Over two years ago, I began a quest for happiness. I read, thought, wrote, spoke, and dreamt about happiness. With the support of the Baltimore Happiness Club, which I founded and coordinate, I worked through just about every major idea out there about how to be happy.
Happiness is a cool topic these days, and lots of people have ideas about how to achieve it, from the mystical (Eckhart Tolle) to the psychological (Martin Seligman) to the religious (Rabbi Zelig Pliskin), and just about every stop in between.
Along the way, I’ve used myself as a living laboratory, trying out techniques and doing whatever the various authors recommended to become happier (positive thinking, exercise, meditation, breathing, humor, diet, nature, self-awareness, mantra, complimenting others, you name it). As I discovered new approaches, I tried them out on myself and the long-suffering Happiness Club (is there an irony there?).
In short, all these approaches really do work to produce more happiness in everyday life. Rabbi Pliskin’s book, Gateway to Happiness is a treasure, an encyclopedic overview of anything you can think of that will make a person happy. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness practice is an excellent approach for combating anxiety and depression. The Dalai Lama’s Art of Happiness, based on both Tibetan Buddhism and modern research into the plasticity of the brain – yes, we can change the physical structure of our brains, and it’s not even all that hard to do – is a beautiful primer on happiness written by one of the world’s happiest people. Mathieu Ricard, officially the World’s Happiest Person, based on scans of his brain, tells us to meditate (the Tibetan way) to achieve real, lasting happiness. They’re all right, but they’re all also a bit short of the mark.
Somewhere along the way in my happiness journey, I stumbled upon the work of Richard Carlson. (Remember Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff?) His book, You Can Be Happy No Matter What, really spoke to me, and I listened to him reading it on CD over and over and over again. His ideas were somewhat different from everyone else’s, and I was intrigued as to where they came from. Doing a little research, I traced these ideas back through Roger Mills to Sydney Banks.
Sydney Banks, an uneducated Scottish gardener living in the Pacific Northwest, postulated that there is a paradigm of Three Principles underlying all of reality: Universal Mind, Universal Consciousness, and Universal Thought. The gist of it is that we create our psychological reality through thought, that our experience of life is not really based on outside events so much as on our thoughts about those events, rendering the context of our lives somewhat irrelevant to our level of happiness. We can experience reality only through thought; there’s no other way. But these thoughts, which are unavoidable, lead us astray much of the time and create much needless unhappiness and suffering. (I have a bumper sticker: “Don’t Believe Everything You Think.”) Amazingly, all feelings come from thought, so the emotions we trust so fervently are just as likely to be inaccurate and untruthful as the thoughts that source them! As Carlson so aptly puts it, “We do it to ourselves.”
Feelings actually are symptomatic of thought that’s gone wrong. Bad feelings are not natural to human beings. Happiness is. Believe it or not, our innate selves are joyful and happy – remember childhood? – and bad feelings are there to get our attention that we’re off track. It’s an incredible, brilliant process that’s rarely understood.
As an example: I’m at the dinner table with a group of people. I start feeling uncomfortable and think, “I don’t belong here with these people. As a matter of fact, they probably look down on me. Why on earth did I wear this dress? I’m way underdressed and don’t fit in here at all… etc.” It just goes from bad to worse, and pretty soon I’ve decided what everybody is thinking and can’t wait to leave. The feeling of uneasiness is by now acute discomfort bordering on depression.
What just happened? Did these people upset me? Not at all. It all started with a single thought, “I don’t belong here,” or some similar thought before that. Once I realize that the powerful feelings are coming not from the company but from my thoughts, I’m free to have other thoughts about the situation. For instance, I can say to myself, “I don’t have to compare myself to others; most likely, they don’t even notice my clothing. I wonder what this lady sitting next to me is all about. I’ll ask her how she’s enjoying the event.”
Once the negative thought is suspect, it loses its power over me and may even disappear entirely, taking the lousy feeling with it. It’s kind of magical, really, when you realize how the process works.
Imagine the potential for alleviating lashon hara! Once you know the problem isn’t “out there,” talking about another person is just irrelevant and purposeless, even boring. You don’t need to put someone down, because you no longer feel threatened by his or her possessions or accomplishments.
The Three Principles approach to happiness, compared to other approaches, is akin to treating the disease rather than the symptoms. Although we can never, nor would we want to, be rid of thoughts, we can raise our consciousness about the role of thought in creating our reality.
The freedom, the peace of mind, and the inner security that come from this consciousness are simply indescribable. It’s like finding the mother lode of happiness, the keys to the kingdom. One need never struggle with positive thinking, or spend hours meditating, or delve into one’s childhood in search of the source of our unhappiness. It’s all right there, in the moment – and changing moment to moment – just like life itself.
Rabbi Michel Twerski and Rebbetzin Faigie Twerski were introduced to the Three Principles approach to mental well being years ago, while trying to find an approach to treat the ills in their community. They formed the Twerski Wellness Institute, with the mission of propagating this knowledge among the Jewish people.
