Write down a list of things that you want to start doing today that will help you achieve your goals for becoming a happier, healthier, more radiant you.

Make your list action-oriented, practical, and possible. Be sure to include both those things that you think will be easy to incorporate into your life, as well as more challenging. Dream big and visualize yourself accomplishing each item on your list as you focus your energy on making it a reality.

If you don’t know where to begin–talk to family and friends about what they want to start doing in order to live a happier life, or borrow ideas from the article with Tips for How to Be Happy.

Then inspire others to do the same. Continue to help motivate one another, challenge each other to make greater changes, and help each other to break through barriers.

Sample Finding Happiness Bucket List:

• Try to spend at least 15 minutes in nature every day.

• Commit to a bi-weekly or more yoga or exercise class.

• Try to learn something new I’ve always wanted to do.

• Take an around-the-world trip and explore new cultures.

• Be kinder to my loved ones.

• Make a complete stranger smile.

• Volunteer at least once a month, even every week, to a cause I truly believe in.

• Learn to meditate.

• Try a new healthy recipe each week and share it with family and friends.

• Make happiness a skill, something I can practice and study how to be happier each day.

• Start the day with a happiness quote, and share it with others to inspire them.

“When you change, your whole world changes.” Begin the journey to finding happiness.

Save

Save

When I was ten years old, the only desire I had was to be happy. It was amazing to me, even then, that almost no one ever talked about happiness in the way I intuitively knew they ought to.

They believed that if you went to college, married and had children, and got a good job that brought you lots of money and success, you’d be happy. The idea was that if you added these external things to your life, they would magically create the fulfillment you were looking for, and you’d suddenly find yourself happy.

Even as a child, I was suspicious of this plan, and it left me in an awkward spot. I had the opportunity to follow the external path and do all of the things everyone said would give me happiness. And because I couldn’t quite believe it would work, I felt paralyzed, because I could see the end of that road clearly, and it wasn’t a place I wanted to be.

I wanted to be in a happy state of consciousness – without having to tack on a bunch of things to make my life outwardly just right.

It was only years later, as I began to awaken to the possibility of inner realities and inner transformation, that I realized my childhood intuition had been right. There really was a way to be happy within yourself, and from that state of being, to relate to money, home, relationships, and everything “out there” on the surface.

I discovered that when the inner state of consciousness is right, everything falls in place. But if your inner state isn’t balanced, and if it isn’t focused on something meaningful, it doesn’t matter how many accoutrements you pile on, because there will always be inner discontent.

In this way, I became aware of a central fact of life: that joy is within you. The lasting happiness we’re seeking is a consciousness that we can cultivate. I came to understand that, step by step, we can develop the attitudes, actions, and practices that create happiness.

How I wish I’d been told these principles as a child, instead of being asked to memorize the capital of Brazil and the primary exports of France.

Once we learn that happiness is within us, we realize a profound truth: change yourself and everything changes.

The obvious next question is, “How do we change?”

Once we ask the right question, the answer is usually close at hand. How can we change? How can we put ourselves in a state of consciousness where our happiness grows from inside?

The “method” is, first of all, to understand that when you take care of the inner reality, your outer reality automatically adjusts. It’s like tuning a radio – whatever station you tune to inside, that’s the music you’ll hear outside.

The lovely thing is that it isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. It’s not that you must suddenly leap from complete darkness to total light. Every step you take, no matter how small, expands your capacity to experience happiness, so that the journey becomes the goal.

It’s instructive to observe those who’ve walked the happiness-path for a very long time.

I remember a vacation that a group of us from Ananda took with Swami Kriyananda.

Next to the lobby of the hotel where some of us were staying was a small jewelry shop. For hours every day, a woman sat alone behind the counter.

Swamiji remarked, “I never see any customers in there.”

There was nothing in the shop he wanted to buy, but the next day he went in, and we followed.

“I see you sitting here day after day,” he said to the woman. “There are so few customers. What do you do all day? It must be lonely.”

She seemed startled by being addressed in such a personal way, and touched by his kindness.

“I read,” she said. “I have a little paperwork to do.” Her voice trailed off. “It is lonely,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.

Swamiji offered no words of comfort. He was silent and still, but as I stood next to him, I was suddenly enveloped by an expanding sense of joy that was emanating from him. He was reaching out to her with his spirit. Suddenly her eyes shone with happiness. When Swamiji saw that she had received what he’d come to give, he wished her well and we left the shop.

After that, whenever he passed, he would greet her with a smile through the window. Often, she would come to the door and follow him with her gaze until he was out of sight. Just seeing Swamiji seemed to ease her loneliness.

A corollary of the law of happiness is the discovery that our happiness grows as we extend our awareness to include the realities of others.

In giving others kindness, compassion, and sympathy, even in small and simple ways, we find our happiness mysteriously expanding from within.

The desire to find happiness and avoid suffering is such a universal and inescapable fact of life that it deserves to be called a law. Some people, of course, seek their happiness in the wrong places – mistakenly believing that they can remove an obstacle to their happiness by treating others unkindly, stealing, or even murdering. But the law of happiness is inexorable – happiness comes by an expansion of consciousness, never by contracting our awareness in the hope of shutting out all but our own limited reality.

How can we develop the capacity to understand where our true happiness lies, and find the courage to follow that inner guidance? Life itself teaches us many lessons – we learn what works and what doesn’t in life’s school of hard knocks.

But there are shortcuts. Deep understanding can carry us over many of life’s dangerous passages. The world’s spiritual teachers tell us that we can find the source of wisdom within. By harmonizing the feelings of our hearts and quieting our thoughts in meditation, we can learn to hear the “still, small voice” that is continually whispering its wisdom and wants only our highest good.

Swamiji led with his heart. From the side, he looked like a strung bow: straight spine, outwardly curving chest. The clarity of his mind came from the courage of his heart.

“In teaching meditation,” Swamiji said, “people speak of the need to calm the mind. In fact, it is the heart that needs to be calmed. That is why devotion is fundamental to success in meditation. When the heart is calm and one-pointed in its focus on God, the mind is also still, because there are no restless feelings to disturb it.

“Jesus put it this way, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’ Purity means the absence of any other desire except the desire for God. This is our natural state. It is not something we have to acquire. All we have to do is remove the impurities of the heart which keep us from knowing ourselves as we truly are: One with God.”

