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Happy for No Reason 7 Steps to Being Happy from the Inside Out

Marci Shim off With CAROL KLINE

Free Press

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fp Free Press A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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New York, NY 10020

form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department,

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First Free Press trade paperback edition March 2009

FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purposes, please contact Simon &

Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or [email protected]

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Shimoff, Marci.

Happy for no reason : seven steps to being happy from the inside out I Marci Shimoff with Carol Kline.

p. em. Includes bibliographical references.

1. Happiness. I. Kline, Carol, 1957- II. Tide. BJ148l.S556 2008 158-dc22

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-4772-3

ISBN-10: 1-4165-4772-X

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-4773-0 (pbk)

ISBN-10: 1-4165-4773-8 (pbk)

2007029803

This book is dedicated to anyone who's ever

wanted to be happy.

It's not just pie in the sky anymore.

And to Dad, my first Happy for No Reason role model.

I carry your joy in my heart.

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Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.

-]. M. Barrie, nineteenth-century Scottish novelist

The Pillar of the Heart-Let Love Lead

When your heart flows in love, you naturally feel happier. But what about those times when you don't feel loving? It may not talce much i:o feel your heart close. When your surly teenager, an annoying coworker, or a dense sales clerk upset you, how do you live in the flow of love then?

You can restart your heart's flow by sending lovingkindness to any- one and everyone you see. It doesn't have to be dramatic; sometimes simply wishing others well switches on the pump that generates love in the heart. This creates a strong current oflove and happiness, because a heart overflowing in love is continually being filled with more love.

When I sent out the Happy for No Reason survey, I was pro- foundly moved by a response I received from CJ Scarlet. I interviewed her further and found her story shows the tremendous effect that shar- ing love, either silently or in words and actions, can have on others and on yourself.

CJ's Story The Flow of Love

I was forty-one years old, but felt like an old woman. For twelve years, I'd been living with lupus and scleroderma, both inca- pacitating autoimmune diseases. The steroids I took caused my

weight to balloon. I needed my walker or cane to make it to the mail- box, and some days I had to crawl on my hands and knees to climb the stairs. Frequently, I couldn't drive and had to depend on my family for everything.

My doctors said that heart failure could happen at any time. I was terrorized by every chest pain, but at times wished death would come quickly to end my suffering. Almost every night I had nightmares of being sucked into black tornados or going down in flaming airplanes.

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Reading self-help books and going to therapy had helped a little, but I was still in very bad shape. Buddhist writer Thich Nhat Hanh's books had touched me deeply, so when I had the opportunity to meet a Buddhist lama (teacher) who lived in my city, I jumped at the chance.

Using a cane, I hobbled up the walk to the house where the lama lived. I told him my tale of woe, fully expecting him to turn his com- passionate gaze on me and offer his sympathy. Instead, he told me, brusquely, though not unkindly, "Stop feeling sorry for yourself, and start focusing on the happiness of others."

But," I objected, "I'm too sick. I can hardly help mysel£" Disap- pointed, I thought, He just doesn't understand.

I was convinced that I was too exhausted and too ill to help any- one; nevertheless, I began to pray for the happiness of others. I brought to mind people I knew, family members and friends, and imagined them happy, healthy, and at peace. Then I began to focus on the happi- ness of strangers. When passing people on the highway, I would look at them and wish for their well-being and prosperity. Finally, I was even able to extend my good wishes and help to people I actively disliked.

One day I was in my scooter, waiting in the grocery checkout line, when a woman came up behind me who was clearly having a bad day. Harassed and harried, she seemed irritated at everybody. Her cart was full to the brim and it was clear she wanted to get through the line as quickly as possible.

Normally, I would have tried to stay away from her bad vibes and negative energy. In fact, my first thought was, Look at how nasty she's being. I don't want to have anything to do with her.

Then I remembered the lama's advice. Okay, I thought, she's really having a tough day today. I know how that feels. Let me think about her happiness. What would help make her happier?

I turned to her and said, "It looks like you're in a hurry." Startled by my overture, she said tersely, "Yes, I am. I'm running

late." I said, "Why don't you go in front of me?" Looking at the few items in my scooter's cart, she quickly shook

her head."No, no, that's okay." But I said, "Really, I'm not in a hurry. Go ahead."

The Pillar of the Heart-Let Love Lead

The transformation was amazing. She went from being this angry person who radiated negativity and was probably going to chew out the clerk at the cash register to someone who felt validated, cared for, and appreciated. She steered her cart in front of mine, thanking me profusely, thanking the clerk, and when her groceries were all bagged up and ready to go, she left the store smiling.