With the recent one-day seminar presented by Tzvi Werther of Twerski Wellness Institute in New York, Baltimore got a bonus: a new Twerski Wellness Institute branch in our own town. As with any new approach or awareness, a one-time presentation is probably not enough to make it stick; regular reinforcements are necessary. The Baltimore Happiness Club, which meets each Tuesday at the Enoch Pratt Library (across from Tov Pizza), from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m., provides a free, informal, drop-in forum for meeting with like-minded friendly people who are also on the Three Principles happiness journey. (There is also a Silver Spring Happiness Club for women, which meets monthly at a private residence. Email me for information.) Come try it out! We welcome new members to our lively interactive group. “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” With the Three Principles, you will know how to feed yourself with your own abundant happiness for the rest of your life.
Twerski Wellness Baltimore will be presenting seminars in the future at local venues by seasoned Three Principles presenters from all over the country. If you’d like to be informed about these and other local activities, just drop me an email: cerniakb@gmail.com, and I’ll be happy to send you updates.
Sidebar
A Matter of Principle
by Margie Pensak
Why is it that people will talk about learning problems, parnassa problems, and addiction problems but are embarrassed to admit they are unhappy? Long the stepchild of psychology, happiness has come into its own as a valid topic for research, and perhaps it is this shift that has provoked a burgeoning popular interest in what happiness is and how to achieve it. At the recent Three Principles seminar in Baltimore, I asked several attendees why they came and what they gained.
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“I attended the Three Principles seminar because I enjoy learning new techniques to improve myself and my relationships,” says Nechami Brilliant. “The idea that our thinking creates our reality has gotten me reflecting on the many ways we can create a kinder environment for ourselves just by having different thoughts. We may not have control over the thoughts that enter our mind, but we do have control of how much attention we give each one, and we can put a different spin on our thoughts.
“I started to think about how I interact with people,” Nechami adds. “If the stress of certain conversations caused one to respond in a loud tone, in the past, one can use the Three Principles technique. Instead of anger, one can listen intently and ignore thoughts of hurt, replacing them with ‘Oh, so-and-so is sharing her thoughts.’ The response to the speaker can then be calm and pleasant.
“Our reactions are ours alone. No one makes us yell or scream; it is all a reaction to the thoughts we are having. Knowing that our feelings are due to our thoughts is really eye opening. The opportunities to use these techniques in everyday interactions are limitless.”
Sarah Berkovits, author of Guided Imagery with Children: Successful Techniques to Improve School Performance and Self-Esteem, longtime New York City school teacher, and presenter of parent and teacher workshops in the U.S., England, and Israel, remarked, “I think the Three Principles is a wonderful way of living life, because life is not controlling you, you’re controlling it. We thank G-d every day for taking us out of Egypt, but we are still enslaved by our ways of reacting to people and to circumstances. Since studying the Three Principles, I am less reactive. I give myself more space, and I’m more present to myself and to other people.”
Avi Brilliant, Nechami’s husband and a longtime member of the Happiness Club, attended the seminar because of the recommendation of Mrs. Cherniak and others. The backing of Rabbi Michel Twerski, director of the Twerski Wellness Institute, was important to him as well. “I know that thought plays a tremendous part in how people perceive things, and much of the material presented at the seminar embodied principles I have learned in yeshiva and by reading books,” says Avi, who has been applying these principles to his life for years. “There is definitely a tremendous amount to be gained from the Three Principles. It is an excellent thing, a mental breakthrough. It can be life-altering.”
Zeldy Trieff, who made the trip from Passaic, New Jersey, has been studying the Three Principles for five months and was looking to go deeper. “Tzvi Werther was so clear and comprehensive in explaining the concepts,” said Zeldy. “It definitely increased my awareness that I’m constantly ‘feeling my thinking.’ Understanding this helps me, because if I get an unhelpful feeling, I know it’s just coming from my thinking and not from my circumstance.”
M.K., one of the youngest male participants at the seminar, was encouraged to attend because of Rabbi Twerski’s involvement. “I like to learn new perspectives on how to manage life’s changes and challenges,” he said. “Some of the ideas discussed at the seminar were helpful to me. “The Three Principles system does not promote changing one’s thoughts and emotions directly. Rather, you are encouraged to accept the thoughts and their consequent emotions. It teaches that life has its ups and downs, and that feeling various emotions is normal, and so is dealing with events that trigger various thoughts.
“By using the Three Principles, a person can also be less self-conscious,” M.K. continues. “He can ruminate less about what he is experiencing. In this, the system is similar to a classic concept in Jewish thought known as yemei ha’ahava and yemei hasina, which is discussed in Sefer Hayashar.
“The other benefit of the Three Principles system is helping a person be more open to change. The knowledge that what you are feeling is derived solely from your thoughts has a corollary – which is that a more effective perspective may pop into your mind and upgrade your experience. The concept of humility – that one does not know everything about everything, and there is more to know – also helps a person become open to learning new perspectives and habits. The principle of acceptance – of letting life’s experiences flow and letting improvement happen by itself – was interesting and refreshing,” he concludes.
ã Margie Pensak-2014
