happiness from the inside out

how to take control of your experience

I was sixteen and in a screaming match with my mother when I finally figured out how to be happy.

When anger is intense it feels like more than an emotion. It feels like a screw being tightened, tangible pressure building up in your head, an explosion as inevitable as the laws of physics.

I was on the verge of shouting my throat raw when I remembered a slim green novel I’d picked up randomly a few weeks before.

That book was Passage Meditation. I talk about it lot, because it was my first introduction to the idea that I could choose how I felt about my life.

It turned out I could make that fury grow or shrink like a balloon by leaning into or away from it. I then did something I’d never thought was possible: I exhaled, paused for a moment with a smile on my face, and shut the door calmly.

I still remember glimpsing my mother’s confused expression as the lock clicked. I was so delighted that I actually skipped away.

I used to think certain reactions were inevitable. Rejection had to make me sad, insults had to make me angry, praise had to make me happy. This was my first experience with the tiny, almost invisible space between perception and reaction, where, if I really wanted to, I could wedge in my toe (metaphorically speaking) and send things down a different path.

I learned to take a step back from my own mind, seeing it—not as me—but as a tricky and powerful thing I could master with enough determination. For the first time ever, I started feeling rather playful about the experience of existing.

This small but vital gap between you and your mental experience is what I refer to as detachment. Detachment allows you to take a step back from whatever you are experiencing and decide what you want to do with it — lean in or lean away.

I think a lot of people associate detachment with learning not to care and no longer trying. But it’s the exact opposite. Whatever you want to do and whoever you want to be, detachment helps you. For me it restored actually restored my lost sense of hope and agency.

I didn’t have a good time growing up, and the last few years living at home were particularly rough. I withdrew into myself like a nautilus, stopped trying at school, started self-sabotaging out of sheer boredom. Existence was a thing to passively endure until my circumstances changed.

That hopelessness I felt was the product of me engaging too much with unproductive ideas and feelings and bad experiences I’d had. Yes, there were many limitations in my world, but I saw them, got discouraged, and proceeded to put myself in an even smaller box.

You create the world you live in. Through action, yes, but even more profoundly through attention. Action’s power is limited; the power of attention is endless.

Learning to intentionally harness my attention was how I narrowly escaped wasting my entire life being depressed, useless, and self centered.

“A mind that is constantly reacting is a mind that is controlled by the world. A mind that observes without clinging is a mind that is free.

The difference between suffering and peace is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but the ability to remain aware without identifying with fleeting emotions.”

— Passage Meditation

the world is a mirror of your belief

The human brain is great at finding patterns. You learn a new word and suddenly see it everywhere. You start thinking about a specific car and begin spotting it all over the road.

This is called the frequency illusion—you didn’t summon more of that thing into existence, you just started noticing it. Attention is deeply generative.

In the famous Dartmouth Scar Experiment, researchers created scars on subjects’ faces using makeup and handed them a mirror so they could see the disfigurement. They were then told to report back any differences in how they were treated.

The subjects were full of stories about being discriminated against: people staring, refusing to engage, acting with disdain.

Here’s the thing: under the pretense of touching up the makeup, the researchers had removed the scar without telling them. The scar had never existed.

They were nervous about being judged, so they were—or thought they were, which amounts to the same thing. Their own expectations shaped every interaction.

This phenomena is called predictive processing and has been demonstrated in many other social experiments. Andy Clark gives many examples in his book The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality.

Insecurity and other beliefs work like self-fulfilling prophecies. If you look for rejection, you will see it everywhere. If you assume you’re always welcome, the world offers you signs that confirm it. Through the power of attention you make your beliefs true.

reality is a choice

Objective reality is somewhat of a myth. Even if it exists, we don’t have access to it. All we have access to is our perceptions of it.

Your whole life is nothing more than a current of experience, an endless stream input from your mind and senses, not to mention your thoughts, feelings, and memories. It’s a strange combination of what is actually there and what you expect to be there.

