The Art of Eating a Sandwich and 3 Easy Steps to Happiness

Today I am tempting you with a challenge. A challenge that if done correctly will result with an increase of happiness in your life.

The first step will be to either make yourself a meal or go to your local cafe or restaurant and buy yourself something delicious to eat. For the example of this challenge, lets assume that you bought a tasty sandwich. The only difference between eating this wonderful sandwich and eating a sandwich of the past is that you are going to eat this sandwich slower than you have ever eaten a sandwich before.

I am getting hungry even thinking about how good this is going to taste.

Once you sit down with your sandwich and maybe a cup of tea, I want you to attempt the first goal of the challenge: slow down.  It's simple.

Slow your movements and pay attention to every little movement that your body makes as you prepare your table to eat. Notice your leg movements, arm movements, the blinking of your eyes, the sounds you hear with your ears and the beating of your heart.

This is harder than it sounds as we get wrapped up in our minds and are always in a hurry. When we are in a hurry we pay little attention to our body and that makes it hard to appreciate our good health.

You are now ready for second part of the challenge: breathe.

Now I would like you to pay close attention to your breathing patterns. Breathe in slowly and breathe out slowly. Continue to repeat the breathing patterns for at least three in-breaths and three out-breaths. At first this may be a little difficult to follow as your mind will want to wonder and think about other issues besides your breathing, but breathing is the foundation of our existence and we should not be too busy to pay attention to it as often as possible; it will help you become in touch with what you are doing and assist in the first challenge of slowing down.

Now integrate slowing down and breathing in to one act.

Now that you are ready I want you to slowly pick up your mouth-watering sandwich and look at it. What do you see? You may see bread, lettuce, tomatoes, onions and cheese, among other ingredients. But is this all you see? Where do these ingredients come from? How are they sustained?

Remember to move slowly and breathe.

When you look at the bread, you now see grain and seeds that make the dough along with the water, the people that helped gathered those ingredients and the people who helped bake the bread. You can now envision the process of the kitchen being built and the people who helped build it.

What about the vegetables? You can see the lettuce and tomatoes that were picked in the garden, the people who laughed during that very process and the people who packaged those vegetables and loaded them on the truck. You can now also see the delivery man who delivered them to cafe that you are eating in right now and the smile he gave when he dropped them off.

But how is this all possible?

When we think about how all of this is possible we simply need to look no further than the elements and nature of this universe. The water that flows down our rivers, in our oceans and the snow that falls on our snow-capped mountains comes from the clouds and participates in a process of recycling a life source. The water in the rivers, lakes and oceans heat up, evaporates, vaporizes and rises in the atmosphere where it condenses, travels slowly around the planet where it drops once again in the form of rain, snow or hail back in to our rivers, lakes and oceans. From there, the water leads to our homes and kitchens where it then mixed with the dough to make the bread in our sandwich.

Slowly breathe.

All of this is done within a universal effort in seemingly perpetual fashion. You should feel grateful for this.

Now back to your sandwich: time to eat! As you take your first bite chew your food and absorb all the wonderful flavors and savor the moment. This is essentially what the entire purpose of the challenge is: savoring the moment. Now try and continue to eat you sandwich with this same type of mentality with every single bite.

As you ponder this notion I would like you to consider the benefits of living your entire life the same way you eat this sandwich. It would be an extremely difficult task to continue at every moment, but even if you integrate it into your lifestyle as regular as possible you will find greater happiness and become more optimistic as well as having a better understanding of your surroundings. When beginning to understand the entirety of what must come together for this sustained life, you will begin to see how many different factors come together and may find more appreciation for the little things once you slow down and breathe.

By following these three simple steps:

1. Slowing down - by relaxing and being mindful of your body in its entirety and how it functions
2. Breathing - concentrating for as long as possible and regularly on your in-breath and out-breath
3. Repeating steps 1 and 2! - by simply following step one and step two and repeating them as much as possible you can begin to savor what is happening in the present moment, which is the only time in which life is available.

One of my favorite Zen philosophers, Alan Watts said that Zen is as simple as, "When you are hungry: eat.  When you are tired: sleep."  We are so often distracted by other things that we forget to become present and enjoy the things that we are doing in its entirety and feeling the present moment.

