A Thoughtful Student Wrestles and Finds "Moment to Moment" Meaning in Camus' "The Stranger" --

NOTE TO READERS: Trevor Williams, a recent graduate of RPI, with a major in biochemistry, is currently enrolled as a non-matriculated graduate student in the Happiness class. What follows is his extraordinary response paper this week, in which he reacts in a very deep and thoughtful way to Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Williams' paper was three times the assigned length! It offers thoughtful, as well as philosophically- and spiritually-sophisticated insights into the existential dilemma posed by Camus' classic novel. The book features a narrator named Meursault, for whom life appears to have no meaning. What is always ironic and extraordinary (and somehow delightful to me as a teacher of literature) is how students like Trevor wrestle with meaning in a narrative that suggests life has no meaning!

For all your hard work thinking this paper through, Trevor, a HUGE THANK YOU. I am so grateful that you are in my class this spring, and I am deeply grateful for this amazing piece of written work!

As I first read the last section of The Stranger, I found myself caught up in the desperate hope for a way out. I could feel my own anticipation manifest in a desire for Meursault to be pardoned. I was swept along with the narrative, and I felt the incredible weight that was pressing down upon him. I, too, wished for him to have another twenty years to his life. And it was because of this hope that I missed the larger metaphor.

After a moment’s pause, I reread the chapter. It became readily apparent that all along, he wasn’t really discussing the situation of a condemned prisoner; he was talking about the fate that every living being shares.

I believe Camus is speaking directly to the moment each of us discovers our own mortality. There were two nights in my own life not long ago (during a time of struggle) that, as I was drifting off to sleep, I was confronted with the finite nature of my life. I’ve never seen that experience put so precisely in to words. ‘The verdict’ Meursault is referring to here is nothing more than the fact that we’re alive, than that we exist at all.

I feel that there are two key facets to this realization. The first is the ‘arrogant certainty.’ Death is an absolute; it is guaranteed from the moment we’re born. That alone is enough to lend the quality of absurdity to the experience.

But perhaps more profound is how little changes upon discovering our transient nature. I remember feeling this primal sense of horror or revulsion, deep in the pit of my stomach, and I realized that no one around me would understand. Moreover, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. No matter how thoroughly I explored the issue, there was nothing I could do to escape death. And the maddening part is how casually the mind will slip into patterns and routines, quickly covering up all the disconcerting evidence.

I love the translator’s choice of ‘imperturbable.’ It captures the sense of inevitability, the unceasing flow of each moment towards death, but it also implies the subtle nature of the process, how deceptively calm it all feels. Meursault eventually finds relief in this, referring to ‘the gentle indifference of the world’.

When I awoke in the morning following those two nights of struggle and realization, I meditated upon the experience, and I was overwhelmed by a flood of compassion. In accepting the certainty of death, I felt connected to all of life –- everything that had ever lived, that was presently living, and that ever would live. The universality of death is an equalizer – I believe that Meursault saw this too, in a way, when he said, “Salamano’s dog was worth just as much as his wife."

There was another aspect to the whole experience that made it feel a bit maddening: how difficult it was to find people who understood. I was raised agnostic, and I believe that had a lot to do with how directly I experienced that sense of mortality. I can empathize with Meursault’s frustration with the chaplain. Religious beliefs (or the lack thereof) can be so fundamental that everything else in a person’s life is based around them. When confronted by the chaplain about the wish for another life, Meursault replies that he’d wish for “One where I could remember this life!”

Camus isn’t denying the very human desire for transcendence.

What he’s trying to say is that it frequently comes at a cost – it limits our valuation and experience of this life.

I felt as though I had woken up, but everyone around me was still asleep. In Meursault’s situation, everything is sharpened to the absolute limit – he is acutely aware of his impending death, and he wants to savor each and every moment he has left. He is frustrated by the chaplain because the talk of God or an afterlife only serves to take him out of the present. He doesn’t want to miss a single drop of life.