About Asha:

Nayaswami Asha is the spiritual director of Ananda Sangha in Palo Alto, California, and the Ananda community in Mountain View, California. She served as content manager during the producing of the Finding Happiness film.

Save

Save

Save

I don’t read the papers much, but several years ago I came across an article in the Sacramento Bee that fairly begged to be disbelieved.

Here’s an excerpt:

In a Journal of Medical Ethics article titled “A Proposal to Classify Happiness as a Psychiatric Disorder,” Liverpool University psychologist Richard P. Bentall argues that the so?called syndrome of happiness is a diagnosable mood disturbance that should be included in standard taxonomies of mental illness such as the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Happiness, as Bentall states in his abstract, is “statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system.” (In this regard, as Bentall later notes, happiness resembles other psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia.)

The author of the Bee article, New Republic contributing editor Maggie Scarf, related Dr. Bentall’s suggestion “that the term ‘happiness’ be removed from future editions of the major diagnostic manuals, to be replaced by the formal description ‘major affective disorder, pleasant type.’”

When I read the article aloud to a friend, she doubled over with major affective disorder, pleasant type.

“That’s such amazing cock-a-doo!” she howled. “It’s so carefully reasoned – yet it’s completely incredible!”

The Practice of Happiness 

It is nutty-cakes. And yet, is there anything actually wrong with using scientific methods to study happiness? After all, it’s what the spiritual explorers of all ages have done – studying happiness in the laboratory of their bodies, hearts, and minds, and keeping tidy notes of what works and what doesn’t.

For most of us, at any rate, happiness is hardly a “diagnosable mood disturbance” – it’s the answer we’re seeking. And if we can get more of it with the help of scientific orderliness and method, so much the better.

That’s the message of Finding Happiness. The film reveals how the members of nine small intentional communities scattered around the globe have made happiness the cornerstone of their lives for more than forty-five years.

(Disclaimer: I’ve lived in the Ananda communities for 40 years.)

Because the world’s spiritual adepts have made a specialty of researching the factors that increase happiness and decrease suffering, what they say may be particularly worth hearing, in these times of pandemic unhappiness.

After all, their approach is practical. They tell us, for example, that we’ve been born with five instruments that we can use to boost our happiness – the body, heart, will, mind, and soul. And they further explain that as we grow up, we pass through five stages, each of which lasts about six years, during which these “happiness tools,” in the order listed, become the prime focus.

Happiness, they tell us, increases as we learn to use the tools “expansively.” (More on “expansion” later.) Thus, the most important time of our lives for learning to nurture and increase our happiness is when we’re growing up.

From birth to age 6, an infant must learn to use its body and senses. From 6 to 12, feelings come to the fore – these are the years when children are highly receptive to learning through the media of feeling – the arts, including stories, music, theater, painting, and dance.

From 12 to 18, teenagers embrace challenges to their will power, in preparation for independent adult life. At around 18, young people become fascinated with the life of the mind, engaging in endless discussions of politics, science, the arts, and philosophy. Finally, at around 24, many people experience significant life events that may precede a spiritual awakening.

As each tool takes center stage, the others don’t simply fade away. Thus, while a toddler’s primary challenge is to gain a certain level of mastery over its body and senses, it will also express its feelings – with the volume turned up! Nor do the stages begin precisely on one’s 6th, 12th, 18th, and 24th birthday; the transitions are gradual.

Why did nature decide on this particular system? In his insightful book, Education for Life, the founder of Ananda, Swami Kriyananda (writing under his American name, J.?Donald Walters) explains how each tool prepares the child for the stage that follows. Thus, feeling comes before will power, because feeling is the faculty that enables us to tell right from wrong. Before we can use our will power appropriately, with sensitive awareness of others’ realities, we need to develop our ability to feel their realities. Walters laments the ruinous consequences of cramming children’s minds with facts at the expense of nurturing and refining their capacity to feel, as is customary in schools today.

Here’s another way to look at it: each stage fulfills the preceding one. Thus, feeling motivates us to action, and will power gives us the energy to act on our feelings. Will power, in turn, finds its fulfillment in wisdom, which tells us which actions will give us the greatest happiness. And wisdom is fulfilled in spiritual practice – because in Self-realization, we unite our consciousness with the source of all wisdom and joy.

The history of education reveals that in ancient Greece and Rome, and throughout the Middle Ages and Enlightenment, the six-year stages were recognized as natural phases of a child’s life. Thus, appropriate teaching methods were devised for each stage, and schools were divided into the rough equivalents of our modern elementary school (age 6-12), junior and senior high (12-18), and college (18-24).

Expanding Awareness Equals Joy

As I hinted above, the spiritual teachings of all ages tell us that happiness comes by using our five human tools “expansively.” Like most abstractions, “expansion” is most easily understood with examples.

Consider what happens when we begin an exercise program. After the first two or three weeks, we find ourselves feeling happier and more alive. Why? Because the exercising body is generating more energy that spills over to nourish our feelings, will, and mind, expanding their range and force. Expanding our awareness through one “tool,” the body, has influenced the others. Good actions spread their effects – as do “bad” ones.

People tend to “specialize” in one or perhaps two of the “tools of expansion.” Thus, some of us go more by feeling, while others tend to lead with their willpower or mind. The spiritual teachings advise us to “go with our strengths,” and work to correct any weaknesses.

In many natural processes, the “tools of happiness” tend to appear in the same order as in a child’s development. When we fall in love, for example, the first attraction is generally, though not invariably physical. We see a person across the room whose appearance attracts us, and our feelings become aroused. We form a volition to act on our feelings, and we walk over and strike up a conversation. The mind probes for information: Is she married? Does he like children? And, if we’re wise, we’ll consult a higher guidance before entering this new life venture. We’ve passed through the five “tools” in order: body, feeling, will, mind, soul.

The System Is Rigged

It all sounds so straightforward: simply use the tools expansively and happiness will follow – rather like remembering to brush our teeth in the morning. But in real life, cultivating expansive attitudes turns out to be a challenge. That’s because the opposite urge, contraction, is strong in us also.

Life places essentially the same choice continually before us: will we use our bodies wisely, or allow them to decay? Our hearts, to love, or to hate? Our minds, to be wise, or merely clever? Our spiritual instincts, to aspire inwardly, or to dabble in psychic trivialities. History – ours and the world’s – is the eternal struggle between these two forces in human nature.