At least for this sandwich, we won't.

Wishing you the best.

Book Review: The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

With a unique style of writing, a variety of choice words and some hilarious and interesting scenarios leaves a highly entertaining and historic story in its wake. Jack Kerouac is a writer that I recently heard of because a band that I thoroughly enjoy, Railroad Earth, was named after a short story written by Kerouac and brought to my attention by a vendor in Pike Place Market in Seattle as I wondered aimlessly with a Railroad Earth t-shirt on.

Essentially, The Dharma Bums, written in the 1950's, which closely resembles the life of Kerouac starts in San Francisco with a group of young men (who famously in real life become known as the beat generation) passing around a jug of wine performing their poetry to crowds at a bar when Ray (Kerouac) began to discuss with his best friend, Japhy, about Japhy's friend, Warren Coughlin:

...Warren Coughlin a hundred and eighty pounds of poet meat, who was advertised by Japhy (privately in my ear) as being more than meets the eye.

"Who is he?"

"He's my friend from up in Oregon, we've known each other for a long time. At first you think he's slow and stupid but actually he's a shining diamond. You'll see. Don't let him cut you to ribbons. He'll make the top of your head fly away, boy, with a few choice words."

These types of clever interactions between Ray and possibly my favorite character I have encountered through books or television, Japhy, are bound to keep the reader entertained.

The book continues with drunk nights amongst friends shouting haiku's in the hills of northern California overlooking the Pacific ocean, multiple cross-country trips traveling via hitch-hiking and train hoping, mountain climbing and finally ending in the secluded mountains of Washington State.

Kerouac seems to constantly be highlighting how living simply is a virtue:

"...he means that's the attitude for the Bard, the Zen Lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system or work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to the mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier..."

Kerouac later describes the cabin of Japhy outside of San Francisco on a large property with multiple cabins and also the setting of some interesting parties:

On the door was a board with Chinese inscriptions on it; I never did find out what it meant: probably "Mara stay away" (Mara the Tempter). Inside I saw the beautiful simplicity of Japhy's way of living, neat, sensible, strangely rich without a cent having been spent on the decoration. Old clay jars exploded with bouquets of flowers picked around the yard. His books were neatly stacked in orange crates. The floor was covered with inexpensive straw mats. The walls, as I say, were lined with burlap, which is one of the finest wallpapers you can have, very attractive and nice smelling. Japhy's mat was covered with a thin mattress and a Paisley shawl over that, and at the head of it, neatly rolled for the day, his sleeping bag. Behind burlap drapes in a closet his rucksack and junk put away from sight. From the burlap wall hung beautiful prints of old Chinese silk painting and maps of Marin County and northwest Washington and various poems he'd written and just stuck on a wall for anybody to read.

I look forward to reading more from Kerouac and hope and expect to find stories that provide insight in alternate ways of living compared to the popular way of consumption. The prompting of the self debate on when is enough actually enough is a topic that consumes my thought quite often and I believe that you can find a balance of purchasing quality products that you actually need and cutting the unnecessary junk that fills our garages and leads to countless hours of unnecessary stress at work. We truly can live rich like Japhy, by putting more thought into what surrounds us, and actually spend close to nothing and fall asleep with a relaxed smile.

Kerouac also brings to light the notion of being who you truly are. Collective thought in society can be quite imposing at times and living a life that causes constant internal conflict due to conforming to social norms can be burdensome and stressful. Kerouac asks us to embrace who we are, dress like it, act like it, live life to the fullest and give a little thought to the decisions we make and try doing so without unnecessary attachments.

The beautiful part of being alive is being ourselves.

Today, my friends, was A Positive Day.

Stephen DeMent

Book Review: You Are Here by Thich Nhat Hahn

Just when I thought that Thich Nhat Hahn, or simply, Thay, could not be any more credible in my eyes, I found out that he was personally nominated by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the late 1960's for the Nobel Peace Prize Award; That is quite the person to recognize and admire your work related to peace activism that they personally hand-write the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Norway to nominate you. A recent book from Thay is titled, You are Here, and focuses on savoring the present moment while living as free and as peaceful as possible.