The reality is that it’s always like this. No matter how long we think we have left to live, each moment is just as precious as the next. The human mind has a very hard time accepting this, and so it requires constant vigilance. One of the points of mindfulness practice is to realize this truth.

MINDFULNESS HELPS US TO BE VIGILANT OF LIFE MOMENT BY MOMENT!!

Meursault’s discussion of the guillotine gets at this fundamental misperception: “For a long time I believed—and I don’t know why—that to get to the guillotine you had to climb stairs onto a scaffold. … I was made to see that contrary to what I thought, everything was very simple: the guillotine is on the same level as the man approaching it. He walks up to it the way you walk up to another person.” We often have a sense that death is a distant, foreign concept – something that will happen to us eventually. But there’s this sort of assumption that we’ll have to take some form of action, somehow be a willing participant. And so we procrastinate, we put off the difficult but meaningful things that we’d like to accomplish. We let ourselves get caught up seeking the moment to moment pleasures, but miss out on the moment itself.

Meursault also accurately points out the problem with hope – it is inherently future-minded and it implies a level of non-acceptance of the present. The line that struck me the most in the entire book—what I consider the most important teaching Meursault has for us—is summed up in his discussion of dawn: “They always come at dawn, I knew that. And so I spent my nights waiting for that dawn. I’d never liked being surprised. If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.”

We’re all aware of sayings like, ‘Live each day as if it were your last’ and ‘Carpe Diem’, but I believe we misinterpret them. Our culture reacts with reckless abandon, determined to squeeze every last drop out of life. ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead’ is another great example. These feel more nihilistic than accepting to me. We rush around over-scheduling our lives, doing our best to make sure we don’t waste a single day, but that’s missing the point. I think it’s borne out of fear – it takes immense courage to fully embrace the inevitability of death and not become frantic or desperate.

I’ve had a very hard time convincing people that it’s logically possible to be optimistic and compassionate while rejecting hope and embracing the absurd. I’d like to conclude with a portion of an interview I read – Pema Chödrön captures it perfectly:

bell hooks: Well, that brings me to my final issue. I have written it in big block letters: DON'T EVEN THINK FOR A MOMENT THAT YOU'RE NOT GOING TO DIE.

Pema Chödrön: Right. "Don't even think for a moment that you're not going to die." Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche said that to a friend of mine who had cancer and was close to death and was having trouble accepting it. And instead of it coming across to her as cruel, it came across as immense kindness, that someone was telling her the truth.

bell hooks: It does seem that so much of our longing to escape has to do with the sense that the closer I am to suffering, the closer I am to death.

Pema Chödrön: For me the spiritual path has always been learning how to die. That involves not just death at the end of this particular life, but all the falling apart that happens continually. The fear of death—which is also the fear of groundlessness, of insecurity, of not having it all together—seems to be the most fundamental thing that we have to work with. Because these endings happen all the time! Things are always ending and arising and ending. But we are strangely conditioned to feel that we're supposed to experience just the birth part and not the death part.

We have so much fear of not being in control, of not being able to hold on to things. Yet the true nature of things is that you're never in control. You're never in control. You can never hold on to anything. That's the nature of how things are. But it's almost like it's in the genes of being born human that you can't accept that. You can buy it intellectually, but moment to moment it brings up a lot of panic and fear. So my own path has been training to relax with groundlessness and the panic that accompanies it. Training to allow all that to be there, training to die continually. That seems to be the essence of the lojong teachings—to stay in the space of uncertainty without trying to reconstruct a reference point.

We can stop looking for some idealized moment when everything is simple and secure. This second of experience, which could be painful or pleasurable, is our working basis. What makes all the difference is how we relate to it.

Excerpted from http://www.shambhala.com/html/learn/features/pema/interview/index.cfm

New Harvard Research Shows that Mindfulness Meditation Produces Positive PHYSICAL Changes in the Brain!!

The word is out. Just about every day, a new article appears celebrating the positive effects of mindfulness and meditation.

