In Everyday Enlightenment, His Holiness helps you expand your spiritual horizon.

He guides you along your path to understanding yourself and achieving greater inner freedom, clarity and happiness. He shows you how to deal with the demands and challenges of daily life and gives you methods to connect with yourself - your true self, not your ego. Only once you have learned to love yourself can you love others and live a harmonious life. His teachings show that:

- we are all connected, and every moment is relative to the previous and the next;

- your gurus are closer than you think;

- you need to be inspired, not influenced, and then you can inspire others;

- everything, both negative and positive, is within you;

- it is down to you to walk the uncommon path

Packed with practical exercises and meditations, as well as fascinating personal anecdotes, Everyday Enlightenment shows you how to let go of your ego, turn anger into compassion and transform fear into fearlessness. Unlike other spiritual leaders, His Holiness is modern and forward-thinking, and his teachings are extremely relevant to contemporary life.

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What is happiness?

We all want to experience some happiness along the way but we’re often not quite sure what happiness is. Is it the pleasure from a particular experience, being with a particular person or in a particular place? Is it selfish to feel happy? Can we make happiness a permanent fixture?

We are often so busy running around wanting happiness that we don’t see it right in front of us; it is like dew on the grass, there for a little while but then gone. As soon as you get some happiness, the feeling disappears just as quickly. As soon as you get some pleasure, it too disappears like those droplets of dew, or like chasing a rainbow. This is our usual pleasure-based experience of happiness and we waste a lot of time and energy trying to find it. But relaxed and peaceful long-lasting happiness can certainly be attained; it is quieter than our glimpses of heightened sensory pleasure but still rich and deep.

‘Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Happiness is what bonds us together. We all have the equal desire to have happiness and at the same time we don’t want to feel pain or sorrow. And yet this is something we rarely think about or truly understand. By remembering that every single other person wants the same thing, we can begin to understand happiness as something full of compassion and generosity, rather than a selfish search for pleasure, for fulfilling our own desires. As the Buddha said, ‘Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.’ Happiness makes you a good human.

For me, I think happiness comes with appreciation. Happiness comes when we are completely inspired, when we are intimately connected with something that moves us, something that really catches our attention. Wanting to improve our understanding about anything, even in a small way, is very good. Learning makes us happy. For example, I wanted to learn French as I felt I couldn’t communicate with my French students at all well and this made me a little bit down. As I started to learn the language I had a tremendous joy as my understanding improved. As we improve our understanding, we improve our wisdom and we are able to do things more skilfully, to the benefits of others. Remembering this helps you in your motivation. If you can continually be learning from each day to the next with the motivation to give something to others and to the world then happiness will stay by your side.