The number of self-help books on happiness has exploded. This drive towards spreading happiness is not surprising, given the fact that as the US became wealthier and more powerful, reported cases of depressed people increased.

Most of this advice gives pointers on how to be happy by not focusing on getting richer, by practicing gratitude, by giving up envy, by helping others, by reducing stress, by paying attention to small wonders around you, by changing the environment whenever it is under your control and practicing happy patience when it is not under your control, and most importantly by connecting to other human beings. Some tell you to “fake” happiness till you “make” it.

Let us for a moment pretend that everybody in the US practices the to-do-list on how to be happy and indeed becomes happy. We all learn to be mostly loving, kind, grateful, compassionate, un-envious form of happiness in the success of the others, optimistic, un-obsessive-overanalyzing, forgiving, virtuous, socially supportive, and mostly committed to practicing happiness within and without. The meaning in life can come from doing the best possible job of whatever is given to us, let it be cleaning toilets, parenting, or being a CEO. Does that sound as close to paradise as our world can get?

Somehow, most people are uneasy about this picture as well! Who would create great works of art, music, and literature? There would not be Van Gogh, Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Beethoven, and Dostoevsky in our world. Great leaders, artists, scientists, and wealth-generators have not always been happy. In fact it seem these individuals created their work out of painful conflict and struggles with adversity.

Without envy and jealousy there would be no fire in the belly to do more and to make progress. All negative emotions have a purpose, and most of the time this purpose is physical and emotional survival. Some say that negative emotions are essential for evolution. Others say that practicing happiness generates complacency which in turn generates a lack of motivation for excellence. Some psychologists argue that personality structures are not so flexible and a pessimist cannot choose to be an optimist and it would be unfair to expect people to all fall into the same mold of being happy.

If we were a nation of happy people, would we be the super power? Would we have the best military and the best weapons? Would we be able to defend ourselves against the aggression of other countries? Does that mean we need to wait for the whole world to be happy first, before we decide not to be zealous about being powerful? Is the self-protective mode, in this world in which cruelty exists, necessarily a happy state of mind? Is a happy state of mind capable of defending against external aggression?

Yet as much as we admire and appreciate great works by great people, if we are asked a question: “Do you want your child to have a happy, safe, and good life or be extremely gifted and yet have a life full of unhappiness?”, most parents will choose a happy, safe, and good life for their children.

What this suggests is the following. We understand the importance of having unusually gifted (albeit unhappy) people and the inevitability of defending against the cruelty in the world (by being a cruel aggressor yourself). However, we do not want to be one of them. If the world has to be divided into two groups of people, we would much rather belong to the happy side, the ones reaping the benefits of the unhappiness from the unhappily gifted and the cruel aggressive defenders!

This is what I suggest. When you are unhappy, let it stay for a while and consider what “purpose” this unhappiness is there to “serve”. Take your own sweet time to stay unhappy. Then allow it to serve its purpose, play out its role, before getting in a hurry to ward it off. This means that being unhappy could in fact make you excited that you are on to the next best thing in life. This is the importance of being unhappy!

When I first started studying Buddhist Psychology, Buddha’s Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path toward enlightenment, beyond the rules and the analysis, there was one thing that was striking about all the teachings. This one thing, which is supposed to be the foundational stone before one begins to internalize the teachings, is COMPASSION.

“If what I hear about your powers is all true, then bring my son back to life”

Unable to bear the intense pain of her son’s death, Gautami had gone to the Buddha to asked him to revive him. Buddha asked her to fulfill one condition before he could do what she wanted. “Bring me one sesame seed from any household in town where there has been no death.” Gautami followed his admonition, combing the whole town. She returned exhausted, without the sesame seed Buddha had requested. She understood what he was trying to teach her. There is no household without the pain of loss. Human lives—no matter how good or prosperous—do encounter difficult and trying times at some point.

This universality of human pain had set Buddha out to look for an answer to the question of how to alleviate the pain, until he found enlightenment in the form of The Four Noble Truths and The Eightfold Path toward enlightenment.

The more I paid attention to this fundamental idea and attempted to truly understand the implications of compassion, I found myself delighted and inspired. The idea of having compassion for the world around us exists in several religious, philosophical, psychological, and humanistic teachings. However, in Buddhist meditations, the art and technique of cultivating compassion is so well developed, and such an integral part of the Buddhist lifestyle, that I could not help but be amazed by its power.

Compassion and Suffering

Dalai Lama defines Compassion as wishing that oneself and others be free from suffering. As a psychotherapist, and as part of any helping/healing profession, the ability to hold compassion is what motivates us to go to work every day and enables us to witness unbearable pain.