Last week, The New York Times featured an article by a woman writing about her husband's discovery of mindfulness meditation. Technically the class he took was called "Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction," or MBSR. MBSR was developed at the UMass Medical Center some 30 years ago by then Professsor of Medicine Jon Kabat-Zinn, who used the mindfulness training to treat patients with chronic pain, stress and depression. In the last three decades, thousands of people have been helped by the program and training that Kabat-Zinn developed.

MBSR meditation features prominently in the Happiness class I am teaching for the first time this semester at SUNY. My students are taking MBSR with nurse-trainer Lenore Flynn in a mandatory lab on Wednesday afternoons.)

Flynn worked with three of my students in an independent study in the Fall of 2010 (a test run for the new class!) The results were quite remarkable. One student, psychology major Allyson Pashko, had been suffering from such intense stress a year ago that she was physically ill (and hospitalized.) Doctors could not figure out what exactly was wrong with her.

Allyson is a new person today. She emailed me last week out of the blue to report that she is still seeing the positive effects of the mindfulness work she did last fall. This is an excerpt from her email:

"Now for the great news, I actually ended up recieving a job offer a couple
of weeks ago with a Long Island company that offers learning processes... I just started training this week and I believe I will go through about 2 weeks of full-time training and then observations to make sure I really understand the program. It is such a great place and
I can't be more excited!

Now for the best part, when I went in for the interview, the last thing the director said to me was, "well you seem like a very positive person, I'm sure you will be a great fit!" I thought to myself WOW! I can't believe that someone had actually said that to me. I thought back to all
of the work we had done last semester and it really helped me so much!

I just wanted to share with you my wonderful experience and I'm not sure this all would have been possible without all of your continued help. I
hope you can share my story with your students and it will encourage them to really work to their fullest and understand that this class really makes wonders happen."

In the Times article, the writer said that her husband had gone on a ten-day MSBR retreat. "Not my idea of fun," she said, "But he came back rejuvenated and energetic." Indeed, he was so transformed by the experience he decided to start meditating an hour in the morning and an hour every evening. The writer added:

"I’ll admit I’m a skeptic."

Meanwhile, though, she pointed to a new study, not the first, which suggests that 8 weeks of meditation can produce important physical improvements in the brain that lead to more well-being in life!

The Harvard research suggests that individuals who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in the gray matter of the hippocampus (associated with increased learning and memory) and importantly, a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, that chunk of the brain associated with anxiety and stress! The control group showed no such changes.

The study appeared in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.

The fact that only eight weeks of meditation produced brain changes that could be detected by MRI imaging is remarkable. What does this suggest for individuals who, like the husband of the The New York Times writer, are committed to trying to make mindfulness meditation part of their regular practice? Quite ironically, as I am writing this post, I hear my own husband upstairs. He just started chanting the "om" that signals the start of his own meditation. He's been meditating for almost four years now. He started during a time of great stress; he came home one day and I had set up a small meditation space for him in the bedroom, a quilt on the floor, a small table and a candle. (Later he got rid of the table, and we bought him a fancy round pillow.)

To all those people who are contemplating trying meditation, I say, go for it. Don't start by trying for half an hour though. To start, set a timer for say, five or eight minutes max.

Perhaps the best way to start is to take a class; it helps to have regular instruction and the support of a trained teacher and a group of people around you.

Meditation has changed my life profoundly. It has helped me to live without anti-depressant medication, and that is something I never ever thought would be possible. It's also given me enormous energy. (People keep asking me how I write so much; I tell them I have a lot of energy and I credit meditation.) It's not just that you feel more relaxed sitting on the mat, focusing on breathing in and out. IT'S OFF THE MAT THAT YOU SEE GREAT CHANGES TOO!

All through the day when life throws its wrenches my way, I stop and take in a long slow breath and say, OK, just let it go. Just stay focused. Just realize that "this too shall pass" (one of my Mom's favorite quotes!) I really think that the meditation practice I started in 1996 has made me see life in a different way. It's made me happier, and it's showed me how to find joy even in the weirdest small moments when you wouldn't otherwise expect to find joy!

