A student recently asked me to share my thoughts on “happiness independent of conditions.” This phrase is widely used in meditation circles, but many people have only a vague intellectual sense of what it means, or worse, a belief that it’s an unattainable goal.

Rather than deepen the intellectual hole, here’s a bit of pragmatic, direct experience…

The way things seem to be going, as I become more mindful, a wider and wider range of sense experiences (the sounds, sights and sensations that make up each moment) become ok. Acceptable. Peaceful. Safe. Sometimes even quite wondrous and beautiful. I still want to improve my life in various ways, but I am willing to be with sense experience as it is, more deeply, and more consistently. In other words, there’s less resistance to the way things are, and therefore, as the Buddhists put it, less suffering.
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I woke up yesterday morning to an email from psychologist and mindfulness teacher Rick Hanson. Rather than his usual kind, neuroscience-informed tip-of-the-day for wellbeing, this is a strong-willed invocation to know the facts and your values as they pertain to the current political situation.

I’m proud of my colleague for speaking out in this way. This message, coming from a meditation teacher, speaks to an important point about meditation, and spirituality in general: A holistic spirituality is political. It is ethical. It holds people to their word. It acknowledges bias, and class, and caste and color and the ways our world is out of balance.

One of the central aspects of mindfulness is the concept of non-resistance. We often talk about not resisting pain, “turning toward” emotional discomfort, “letting go.” Another word for this is “equanimity.” While this is a tremendously valuable teaching, it can often get us stuck on notions of calm, passivity, even indifference as the goal of meditation. This represents an incomplete understanding.
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