Throughout this book and many of Thay's books and lectures, he uses metaphors brilliantly relating philosophy and nature. When he does so it reminds me of taking a mathematical problem and inserting your computations into a seemingly difficult equation and finding out after verifying your work that you surprisingly got the correct answer. One of my favorite metaphors is when he compares emotions to clouds in the sky. Clouds will surface and be present for a short period of time and then slowly disappear. Emotions are exactly the same as they arise and similarly can be very powerful, but just as clouds they will shortly disappear. Such notions can be liberating in the sense that by understanding the nature of difficult emotions, we can reduce the negative impact and free ourselves from the burdens they cause by understanding that they will surface and then disappear because they are impermanent.

Impermanence is another major topic of this book, as well. Many of us tend to believe that it is a bad thing, but Thay has a different perspective when he states:

"When you look at the nature of things with concentration, you discover that they are all impermanent. Everything is constantly changing. Nothing has a permanent identity. This impermanence is not a negative thing. If things were not impermanent, growth would be impossible, and manifestation would be impossible. If things were not impermanent, you could not have children, and your children would never grow up. When you sow corn seeds, they would never be able to grow. They would remain corn seeds forever."

He then later adds: "Long live impermanence!"

We can begin to discover such notions of impermanence, which can lead to a deep-rooted happiness through the practice of mindfulness. This is mountain of a task as many of us mistakenly live our lives by focusing on the fruits of our labor. In other words, we focus too heavily on what our actions will lead to and not enough on savoring the actions themselves. Thay helps us savor the moment and guides us to the present moment by doing what should be so simple: following our breathe.

Breathing is the fundamental basis for our existence, but since we are so busy in our lives we tend to forget it is even happening. It reminds me of a forgotten band member whose work does not make the most noise, but holds everything together. Thay says we can enter the present moment, among other ways, by relaxing while sitting or walking and focusing on our breathing. This may be difficult at first, so he offers such ideas as reciting the following slowly to help:

In; out
Deep; slow
Calm; ease
Smile; release

Thay also gives a variety of other poems or sentences that contribute to this practice. I challenge you to try this for as long as possible. It takes serious training to pay attention to our breathes for long periods as our minds tries to occupy the moment, but this is a giant step in freeing the mind and finding peace. What is so important that you cannot offer 5 to 10 minutes for yourself daily?

Other ways to help enjoy the moment are simply to slow down! As you walk slowly and pay attention to your breathing, also pay attention to what is going on with your body and focus on those energy fields. Focus on each step you take by channeling the energy and impact of each step; put everything into each step, but stay relaxed. It is quite the experiment and you should begin to feel alive in that moment with more mindfulness of what is going on within and around you.

I will shortly be reviewing another book heavily related to this one titled, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle in the near future, but I believe I have gone on enough, plus I think I am ready for bed. I would like also leave you with one more quote from Thay when he says: "Life is only available in the present moment." The past no longer contains life and the future has yet to contain life. I feel that once you truly touch this notion and give yourself the time to breathe, you will in fact realize that You Are Here.

Thank you!

P.S. A recommended YouTube video from Thay if you wish:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZKrl5n79hY

Stephen DeMent

"You are what your deep, driving desire is.

As your desire, so is your will.

As you will, so is your deed.

As your deed is, so is your destiny."

-Brihadaranyaka

Taming the Tiger Within

So after looking for this book for a month after finishing it, I found it hiding in a jacket that I rarely wear. Taming the Tiger Within by Thich Nhat Hanh, one of my favorite current writers/teachers, is meant mostly to deal with emotions such as anger.

Taming the Tiger Within offers just under 300 pages with only a paragraph or sentence per page addressing topics on how to transform anger to compassion and also how to transform fear into love, which relates to relationships or just daily life. I strongly recommend this quick read for those like myself, who hates being angry.

Below are some quotes from the book:

"Recognize and embrace your anger when it manifests itself. Care for it with tenderness rather than suppressing it."

"Inside every one of us is a garden, and every practitioner has to go act to their garden and take care of it. Maybe in the past, you left it untended for a long time. You should know exactly what is going on in your own garden, and try to put everything in order. Restore the beauty; restore the harmony in your garden. If it is well tended, many people will enjoy your garden."