I felt fabulous. Looking around, I noticed that everyone around me was smiling and friendly and talking to each other. "That was a nice thing to do." "Hope you have a great day today." We had all been. affected by the interaction.

I started looking for more ways to think of the happiness of oth- ers. I smiled and rushed to help anyone in need, from giving money to homeless people to helping a woman arrange to buy a car so she could get a job. I bought a tank of gas for a woman who had no money and volunteered at the Red Cross during Hurricane Katrina. Every moment seemed to present an opportunity to improve the life of someone else and I rejoiced in my physical, mental, and financial ability to do so. '

I had done volunteer work before this-I had been very active in nonprofits for victim and child advocacy-but there had always been a trace of ego involved as I perceived those I helped as victims and myself as their rescuer. It had made me feel good about myself for helping. But this was different.

~ow it was 100 percent about them. My focus was on their happi- ness dtrectly. And when I wished them happiness, I felt a wave of love for them, which sometimes led to action and at other times was just a prayer, a heartfelt desire for their happiness. Very often they weren't aware of my intention at all. But it created a flow of love inside of me that grew stronger and stronger.

When I stopped focusing on whether other people were malting me happy or meeting my needs and thought about what would make them happy, I started to see everyone as beautiful. I could understand tha~ they were fighting their own heroic battles and trying to make their own way through life, and my heart went out to them. The more I focused on contributing to the happiness of others, the better I felt. And the better I felt, the happier I became. My dreams transformed into joyous celebrations.

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Within a year my health was transformed. The pain that had wracked my body disappeared. I could once again take a deep breath, and I had more than enough energy to resume my life. Today, two years later, I feel better than I did at twenty-nine before I became ill. To my doctors' amazement, my once debilitating medical conditions are reversing themselves. I continue to live pain-free. I even work out at the local gym three times a week and am losing the steroid weight.

I met with the lama again, about a year after our first meeting. When I told him how my life was transformed from focusing on the happiness of others, he clapped his hands and smiled broadly at me. "Very good! Very good!" he kept saying.

His wise words had stopped my descent down a terrible slope and put me in touch with the most powerful force for good that there is: the loving compassion that resides in our hearts. It was the flow of that love that healed my body and today has become a bubbling, dear spring of happiness in my life.

Wishing You Well What a simple idea, and yet so life-changing. I've started practic-

ing CJ's technique with great results. I used to hate waiting in line or getting stuck in traffic, but now I spend the time looking around and silently wishing everyone around me happiness, ease, comfort, and peace. Instead of fuming, I find myself smiling and feeling good.

Sometimes I go beyond just wishing people well in my heart. Recently I was at an airport, buying a burrito from a server who was crabby and grumpy. I was tempted to get a little crabby back, but instead, I thought about this guy on his feet all day long, cranking out burrito after burrito for impatient flyers off to exotic destinations while he was stuck in one place, baking under the warming lights. A pretty thankless job. I caught his eye. "Boy, you must get really tired of doing this all day long."

My server was completely taken aback. Someone had reached out to connect with him. He just melted. He gave me the biggest, warmest smile-and extra chips!

The Pillar of the Heart-Let Love Lead

I think we all underestimate the power we have to make someone else's day just a little better simply by beaming them a little light and love. I suggest that you try CJ's technique yourself. You can also set some time aside each day to do the following short lovingkindness exer- cise. It's adapted from a Buddhist practice for culturing metta, which is defined as the strong wish for the welfare and happiness of others. This isn't exclusively a Buddhist concept; in Christianity, the term for this kind of unconditional love is agape. In Judais~, rachamim is the love that motivates us to give to others and includes empathy and care. This same ideal of love is expressed in Islam with the word mahabba, which means spiritual love for others and the divine.

Choosing to feel love and wish the best for everyone-a natural habit of happy· people-can help you cultivate more happiness in your life.

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I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have

sought and found how to serve.

-Albert Schweitzer, physician and humanitarian

The happiest people contribute to something greater than them- selves in life. When Stewart Emery interviewed people with enduring success and happiness for his book Success Built to Last, he found that their goals weren't fame, wealth, or power. People with those goals inev- itably ended up feeling empty and unhappy. My interviews with the

The Roof-Live a Life Inspired by Purpose

Happy 100 showed me that people who are Happy for No Reason may be famous, wealthy, and powerful, but those are outcomes of living fully and passionately, engaged in meaningful service to a larger cause. Oprah Winfrey once said, "I never went for the money, I just said, God use me. Show me how to take who I am, who I want to be, and what I can do, and use it for a purpose greater than myself."

