Claire Conger

I decided I needed to expand my horizons, so I paid $45 to go to Spirit Rock Meditation Center to hear Buddhist Sylvia Boorstein speak on happiness. Actually, she was selling her book Happiness Is an Inside Job.

The whole experience was not what I expected. In the first place, the room was full of people sitting in chairs. (It was recommend that attendees bring cushions—I expected to sit on the floor.) I found a chair in the back where I could sit what we used to call Indian style. I always thought that was for American Indians, but now, taking yoga, I know better.

So I sat in the back between two open windows gazing out on the greenery that surrounds Spirit Rock. It was breezy and cold—meaning about 50 degrees Fahrenheit, this is California. I was cozy in my jacket and happy happy happy for the little bits of air blowing in through the windows. I gazed at the trees tossing to and fro and thought about my friends out riding their bikes in the woods as I listened to Ms Boorstein.

For me, though, this conference wasn’t about happiness at all. It was about overcoming adversity, about how magical it is when someone is terminally ill or escapes a hurricane. It sets right your priorities and provides practice at returning to mindfulness. All good, but I was looking for something more.

Ms Boorstein has some effective ways of getting across Buddhist concepts, for example she calls it the “uh-oh” moment when something goes wrong and you flood with emotion and are suddenly confused. I don’t usually realize that I flood with emotion—I was trained to be rational and so I often don’t recognize emotions when they happen and I react unskillfully.
I was happy enough listening to Ms Boorstein for about an hour. Then a guy in front of me suggested the window be closed a bit, and I said I thought other people might want it open. I figured people in the middle of the room must appreciate the windows open. Who wants to sit in a stuffy room?

About 20 minutes later a woman came back from five rows up and unceremoniously slammed shut one window and just about completed the job on another when I stopped her. That’s the kind of person who needs to go to a seminar on happiness.

I sat there another five minutes or so, but without my breeze from the open windows and knowing my friends were happy and free outside bombing around on their bikes, I could no longer stand it. I got up and left. Happiness is an outside job.

I picked Happiness Is an Inside Job at the library and I found it to be reasonably readable. I particularly like her explanation about confusing pity with compassion and indifference with equanimity.

Ms Boorstein’s description of exercises on the “uh-oh” moment and the five immediate emotions: desire, anger, fatigue, fear, and doubt is also instructive. Most people, she says, tend toward anger or fear.

She describes herself as a recovering fretter and says she worries much less that she used to. That’s not a surprise, given that now Ms Boorstein’s books make her a reasonably famous published author and wealthy enough with her husband, Seymore, to own a second house in France.

I’d worry less, too, Buddhist training or not.