are missing a great, big, giant, massive, right-in-your-face, glaring kind of problem: mindfulness alone is not enough.1
Mindfulness is not enough to live a levelheaded existence right in the middle of the storm that is contemporary life. Mindfulness is not enough to find your way through the cyclone of your days. It’s not enough to help you make the tough choices. And here’s the real kicker: it was never meant to be enough.
When the Buddha taught mindfulness, he always taught it as part of a whole. He never said, “Pay attention to your breath and you will be free of suffering.” More like, “Pay attention to your breath as a way of steadying the mind, and then look at your life.”
Look at your life. Closely. Notice your mind states. Notice your heart states. And, also, if you want to be happy, make sure you’re really taking care of things. Like goodness, and sweetness, and love, and compassion. In fact, the Buddha said goodness, not mindfulness, is the foundation for a happy life.
Good Is Good
The basic assertion of this book, then, is that good is good. Like, it’s good to do good. And it not only is good, it also feels good. So yes, you should act on all your better urges—you should help the old lady cross the street, give money to charity, say kind things to your friends, and keep your head on straight.
How? Well, in addition to practicing mindfulness—which of course we highly recommend—we’d like to offer five more hot-mess-busting pieces of semi-Buddhist advice. And they are as follows:
Don’t Be a Jerk
Give a Little
Say What’s True
Make Sex Good
Stay Clear
In Buddhism, we call these the precepts. Think of them as a road map. Or an instruction manual. Don’t think of them as rigid prescriptions for how to be some sort of plasticine smiling goody-two-shoes. They’re more like trainings. You can just try them out and see what happens. In fact, you can take each one of them with a giant grain of salt. Take one at a time into your days, knock around with it for a while, and see if things get better. Meanwhile, as you try them out and see what happens, you’ll likely find that they build on each other, ricochet off one another, and overall end up being a pretty stormproof formula for how to be happy and live a halfway decent existence.
So in the following pages we’re going to unpack what it actually takes to live these principles in real time: in the classroom, the boardroom, and the bedroom; in the chat-room and, God help us all, in the comments section of the Washington Post. We’ll talk about our own failures—maybe some successes, too—we’ll tell a bunch of stories, and we’ll pepper the whole thing with references to the best psychological literature out there that is looking at how to accomplish the good life.
What we won’t do is talk to you about the complexities of Buddhist cosmology. We won’t ask you to sign on for yet another belief system. But just know that, in addition to some great studies and our own personal experiences, there is also the time-tested wisdom of the whole of Buddhism that we’re trying to pack into this little missive, which carries with it a thousand minds and hearts that have road-tested every one of these principles in their very real, very vulnerable lives. Just like you, these friends—our Buddhist ancestors—have wanted to live a life that is happy, satisfying, and meaningful. They’ve succeeded. We think you can, too.
One Last Thing
Who the heck are we? Are we greatly enlightened spiritual masters who are going to give you all the answers? Are we here to solve all your problems? Have we even solved all our own problems?
In a word: nope.
We’re not great spiritual teachers. We’re just two seekers who have tried to put these principles at the center of our lives. They’ve worked for us. They still are working in us. And while we can’t say we’re all that realized or all that special, we can say with conviction that we live a life that is, all in all, astonishingly ordinary and very happily adequate.
Yeah, okay, but who are we?
We’re a white, hetero, cisgender, middle-class, hyper-educated American couple who have studied with some of the great Asian and American Buddhist teachers alive today. We’ve been at it for about twenty years each. We’ve spent years in meditation retreat and years studying old Buddhist books, new