"The reason we are foolish enough to make ourselves suffer and make the other person suffer is that we forget we and the other person are impermanent. Someday, when we die, we will lose all out possessions, our power, our family, everything. Our freedom, peace, and joy in the present moment is the most important thing we have. But without an awakened understanding of impermanence, it is not possible to be happy."

"When you try to make each other suffer, the result is an escalation of suffering on both sides. Both of you need compassion and help. Neither of you needs punishment."

"If you allow compassion to spring from your heart, the fire of anger will die right away."

"To meditate means to be invited on a journey of looking deeply in order to touch our true nature and to recognize that nothing is lost."

Hope you enjoyed.

Stephen DeMent

Light of the Bhagavata

Well, maybe it's not the complete reason why I have be misled throughout different types of situations in life, yet, maybe it is.

After browsing through a used book store I came across a hardback book (which a few minutes earlier told myself I hate hardbacks and won't read) with some cartoon-style art on the cover that caught my attention. The bumper sticker "distracted by shiny objects" applies here.

Light of the Bhagavata was written by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada and relates text from a Hindu scripture, Bhagavat Gita (or simply, Gita), with his own commentary to help in comparing the autumn season with a parallel teaching. The reason this book was written is quite unique, but feel free to do that research on your own if you're interested.

I am close to finishing this book (only 140 pages with animation), but thought I would simply give you the first page to read for yourself. It definitely captivated me--which I love when a first page has that affect. It states:

"The serene sky, listlessly expansive, is compared to the Absolute Truth. The living entities are truths manifested in relation with the modes of material nature. The deep-bluish cloud covers only an insignificant portion of the limitless sky, and this fractional covering is compared to the quality of ignorance, or forgetfulness of the real nature of the living being. A living entity is as pure as the limitless sky. He becomes covered by the cloud of forgetfulness, however, in his tendency for enjoying the material world. Because of this quality, called tamas (ignorance), he considers himself different from the Absolute Whole and forgets his purity, which is like that of the clear sky. This forgetfulness gives rise to separatism in false ego. Thus the forgetful living entities, individually, and collectively, makes sounds like thundering clouds: 'I am this,' 'It is ours,' 'It is mine.' This mood of false separatism is called the quality of rajas, and it gives rise to the creative force for separate lordship over the mode of tamas. The flash of lightning is the only beam of hope that can lead one to the path of knowledge, and therefore it is compared to the mode of sattva, or goodness."

I read that quite a few times to let it sink in. My commentary is not needed. I hope you enjoyed it and assume at least at some point in life we have all related to it.

I did promise you a book review on my last post, but since I gave that book to a friend in Texas, it's not gonna happen! I do, however, have a few ideas and hope to post something soon.

Enjoy the day!

Stephen DeMent

Short Story of the Day

Life from my point of view:

An American businessman took a vacation to a small coastal Mexican village on doctor's orders. Unable to sleep after an urgent phone call from the office the first morning, he walked out to the pier to clear his head. A small boat with just one fisherman had docked, and inside the boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of the fish.

"How long did it take you to catch them? the American asked.

"Only a little while," the Mexican replied in surprisingly good English.

"Why don't you stay out longer and catch more fish?" the American then asked.

"I have enough to support my family and give a few to friends," the Mexican said as he unloaded them into a basket.

"But...What do you do with the rest of your time?"

The Mexican looked up and smiled. "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, Julia, and stroll into the village each evening, where I sip wine and play the guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, senor."

The American laughed and stood tall. "Sir, I am a Harvard M.B.A. and can help you. You should spend more time fishing, and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. In no time, you could buy several boats with the increased haul. Eventually, you would have a fleet of fishing boats."

He continued, "Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you would sell directly to the consumers, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village, of course, and move to Mexico City, then to Los Angeles, and eventually New York City, where you could run your expanding enterprise with proper management."

The Mexican fisherman then asked, "But, senor, how long would this take?"

To which the American replied, "15-20 years. 25 tops."

"But then what senor?"

The American laughed and said, "That's the best part. When the time is right, you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions."

"Millions, senor? Then what?"

"Then you would retire and move to a small coastal fishing village, where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with you kids, take siesta with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos..."

From The 4-hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss

Stephen DeMent