Experience is almost infinite, but attention is limited. It’s like a spotlight illuminating only part of a stage. It’s why you can be so absorbed in memories of the past that you bump into something right in front of your eyes.

Both good experiences and bad experiences are inevitable in a lifetime, but you can choose which ones you actually fill your life with. You can take control of that spotlight and train it where it does the most good. I talked about this in the context of getting rich in another essay, “how to become exceptional.”

Very few people do this. Every negative experience they have adds on bitterness, resentment, and trauma, leaving them weighed down by more and more baggage as the years pass.

Your lover glances at an attractive stranger and knot tightens in your stomach, reminding you of being cheated on years ago. You have to speak in front of a crowd and it’s like you’re fifteen again, getting bullied for the stutter you don’t even have anymore. Someone criticizes your work and your fragile confidence vanishes the way it did every time your hypercritical mother picked something about you apart.

The impolite truth is this: you don’t have to be traumatized by the bad things that happen to you¹ The trauma comes not from the painful experience itself, but from the fixation on the painful experience. You are tortured quite literally by your own mind.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

— Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl²

The power of attention allows two people to live through the same event and walk away with completely different experiences of it. It’s why some people survive enormous trauma and remain resilient while others are scarred for life.

It’s not luck; it’s skill, and you can learn it. As Visakan Veerasamy says over and over: Focus on what you want to see more of. So how do you train your attention to go where you want it to go?

why I meditate

One of the common goals underlying every meditation technique is becoming more aware of the separation between experience and awareness.

Imagine sitting in a theater, watching the most immersive movie of all time — so immersive, actually, that you forget you’re watching. You shiver at the scary parts, weep at the sad, rejoice at the happy. “You” are simply a consciousness, pure awareness, a soul experiencing a human lifetime.

Remembering this keeps you from getting overwhelmed. There is nothing inherently positive or negative or shameful about an experience. It simply is. You have the choice to interpret that experience however you want. This is the first reason why meditation is so powerful.

The second is that meditation trains your attention to become “single-pointed” and therefore powerful. Most people’s attention is completely untrained, jumping from one thing to another like a grasshopper.

Instead of thinking about the meal you’re cooking or the homework you’re finishing, your mind keeps jumping to a coworker’s snide remarks, the errands you have to run, the five pounds you’ve gained, and god knows what else.

You are neither fully in the present nor anywhere else; rather than fully experiencing each moment of the limited time you have, you hover in inconsistent mental limbo. Everything you do takes longer, is accomplished less efficiently, and satisfies you less.

You can unlock tremendous focus, discipline, and happiness by learning to intentionally keep your attention in the right place. Instead of getting carried away in the film, you become the director who decides what stays in the final cut.

The mind well trained in meditation responds to a light, almost effortless touch. If the memory of a hostile act done to us by our partner tries to force its way in, we can eject it by turning our full attention to the many loving acts our partner has done in the past.

Here we are refusing to be pulled about relentlessly by our thoughts – we are thinking them in full freedom.

— Passage Meditation

If you want to study instead of scroll, your mind obediently studies.

If you want to stop ruminating on how you’re the least successful person in the room and interact with light heart, your mind puts those insecurities aside.

If you want to eat an apple instead of a bag of chips, your mind simply turns away from the snack cupboard.

Meditation helps me practice the art of focus. As soon as I wake up, I sit for half and hour and repeat a certain passage in my mind over and over. My mind races to dwell on my anxieties, my to-dos for the day, random things I found interesting, anything and everything.

It’s like getting an excitable puppy to sit still and stop running around. Getting frustrated only takes you further from the goal. I gently and patiently bring it back to the words of the passage over and over.

If my mind remains still for long enough, I can feel myself sinking deeper into my own consciousness, getting a sense of the profound and eternal peace that lies underneath all my surface-level thoughts and reactions.

After many years of (honestly inconsistent) practice, I can still only go a few minutes without getting yanked back to the surface. Some days I can’t even do that.

But for the rest of the day, I’m calmer, happier, more present, and more disciplined. My many quick-shifting moods and impulses don’t have quite as much control over me.

