No arms, no legs, no worries!

This brave, funny and happy man is helping millions of people to change their attitude, seeing the glass as half full rather than half empty. He is inspiring because he is a dramatic, visible, irrefutable example of how life depends on how you look at it. It is hard to sustain self-pity or even self-doubt when watching this video. That might be why some people have watched it many, many times!

Where does happiness come from?

Nick Vujicic reminds me that we have all the tools we need to be happy — very happy, indeed very blissful — but we won’t get round to using them if we don’t sincerely believe that we possess the seeds of happiness within. If our starting point for meditation is: “I’m a real mess and happiness is alien to me, but I guess I should try this meditation thing”, or — identifying with the delusions — “I’m so deluded, I better get around to training my mind”, we are off to a very slow and possibly quite torturous beginning. To succeed in becoming happier, we first have to actively want to be happy and stop buying into our misery. (It may sound obvious, but this step is surprisingly often left out.) Then, with that, we can be confident that happiness is a given if we apply effort. Why? Because we are not adding anything that is not already there.

The root of the Western word “happiness” is apparently Scandinavian and means “luck”. Happiness is randomly assigned to lucky people in some cosmic lottery, sorry mate if you got the losing numbers. And a lot of people subscribe to a Western psychotherapy “set level of happiness” theory, where an individual is always moreorless at the same level of happiness – studies showed happiness spiking or dipping due to e.g. winning the lottery or getting cancer, but returning to the same level later. If we believe all this, there is not much point in training the mind to be happy.

However, the only reason these studies showed that people’s happiness doesn’t appear to change much during their lifetime is because people are generally not training in happiness – they are trying to find happiness in external sources. Buddhism 101 explains how happiness is a state of mind, so its real cause lies in the mind, not the external world. Change the mind, everything changes. Change the mind a lot, and everything changes a lot.

I’ve had a lot of external changes over the last few years, and some of them have looked rather alarming to my loved ones. Over the holidays, my aunt, whom I haven’t seen in a while, asked me: “But how are you really feeling? I know you are always happy, but what is really going on?” What do I answer, “I’m really feeling awful… but I’m happy!” No, it is one or the other.

Yesterday, a friend told me how in a teaching he compared training the mind to going to the gym, in that you wouldn’t get round to going to the gym if you didn’t know for sure that you already had muscles to exercise. My biceps may be rather puny at the moment, but they are there, so I am prepared to make the effort to bring out their potential (well, I”m not really, but I am prepared to continue the effort to meditate.)

And if someone without arms and legs can learn to be happy, what is stopping us? As one school kid’s comment put it:

“I shall always remember this when I think I’m having problems, be happy. ‘Cos if he can, anyone can.”

Precious human life

One way instantly to lift our spirits is to count our blessings rather than worrying about all the things we don’t have. As another comment put it:

“Before this video, I felt I was so unlucky and I’ll never be good at something. After watching, DAMN! I’m lucky!”

This video for me was a meditation on my precious human life. Precious human life meditation is placed at the very beginning of the stages of the path so that we actually get going on the other stages. If we don’t remember and feel glad every day about how lucky we are right now, we’ll never get round to using our good fortune. We’ll take this rare life for granted — count out our life in coffee spoons — even though Buddha compares a precious human life to a star in the midday sky.

Nick Vujicic is being described by many as “a hero”. He has gained a victory over his own mind by fighting the inner enemies of self-pity and self-doubt. His website is called “Attitude is Altitude”. Nick Vujicic may not be able-bodied, but he sure is able-minded.