Mardi Horowitz M.D. - A Course in Happiness: Mastering the 3 Levels of Self-Understanding That Lead toTrue and Lasting Contentment

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Table of Contents

For Rene, with love,
and in memory of
Carol Horowitz and Aubrey Metcalf,
who also taught me a great deal about happiness

INTRODUCTION

If youre happy and you know it, clap your hands.

I love this nursery school song. It brings a smile to my face and lifts my spirits every time I hear it. The simple lyrics and catchy tune teach small children the important skill of recognizing and acknowledging good feelings within themselves. For adults, getting in touch with a sense of happiness is rarely so simpleand achieving a lasting happiness can be extremely elusive or unattainable no matter how much it may appear that someone has it all.

For more than forty years as a psychiatrist in private practice and as a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, Ive worked with thousands of individuals as theyve searched for greater meaning and happiness in their lives. While some struggled to heal from terrible tragedies and conditions and to recover a zest for living, many others strived simply to master the ordinary stresses of life or grappled to understand a mystifying, underlying discontent.

Through the years, Ive met countless people who have had all the outward manifestations of success yet were still searching for the golden key that would unlock the secret to enduring inner satisfaction. What I have found is that there is no golden key to the achievement of happiness; there is only the hard work of creating the type of inner peace that underlies it. And what is the raw material from which this inner peace is built? In a word: self-knowledge. To grasp who we are and what is most important to us in this life.

There is an old saying that the mind is like a muscle: With exercise, it can build both strength and skill, and, with exercise, it can lead us to happiness. Putting our internal house in order can be hard work, but it is the most important work of all.

With this book I invite you to make the choice to see all that lies within you, to believe that you can have a heart full of peace and a happy life no matter what your history or your current circumstances or what may be awaiting you in your future. Im not saying your life will be always blissful or problem free. I am saying that you can find a stable, serene center within yourself and live a life that you can honestly label as wonderful.

THE ROAD TO SELF-DISCOVERY

This book is comprised of a series of lessons, a virtual course in the achievement of happiness. Lesson by lesson, step by step, it will introduce you to a process of thinking about yourself, your goals, and your choices. Along the way, I will share with you stories of individuals who have turned their lives around through the hard work of self-analysis and self-directed change. And I will present exercises that will help you develop the skills to maintain a determined focus on what is really important to youeven when life throws you a curve ball.

When you make your mind a better tool for performing the crucial adult task of seeing yourself and your place in the world in sharp, undistorted focus, you arrive at fresh, clear ideas. You know the difference between fantasy and reality. You make good decisions. Youre aware and accepting of your oh-so-human imperfections and the traps that can snare you. You free yourself of avoidances, inaccuracies, false assumptions, rationalizations, and projections. You take responsibility for goals, priorities, and all of your choices and actions.

Its a serious task to undertake this self-development, significant inner change requires hard effort. New patterns of behavior will always feel awkward at first, but practice creates familiarity. Through repetition, a new way of acting in the world can soon become your automatic style. Your poise and confidence will grow. So will your sense of satisfaction with life and your self-esteem, and youll be establishing the strong foundation that will withstand whatever the winds of fate may blow your way.

The strategies that I will teach you have evolved from my work with patients who have succeeded at courageously exploring their inner landscapes, battling their demons, and growing in integrity, wisdom, and character. For some, the roadblock to serenity was unresolved past traumas or unsettling childhood memories or, conversely, struggles with anxious fantasies of an anticipated crisis. For others, resistance to thinking about difficult emotional issues and a lack of self-understanding were the obstacles preventing them from enjoying lives rich in meaning and fulfillment. For still others, the barrier to equanimity was a type of behavioral pattern, such as procrastination, perfectionism, severe self-criticism, selfishness, self-righteousness, indecisiveness, and wishful thinking, among others. When my patients gained more self-awareness and experienced the exhilaration of growing and changing, they found a renewed lust for life and a greater, steadfast inner peace.

As I observed my patients working so hard, drawing on great depths of courage and strength, I marveled at the healing, growth, and remarkable changes in their lives. Their discoveries and insights, the course of their journeys, are the knowledge I wish to pass on.

What are the core processes of creating a happy life? What are the dimensions of our identities as human beings? What gives our lives passion, purpose, and value? What are our deepest commitments and the ground from which our actions spring? How can we become more loving, wise, and joyful?

The answers to these questions are the message of A Course in Happiness.

TELLING MY TRUTH

In my own life, I know what it is to struggle with decisions, to be befuddled by choices, to long for personal happiness and yet be unsure about how to achieve it. I grew up in Hollywood, California, but stardust did not cover me. My parents were lower-middle-class working people. For the first ten years of my life, I was an only child, and I was very close to my mother and father. One of their highest priorities was for me to be well educated. They dreamed that I would go to college, find a professional calling, and have a good, stable, and secure life. I embraced that vision and applied myself to learning. I had high hopes that my future would unfold beautifully, although my notions of how this might come about were somewhat foggy.

I attended college at UCLA and then started medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. It was a tense time for me. I was full of insecurity, anxious about the competition, and doubtful of my ability to measure up to what would be required of me. It turned out that I earned high marks, and by the end of my first year of med school I felt much more confident as a student. But my social life was a different matter.

A few months earlier, Id had a girlfriend whod given me the ultimatum Marry me or break up. I knew I wasnt ready for marriage, so I opted to break up, although it left me feeling quite dejected. I soon started dating another young woman but quickly discovered that she was seeing someone besides me. This ruffled my feathers a lotI expected exclusivityso I gave her an ultimatum, and, to my surprise and dismay, she chose the other guy.

Feeling betrayed, I felt I had to get away. Luckily, my summer months between the first and second year of medical school were free, but I had little money and my options were limited. Then fate handed me the perfect solution: a job in Alaska with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. For two months, I would guard five salmon streams from poachers, stationed alone on a remote, uninhabited bay in the northern wilderness.

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