This winter for example, I am like most folks, not loving all the snowstorms and the fierce cold. But I'm watching (being mindful) of my reactions to the incessant snowfall. All I can say is, I am not going totally crazy.

I tell myself, "it is what it is. It will be what it will be." I get nervous looking at that block of ice, now approaching two feet in thickness on the porch roof. I start to worry that it might bust up the roof. I breathe. I say. Whatever it will be (I also take the roof rake to it!)

But if it wrecks the roof, well, so be it. We will deal. We will get the roof repaired.

Yesterday I was trying to cross the backyard to bring the compost outdoors. I wasn't even trying for the spot we've got set aside back behind the garage. Much too far, and way too much snow. No, I had decided to go just to the edge of the yard beyond the old apple tree.

It was so exhausting, sinking deep into drifts with each step. Finally, half-way to my goal, I collapsed, and just sat there, me and the compost container, sunk in the snow. I started to laugh. I found this bizarre situation comical. Instead of being annoyed and angry about being trapped by snow, I said to myself, hey, might as well accept it. It's just...snow. It will eventually go away and spring will come and all those hundreds of tulip and daffodil bulbs will come poking up out of the lawn.

I struggled up out of the snow and trudged the rest of the way across the backyard.

Mindfulness has taught me to let go and stop resisting whatever it is that I am fighting. I'm also learning to stop complaining and whining about this and that. I've learned to try to find the smallest moments of joy in whatever it is I am doing. In our first mindfulness class last week, Lenore Flynn led us through the "raisin-eating" experience (famous in MBSR-training.) You take a couple of raisins in your hand and you pretend that you've just arrived from another planet and you've never seen raisins before.

You spend long minutes just staring at those raisins. You look at the shape and the color and the texture and the minute wrinkles.

Then, just when you think you can't stand another minute of raisin-contemplation, you start to feel them with your fingers. And then you slip them in your mouth. But no eating -- you feel how the raisins feel in your mouth, on your tongue.

In other words, you become mindful of what it feels like to eat a raisin.

All week since that class I have been much more mindful of what I've eaten. Interestingly, some practitioners are using mindfulness with diets and food disorders. Making people more mindful about what they eat helps people to slow way down and to appreciate every morsel of food that they put into their mouths. This kind of food-related mindfulness training tends to get people to eat less and enjoy food more.

There are also specific mindfulness classes designed to help depression.

Well, so, mindfulness, like life, isn't perfect. It doesn't always work. I still curse and get frustrated and angry. But I can pull myself back from the brink. I can think myself out of dark corners. I can live with what happens. I am way more forgiving of myself and others, and unfortunate (and worse) circumstances.

To the skeptical New York Times writer (her name is Sindya N. Bhanoo), I have two things to say: thank you SO much for writing this article. And very humbly and respectfully I would add: try joining your husband. Try meditating!

P.S. I also want to thank my husband for forwarding The New York Times link about Bhanoo's article to me; in forwarding it, he told me that this article was one of the most frequently viewed on the Times site! Now that is quite remarkable. And is it any wonder! We have the capability of changing our brains for the better! What a great message!

CLASS # 2 January 21st SNOW HAPPENS!! Write a SNOW HAIKU!!

So here we are, it's time for our second Happiness class of the spring semester and guess what HAPPENS?

As writer John Lanchester suggests in one of the readings we had for today (from The New Yorker, Feb. 27, 2006):

"...the oldest and most deeply rooted philosophical idea in the world and in our natures is

"SNOW happens."

Actually Lanchester used the other S word but I am going to stick with snow!

Lanchester quotes Darrin McMahon, a historian at Florida State University -- where I presume snow DOES NOT HAPPEN :) -- who has written a "heavyweight" study called "Happiness: A History." In that book, McMahon instructs us on the ORIGIN OF THE WORD HAPPINESS, which on this, the second day of class it seems to me to make sense to start.

McMahon: "Happ was the Middle English word for 'chance, fortune, what happens in the world, giving us such words as 'happenstance,' 'haphazard,' 'hapless,' and 'perhaps.'"

