The Secret of Happiness

18.9.2017

Matthieu Ricard, a French Buddhist monk, has been called the ‘happiest man alive’. Those claims no doubt embarrass Ricard, and they are probably hyperbolic, but they emerge from 12 year long research study into meditation and compassion, carried out by Doctor Richard Davidson and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin.

 

What is Ricard’s secret and how can we learn from his practice to lead a happier life ourselves?

 

The science of happiness

Ricard had a good upbringing (his father was the famous French philosopher Jean-François Revel) and he completed a PhD in molecular genetics at the prestigious Pasteur Institute in Paris. But rather than going on to develop his scientific career, he became interested in the idea of happiness and wanted to explore this more from a first-person perspective – in other words, in his own life.

 

He moved to the Himalayas, became a Buddhist monk, and (amongst other things) engaged long periods of meditation practice.

 

During the study in Wisconsin, MRI imaging was used to get some understanding of what was going on in Ricard’s brain. The scientists, for example, asked him to meditate on compassion while they used sensors to monitor his brain activity.

 

What they found was that, compared ‘normal’ brain’s Ricard’s brain waves were far more interlinked with consciousness, attention, learning, and memory. His left prefrontal cortex, whose activation is linked to happiness, showed unusually high levels of activity and his patterns of brain-activation showed almost none of the activity associated with negative emotions.

 

We can’t all meditate for 12 hours a day, and wouldn’t all want to be Buddhist monks. but we can learn a lot from Ricard’s mind-set.

The struggle to be happy

In his Ted Talk, Ricard said:

 

“No-one wakes up and decides to suffer the whole day...we all innately want to be happy though negative thoughts invade our minds...Consciousness is like a mirror that allows all images to rise up in it.”

 

By this he means negative and positive thoughts and feelings can emerge at will. Underneath our more superficial patterns of thinking and feeling is another kind of consciousness. We can change our mind-set by touching on that state. Meditation and mind training can help do this.

 

Research has shown that the structures of the brain change with repeated meditation. After as little as 8 weeks of practice, for example, there is increased grey matter concentrations in areas of the brain help us deal with stress, allow us to empathise, provide us with a sense of self and help us to process memory.

Mind training

According to Ricard, mind training works on the premise that “two opposite mental factors cannot happen at the same time.” For example, we can’t be loving and kind towards others and experience hatred as well. Positive feelings and emotions are “antidotes to the emotions that are destructive to our inner well-being.”

 

He suggests that such simple and beneficial practices could be much more widely used to improve states of happiness and wellbeing:

 

“We spend surprisingly little time taking care of what matters most; the way our mind functions which is ultimately what determines the quality of our experiences.”

 

To find out more about how mindfulness can help create higher levels of wellbeing at work, contact rachel@mindfulnessworks.com or call (+44) 01223 750660.