Sustainable Happiness The Mind Science of Well-Being, Altruism, and Inspiration

INTRODUCTION: RECENT BREAKTHROUGHS, TIMELESS METHODS
Today’s greatest health challenges, the so-called diseases of civilization—addictions, anxiety, depression, obesity, heart disease, cancer—are now known in large part to reflect our inability to tame stress reflexes gone wild and to empower instead the peaceful, healing part of our nature that adapts us to civilized life. The same can be said of the economic challenges posed by the stress-reactive cycles of boom and bust, driven by addictive greed and compulsive panic. As current research opens up new horizons of stress-cessation, self-healing, longevity and optimal health, it has also encountered Asian methods of self-healing and self-change more powerful and teachable than any known in the West. This book is the first to make Asia’s most rigorous and complete system of contemplative living, hidden for centuries in Tibet, accessible to help mainstream readers on their life journey towards sustainable health, growth and well-being.
TURNING THE BODY WHEEL: MINDFULNESS & PERSONAL SELF-HEALING 
1. Deep Mindfulness: The Fundamental Skill of Self-Healing
In the mindfulness popularized in the West, people bring non-judging attention to everything in the here and now. Yet what happens when the here and now feels just plain traumatic and overwhelming? Traditionally, such “simple” mindfulness is considered incomplete in itself, only the first step on the life path of self-analysis and self-healing. Since full practice requires too much training for most lay practitioners, Indian masters developed other techniques as teachable as simple mindfulness but with all the main benefits of full practice. Taught in a modern tradition preserved in Tibet, these alternatives help novices tap into a normally unconscious, naturally clear state of mind that makes it easier to discern and let go of stress-reactive habits and the stress-instincts driving them.
2. Insight, Intuition and Light: Reversing the Cycle of Stress & Trauma
This chapter unpacks the insights of the new mind/brain science, anticipated by the illuminating experience Shakyamuni Buddha shared with the world in his first teaching of four noble truths. Like the ancient Greeks’ insight that we can transcend evolution and unexamined life, the optimistic gist of the new science and these timeless truths is that we all have what it takes to make our human life a path to lasting peace and freedom rather than a vicious cycle of mere survival. The objective of the chapter is to help people conceive and commit to a contemplative life that can open and strengthen their minds for healing insight, recovery and life change.
3. The Lifelong Path of Contemplative Health
Our increasingly complex and fast-paced lifestyles are driven by a feeding frenzy and adrenalin rush that we often confuse with the genuine pursuit of happiness. Unlike the path to true happiness, however, such confused pursuits and the compulsive lifestyles they generate inexorably end in a crash. The discipline of deep mindfulness helps dispel this confusion and open a clear, inner space for letting go of stress instincts and building a sustainable life we can enjoy here and now. While there is no one formula for balancing simplicity with complexity in daily life, this chapter teaches the sober life arts of recovery and inner freedom people need to reach balance in time.
TURNING THE SPEECH WHEEL: COMPASSION & SOCIAL SELF-HEALING
4. Mind-Clearing: Intermediate Skills for Social Well-Being
Around others in distress, we often begin to feel pressured or threatened, slipping back into an endangered sense of self. The kung-fu approach of mind-clearing helps us to expose and disarm the rush of traumatic memories that can throw us back into childhood and trigger the primitive reflexes we share with all cornered animals. By using our insight and alertness to keep our mind clear and our energies cool, calm and collected, we can exercise and expand the higher, mammalian powers of empathy and communication, the very tools in our mixed genetic make-up that make us most fit to cope with complex social challenges. 
5. Insight, Openness and Empathy: Breaking Free of the Traumatized Self
This chapter explores the new insights opened up by using mind-clearing to free the mind from the self-enclosing habits of scarcity thinking, traumatic emotion and isolated living. It reviews a four step shift in perspective meant to guide the practice of mind-clearing towards its aim of social well-being and shared happiness. When even one person learns to break out of the self-enclosing cycle of stress and trauma with these steps, it starts a social chain reaction that has ripple effects not just in that individual’s life, but in the lives of all those around her.
6. The Worldwide Web of Contemplative Engagement
This chapter introduces two advanced arts of social living: unconditional empathy and enlightened altruism. The cornerstones of all institutions beginning with family life, these two basic faculties of the mammalian brain help shift the course of individual life from the crippling alienation of trauma to the empowering engagement of true generosity and universal responsibility. The life arts discussed here involve step-by-step strategies for building the proactive spirit and win-win social style people need to breathe newfound trust and connectedness into their way of being with others in the world, one interaction at a time.
TURNING THE MIND WHEEL: CREATIVITY & CULTURAL SELF-HEALING
7. Role-Modeling: The Advanced Skills of Self-Transformation
Role-modeling through mentoring, imagery and affirmation makes an art of the way mammals use the qualities of those they love or admire as models for mind/brain development. Like play-acting or task-simulation, the technique here is learning to use empowering images and affirmative statements as imaginary role-models to envision and rehearse a healthier way of being in the world. Although role-modeling skills are traditionally taught based on suggested visualizations of traditional archetypes, my work and this book adapt Tibetan methods to help people from any background find positive images and affirmations that reflect the healthiest aspects of their own culture, experience and values.
8. Reconstructing Life: The Science of Perception in Action
This chapter explores the insights opened by using role-modeling skills to gain greater freedom from self-limiting habits, including traumatic self-images, shame-based attitudes and conformist lifestyles. It touches on three insights key to role-modeling and its aim of creative self-mastery: the effectiveness of mentoring, vision and affirmation. Current research on imprinting and imagery help explain how mentoring and imitation prime human development and guide peak performance. Since we create ourselves with other’s help, the ripples we make with our personal growth are far broader and deeper when we have qualified help recreating our narrow, self-limiting view of ourselves and our lives.
       9. Cultivating Our Humanity with Contemplative Vision
The art of transforming our way of being and life with imagery is based on the life strategy of replacing default role models from childhood, schooling, popular culture and the media with consciously chosen models that reflect our mature ideals. The Tibetan art of role-modeling allows us to climb into the driver’s seat of our human development, helping us leverage our admiration for exceptional others and inspiring ideals to map out a more creative course for ourselves and our lives. The strategies of vision and affirmation help make such a map and bring it into daily use, guiding us to overcome the inertia of our habitual self-image, inner dialogue and worldview and to make our way of life in the world an ongoing, creative project.
TURNING THE BLISS WHEEL: INSPIRATION & NATURAL SELF-HEALING
10. Inspiration: The Refining Skills of Self-Transformation
A kinder, gentler version of the breath-control skills in Kundalini Yoga, the Tibetan art of breath-pausing or breath-holding called pot-belly breathing pushes deep breathing into aerobic mode, kindling pleasure circuits that support peak experiences of euphoria and flow. In meditation, this natural ability is consciously used as a gear shift or joy stick to help shift the nervous system out of the addictive, self-protective energy and chemistry of stress into the life-giving energy and chemistry of growth, healing and change. Although the techniques I share in this book may offer only a glimpse of this shift, even a taste of the natural high we are all able to tap with the right skills can be a truly empowering force for change.
11. Pure Passion and Spontaneity: Energizing an Optimal Self and Life
This chapter unpacks the revolutionary insight that the negative energy we struggle with day to day is not biologically determined but a default setting we can change, without medications like Prozac. Reviewing the biological link between close social bonds and the chemistry of growth, love and learning, it explains why that chemistry is as natural as stress but infinitely more effective for inspiring us to recreate the shape and feel of our daily life. This same link also explains why the best way for us to learn the art of kindling positive energy is with role models who “stir” or “inspire” us.
12. The Natural High of Contemplative Living
Cultivating a mindset of pure passion by exciting the mind and body in the controlled context of meditation opens up a safe space within which we can unlock the energy of our natural endorphin highs. Learning to tap this energy through inspirational breathing helps us to harness the network of life-giving bliss at the heart of our complex mind/brain. The strategies of true intimacy and deep communion then help guide us in applying this fresh energy and chemistry to develop healthy love and family life at home and build creative mastery in the world at large.  
CONCLUSION: CONTEMPLATIVE SCIENCE & OUR GLOBAL FUTURE
Sustainable Happiness closes by opening horizons far beyond the scope of personal health and well-being. Multiplied by the magnetic force of happiness, the butterfly effect of deep personal change in our age may have an impact on humanity as dramatic as the explosion of the internet or wireless communications. This concluding chapter reveals the futuristic vision of The Wheel of Time, a prophetic teaching from India and Tibet in which the “timeless science” of contemplative living helps all humanity fulfill the destiny of civilized life on earth by steering individuals and societies towards sustainable options in healthcare, business, education and the arts.