Lanchester's article argues that we are hard-wired to be scared and nervous. He presents us with two characters from 100,000 B.C. -- Ig and Og. Ig is the courageous hunter-gatherer who takes all kinds of chances, and Og is the scared one who freezes at the first sign of danger.

Which one, Ig or Og, is likely to survive? Which kind of behavior is likely to be passed on, the courageous free-wheeling IG behavior or the scared, anxious OG behavior?

Well, so back to HAPP and HAPPINESS and what HAPPENS. Happiness comes from accepting whatEVER happens in life and adjusting accordingly. It's a snowy day, the roads are horrific, and so, as much as I don't want to, and didn't anticipate this, I must do what I must do. So I cancel class. And we adjust by doing something right here on-line.

Which brings me to the assignment for Monday, Jan. 24th which you can now do from the comfort of your couch. :)

1) Please watch the YOU TUBE video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tRdDqXgsJ0 (I think it's 45 minutes or an hour) in which U. of Wisconsin researcher Dr. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, explores the emerging field of “Contemplative Neuroscience.” Davidson is one of those suggesting that our mental activity, including mindfulness and meditation, can induce physical changes in the brain. This is also the subject of Sharon Begley's book, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, so if you are inclined, pick up that book and start reading the first two chapters. (We will get to it a bit later in the semester.) Begley is a very gifted science writer for Newsweek and has explained the research with a storyteller's eye!

Davidson’s cutting-edge work, meanwhile, is influenced by the emerging fields of neuroplasticity and epigenetics: the first is that the brain is a flexible organism. The second idea, epigenetics, suggests that genes are regulated by the environment in which they reside; Davidson says the notion that our genetic structures are inalterable blueprints is “antiquated and Newtonian.”

2) Also, I am going to ask you to read please read a research article that Trevor Williams, a grad student taking this class (THANKS TREVOR!) emailed me on Wednesday. You don't have to absorb every detail of the article, just concentrate on the narrative in the beginning and at the end!) This article, from The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is appropriate particularly today being the snowy day it is, to read this article as it discusses research that shows basically the "positive emotions" that emerge from meditation "compound over time" (i.e. they create a SNOWBALL EFFECT!)

3) Go out and play in the snow, or at least experience the snow in some direct HAPPY way :) I will leave the details of that up to your individual imaginations.

4) Write a snow poem, specifically, a SNOW HAIKU, (here is a link to the haiku form, the Japanese form of poetry very short but very powerful!) and I will publish them here!

So, in the spirit of WRITING THE HAPPIER SELF I offer you my own SNOW HAIKU:

All white all soft all

mounded and smooth, white and white

the nothing of quiet.

HAVE FUN with this Haiku, HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND and see you on Monday!

Other readings that we read for today (and will discuss Monday, Jan. 24th):

1) The short story, "Getting Closer," by Steven Millhauser, from The New Yorker, Jan. 3, 2011

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2011/01/03/110103fi_fiction_millhauser

2) Chapter One of Tal Ben-Shahar's book, Happier (buy yourself a copy!)

3) "Everybody Have Fun," by Elizabeth Kolbert, from The New Yorker, March 22, 2010

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/03/22/100322crbo_books_kolbert

First writing assignment, due Monday, Jan. 24th: write a one-page typed letter to Jimmy, the boy in the story, "Getting Closer," giving him advice from the other three readings! Draw on your own experience trying to find happiness too!

Professor Ricci

CLASS # 1: Stress and Happiness and A Wondrous Winter Scene!

We probably broke at least 65 University rules by lighting a candle to start our first Happiness class today. We spent a few minutes writing about stress -- it was a very messy day with snow and ice trying the nerves of any and everyone attempting to get to the U for the first day of classes.

Then we switched gears and wrote about something -- however small -- that had made us happy in the past day or so.

One student said it was returning to school, seeing her roommate after a month-long holiday break -- they cranked up the music (Backstreet Boys!) and danced around their dorm room together!

Another student said that she had been overjoyed to find a parking spot exactly where she needed one.

