Happiness is an inside job

Willing your way to happiness

It also mirrors cutting-edge research that made news recently with an experiment at the University of Wisconsin on a Tibetan Buddhist monk who had spent 30 years meditating in the Himalayas.

Dr. Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience, put the monk, Matthieu Ricard, into an MRI that videotapes functions of the brain. Inside the machine, as the monk meditated on compassion, his brain showed a dramatic increase in activity in the areas connected to enthusiasm and joy.

The result was magnified in a follow-up study where Davidson charted the normal, emotional states in the brains of 150 people, including the monk Ricard. Most people fell into the middle ground between positive emotions and negative emotions.

But Ricard, who had been deeply meditating on compassion when his brain was scanned, nearly soared off the chart of positive emotions - he had the highest level of happiness ever documented.
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The good news is that you needn't have 30 years' experience meditating in the Himalayas to improve the quality of your life.

For example, studies are finding that meditation can benefit average people with little experience. Workers in a high-tech company participated in a two- month course in meditation, then were tested by Davidson and Jon Kabat-Zinn, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, bestselling author of "Wherever You Go, There You Are," and a Mind and Life board member.

Results showed decreased anxiety, improved immune function and significant changes in brain activity.

If employees in the notoriously high-stressed, high-tech world can feel better in just a few months, maybe there's hope for the rest of us.

and from the Happiest guy in the world: Happiness: a guide