Also, the theory is simple, but the details are not. We’ve been given all of the tools we need to achieve happiness and success – or so it seems. The trouble is, relying too exclusively on our purely human tools, we find ourselves sooner or later bumping against their built-in limitations.

The five tools of expansion embody wonderful expertise, yet their very specialization can trip us. When that happens, we can still find answers by looking beyond the tools. Happily, we can use those same instruments to tap into an awareness that is endlessly wise and loving, and that has our best interests at heart.

But what of Professor Bentall? Researchers are discovering that happiness is good medicine. Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, found that the most successful Harvard freshmen were not those who resolved to hole-up in the library and grind out good grades; they were the happiest students, who formed study groups and carried a positive, life-affirming attitude to their studies. And scientists at Heartmath Institute are discovering that expansive attitudes powerfully contribute to the health and efficient functioning of our bodies and brains.

A study of nuns found that those who lived longest were unrepentantly happy, and those who were disappointed with their vocation and bitter died at a younger age. From a London Times article on the study:

It’s difficult to resist the logic of the happiness doctors. Stay in your Eeyore-ish bubble of existentialist angst and have a life that’s short, sickly, friendless and self-obsessed. Or find a way to get happy, and long life, good health, job satisfaction and social success will be yours.

Find a Finding Happiness Movie Screening in your area.

Save

Save

Finding Happiness went in search for the answer to the question “why are happy people happy?”

Here are our top tips for how to find true and lasting happiness in daily life:

1. Let go of negativity.

• Learn to forgive and forget.

• See every challenge as an opportunity for further growth.

• Express gratitude for what you have.

• Be more optimistic about the future and your ability to accomplish life goals.

• Open yourself up to success and embrace failures or mistakes that happen along the way.

• Know that none of us are perfect, we are all here to entertain and be entertained.

• Don’t worry about the little things. Take plenty of “worry vacations” where you train your mind not to worry for a certain lengths of time.

• If you want to be more positive, surround yourself with positive energy and people. Nurture the positive relationships that you have, seeking out more of those relationships that help uplift you.

• Accept and love yourself for the unique gifts and talents that you bring to life. Spend less time trying to please others and spend more time trying to please your higher self.

• See the humor in life and in our experiences. Take life less seriously and learn to laugh at yourself.

2. Serve and be kind to others.

• Treat everyone with kindness. Not only does it help others to feel better, but you will notice that you too feel good after having a positive interaction with others.

• Speak well of others. When you speak negatively of others you will attract more negativity to yourself, but when you speak positively of others, you will attract more positivity.

• Truly listen to others. Be present and mindful to what others are really saying when they speak. Support them without bringing yourself into it.

• Be careful with your words. Speak gentler, kinder, and wiser.

• Respect others and their free will.

• Put your trust in others and be trusted in return. Enjoy the sense of community and friendship that comes from this openness and faith in one another.

• Work as part of a whole. See others as partners in your efforts. Unite your efforts with them to create a synergy more powerful than anything you could do alone.

• Practice generosity and giving without expecting anything in return. Get involved with service opportunities and offer what you can to a greater cause.

• Smile more– to family, to co-workers, to neighbors, to strangers– and watch it not only change how you feel but also how they feel too.

3. Live in the present.

• Don’t replay negative events or worry about the future.

• Accept and celebrate impermanence. Be grateful for your life, for each moment of every day. Observe the constant and natural flow of change that surrounds us, and your small yet important part in the natural, divine flow of life.

• Observe yourself in the moment. Work on your reactions to outer circumstances and learn how to approach life harmoniously.

4. Choose a healthy lifestyle.

• Keep a daily routine. Wake up at the same time every morning, preferably early. Setting yourself to a natural biorhythm will make it easier to wake up and feel energized.

• Get enough sleep. Proper sleep is linked to positive personality characteristics like optimism, improved self-esteem, and even problem solving.

• Expose yourself to cold temperatures (especially first thing in the morning with perhaps a cold shower). It increases your circulation, helps minimize inflammation in the body, enhances weight loss, and energizes and invigorates you to start your day.

• Turn off the TV. For every hour of TV you watch, you reduce 22 minutes of your life expectancy.

• Eat properly. What you eat has a direct effect on your mood and energy levels. Eat plenty of organic, locally grown fruits and vegetables, nuts, whole grains, and dairy products that are both vitamin and mineral infused. Don’t overeat and try to practice healthy self-control.

• Exercise daily to the point of sweating. It not only helps to purify the body, but also releases endorphins which help to prevent stress, relieve depression, and positively improve your mood.

• Laugh more. Laughter is the best medicine. Like exercise, it releases endorphins that battle the negative effects of stress and promote a sense of well-being and joy.

• Practice deep breathing and yoga. The body and mind are connected. Emotions affect the physical systems in the body, and the state of the body also affects the mind. By relaxing and releasing tension through the breath or yoga practice you feel more calm and centered throughout the day.

5. Take care of your spirit.

• Strive to always learn new things. Constantly expand your awareness and discover new ways of expressing your divine gifts.

• Get creative. This will not only challenge you to learn new things, but will also help to keep your mind in a positive place. Practice living in the present moment and being a channel for the divine flow of creativity.

• Practice meditation. Research has proven that even as little as 10 minutes of meditation a day can lead to physical changes in the brain that improve concentration and focus, calm the nervous system, and help you to become more kind and compassionate, and even more humorous. Then bring the joy and peace you receive from meditation into your daily life and activity.

• Be honest. Telling the truth keeps you free inside, builds trust in relationships, and improves your will power and the ability to attract success.

• Surrender to the Universe Divine and allow it to take care of the littlest things in life to the greatest and most important.

6. Be inwardly free.

• Live minimally and simply. Often extravagant living brings more stress not more satisfaction.

• De-clutter your home to de-clutter your mind. Clutter is an often unrecognized source of stress that promotes feelings of anxiety, frustration, distraction, and guilt. Feel good in your own home. Make it your sanctuary by keeping it clean, organized, and uplifting.

• Go without certain things you think you need. Travel to new places where not everything is as easily accessible or readily available, and learn to appreciate what you have by expanding your world.

• Take some time away from life’s complicated outer involvements to get to know your family, your neighbors, and your loved ones better; and to get to know yourself.

7.  Reconnect with Nature.

• Take some time every week to recharge your body battery. On the weekend, escape to nature or a place where you can feel peace in time for a fresh start to the work week.

