A Better Sense of Happiness

There’s also the issue of the effort you put into that happiness. Is it worth it? Do you really get the happiness you want from it? What’s the cost of this happiness you’re pursuing?

You want to look at this balance sheet very carefully. One of the reasons we practice concentration is to gain a sense of the range of happiness, the range of well-being that the mind is capable of. For a lot of people, sitting and meditating is not easy. Almost everyone has hardships; the few people who don’t have hardships, as I’ve said many times, are like flowers that were ready for the Buddha to pick. We weren’t ready at the time, so we still have to struggle.

The Buddha was often clear about the fact that skillful practices can involve both pain and pleasure, and that unskillful practices can involve both pleasure and pain. You’ve got to look past the immediate pleasure and pain to sort out which kind of happiness, in the long term, is worth pursuing.

With every effort you make, you want to examine: What’s the amount of happiness you gain as a result?

Psychologists have noticed again and again—and not just psychologists, almost everyone has noticed this in other people—that we tend to overestimate certain pleasures, the ones we like to like. We dress them up for ourselves to make us want to go back to them again and again. Yet when you actually look at the direct experience of these things, there’s not much there.

So the Buddha wants you to get a better sense of what happiness is, what well-being is, what bliss is.

This reflection by Ajaan Geoff is from the Dhamma Talks Section, Meditation Series book, Meditations 8, “Examine Your Happiness.” (Also in audio format at, “Examine Your Happiness,” December 28, 2014.)