After 25 years of teaching happiness, I've found there's one key ingredient: awe
I have taught happiness to hundreds of thousands of people around the world. It is not obvious why I ended up doing this work: I have been a pretty wound-up, anxious person for significant chunks of my life and was thrown out of my first meditation class for laughing. Life can surprise us, though, in giving us the work we are here to do. So, nearly every day in classrooms of different kinds, from kindergartens to lecture halls, from churches to prisons, I teach people about finding the good life.
It is a perennial question that we have been asking, in different ways, for tens of thousands of years: how can we live a life enlivened by joy and community and meaning, that brings us a sense of worth and belonging and strengthens the people and natural environments around us?
Now, 25 years into teaching happiness, I have an answer: find awe.
Awe is the emotion we experience when we encounter vast mysteries we don’t understand. Humans have always made sense of awe through culture, and often through religion. But awe does not have to be understood as a religious experience. Twenty years ago, my PhD students and I, as well as other scientists around the world, began to find awe in the lab.
We charted this elusive emotion with new measures of the brain and body, physical responses like tears and goosebumps, and demonstrations of how awe transforms the ways we think and act. We studied how and when we feel awe – during prayer and meditation, yes, but also while looking out at panoramic views, listening to music, and during psychedelic trips.
Our research suggests that we have a basic need for awe wired into our brains and bodies. Just a couple of minutes a day can improve happiness.
Why? In our distal evolution as very social mammals, those individuals who united with others in awe-like patterns of behaviour fared well in encounters with the unknown. And in the more proximal calculus of thriving in the present, awe brings us joy, meaning and community, healthier bodies and more creative minds.
The really good news is that awe isn’t anywhere near as elusive as you might think. Finding it is easy if we just take a moment and wonder. It doesn’t require money or the burning of fossil fuels. And all of us, no matter our background, can find our own meaningful pathway to awe.
Our research shows that it emerges in response to what I call the eight wonders of life: the strength, courage and kindness of others; collective movement in actions like dance and sports; nature; music; art and visual design; mystical encounter; encountering life and death; and big ideas or epiphanies.
These wonders are all around us. There are many opportunities for everyday awe. The experience transforms us by quieting the nagging, self-critical, status-conscious voice of our self, or ego. It empowers us to collaborate, to open our minds to wonders, and to see the deep patterns of life.
Extracted from “Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder”, published by Penguin.