• Get outside whenever possible to breathe in the fresh air and feel the sunshine. Both of which studies have shown to have a positive effect on our health and our mood.

• Take some time to be silent. Be silent and calm every night for at least 10 minutes (longer if possible) and again in the morning before rising. This will produce an unbreakable habit of inner happiness to help you meet challenges in life.

• Observe the natural beauty that surrounds you and feel a sense of connection. Appreciate the details and miracles that can be found in nature.

Taking the Next Steps to Finding Happiness:

Ask yourself what makes you happy, and find ways to restructure your life so that you are able to do more of those things.

Then ask why you struggle to do the things that you know will make you happy. Why are you not yet happy? Why haven’t you taken the next steps to find your happiness? Why are you here? And what do you need to do to feel a sense of accomplishment in this life?

Visualize yourself happy, doing the things that will bring you inner and outer success in life and write down the things you need to do to create a Happiness Bucket List. Start with the little things you know you can do each day that will bring you joy. Then move on to accomplish greater and greater things on your happiness bucket list.

Sign up to receive our free daily happiness quotes, and download our happiness tips mini-poster gift to you, or view a list of our favorite happiness quotes.

Share Happiness with your friends:

Save

Save

“Student-centered, not curriculum-centered.”

Nitai is also the author of two books on childhood education: The Art of Joyful Education and For Goodness’ Sake: Supporting Children & Teens in Discovering Life’s Higher Values.

Q: What was it like to work with the filmmakers at Ananda Village?

Nitai: I didn’t get a chance to talk at length with them about the school because I was only there for a weekend’s filming, and we were busy with the shoot most of the time. But Elisabeth Rohm, who plays the lead role in the film, was excited to find out how her daughter Easton, who was five, could benefit from the Education for Life principles we follow in the schools.

The children were enthusiastic about being movie extras until they realized that every scene had to be re-shot twenty times, whereupon they rapidly lost interest. (laughs) Children are spontaneous, and movie-making isn’t.

Q: The segment on the schools was a whirlwind overview. Is there anything you wish you’d had more time to say?

Nitai: After the first take I realized I’d have to throw out about eighty percent of what I wanted to say. In the movie scene, I walk between two buildings while I explain the entire philosophy of Education for Life. It’s a one-minute walk, so I could only say a tithe of what I hoped. (laughs) I realized you can’t go very deep in a movie, because audiences want action and a good story.

Q: Now is your chance to go deep.

Nitai: Okay. I regret I didn’t have time to talk about consciousness in education. In our schools, we work with the child individually, and focusing on their consciousness gives us a foundation to help the individual child.

In the book, Education for Life, Swami Kriyananda talks about how a child’s consciousness can be “heavy,” “ego-active,” or “light,” or a mix of these qualities. The idea of a spectrum of consciousness is easier to understand with concrete examples. Let’s assume we want to help a child develop more wise judgment. When they’re at the “heavy” level of awareness, their energy is low, passive, and they tend to misunderstand. And even if they do understand something, they tend to interpret it in a lazy, superstitious manner. A heavy consciousness implies a low-energy mind that’s narrow, and always looking for the easiest way to get by. It wants to sleep or gaze about and do nothing. It’s consciousness in an undeveloped state.

When a child’s energy rises to the ego-active level, they’re starting to realize that wisdom exists. But even at that stage, they don’t care. They may even mock wisdom. “Oh yeah, those people are soooo spiritual, ha-ha.” They’re somewhat more aware, but they aren’t ready to take wisdom seriously and act on it. If you suggest a wise course of action, they’ll probably push back. “Well, I have my own values.”

Q: They still lack sensitivity?

Nitai: Yes. The notion of considering a wise course of action hasn’t opened up for them yet. They haven’t learned that there are options that will give them more of what they want.

As children rise to the “light” level, they’re starting to understand that there’s more to life than material things. They’ve usually had some hard knocks, and they’re starting to ask questions. They’re anxious to avoid any more suffering, so they begin to want to understand how life works. As they rise out of the ego-active level, there’s a respect for wisdom as a way to avoid the hard knocks and be happier. There’s a sense of looking around and trying to weigh the consequences of their actions and understand life.

When they reach the highest level, they’re starting to be able to live by higher principles. For example, they’re able to reflect on what it’s like to be unselfish, and understand that it makes them feel happy.

Q: In your book, The Art of Joyful Education, you mention Leonard Kohlberg, a Harvard researcher who studied children of many cultures, and how they all pass through the same stages of increasing moral awareness. Does Kohlberg’s scale relate to the terms you’re using?

Nitai: I wrote that book in response to a request from a professor in the late 1970s. My master’s thesis was on the eastern approach to evaluating children’s values, and he said, “You need to tie it to a western model. Go study Leonard Kohlberg.”

I had a strong feeling that Kohlberg must have touched on the eastern view at some point, because his scale matched so perfectly. But he framed it in western terms, with data from many countries.

He talks about the idea that some people are very moral, but they’re very rule-bound. They’re the people who obey all the traffic laws and pay their taxes on time, because obeying rules and laws gives them an enjoyable feeling of belonging and being good citizens. But a step beyond that stage we find people who follow more inwardly directed values – they do the right thing because it feels right and harmonious and personally fulfilling.

Q: In Education for Life Swami Kriyananda talks about how our sense of values evolves. He says it’s not really possible to rise to a higher level of awareness until we’ve realized “with inner knowing” that it’s what we want. In the Living Wisdom Schools, how do you help a child who’s lazy and passive realize that energy is a tool to get what he wants?

Nitai: At the bottom level, they’re not even capable of thinking like that. (laughs) They don’t have a motivation to summon the energy to act and get something better. So you have to provide it. You do it by something we don’t like to call “punishment” in our school, so we call it “removing privileges.” (laughs) It’s the idea that “If you don’t get out of bed and get to school on time, there won’t be any dessert in your lunch box.”

It has to be something they value, and you have to spend time working with them at that level. So, okay, now they’re getting up and getting to class on time. Then the next step is where you offer them an external reward for putting out positive energy. “Bribe” is too harsh a word, but as Shakespeare says, you get them to “pretend a virtue if you have it not.”

If they don’t have kindness, you reward them when they perform kind actions, until they begin to act that way. At first they’re doing it for the reward, but after they’ve done it a few times they’ll start to think, “Hey, I feel better when I do this.” At that point, you’re over the hump and you don’t have to reward them anymore. You can appeal to their desire to feel good.

But they don’t have that experience at the start. And if you say “Johnny, if you share your doughnut you’re going to feel better,” they’ll say “No way – I’m not giving up my last doughnut!” (laughs)

You can’t motivate children beyond what they’ve experienced. At the higher levels of awareness, you can say “Remember how you shared your doughnut and you told me how good it felt?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Well, now you’ve got some candy and you can get the good feeling again.”

Q: Does this relate to how they apply themselves in school? Do they evolve from being uninterested, to working for a reward, to working because it’s enjoyable?

Nitai: Yes. If they’re fixated on being a four-point-oh student, they’re probably at the ego-active stage. The lighter students aren’t motivated so much by grades. They’re motivated by what inspires them, and what they feel excited about learning. Typically they’ll have lots of things they want to explore, because they’ve learned to love learning.

At Ananda College we have quite a few students who come to us from that stage. Many haven’t excelled in high school or junior college, because the system of external rewards didn’t make sense to them. The materialistic value system – “If you get good grades you’ll make lots of money” – didn’t match their awakened sensitivities, so they might have dropped out or gotten mediocre grades. And when they enter a situation where their individuality and creativity are valued, they blossom and they’re excited about learning.

Q: My college graduating class is having its 50th reunion. I remember how, when I took courses that fed my search for meaning I got excellent grades, but otherwise I wasn’t terribly interested.

Nitai: Who wants to memorize a bunch of facts and spout them back? We named our university Ananda College. “Ananda” means the bliss of the soul. And we gave it the subtitle “Higher Education for Higher Consciousness.” We’re entering our 10th year, and we’re still putting the pieces together, but it’s been an excellent experience.

Q: Are the students happy with the education they receive?

Nitai: We’ve received wonderful testimonials. Mainly the students talk about the experience of discovering who they are, as individuals. It gives them a place to launch from and learn about life and other people’s realities, and expand their awareness of the world.

The testimonials aren’t the usual “chestnut tree and wishing well” college memories. I’ll share what one student wrote:

“It has been the most blissful, challenging, beautiful and expansive experience in my life, by far! Every day is filled with joy and wonder…. Academically, all the classes are stimulating and directly relevant to my personal, spiritual life. I can instantly apply everything I learn in the books.”

Q: As the founder of an alternative school, what do you see as a better direction for education today?

Nitai: We call our schools “student-centered,” as opposed to “curriculum-centered.” There are major implications in those terms. “Curriculum-centered” means that someone sets up the system, and the teacher’s job is to make sure the students meet the demands of the system. The curriculum is set before the student walks in the door, and it has nothing to do with the student. Everybody who walks in is expected to do the same thing, mandated by the committee that sets the curriculum.

A “student-centered” curriculum says that when the student walks in, the teacher starts with them. By getting to know the student, the teacher can adapt what happens in the classroom so it addresses each student’s needs.

It means the teacher never gives the same class twice. Every time you walk into the classroom, you’re adjusting the lesson plan to the student’s particular needs, at that time.

It sends a message that the students are respected as people, where the other system tells them they don’t matter so much, because the system is what counts and they’re just fodder for the mill.

In education, one of the better-known directions today is called “personalized learning.” It’s a big deal in the charter school movement, and it’s definitely a move in the right direction. But it’s a bit narrower than what Education for Life does, because it doesn’t include all of the personal dimensions of the student.

In Education for Life, we deal with the intellect, which every school at least pretends to understand. But then we also deal with the body, which everybody thinks they understand because they have sports and PE. But what hardly ever gets addressed is the heart and will, and an even deeper understanding of the body and intellect. That’s the richness of Education for Life.

Something else I wish I’d had time to say in the film is that it works. (laughs) There’s a page on the Edforlife website dedicated to this, with an overview of our test scores, showing how the system proves itself in academics.

Q: I interviewed Gary McSweeney, the middle school teacher at Living Wisdom School in Palo Alto. We talked about how the children learn math. Gary explained that the students are a lot more engaged because they’re taught as individuals.

He pointed out that the class is more efficient, because the teacher doesn’t have to nag the kids to learn, or manage discipline problems. When I spent time in the class, I saw the system at work. Even though it was the end of the school year, when kids are supposed to be impossible to motivate, they were working with enthusiasm and focus.

Nitai: Again, it works because we respect them, to the extent that we’re willing to adjust the curriculum to serve their needs.

Q: Parents often want to know how the system can address the individual student without losing academic rigor.

Nitai: “Academic rigor” is kind of an interesting term.

Q: Because it suggests rigor mortis?

Nitai: Oh yes. (laughs) Everybody knows that if you’re doing something you’re excited about, you’ll work your tail off. You’ll put in extra time, and you won’t complain, because it’s what you want to be doing. And for more than 40 years we’ve shown that education can be that way.

If you’re beaten down by a curriculum-centered system, and then you leave school and realize you’re free to learn what interests you, you’ll take off. People will spend endless hours working on a hobby they love, and they’ll achieve excellence as a byproduct of that love.

As for “rigor” – it’s true that there’s a certain value in perseverance, concentration, and the doggedness to plow through. But if you’re just being rigorous because you’re trying to meet the demands of a system, it’s probably not education. It’s probably indoctrination.

Q: When people worry about rigor, there seems to be an implication that we’d better brush enthusiasm aside, because feelings aren’t rigorous.

Nitai: It’s amazing how deeply that thought is ingrained in our culture, that education should be painful. Helen Purcell, director of the Living Wisdom School in Palo Alto, told me about a mom and dad who took their child out of the school because, as they put it, “He can’t be learning anything. He’s much too happy.” (laughs)

Even after forty years, we still have to persuade parents that education can be joyful. In Palo Alto, they have a motto “Where learning and joy come together.” It’s true. People learn best when they’re highly enthusiastic, and feel respected and included.

I visited the Portland school for the year-end ceremony, and two sets of parents separately approached me. They said, “My child was so depressed and sad today, and when I asked them why, they said, ‘Because it’s the last day of school, Mom, and I can’t go tomorrow!’”

Further Reading:

• Education for Life system
• Living Wisdom School in Palo Alto
• Education for Life Book

An interview with Mary Kretzmann, on what it was like raising and supporting a family in a spiritual community. 

Q: In the movie, you describe how the community supported you at the time of your husband Tim’s passing. Are there other things you wish you’d had time to say?

Mary: I wish I’d been able to talk about raising spiritual children. I think it was a special calling of ours to help set an example for spiritualizing family life, at a time when it’s sorely needed in the world.
Tim was a peaceful, joyful, spiritual man. His passing was sacred and blissful. It came soon after we completed our sacred journey together of raising our children in a spiritual way. He died when our youngest son was 19 and had recently left home.

The heartache of losing a dear husband and father has moved us to live up to our spiritual potential every more deeply. It powerfully emphasized for us that the meaning of life is to go ever deeper in God. We know this from our spiritual teachings, and now it feels as if our lives can never be quite as comfortable, and that the only reliable comfort will come by trying to feel God’s bliss.

Q: What were some of the things you did to raise spiritual children?

Mary: One of the most important things was that we read spiritual stories to them regularly, along with saying bedtime prayers. From the time our first child was very young, it became my hobby to collect spiritual stories from many traditions.

Another thing was that we involved them in the spiritual life of the community. When Peter was thirteen, I said, “We want you to go to the regular adult Sunday service.” We had been attending special weekly services for school-age kids, and we felt it was time for him to be part of the adult community.

He said, “You want me to do what?!”

I said, “Yeah, we want you to go to Sunday service. Or you can come up with an alternate program of focused spiritual study.”

He said, “Gosh, it’s easier just to go to service.”

He did, and we felt it was an important influence. I said, “The cops would be at my door if I didn’t send you to regular school, and I want you to have some spiritual teaching, too. You can choose Sunday service, or you can come up with another plan, but it has to be at least an hour every week.

We made that rule for all our children. When Krishnabai was young, she would scour the village newsletter for spiritual gatherings – she liked to go to baby showers and other events where there would be chanting and prayer. I would let anything count, but it had to be at least an hour a week, like clockwork. I started Krishnabai at 18 months. We would attend a chanting kirtan on Sunday afternoon together, and I remember how much she loved it.
As the years passed, I realized that the weekly satsang was one of the most important influences we could have on them as parents.

An amusing thing happened when David was nine. For several Sundays, he asked if he could go to the purification ceremony instead of Sunday service, which starts an hour later.
I said, “Okay.” But I was thinking, “Why on earth does he want to go to purification? He isn’t even old enough to sin!” I mean, what was he purifying? (laughs)

I finally figured out that the Sacramento Kings were in the NBA playoffs, and he wanted to watch the games. He was just nine, but he figured out a way to follow the family rules and get what he wanted.

Q: It seems you were fairly strict with your kids.

Mary: I realized that spiritual child-raising isn’t only about the lovey-dovey-kissy stuff. It’s about the mother having some will in her children’s lives. We didn’t force our children to go to service, but the required weekly hour of spiritual instruction, added to our regular daily prayers and spiritual stories, became a powerful influence in our family.

For one thing, the children got used to being part of the spiritual life of the larger community. We gave them an opportunity to express their free will in a positive way, but not in a purely rejecting way. This is where I would often see other parents cave in. If the child didn’t want to go to Sunday service, they didn’t know how to address the situation with creative alternatives.

I was raised Catholic. It’s popular these days to bash the Church, but I got something positive from the experience. I learned to love God, Christ, and the Divine Mother. I felt that love deeply in my heart. Every night after bedtime prayers, I would see a mystical light. It made me feel happy and loved. This went on for my entire childhood. All I knew was that the light came from my loving Jesus and Mary. It was only when I learned of Yogananda’s teachings that I realized I’d been seeing the light of the spiritual eye as a child. And when I had children, I wanted to offer them opportunities to awaken the love of the Divine in their hearts.

I was aware that the church gave my parents a framework for a spiritual life within the family, and I took some of that structure from my childhood memories. I didn’t force my kids to go to church, but I feel very strongly that having a degree of form and discipline greatly helped them.

I felt it would be a disservice to “wait and see” how they might or might not develop a spiritual life. Or let them decide for themselves whether they wanted to be “spiritual” as they grew up. That’s a common thought in the New Age movement. I think we should water the child’s spiritual nature from what we’ve learned. Otherwise, what’s the point of being a parent?

From the lives of the saints we learn that spirituality isn’t about rigid dogmas; it’s the foundation for expansive attitudes such as kindness, friendship, and compassion.

My goal wasn’t to raise kids who would join our path, but to raise kids who loved God. The stories about God that we read together had to be real. They had to be about saints who loved and knew God, and it didn’t matter what tradition they came from.

They learned a great deal from the saints of different paths – Buddha, Krishna, Christ, Catholic saints, and saints of India. I wanted them to grow up so that if they ever felt they had to rebel against me or against Ananda, it wouldn’t even occur to them to rebel against God, because it would be like rebelling against the air.

That was my goal. And then it was a question of working with stories and prayers over the years, and ensuring that they spent spiritual time with the wider community.
We raised them on our path as a foundation for a universal spirituality. I would start them in the cradle, lovingly saying prayers aloud to our Masters. And I would watch for any signs that might help me understand this particular soul’s spiritual inclinations.

Yogananda said we should start children on the spiritual path before age three. I believe he meant we should say prayers and share spiritual stories with them, to awaken a love for God and the saints in their hearts.
I was always on the lookout for opportunities to help them gain insights into questions that would be bound to come up in their lives. A small example was when Peter and I watched a Whoopi Goldberg movie together. He was nine, and we watched Sister Act. Until then, we had barely watched any PG-rated movies, but I thought, okay, I’ll watch it with him.

When the mafia guys started beating up Whoopi Goldberg, I could see that he was getting upset. As adults, we know it’s comedic, but he was alarmed that those men would beat up someone as nice as Whoopi Goldberg. So I paused the movie, and I said, “Do you know how to watch a scene like this?”

He said, “Do you say it isn’t real?”

I said, “No, it’s very real. In fact, it’s way more real than this. The way you do it is you say, ‘Drugs are what pays this guy’s salary. Drugs pay the mafia’s salary.’ And you say, ‘I’m never giving money to those guys! I’ll NEVER DO DRUGS!’ That’s how you watch a scene like this.”

His eyes got real big, like, “Okay, Mom.” And we went back to the movie. I don’t think I was overdoing it, though others might disagree.

When they got a little older and I would pause a movie, they would beat me to my point. But I must say, if you have any moral standards, you really can’t watch many movies nowadays.

You have to take a stand on drugs starting when they’re very young, even in a community like Ananda. We live in a rural area that’s been plagued by drugs over the years, and it’s out there beyond the community’s borders. I modeled my example on the strong mothers in the ‘hood who were determined to keep their kids off drugs. That’s how strong I felt I had to be.

It’s tempting to think, “Of course my kid’s spiritual. After all, we’re living in a spiritual community.” But my thought is, “Yes, and the sharks are just outside the property lines.”

I have a great deal of respect for one of the mothers at Ananda. Her son was energetic, adventurous, and could sometimes be a handful. When he told her he wanted to go to the local high school instead of the high school in the community, she said, “I have to let you know, honey, that if you do drugs we’ll have to find a separate place for you to live.” She said, “If you make that personal choice, we will always love you, but you have to know what will happen.”

He said, “What?! You would choose Ananda over me?!”

She said, “No, honey, you would have chosen drugs over us.”

The easy part of spiritual parenting is the first twelve years, when the parents have more influence. When they reach the teenage years, the need for guidance goes on, but the focus changes, and at a certain point you may only be able to help them by praying for them. Until then, we can consciously water spiritual seeds in our children, through our prayers and by sharing daily spiritual stories.

Even though I’m done with the parenting phase of my life, it continues to have power for me, because it was so blessed. When Tim passed, I felt him telling me, “Our family was beautiful. See it as a cosmic expression.”

Helen Purcell is director of an EFL school, Living Wisdom School, located in Palo Alto, California.

Q: The first Living Wisdom School was started in 1971, in the rural environment of Ananda Village. As director of a Living Wisdom School in a major metro area, do you find you’re able to serve a more diverse population?

Helen: The first question many parents ask is how we can accommodate our very diverse student body. On the spiritual side, we have children from Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian families. We’re also diverse in race – we have Asian, Hispanic, Native American, African American, and Caucasian children. And finally, we have children from broadly diverse economic backgrounds.

But the demographics of our students aren’t actually a concern, because our approach to children levels the playing field. We’re acutely aware of the individuality of each child, regardless of their background. We’ve demonstrated that if you honor the individual child, including those who are academically gifted, wonderful things can happen.

We’re deeply aware that our first task with each child is to love them, see them for who they are, and encompass them in an energy of acceptance, support, and love. This approach cuts across demographic fences, and it’s firmly embedded in a school culture of kindness and compassion. As a result, we’ve seen tremendous growth among the children, often bordering on the miraculous.

Here in Silicon Valley, many families are highly intelligent, and strongly motivated toward performance. When we tell parents that our first consideration is to love the child, there’s often a disconnect for them, because it’s so far outside their own experience. Everything they know tells them that a successful school is one that enables the children to get A’s on their report cards and be accepted by a prestigious high school.

Q: Spending time in the middle school classroom, I saw many examples of individual attention and kindness. How does a system that’s based on loving the children work for them academically?

Helen: When you find yourself in an atmosphere of acceptance and support, it frees you to become better. It’s not just for the students who need help meeting the academic norms. We’ve had our share of students that we might call prodigies, and they aren’t free of issues. They may have no problems meeting our academic standards, but there’s almost always some factor that’s preventing them from being as successful and happy as they could be.

I’m thinking of a student who took advanced calculus in eighth grade. In terms of his intelligence, he was obviously in a class by himself. In fact, we had two exceptional middle school students in math that year, and we had teachers who could challenge and help them. However, that boy needed to learn that he wasn’t the center of the universe. When he arrived, he was very abrasive, because he was so mentally quick, and he’d been used to receiving a ton of special attention. He had to learn to value others who weren’t capable of doing math at his level.

In his four years with us, he became a charming young man, and it was all because of Gary, our middle school teacher, who took an approach that I think was brilliant.

Among other things, Gary encouraged this boy to tutor the other students who needed help, and it ended up humanizing him. The other students loved having a peer that they could go to with questions. And it didn’t affect his academic performance; in fact, it energized him, because he discovered a sense of belonging and being valued at a human level for his teaching skills and compassion.

When I had him in my language arts class, his skills were amazing. His rough drafts were often final drafts that only needed minor polishing. He had an amazing, high-energy mind, but Gary taught him to laugh and discover how his intelligence could help him succeed in the context of his life and his search for fulfillment and happiness.

I ran into his mother recently, and she told me he’s doing extremely well at one of the Bay Area’s most prestigious high schools. She laughed because she said she has trouble keeping up with him. He’s written a commercial computer program that he started working on in eighth grade, and he’s acquired investors and has a start-up in the works.

Thanks to the remarkable gene pool in Silicon Valley, we have amazing children like this boy, and our curriculum serves them very well, because we’re able to challenge them at their level. But our curriculum is about far more than academics. It’s about the whole person, and learning to bring your whole self to everything you do.

We had a girl who was very, very adept academically. After fifth grade, she announced that she wanted to transfer to a public middle school. We said, “Why would you want to do that?” I thought it was the wrong decision for her, and so did Gary. But her mother said, “I have to let her follow her path.”

She told Gary she wanted to be in a big school with lots of kids, and a swimming pool and tennis courts. Gary said, “But you don’t play tennis or swim.” She said, “I know, but I just want that.”

So off she went, and in May her mother called and asked if her daughter could return.

I said, “Great, I’ll put her on the list for next year.” But the mother said, “I don’t mean next year. She wants to come back right now.”

I said, “But it’s May, and school will be out in three or four weeks.”

She said, “Helen, she can’t stay there.”

So she came back, and she had lost some of her spark. It took her six months into the following year to come back to her genuine, enthusiastic former self.

She told us that she’d been placed in a class where the teacher was very rigid. She was capable of so much more than the teacher was asking, and she was very much more personally expansive. But the teacher was wedded to the state-mandated curriculum which says that on such-and-such day everyone will be working on such-and-such page of the book. So they locked horns, and the teacher heaped a ton of negative energy on her.

She was miserable, because it was all about the rules. And it’s not that we don’t have structure and rules, but we’re eager to do whatever it takes to help the individual child succeed and be happy, both personally and academically.

Q: The image strikes me that if you’re training only the intellect, it’s like trying to work as a carpenter without arms. When you’re doing academics, you can’t avoid bringing feeling and will and energy, and your hopes and dreams to it, and not only your reasoning faculties. I sense that you believe modern public education can be harmful if it lobotomizes these other faculties, cutting them off and telling the student to repress them.

