american meditation (on gretchen rubin and the insight meditation practice of labeling.)

I read “Gretchen Rubin’s” The Happiness Project a few weeks ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The book details a year-long project she undertakes, keeping an increasingly large set of resolutions inspired by all kinds of literature on happiness, adding in a new theme each month, in an attempt to discover what will make her happier.

From the outset of the year, she comes up with twelve “Personal Commandments” , and one of them, “Act the way I want to feel” she comes back to again and again. One of the things I liked about Rubin’s writing is her candidness: you can feel it as tries this commandment on. It’s not natural for her, and the whole idea is clearly a little preposterous … so when she employs it in times of family strife or general crankiness — by thinking and setting her attention accordingly — you can feel her marvel in genuine surprise at the positive effect.

Later on, she describes spending a month focused on spirituality, and describes how she has no interest in meditating or in including it in her happiness project (to the surprise and what sounds like offense to some of her meditating friends.) This intrigued me, as I’m personally interested in what people do for happiness and to understand themselves better, and for myself, meditation has been the chief tool in this regard for the past few years.

Then something dawned on me — her commandment, “Act how I want to feel” was really quite reminiscent of the insight / Vipassana meditation practice of “labeling.” Looking at a description from an article in the Shambala Sun:

17. How should you note mental objects?

Mental objects seem to present a bewildering diversity, but actually they fall into just a few clear categories, such as “thinking,” “imagining,” “remembering,” “planning” and “visualizing.”

18. What is the purpose of labeling?

In using the labeling technique, your goal is not to gain verbal skills. Labeling helps us to perceive clearly the actual qualities of our experience, without getting immersed in the content. It develops mental power and focus.

and I thought — hey! That’s what Gretchen Rubin does all throughout her book. Through constantly reminding herself of her resolutions and commandments, when an appropriate situation comes up, she is able to clearly label it. And then, often to her surprise, when employing an “Act how I want to feel” in an emotionally unpleasant situation — in a sense identifying and noting the negative situation at hand — the charge of the scene dissipates. This made me wonder if this commandment worked not because of “positive thinking” (it wasn’t because she was thinking positive thoughts that she then felt good) as much as it was gaining enough space from the thinking and associated emotions to let them dissipate.

I believe it’s also in the chapter on spirituality that Rubin identifies a Western approach to happiness — cultivate and indulge one’s passions — as a counterpoint to what she typifies as an Eastern one — identify and detach from all possible attachments. I wonder if in this idea of carefully selecting and cultivating habits of mind, as Rubin does in her book, one isn’t doing the same thing espoused by Vipassana teachers — to note your thinking and notice it as fundamentally “empty.”