A third student said he had heard from a friend that he'd met in a meditation class, and was delighted to reconnect.

For me, the moment occurred as I was walking across the ice-crusted campus weighed down with four bags full of schoolbooks and other gear. It had taken a lot longer to drive the 40 miles from home to school and I'd had to take my husband's car as we had an accident in mine on Saturday night (hitting a chunk of ice -- it left us with two wrecked tires and a damaged rim). My husband's car hesitates going into first gear and let me just say, I hate driving that vehicle (not him, he loves the car, go figure.)

Anyway, there I was, arms full of school junk, laden down and stressed because I was arriving on campus late when suddenly I noticed a student peering up into the snowy pine trees. She was taking a picture of the beautiful ice-coated pine trees! I glanced at the scene that she was capturing and smiled.

It was a winter wonderland, for sure, the pine branches sparkling and icy and gorgeous.

I smiled and thought how grateful I was that this stranger had showed me a moment of pure beauty on a lovely winter day!

Join Judi England and Sharon Salzberg in a 28-day commitment!

By Judi England

We live in a culture that loves more. More money, more stuff, more stimuli, more speed, more of everything! We move so quickly from one experience to the next, that the first sits, undigested in the past as we launch headlong into the future. Never mind the present moment. It seldom seems to be enough.

Sharon Salzberg’s latest work “Real Happiness, The Power of Meditation” is a gracious, workable antidote for the illness of “more”. It offers a step-by-step introduction to a practice that can enhance the quality of life and living, regardless of what that life might look like. As she writes: “We might not be able to change the circumstances of our lives, but we can change our relationship to those circumstances.”

With 40 years of personal practice, and 36 years as a teacher of meditation, Sharon knows her subject – quite literally from the inside out. Her students have included Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, police officers, burn patients, prisoners, and front line workers in domestic violence shelters. In 1975 she became a cofounder( with Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein) of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. Her written work includes eight books, as well as countless articles.

Sharon Salzberg

In “Real Happiness” she offers us a guide for how to begin (and begin again), and a wealth of techniques to explore in discovering what works best for each individual. A CD accompanies the book for audio support. But what adds depth and heart to her work is how she addresses the reactions, experiences and questions that come up in the process of meditating. It is here that her writing reflects the deep compassion for self and others which I always notice in long-time meditators.

********************************************************************

JE: Thank you so much for taking some time from your busy schedule to share with our readers! In your latest book” Real Happiness, The Power of Meditation” you speak about the life events which led you to explore meditation. In all your years of personal practice as well as teaching, would you say there’s some common threads in what triggers a person to try meditating?

SS: Very often, as in my case, some kind of unhappiness or discontent leads one to explore meditation. Sometimes it is an intense curiosity about life, a wish to live not just on the surface of things that brings one to that exploration. And these days, with so much research going on, often people are motivated by seeking better health, less stress, and real help with all kinds of concerns, including ADHD, addiction, and a long list of conditions people find limiting or depleting.

JE: In my early days of practicing, I remember having a particularly restful, relaxing, almost ecstatic experience. Of course, being a zealous new convert to the whole thing I ran to my teacher to share my joy. His comment: “Don’t get caught in the Bliss-Trap”. Can you relate to this?

SS: Oh yes. We say that the essence of mindfulness is relationship: how we relate to pleasure, how we relate to pain, and how we relate to everything in between. Our goal is to experience the pleasure or even bliss that comes our way fully, but without that extra thing we tend to do of clinging and holding on. We want to relate to painful experience fully, without closing down, and with an open heart of compassion. And we want to wake up and experience basically neutral times with strong presence and connection.

JE: If meditation is about simply “being with” all that we are: sensation, thought, emotion – wouldn’t it promote a sort of passive acceptance of our life, rather than an invitation to grow and change?