Helen: Oh, yes. We had another little girl who was highly, highly intelligent, but she came from a school where she’d been severely bullied, and there was a part of her that was so closed down and tight that she could barely breathe.

During her three years in our environment we saw a remarkable transformation. It culminated in her graduation speech, where she described how she used to be afraid of everything. “And now,” she said, “I am not afraid of anything. I can stand up and talk to any group, no matter how big, and I can ask them questions. I can move through life.” She said, “I am ready for high school.”

Children who’ve been badly bullied are like the children of alcoholics. They desperately need to control their universe because it’s so dangerous and unpredictable. At Living Wisdom School she found supportive teachers and peers who helped her relax and feel accepted and safe so that she could learn. Today, she’s traveling all over the state as part of her high school’s debate team.

You want children to rise to their potential – you don’t want to confine them to somebody’s rigid standards, which are nearly always set too low.

Q: The assumption in education today seems to be that by focusing on the mind, it’s more efficient to transmit academic knowledge. Gary McSweeney, the middle school teacher at LWS, explained how it’s actually much more efficient if you engage the child, which means that you have to work with their hearts and who they are. Observing in Gary’s class, I saw how enthusiastic the children were for what they were doing, and it seemed far more efficient than the typical public school classroom where the students are reluctant and the teacher’s energy is absorbed in prodding them to learn and preventing them from getting out of control. In Gary’s class they were engaged and they weren’t trying to escape the situation.

Helen: Exactly. If you had come to a language arts class where we were doing Shakespeare, you’d have seen that we don’t simply read Shakespeare. We do reader’s theater, where they’re acting out the parts in Elizabethan English. If they don’t know the meanings of all the words, nobody cares, nor do we care if they mispronounce a word. We’re not there for perfection. We’re there for the enjoyment of something that’s terribly worthwhile and wonderful. By the time we’ve finished a play, even the students who had never read Elizabethan English are completely jazzed, because it’s a classroom culture of celebration and learning.

Then I take them to a professional performance where they can see real actors living the play magically. Some of them become perceptive theater critics, because they feel a personal connection and expertise, from acting the play. “This actor was really good, but that one could have done her character better because….” It’s marvelous – just imagine, these are 11- through 14-years-olds, and they’re thoroughly engaged with Shakespeare.

One recent student was deeply involved with drama. We went to see Taming of the Shrew, in a performance that was skewed toward a feminist perspective, and she picked up on it right away. She said, “I don’t think a male director could have done this.” This is a 13-year-old. She wrote a marvelous analysis of the direction of the play.

It could never happen in a culture that requires the students to plow through the book mechanically and “study to the test.” It’s possible because there is such freedom to be who you are. This girl was so excited about drama, and when she asked if she could write a critical review of the direction, I said, “Of course.” Another student might ask to write something completely different, and if it’s creative and expansive, I would encourage it. It’s very far from the “efficient” curriculum of standardized, flatly uniform assignments and testing.

Q: That’s a huge step – writing papers at that level. It’s exactly the training they need for college, much less high school.

Helen: Yes, it is. My goal for the eighth graders in writing is not only that they know how to put together a nice expository essay, but that it has their personal creative engagement, solid content, and a nice, readable flow. So I’m looking for things that I didn’t learn until I was in college. And when we’re talking about style and tone, it often comes naturally, because they’ve had a personal experience of the energy and beauty of the play before they start to develop their analytical papers.

Their research papers for history and science are very real. Sometimes they’re based on a combination of a class lecture, reading, and a field trip. When they’re studying Native American cultures, for example, they might visit a Miwok Indian village. During our annual school play, a huge, all-school production that’s based on an inspiring historical figure, they study the history and culture of the times. After the production, they write reflections on their experience, and they often reference their academic knowledge in describing their personal growth.

Learn more about Education for Life and the Palo Alto Living Wisdom School.

“People are more important than things.”
– J. Donald Walters

Genuine leadership is of only one type: supportive. It leads people: It doesn’t drive them. It involves them: It doesn’t coerce them. It never loses sight of the most important principle governing any project involving human beings: namely, that people are more important than things.

Work With People’s Strengths. As a leader, you will get the best results for the least amount of effort if you work with those who are in tune with your ideals. You would be wise not to give a disproportionate amount of energy to those who are not in tune. Creativity cannot thrive where too much effort is devoted to combating negativity.

Give Support. The leader who fears strength in his subordinates is concerned merely with protecting his own position. Any work that he and they may be engaged in is certain to produce only negligible results.

Make Action Your First Priority, Not Talk. When faced with any decision, make your primary criterion “what will work,” rather than beautiful (but impractical) theories.

Be Flexible. It is not weakness in a leader to admit error. Nor is it weakness to agree to other ideas than his own. The wise man knows that the fear of being thought fallible is itself a proof of fallibility. Human nature, after all, is fallible. But remember also: Truth always wins out in the end.

Leadership is Intuition, Guided by Common Sense. The wise leader is more concerned with what will work than with getting his opinions accepted. And he is more concerned with truth than with merely being thought right.

Leadership Means Loyalty. It is easy to drive people, more difficult to lead them. No matter how good an idea, if you can’t earn the loyalty of those charged with implementing it, by giving them your loyalty, your efforts will be doomed to mediocrity.

Leadership Means Service. Too much attention is generally given to the position, rather than the function of leadership. Once rank assumes importance for its own sake, creativity and meaningful progress grind to a halt. Only a weak leader feels the need to wave his position before his subordinates.

Leadership Means Setting Aside Personal Desires.

Leadership Means Responsibility. The true leader is concerned not so much with the opinions of others as with the truth, with getting a job done, with inspiring others to join him in working toward a worthy common goal. This concern implies a willingness to assume responsibility.

Leadership Is Not an Ego Game. What does leadership mean to you? Does it give you a thrill to think of others looking up to you, waiting breathlessly your slightest, but ever-wise, decision; or leaping to carry out your least, but always-firm, command? If so, you may have the necessary instincts to command a flock of sheep, but not to lead a dynamic organization.

What is True Success? A true leader is neither attached to success nor afraid of failure. He knows that success is not so much the completion of a specific project as the energy that goes into completing it. Projects can be destroyed, but never energy itself.

 Learn more Leadership Strategies for Happiness in the book: The Art of Supportive Leadership, by J. Donald Walters