I feel things, yes, good and bad, but I don’t get swept away in my feelings. I can choose not to act on them or get carried away by them. Instead of fixating on what makes me unhappy or worried, I can move the spotlight to what makes me feel optimistic, cheerful, and at peace.

detachment vs. repression

Most people assume that pushing an emotion down makes it go away. It doesn’t. It actually makes it stronger.

Taking control of your mind doesn’t mean forcing yourself to “think positive.” It doesn’t mean pretending you don’t feel what you feel. That’s not control—that’s repression, and it will eat you alive.

Repression is resistance. It’s when you feel something negative—anger, fear, sadness, jealousy, grief—and you decide No. I shouldn’t feel this. I shouldn’t be sad. This is dumb. I shouldn’t be angry. I should be better than this. I shouldn’t care this much. I shouldn’t want this this much.

So you push it down, you try to ignore it, you pretend it doesn’t exist. But the more you fight, the harder it pushes back.

Detachment is observation. It’s when you feel something and think okay. That’s interesting. I feel this right now. You watch the thought or emotion float by on the river of experience while you stand on the shore. You don’t owe it anything: any action, any justification, any battle.

The difference between repression and detachment is shame. Emotions feed on attention, and shame is an extremely obsessive form of attention.

“What you resist persists. What you accept transforms.”

—Passage Meditation, Eknath Easwaran

When you feel ashamed of something, you’re fixating on it, bracing yourself against it, constantly on the lookout for it. Ironically, this locks you into an endless war with the experience you started out wanting to get away from.

Carl Jung popularized the concept of “the shadow self” — the desires and thoughts you have that are deeply shameful and taboo. A lot of his approach to wellbeing is centered around confronting, understanding, accepting your shadow self. In doing so, those hidden desires and fears lose their power over you.

This is the same as what I’m talking about—the neutral observation of all mental experiences without shame.

Many times throughout my life I’ve become aware that I was, well, shitty. I was making my life and the lives of those around me worse. I was actively creating problems, and if I wanted things to get better, I’d have to change.

The idea being deeply flawed fills many people with distress, but to me it was completely matter of fact.

I was merely observing relationships between my thoughts, my emotions, my actions, and the world around me. All of these things were just experiences, no more a stain on my “true self” than Divya, twenty-four year old software developer, would be guilty of a murder she just read about on the news.

This way of approaching my identity helped my personality become fluid, adaptable, and resilient in the best way. Like any other experience, my thoughts and feelings can be crafted intentionally through the power of attention, and so can yours.

In the end, your experience is not the simple sum of what happens to you. The worst day you’ve had can expand to fill up your whole life if you think about it all the time. In learning to control of your attention, you control what your life becomes.

from the Dhammapada, Chapter 1: The Pairs.

light reading

• Passage Meditation, by Eknath Easwaran - a clear and gentle introduction using the techniques described in this essay. I picked it randomly off a bookshelf and it changed my life.

• The Dhammapada is a collection of simple verses about enlightened thinking that I come back to again and again

• Duet by Glen Keane, one of the most beautiful animations I’ve come across

• Thought of You by Ryan Woodward, a haunting illustration of love and limerence

Studies show that chronic rumination—mentally replaying negative events—can literally increase stress, anxiety, and even physical illness. People with high resilience actively redirect their attention instead of fixating on past pain.

1. Nolen-Hoeksema, Susan. “The Role of Rumination in Depressive Disorders and Mixed Anxiety/Depressive Symptoms.” Journal of Abnormal Psychology (2000).

Not everyone who experiences trauma develops PTSD. Some people experience Post-Traumatic Growth, meaning they become more resilient, wise, and fulfilled after a hardship. What determines this? Attention and interpretation. People who focus on growth instead of victimization are more likely to benefit from hardship.

Tedeschi, R.G., & Calhoun, L.G. (1996). “The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory: Measuring the Positive Legacy of Trauma.” Journal of Traumatic Stress.

2. As a Holocaust survivor, Frankl’s thoughts on this topic are especially poignant.