Biography

Joe Loizzo, MD, PhD, is a psychotherapist and founder of the Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science, a non-profit contemplative learning community that helps people find sustainable ways of living in today’s complex world. On faculty at the Weill Cornell Center for Complementary and Integrative Medicine and the Columbia University Center for Buddhist Studies, Dr. Loizzo lectures widely on the role of contemplative science in the future of health, education and contemporary life, and teaches regular public classes and workshops at Nalanda Institute, New York Open Center, and Tibet House.

"In a unique voice that is at once scholarly and eloquent, Joe Loizzo offers the reader a vast, integrated vision of wellbeing for the individual and society. Sustainable Happiness lifts our understanding of mindfulness in health care to a new level, describing in exquisite detail the innate brilliance and potential of the human mind. For those who have been wondering what Tibetan contemplative science and mind training is all about, this is the roadmap you’ve been waiting for."

—Christopher K. Germer, PhD, coeditor of Wisdom and Compassion in Psychotherapy: Deepening Mindfulness in Clinical Practice

"On our way to sustainable development and global consciousness, our greatest challenge lies not outside us but within: in the shift we each must make from scarcity thinking and self-enclosure to optimism and altruism. In Sustainable Happiness, Joe Loizzo lays out a treasure chest of maps and tools for this sea-change, melding current neuroscience with the ancient contemplative science of India and Tibet into a clear path to sustainable living today."

—Jeffrey C. Walker, former chairman, Millennium Promise, and partner, Millennium Development Goals Health Alliance

"If we want real happiness in our stressful lives, we need the mindfulness to cultivate it and the loving-kindness to share it with everyone. Tibetan Buddhism is devoted to making everyday life a way to combine personal happiness with compassion and altruism. Joe Loizzo's Sustainable Happiness guides us through the rich Buddhism of Tibet, clarifying its many arts of compassion in light of both current science and living tradition."

—Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness and Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation