Sustainable Happiness ─ The Mind Science of Well-Being, Altruism, and Inspiration

Today’s greatest health challenges, the so-called diseases of civilization—depression, trauma, obesity, cancer—are now known in large part to reflect our inability to tame stress reflexes gone wild and to empower instead the peaceful, healing and sociable part of our nature that adapts us to civilized life. The same can be said of the economic challenges posed by the stress-reactive cycles of boom and bust, driven by addictive greed and compulsive panic. As current research opens up new horizons of stress-cessation, empathic intelligence, peak performance, and shared happiness, it has also encountered Asian methods of self-healing and interdependence more effective and teachable than any known in the West. Sustainable Happiness is the first book to make Asia’s most rigorous and complete system of contemplative living, hidden for centuries in Tibet, accessible to help us all on our shared journey towards sustainable well-being, altruism, inspiration and happiness.

Joe Loizzo, MD, PhD, is a psychotherapist and founder of the Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science, a non-profit contemplative learning community that helps people find sustainable ways of living in today’s complex world. On faculty at the Weill Cornell Center for Complementary and Integrative Medicine and the Columbia University Center for Buddhist Studies, Dr. Loizzo lectures widely on the role of contemplative science in the future of health, education and contemporary life, and teaches regular public classes and workshops at Nalanda Institute, New York Open Center, and Tibet House.

Thurman, foreword. Siegel, foreword. Introduction: Recent Breakthroughs, Timeless Methods. Part I: Turning the Body Wheel. Deep Mindfulness and Self-Healing. Self-Analysis, Insight, and Freedom. The Lifelong Path of Contemplative Health. Part II: Turning the Speech Wheel. Clearing the Mind for Social Engagement. De-Reifying and Dismantling the Reactive Self. Altruism and the Path of Engagement. Part III: Turning the Mind Wheel. Role-Modeling Imagery and Self-Transformation. The Art and Science of Reconstructing Life. Living Altruism Through Impassioned Vision. Part IV: Turning the Bliss Wheel. Sublimation: Tapping and Channeling Flow. Inspiration: Turning Bliss to Light. Uniting Pure Inspiration with Perfect Clarity. Endnotes. Bibliography and References. Glossary of Technical Terms.