SS: I think that’s the common misperception, and it is easy to see why – the words we tend to use to describe meditation can well imply passivity, but it’s not what actually happens. If we learn to simply be with our experience, that’s the beginning of the process of insight. If we are struggling against our emotions, our bodies, there’s not a lot of learning that can happen. If we are overcome and defined by all of our changing states, there’s not a lot of learning that can happen. As we learn to be with all of our experience, we are creating the space we need to make choices out of clarity and wisdom.

JE: How would you respond to a prospective student who considers themselves “much too busy” to “just sit” and meditate?

SS: I find that reaction very interesting. I often say that if most of us were told, “Here’s this activity you can do 20 minutes a day and it will really help your friend.” Most of us would jump at the chance. But framed as “It will really help you,” suddenly we are too busy, it seems selfish, not worth doing. I’d say start with just 5 minutes of formal practice each day, and add a few fun things – like not answering your phone on the first ring, but letting it ring 3 times, and breathing; have one cup of tea or coffee a day without multitasking at the same time – no checking email, having a conversation, listening to the news at the same time. These things really are fun when put into practice.

JE: The program outlined in “Real Happiness” asks for a 28-day commitment to begin a regular practice. I also know that you’ve already gathered a number of people to take part in this exploration and to report their experiences via your web site. Is there some way the readers of the Holistic Health blog might join in the adventure?

SS: We welcome everyone to take part in the 28-Day meditation challenge. People can read the book and do the practice laid out in the book. The challenge will begin Feb. 1 (although you can begin at any time). There will be a comment section on the blog on my website www.sharonsalzberg.com so people can post comments on particular posts. Also people can join in the challenge on twitter. They can post their reflections and follow others who are doing the challenge by following the hashtag #realhappiness. I will be hosting 3 live tweetchats during the month of Feb and if you follow @sharonsalzberg I will post the dates and times for these. The chats are one hour long and anyone can ask questions, which I will do my best to answer in 140 characters or less. And of course there is my FB page, where I will posting excerpts from the blog and everyone can comment/share there as well. I will be posting on my site as well as tweeting to give everyone support and encouragement all month long.

JE: Again, Sharon, my thanks for talking with us about your work to bring this powerful practice into so many lives. Do you have anything else you’d like to add? A favorite quote you’d like to share?

SS: Here’s a quotation from Real Happiness: The door of possibility has been opened—the door to authentic and accessible happiness. Welcome. Come in and sit.

******************************************************

…..and today, like every other day, is the perfect day to do that.

Peace-Judi England, RN, LMT, Kripalu Yoga Instructor – yogajudi@aol.com – 1/17/2011

Up and Coming Events in the Albany Area:

1) Creating and Vision Board for Goals in 2011 and Sound Healing Demonstration: Saturday January 22, 2011-11-2:30, Key 2 Joy, 142 Vly Road, Niskayuna, NY-Presenters: Janet Tanguay, Creativity Coach at Art ‘N Soul, and Shannon Keys, Key 2Joy, Inc. – $35 in advance, $40 at the door,-518-842-1757jazzyjan@artnsoulinc.com

2) “The Power of Quantum Transformation” a free talk by Michael Wayne, author of “The Low Density Lifestyle”, Saturday, January 22,2011, 7-9pm- Hosted by Capital Region chapter of the Institute for Noetic Sciences (IONS). Home of Maryjane Cleary, Altamont, NY. For directions and more info call 518-861-1122

Writer Judi England, a yoga teacher and massage therapist in Albany, New York, writes the Holistic Health blog for the Times Union. This piece appeared there first.

Class Begins Wednesday, January 19, 2011 -- Or Whenever You're Ready!

Maybe you found this blog by "accident."  Well, so, some people say that there are no accidents in this Universe.

In any case, here is a class I am teaching beginning January 19, 2011, at the University at Albany. But perhaps you want to take the class here, free, on-line.

Even though the class is brand new, three students did a "test run" of the class last fall, in an independent study with me, and it was quite a remarkable experience. Here is a letter to prospective students written by Allyson Pashko, one of the students who took the class in the fall. (A senior, Allyson was a psych major at SUNY who graduated summa cum laude in December, 2010. Congratulations and much good luck to you, Allyson!)

