Name an emotion, and it has a function that’s been handpicked by millennia of natural selection. Unfortunately, our culture’s view of emotions is pretty unsophisticated. We tell people that having emotions is weak or shameful, which is about as dumb as telling someone that eyesight is weak, or that you should pretend not to have a sense of smell, or that using reason is something only sissies do. 

A part of me dies every time someone asks if my job is just to sit there and “listen to people talk about their problems.” That’s actually not what therapy is, but somewhere along the line, people got the wrong idea. It’s probably mostly Hollywood’s fault, although some blame can be placed on therapists who actually do just sit there slack-jawed for an hour and then take people’s money as if they’d just provided a valuable professional service.

For the first 20 years of my life, I stayed safely within my comfort zone. And, after gathering two decades’ worth of data, I can conclusively say that it was an awesome strategy for keeping myself miserable.

If you’re a human being with a pulse, the chances are pretty good that you’ve been overwhelmed by sadness, anger, or anxiety at some point. And while it’s not possible to just avoid negative emotions, there’s a lot you can do proactively to reduce your chances of being overwhelmed by them. 

I wrote before about understanding the nature of suffering, and so I thought the logical progression would be then to talk about its complement, the thing we do want – happiness.   If we accept that suffering is made of resistance, it holds that happiness is the lack of resistance.  If you look closely, you’ll see how true this is.