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Cultivating a feeling of happiness for the success and good fortune of others has become a regular part of my meditation routine. I didn’t realize how powerful it was until I started practicing it.
There’s something liberating in consciously wishing someone to be accomplished in everything they do. It makes you less judgmental not only towards others but also towards yourself. You start to realize that we’re all interconnected and that our own well-being is inextricably linked to the well-being of those around us.
But, like any practice, it needs to be sustained. One of my favorite resources that inspires me to keep going is Free Buddhist Audio website. That’s why I want to share with you a poem that meditation teacher Singhamati read while talking about how this type of meditation changed her life for the better. It’s called “So Much Happiness.”
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SO MUCH HAPPINESS
by Naomi Shihab NyeIt is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.
“So Much Happiness” is a part of “Words Under the Words: Selected Poems” by Naomi Shihab Nye.
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