Happy 100 member Lynne Twist is also someone who passionately devotes her life to a greater purpose. She's sometimes referred to. as a modern-day Mother Teresa. I've been fortunate to spend time, person- ally and professionally, with Lynne, and whenever I'm around her, I'm so moved by the way her beauty and goodness shine from her in everything she does. She's often so full of gratitude that her eyes fill with tears. In our interview, Lynne shared the story of how she found her call to serve.

,(ynne's Story The Calling

s a teenager, I led a double life. To most people I appeared a typical 1950s high school girl. I earned straight N.s, was a cheerleader and homecoming

queen, and even dated the captain of the football team. But there was also another Lynne. This Lynne was deeply religious: she woke every morning before dawn to go to morning Mass, idolized Mother Teresa, and entertained dreams of becoming a nun. Which was the real me? They both were.

This double life began with the death of my father, whom I'd adored. A big-band leader like Glenn Miller, he'd turned our home into a joyful, fun place, filled with musicians, dancing, and singing. Then, two days before my fourteenth birthday, my father died of a heart attack, peacefully, while he slept. He was only fifty years old.

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His death was incomprehensible to me. My shock and grief made me look for a deeper meaning to my life, and I turned to God and the church. It was then that my aspirations for a life of service-a life that made a difference-started.

I hid 'xuy spirituality from all the kids I knew because it wasn't cool to be religious, but I tried to bridge the gap between my inner and outer life by becoming involved in community service projects and roping in all my friends to help. We taclded all kinds of jobs, from col- lecting clothes for a local fund-raising sale to tutoring disadvantaged kids who had dropped out of school. It was so satisfying to help other people, and we all had fun doing it.

After high school, I went to Stanford, where studying the mystical poetry of Rilke and Rumi, among others, took the place of my daily churchgoing. I was still searching for the mission I was put on earth to accomplish when I fell in love with Bill Twist. We married during my senior year, and after graduation, in very short order, our daughter and two sons were born.

Although those were happy years, my search for greater mean- ing was always simmering below the surface. It spurred me to talce a personal growth seminar called est, which I found profoundly trans- formational, and also to study with the renowned inventor, designer, and futurist Buckmin:ster Fuller, whose books I'd read in college and admired greatly. As a young man of thirty-two, Bucky had contem- plated suicide. Deciding against it at the last moment, he'd said to himself, "I may be a throw-away person, but perhaps I can take this throw-away life and devote it to making a difference." (It was actually Buclcy who coined the phrase, "Malee a difference with your life.") He'd launched an experiment to see if one ordinary individual could change the world and benefit all humanity.

In 1977, I helped to introduce Bucky to the founder of the est program, Werner Erhard, and from that relationship, the Hunger Project-the commitment to end world hunger by the year 2000- was born.

When I heard about the project a few days later, it created an inner earthquake in me. I knew without any doubt that this was what I was meant to do. I stepped out of "the movie of my life starring me"

The Roof-Live a Life Inspired by Purpose

and became a supporting player in a much larger film. Suddenly, my personality and my agenda took a back seat to this greater calling. This commitment woke me up in the morning, showed me what to wear and where to go. It gave me an eloquent voice and the words to spealc

I took on a leadership role at the Hunger Project and soon found myself stretched to the max. Once again I was leading a double life- now a suburban mom and a crusader-although this time it wasn't a secret. I had a wonderful husband and three kids, six, eight, and ten, and was committed to being there for them; I was also committed to doing whatever it took to end world hunger by the year 2000. My two commitments lived side-by-side-sometimes literally. People from places lilce Bangladesh, Sweden, Japan, and Ethiopia often stayed in our home with us during their Hunger Project training in the States, and because I traveled constantly, I brought the kids and Bill with me whenever possible. Other families went to Disneyland and Aspen for vacations; we went to Zimbabwe and Indonesia.

We had enough money so that I could hire a terrific housekeeper, which helped enormously, but I still made a concerted effort to always be home on weekends. This sometimes meant flying to India on a Monday and flying back home on Friday! I felt the strain of always being pulled in two directions.

One Saturday, distraught that I had missed my daughter's cho- ral concert and my son's championship soccer game, I called a family meeting. We sat on the floor in a circle and I told Bill and the kids, "I'm feeling so guilty that I didn't make the Halloween costumes this year, and that I missed the concert and the game. I need your permission to go on. I'm so dedicated to my work with the Hunger Project, but I feel torn that I can't do everything." By the time I finished, I was sobbing.

Summer, my eight-year-old daughter, came over and put her arms around me and said, "Mom, if you can help end world hunger, we don't want you driving us to the orthodontist. Someone else can do that." She went on, "We have the coolest life and the most amazing people living with us. We're so lucky and so proud of you."

My two sons and my husband joined in, putting their arms around Summer and me, as my husband said, "Go for it. We're just thrilled with your commitment; it lights up our lives." We hugged and cried

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and laughed, and in that moment, the schism between the two things I held so dear closed up and any lingering traces of a double life van- ished.

Ending world hunger became a family commitment after that. The kids volunteered at the office, often lying on the floor beneath my desk to do their homework, and we all became world citizens. I realize now that my kids didn't have to have two separate lives, one "normal" and the other "spiritual." We melded the two-and have been all the better for it.

People often think that living a life of meaning means sacrifice, but for me, it's been exactly the opposite. I've had opportunities to do things and meet people I could never have imagined. When I finally met my childhood hero, Mother Teresa, our connection was immediate and natural. She called herself "God's pencil" and felt that God wrote his story to the world through her and people like her. I could relate to that-I also felt I was being used by God to write the end of hunger and the end of the suffering that goes along with it.

Living a committed life gave me the opportunity not only to work alongside Mother Teresa, but also to sit with the Dalai Lama and to have an ongoing relationship with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. These were people that I never in a million years thoughtl'd know, let alone have an opportunity to work with. It's also provided me the equally valuable privilege of being in the presence of wise and courageous people all over the world. Following the famine of 1984-1985, I sat around a dry well for five days and nights with a group of Ethiopian mothers whose children had died of starvation. These women and others like them inspired me to keep going for the goal we'd set.

When we started the Hunger Project in 1977, 44,000 people a day were dying of hunger and starvation, most of them children under five years old-and those numbers were· rising every year. Today, though the world's population has grown by over 50 percent, the number of deaths from hunger and starvation is 19,000 people a day, less than half of what it was in 1977. It's still too many, but it's a staggering accomplishment.

I always thought that I'd be working for the Hunger Project for the

The Roof-Live a Life Inspired by Purpose

rest of my life: I'd either end hunger or die trying. But in 1994, to my great surprise, I heard something new calling me. At first, I ignored it, thinking it was just a distraction from the work in front of me, but its voice was so persistent and so persuasive, in the end it made me look inside and take a new direction in my life. In 1996, Bill and I founded the Pachamama Alliance to work with the indigenous peoples of South America to preserve the rain forests and to create a new global vision of sustainability for all life. Scientists predict that without the rain for- ests, South America will become barren, creating a hunger crisis that will affect millions of people and endanger the health of the planet as a whole. This goal is not as far from my original mission as it may seem: rather than working to end world hunger, I'm working to ensure that it doesn't happen in the first place.

Over the past thirty years, giving myself to the larger purpose that calls me, in whatever form it appears, has led me to a life happier than any I could ever have imagined.

Making a Difference with Your Life It's not necessary to be a Mother Teresa or a Lynne Twist to con-

tribute to something greater than yoursel£ When you discover what matters to you, your everyday actions can serve others and the world in ways large and small.

It really doesn't matter what you choose to serve. All of us are drawn to different causes. For some people, it's wildlife; for others it's social justice, ending poverty, or making sure all children have access to the arts. The details aren't important. When you serve a purpose larger than yourself it brings more meaning and joy to your life. I've expe- rienced this myself being a part of the local Big Brothers/Big Sisters program. Spending time with my fantastic little sister, Leah, brings me great delight.

Your desire to make a difference can influence even routine deci- sions, such as what you eat, where you shop, and what kind of car you drive. I have a friend who drives a hybrid and eats only organic produce

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that she buys at the local farmer's market. She calls this voting with her pocketbook, spending her money in the way that supports what she believes in.

And you don't have to be wealthy to make donations that yield generous results. Even giving $10 or $20 to charitable organizations can feed a family for a week, buy a cow or goat, help fund a small busi- ness, or buy seeds to grow crops, making a huge difference in others' lives. Contributing to something greater than yourself doesn't have to involve money; it can be an exchange of your time, your interest, or your caring.

Research has consistently shown that giving of yourself to others- altruism-is associated with greater well-being, health, and happiness, as long as you don't "overgive." Giving of yourself doesn't mean being codependent, trying to @1 an inner emptiness, or serving others at our own expense. The service I'm talking about comes from joy, inspiration, and purpose and supports more peace and well-being in your life.