to get it and are based on a series of conversations held over many years on the purpose of life and the way to find happiness in it. General collections and spirituality libraries will find this a 'must'.
Visit my Blog if you like my review: [.].The Art of Happiness is a book born from the interviews of the author (a psychiatric named Dr Howard C. Cutler) with his Holiness the Dalai Lama.The author tries to fill the whole book with some (mostly brilliant) Dalai Lama's declarations, made in their interviews and in his public appearances.It's true that there are some interesting thoughts in the book (mainly in the first part: The Purpose of Live), but the rest of the book has a lack of intensity.The Dalai Lama seems a very interesting person, but the author doesn't have the ability to suck the juice of those declarations, and the best part of the book are transcriptions of the own Dalai Lama's words.I don't recommend the reading of this book, however, some Dalia Lama's ideas are excellent.
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