How to conquer fear and find happiness
Transcriber: Maram S
Reviewer: Hani Eldalees
Good afternoon, everybody.
My talk today is about taking
an inward step to happiness.
About the mid 1980s to late 1980s,
I was working in a clinic in the
Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
And unfortunately,
with that population,
there was a high rate of alcoholism.
And, to better understand their needs
and how to meet them, I started
going to Elhanan.
And there was this one lady at this
meeting that I’ll never forget.
The meeting started off
with a young lady
who, from the beginning of the meeting,
was talking about
how miserable her life was
because of her husband’s drinking.
And she pretty much talked through the
whole hour that we were meeting.
But getting toward the end,
another lady
I’ll call her name Doris.
The younger woman, I’ll call Jane.
Doris said to her that she was sorry
to hear about her life being
the way it was because she herself had
experienced it when she was younger.
But she said, you know, if you’re unhappy,
it’s your own damn fault.
We were all kind of surprised to hear that
because she we felt sorry for her
and it seemed like the person with the
problem wasn’t her
who just wanted a happy marriage,
but, her husband who was drinking.
But Doris continued.
She said, your husband may
have an alcohol problem,
but your happiness is your responsibility
and no one else’s.
And as long as you continue to choose
to make your happiness dependent
on things outside of yourself,
which you don’t have control over,
then any unhappiness you experience is
your own. You only have yourself to blame.
And as long as you continue to choose
that and you suffer the unhappiness,
I’m not interested in hearing about it
because of your choice
and you’re coming here to this meeting.
It’s not doing you any good and it’s
not doing anyone else good.
And I thought about those words.
and how they might apply to my life.
and, it made a lot of sense.
But what I didn’t know was how
to make the happiness
dependent on things within
well, about 10 years later,
I was working in Detroit at that time
andI was working in
the inner city area
and a lot of my patients had AIDS.
Now, the thing about AIDS back
then was that we didn’t have
the treatments we have today.
You can take a few pills today and you
can pretty much suppress the virus to
a point that can’t be detected
and live normal lives.
But back then, it wasn’t like that.
We only thing we could do for them was to
treat their opportunistic infections
and they’re pretty devastating.
And as time went on and the virus
weakened their immune system,
what would happen is that
these opportunistic infections would occur
frequently and there’d be more severe
until we couldn’t successfully treat them
anymore and they would die.
And at that time in my professional
life is probably
the one most marked by
suffering and death.
And as they got more ill and I was
working with them more closely,
I started to see myself in them
and I was wondering how
I would respond when that time comes.
And I’m in that moment of suffering and
I have about ready to give up my life.
As time went on and my search
took me eventually to going to
the Zen monastery and searching for
answers about these questions
I had about my own life and mortality.
And one of the meetings, one of
the talks, a senior monk,
had mentioned things about life and
he said that AIDS isn’t the problem.
Well, when I heard that, I was a pretty
irate I had seen these people suffer.
I’ve seen it firsthand. And I was
particularly angered by that.
So later after the talk, I went up to him
and I said, how can you say that?
And he said, Oh, please don’t
misunderstand me.
I’m not saying that AIDS isn’t a problem.
I’m saying it isn’t THE problem.
The problem overall, the ultimate
is that our fear of death.
Our fear is we create and our
fear is we can uncreate.
And until we deal with them and until
we answer them
in a resolute way,
we’re always going to have
the doorway open for unhappiness.
With those words that
start to make no more sense,
what Doris was talking about,
about dealing with things on inside.
But I don’t know how to deal with the
fears, what he said made sense,
but I don’t know how to
deal with the fears.
Well, at the monastery, the abbot
would say to everybody,
he would say these phrases over and over
again and applied to everyone,
he said that we are perfect and complete,
lacking nothing.
All we could ever hope for
we already have
all we ever hope to be,
we already are.
Nothing can be added
and nothing can be taken away.
We never fail to cover the
ground in which we stand.
I didn’t fully understand those words
when he first talked about them,
because I didn’t feel perfect.
I didn’t feel complete.
what I found out later was that we may not
express this perfect or complete nature,
but that’s what we are.
And I didn’t feel
like I had all that I wanted and
things I was working for,
but he also said don’t believe
this just because I say it
believe it because it’s
proven true to you.
So as I continued with the monastery
and I will practice their follow
their meditation,
I found that I was able to discontinue
or bring down all the chatter in
the talk in my mind and bring
my mind into silence.
And when I had done that,
it was possible to just
have my mind rest in a global
abiding awareness.
And it was in that, surprisingly enough,
there was a natural arising of
a sense that everything’s OK.
I’m reminded of the words
of Saint Giuliano,
nor at which where she said
all is well, all is well,
all manner of things shall be well.
And she realized that when
she was in the process of dying.
Along with that came a sense that
there was nothing to lose like
the abbot had talked about, and along with
that, the fear started to come down.
And not only a meditation,
there was that sense,
but it started to go out into
other parts of my life.
And I began to understand what the
senior monk was talking about,
which enriched even more what
Doris was talking about.
There was a Monk there, a female monk.
That didn’t have it easy at the monastery.
She was older, she had a lot
of medical problems.
The physical layout of the
monastery wasn’t easy for her.
The food has never been appetizing
when I’ve been there and
the beds have never been comfortable
and you’re always told what to do.
But I was always amazed at
how she was always happy.
And I asked her how she was like that,
what was her secret?
And she said that she wasn’t always like
that. And I said, Oh, what happened?
What changed? And she said, Well,
I realized one day I can choose to be
miserable or I can choose to be happy.
I just choose to be happy.
She later died just as happy I heard as
the day that I talked with her
and I would think
if she was here right now
and there is anyone who doesn’t think that
that happiness is not something they
deserve or that they can have. She
would say, what are you choosing?
I would like to end with a few
quotes by a Christian mystic.
He lived about three hundred years ago in
Spain and before he died, he was tortured.
And he said, if you want to arrive and
having pleasure in everything,
desire the pleasure of nothing.
If you want to arrive at having
possessing everything,
desire the pleasure of the
possession of nothing,
if you want to arrive at being everything,
Desire to be nothing.
And if you want to arrive at knowing
everything, desire to know nothing.
Thank you.