Text Credit: Shibul Pavithran 

Matthieu Ricard, a 71-year-old Tibetan Buddhist monk, has been hailed as the ‘world’s happiest man’ by scientists. Born in France, he grew up in an intellectual atmosphere – his father was a renowned philosopher and his mother a painter. Ricard went on to earn a Ph.D degree in molecular genetics, but left it all to become a monk in the Himalayas. And has been practicing meditation everyday from the age of 20.

He participated in a 12-year-long brain study that was conducted by Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist from the University of Wisconsin. The study’s focus was on the positive effects of meditation and compassion on the brain, and it was found that when Ricard meditated, his brain felt exceptionally light.

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Take out 15 minutes from the day, sit down alone, and think happy thoughts. Yes, it’s as simple as that. Just train your mind to not think of sad or negative thoughts during this time. Consciously, focus on positive thoughts. It might be difficult in the beginning but gradually you can train your mind as you want. Nobody is an expert, when they start.. all good things take time.

This sounds oh-so-simple that we just might be tempted to dismiss it as one of these preachy mantras we all hear often but don’t have the time and patience to. Our mind is so preoccupied with a zillion things that we may find it easy to order a pizza but wouldn’t find 15 minutes for ourselves, so that we can be happy. After running on routines for sometime, our mind becomes fearful of experimentation. That’s the cause and culture of conditioning that we suffer from. Note: It is a self made condition.

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Training the mind is a very easy task, if you really try 

The human mind is a wonderful organ. It has limitless potential and is much stronger than we think it to be. It is possible to train it to do anything, even be happy. Matthieu says, “With mental training, we can always bring our level of happiness to a different level It’s like running. If I train, I might run a marathon. I might not become an Olympic champion, but there is a huge difference between training and not training. So why should that not apply to the mind?… There is a view that benevolence, attention, emotional balance and resilience are skills that can be trained. So if you put them all together, you could say that happiness is a skill that can be trained.”

Have a look at what Matthieu had to say when asked about happiness…

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