Compassion For Self

For those who are not in a helping/healing profession, holding compassion for oneself (self-compassion), and for others(for the difficult emotions of fear, anger, shame, guilt, loneliness, confusion), makes the world around them a better place to live. The non-judgmental view of the humanness of our condition, makes them better parents, better friends, less critical of themselves, and better global citizens.

Compassion and Freedom

Compassion makes all teachings and rules less dogmatic, more human, and more realistic. The definition of compassion, the wish to be free from suffering, makes it possible to hold it even for the most sociopathic elements in our world.

What Compassion Isn’t

One very important understanding of compassion is the following. It is not simply a sugary sweet way of talking or being. It is not a lame excuse for inaction. It is not condoning acts of violence. Compassion is a force. Compassion changes the impulsive way you would take action against injustice. Compassion gives you a more effective and long-term way to overcome the perils of your life. Compassion is not bleeding-heart pity for others, nor it is a feel-good act of giving money away. Compassion is a world view that we are all in it together, that we all make mistakes that we have a right to correct. Cruelty and inconsideration can be replaced with strength, instead of striking back with the same cruelty.

Compassion Is Tricky

Thinking about compassion in extreme and politically jaded and violent situations (crimes, terrorism, war, and so on) becomes tricky. I’ll leave this one to the masters, however, one thing I can absolutely promise, in your personal life—toward spouses, kids, friends, acquaintances, service people—learning to hold the right type of compassion will enhance the quality of the world around you to an unlimited degree!

Episode 3 from the ten part series on CNBC TV-18 about Good Relationships.

Are you a married couple with children, often times considering divorce as a way towards freedom from all the scary compromises you have to make? Are you not yet doing it just because keeping a marriage is a value to you? Are you wondering if it is all worth it?

I have some “Grandmotherly old-fashioned” advice for you, with one difference; I am going to support it with “evidence”. The advice is: “stick it out” till the last drop of your blood! Dramatic? Yes, it is! However, it makes a point: wait it out for the longest time, even if it means going through years of overwhelming dissatisfaction.

First I want to present evidence that you are not alone in experiencing a post-children reduced sense of well-being. Your dissatisfaction with the post-children marital relationship is a growing trend in our modern and increasingly individualistic society, getting worse with each generation. This is a conclusion reached by a study conducted by the psychologists Campbell and Twenge, in 2003. This dip in the marital satisfaction and sense of well-being is well supported in academic research as reported by the 2008 NPR program “Kids may not be bundles of joy”, the 2010 popular New York Magazine article “All Joy and No Fun”, and 2011 report “The Global Perspective on Happiness and Fertility” presenting a study conducted in 86 countries ranging from Tanzania and El Salvador to the US and France.

This evidence may make you realize that you are probably going through a perfectly normal phase in your marital life, so you can simply relax, take a breather, and think about the next two pieces of evidence that support my advise to stick it out for the longest period.

First, a major scholarly study released by University of Chicago sociologists challenges the assumption that staying in an unhappy marriage is asking for misery forever and getting out of this marriage will mean happiness in the long run. Not so simple! This study concludes that the people who divorce are not necessarily happier than the ones who choose to stay. More interestingly, two thirds of the ones who stay in the unhappy marriage reported being happy in their marriage five years later. The increase in marital satisfaction is especially true for couples who reported their marriages as “very unhappy” and still stayed together!

Second, along with the above result, consider that a decade old long-term study from UC Berkley shows that as a couple moves into older age, the marital satisfaction increases, possibly because children leave the nest to be independent.

Both these findings together suggest: it may be worth staying together, not just for kids, or for financial reasons, but for the increased sense of marital happiness awaiting you.

As a couple’s therapist I would like to suggest keeping a few key points in mind as you wait it out. This makes the current wait easier and the future increased marital satisfaction more meaningful.

1)     Make it into an “active” waiting it out, not simply numbing you down.

2)     Active wait would mean a few different things: sometimes letting go of your demand, sometimes looking for a different way to communicate your demand to your partner till you find the right way, and sometimes looking for other ways to satisfy your “personal” needs bucket.

3)     Active wait may include arguments, sometimes too intense, but that is better than numbing down everything. Just keep it away from children as a “must” rule.

4)     Look for ways to keep at least some sexual intimacy alive. Never give up on that completely.