Word is out now on campus that I am teaching this new class in Happiness. Students are stopping by my office saying they can't wait to take the class OR, they say they wish they could fit it into their schedules.  Grad students (former students of mine at the University) are saying they wish they had had a class like this available when they were undergrads. One grad student has enrolled and another wants to.

So, I thought maybe I should make the class available to everybody, everywhere, on-line. Or at least, I could let the Universe carry the syllabus wherever it will go.

If the reading list looks daunting, don't sweat it. This class isn't your typical class. You have all time in the world to complete the reading :). And you get as much time as you need, i.e., years if necessary, to complete the writing assignments.

Speaking of writing assignments, there is one in particular that you ought to try! It's called "Flipping the Script," and it promises to help you find peace in a not-so-peaceful relationship.

When that student Allyson Pashko tried it, the exercise proved remarkably helpful. Try it, what do you have to lose but an hour or two of time and a few sheets of paper?

And one other thing about this class, you grade yourself. :) Or you don't. You feel better, almost certainly.

So, here you go. Here is the syllabus for"Reading & Writing the 'Happier Self.'"

Class begins here on the blog, as soon as you're ready.

How I Got Happy Developing a Class in Happiness

Great is the irony of designing a brand new class in happiness. Because as you will see if you read the computer diary that I kept when I first started developing the class back in May of 2010, I WAS DECIDEDLY NOT VERY HAPPY when I began developing the class.

I told my husband the other night that developing this class (at the University at Albany, SUNY) has been one of the best things I have ever done in my life.

It has TAUGHT ME VERY IMPORTANT LESSONS ABOUT HOW TO BE HAPPY.

I would like to thank my husband, Richard Kirsch, for suggesting that I keep a journal as I started to do the reading and thinking that I needed to do for this class, which begins two weeks from tomorrow on January, 19, 2011.

My husband, one of the most optimistic people I know, was a principal player in the long and difficult fight for health care last year. Last May, as I started thinking in earnest about a happiness class, Richard was just starting to think about how he was going to write a book about the role that he (and the progressive organization that he ran, Health Care for America Now or HCAN) played in getting health care passed. (Now, he's fighting to keep it!)

So there were BOOKS IN THE AIR.

It took months and months, first to do all the reading that I needed to do, and then, to assemble the syllabus. And then, it took an equal number of months to get the class through various comittees and subcomittees and Dean's and departmental offices etc. You have no idea what a bureaucracy a university can be.

Then I had the equally trying task of getting all the paperwork completed to post the class in the course catalogue on the University's People Soft registration system.

It wasn't until last week that we finally crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's and got the class ready for registration.

As I have started to reread the journal -- it is 43 pages, single-spaced, on the computer -- I am reminded of a couple things: a) when I started developing the class I was really quite depressed, and b) I kept praying for happiness.

So you could say that my prayers for happiness were answered by starting a happiness class.

I want to thank my supervisor, Maritza Martinez, in the Office of Academic Support Services at the University at Albany, SUNY, for her continued support during this long and often torturous process.

It was very difficult at times to continue believing that this was the right thing to do.

But Maritza just kept reassuring me that everything would be fine, and that I was doing the exactly the right thing, developing a new interdisciplinary class that could, through cognitive skills, help students to understand what would make them happier.

At one point last June, as I was describing to her some of my fears and my hesitations about the class (including the fact that the class could turn into a giant therapy session which I did NOT want!) she very calmly listened to me. She acknowledged my fears and then she calmly slid a book across her desk to me.

The book is called Feel the Fear And Do it Anyway, by Susan Jeffers, which Maritza was using for the summer program that we offer to our students as part of the Educational Opportunities Program at the University.

That book's title was precisely the message I needed to hear. I needed to feel the fear but do it anyway.

So, THANKS MARITZA!

The first entry in the diary originally ran as an essay on the Huffington Post. But it is the second diary entry that really captures the irony of this endeavor. Here it is, called, "Who Me? Teach Happiness? But I'm Depressed!"