5)     Reorient yourself to the “meaning” your kids bring to you! In spite of the literature pouring out of academic circles on the reduced sense of well being while raising young or adolescent children, most parents think of their children as the most meaningful thing that has happened to them. Whether raising kids takes a toll on the marriage or not, it creates a fiercely protective, all engaging, and “primal” joy, as chronicled in “Parenting and Happiness Pair Well Despite What You Read” published in Politics Daily. What this suggests is that your life has a source of meaning and joy, a potential antidote to allow you to go through the troubled marriage for some time.

Make the process All Joy and Some Fun!

Download the Original article in PDF.

Even in the best of relationships, in the middle of all the closeness and companionship, some times things just don’t seem to work. Your partner just does not seem to understand your needs, the communication seems broken, frustrations from irritating patterns build up, and you either “freeze,” creating a sort of cold war or “explode,” resulting in arguments. You may even give up and you either create walls of “What is the use of saying this, I will just keep this to myself,” or you get into the “freeze” and the “explosions” more rapidly and for longer periods of time. You often wonder if you will be better off being on your own. You continue staying together, but you decide that nothing is going to work and there is no way out of such impossible impasse.

If you feel this way, that there is just no way out of such impossible impasse, I challenge you that there is one way that you have never explored! This way will return you back to closeness, understanding, and a sense of belonging with each other. This way is to learn to meditate over compassion. As a meditation teacher and a psychotherapist who works with couples, I can guarantee you the positive effect of compassion meditation on relationships. Personally, I can say that compassion meditation is what has saved my marriage from going the wrong way and allowed us to fall in deep “connection” with each other.

First, understand what compassion means and then learn to meditate over compassion. Compassion is to join a person in his or her suffering in a genuine way. Furthermore, compassion is the wish that the suffering be alleviated for the person. In case of your relationship, compassion is the strong wish that the suffering be alleviated for you and for your partner. Compassion is not just empathy, sympathy, being in the other person’s shoes, all-acceptance, or a sweet attitude towards your partner’s mistakes. It is not just one of these things, although they may become by-products of compassion. If you are able to feel the suffering of your partner in a genuine way, with the wish that this be alleviated for you and your partner, your communication for your partner will have a different quality.

Meditating over compassion is a way to train you to orient yourself towards compassion and to experience compassion. There comes the important question. What does it mean by meditating over compassion? Here is one meditation over compassion when you want to make sense of your built-up frustration and when you are not sure how to deal with it.

Sit in the meditative pose and for some time pay attention to your breathing. Then allow your partner’s face or a gesture to come to your mind and observe whatever feelings this brings to you. Now repeat this to yourself:

“Inhale; I breathe in compassion for my partner and me, and exhale; I breathe out compassion.”

Repeat this to yourself as long as you can and just watch what feelings come to your mind. No need to analyze the problem, no need to desperately look for ways to solve the problem, just simply allow compassion (the wish that the suffering be alleviated) to flood your system.

As you are doing it, sometimes, an insight will fall in your lap, insight into either why your partner may have behaved in a certain way, or insight into a reframed version of your fight, or insight into what you should be doing next to alleviate the suffering for you both. You will have new view of what to communicate to your partner. You will get the wisdom to know what you want to do with the problem at hand. You will get new realizations of the closeness and belonging that you share with your partner. If not in each instance of meditation, it will happen at some instance.

There lies the interesting irony! If you offer compassion to your partner, and figure out what that means to you in terms of your own behavior, no strings attached and with patience, then you will eventually get what you need from your partner! Get into the habit of meditation over compassion for you and your partner, get the insights into the pain you both are going through, and you will make progress out of the impossible impasse. You will get what you want, by offering genuine and patient compassion to your partner—without “who goes first.”

You will see that new connections will spring up, new explanations will emerge, and a new harmony may show up. The relationship may be lifted to another plane.

Build a regular meditation practice. Building the meditation muscle on a regular basis will make it easier to get insights by meditating when and if you need such an insight, for example, right after a frustrating argument. Meditate over compassion for your partner, alone, or with each other. These quiet moments of contemplation are the unexplored other way.

Swati Desai, Ph.D., LCSW, is a psychotherapist and meditation teacher at The Akasha Center for Integrative Medicine.

* Meditation is currently one of the most researched psychological tool. Preliminary studies show that compassion meditations reduce the stress-related behavioral response, which could lead to more social connectedness. Studies conducted by Davidson and colleagues in the Lab for Affective Neuroscience & Waisman Lab for Brain Imaging & Behavior, UW-Madison Psychology Department show that compassion meditations attune the brain to all sorts of emotional stimuli, including suffering, and intense practice will evoke loving feelings independent of object and circumstances.