It was Siddhartha Gautama – otherwise known as the Buddha – who 2600 years ago came up with a term for a feeling that might seem like a modern affliction: a sense of unease, of pervasive dissatisfaction, discomfort or discontent with life.
“Regardless of who we are or our status in life, there’s that sense of: it’s just not right,” explains Dr Tony Fernando. “It can be small or it can be big. And it can result in suffering if you don’t know how to handle it.”
The Buddha called this feeling “dukkha”. “And life is like that most of the time,” says Fernando.
Fernando, an ordained Buddhist monk, is an Auckland-based psychiatrist and sleep specialist. He describes the Buddha as “the smartest psychologist who ever lived”.
He uses more Buddhist psychological principles in helping his patients manage stress and suffering than Western psychological approaches from Freud, Jung or Beck. And, he adds, he uses Buddhism in his own life every day.
Fernando addresses dukkha and many of the other reasons we’re often not as happy as we’d like to be in his just-published book, Life Hacks From the Buddha: How to be calm and content in a chaotic world.
He also admits he’s nowhere near understanding all the Buddha’s teachings. “Buddhist scriptures are so dense,” he says. By comparison, “reading the Bible is kindergarten stuff”.
He’s constantly practising the hacks he writes about to manage his own struggles. “For example, I published the book. It’s come out. I should be happy. And yeah, I am happy. I’m excited. But then I start to worry, oh, what if no one reads it? Or what if I see it in the discount bin? Because I’m an overthinker. But since I use a lot of these techniques, I notice my mind and tell myself, Tony, you’re in a papañca.”
“Papañca” is another Buddhist term for a familiar phenomenon: the mind becoming “caught in a spin” of unhelpful thoughts, stories and ideas. There’s not an exact equivalent in English, Fernando says, but it’s a stressful mash-up of rumination, overthinking, overplanning and catastrophising. Managing papañca means noticing the spin. “You back off overthinking; see what happens. When we’re at ease with the present, there’s much, much less dukkha.”
The path to acceptance
Fernando has taken a winding path to get to the point of writing a book on Buddhist psychology. Raised in the Philippines as a strict Catholic, he ended up in New Zealand several decades ago after being recruited by the Auckland District Health Board, by way of university in the US. The young Fernando was a self-described “Catholic extremist”.
“My belief was so fervent that if the Pope had called for a holy war, I would have gone straight to Rome ready to die for the church,” he writes.
It started to change when he moved to New York for postgraduate medical studies, where he was surrounded by people of many different faiths. “My non-Catholic friends actually seemed more ethical,” he recalls. “They were living good lives. They were kind. And I was thinking: if the teaching of the church is that only baptised Catholics who receive the sacraments will go to heaven, what will happen to all of my non-Catholic friends? So I started to expand my thinking … that there might be other ways, or that the way I interpreted the teachings [of the church] were too strict.”
He now considers himself agnostic, although “there was a time I felt, ‘I think I’m becoming an atheist.’ Now my feeling is there’s so much out there. I don’t know. There might be a god, there might not be a god. Sometimes I go to church, where I’ll meditate … And then I always, in humility, say: if you are there, if you are really here, I hope you’ll be nice to me when I die. Or you’ll be nice to my family. And if you are not here, that’s okay.”
Fernando became exposed to Buddhism at first through reading the Dalai Lama’s book, The Art of Happiness, picked up at random in an airport, and only because it had been co-authored by a psychiatrist, Howard Cutler. Before that, Fernando says he thought of Buddhism as “an exotic Eastern religion that had bizarre practices … and growing up Catholic, there’s that sense of superiority that nothing else is good enough”.
My non-Catholic friends actually seemed more ethical. They were living good lives. They were kind.
Cutler had interviewed the Buddhist leader extensively, probing into issues of happiness, anxiety, conflict and many other problems of daily life. “I was just amazed by how the Dalai Lama answered those questions,” Fernando says. And as a psychiatrist, he wondered why he hadn’t been taught these concepts.
“I think as mental health people, in addition to learning Western psychology, we should learn basic Buddhist psychology, because it’s so rich and so practical that a lot of people will benefit. And it’s not theoretical. You actually can apply it to your own experience.”
Some Buddhist concepts are now widely adopted in mainstream medicine, though Fernando notes they’re not described as Buddhist. Mindfulness is taught in many medical schools around the world.
Fernando stays away from concepts we might typically associate with Buddhism, such as karma. He also believes that Buddhism isn’t really a religion, more a way of being, or living. “It doesn’t concern itself much with a higher being who is omniscient and powerful.”
Ungrasping
In fact, according to Buddhist philosophy, strict adherence to religious doctrine is an example of another major way human beings can make ourselves unhappy: the concept of “grasping”, of holding on too tightly to things, including ideas and beliefs. The theme runs through Fernando’s book.
“If you understand the idea of grasping, it’s actually quite liberating,” he says. “I use it almost every day. When I’m upset, when I’m anxious, when I’m annoyed, I ask myself: what am I grasping at? And often it’s because I’m grasping at an expectation. I’m grasping at an outcome.”
It can be even more prosaic. Fernando cites the example of a supermarket parking space. “You see that parking space and think ‘That’s mine’. And then a smaller, faster car gets ‘your’ space. And then you get angry. But what about, instead of blaming that other guy, think: ‘What is my mind doing? Oh. I grasped.’ The whole concept of grasping as a cause of suffering universally works.”
Fernando teaches this to his insomniac patients who grasp at the concept they “should” be asleep. By explaining the concept of grasping, and talking patients through breathing and other techniques to help them hold their expectations more lightly, he hopes better sleep follows.
Grasping – to material things, ideas and people – leads to stress, suffering and dissatisfaction. We should instead learn to ungrasp and hold things lightly. Ungrasping our ideas of identity – in psychology, the concept of “in-groups” to which humans gravitate and “out-groups” – is not easy in today’s increasingly polarised world.
The mindfulness muscle
Mindfulness is probably the most widely known element of Buddhism. It’s also possibly the most misunderstood. Fernando writes that it has become synonymous with stress relief and relaxation. But using it just for that is “like using a Ferrari to drive to the supermarket two blocks down the road”.
Mindfulness is much more than just relaxation. And the ways it is often taught in isolation are somewhat missing the point.
“From a Buddhist perspective, mindfulness is just one [part] of the eight-fold path for happiness and liberation.”
He points out that mindfulness loses its context when, for example, it is even taught in the military, “which is good, because when soldiers become mindful, it might prevent burnout. But invariably, they would use mindfulness when they push the button or use their rifles to kill people.”
For Buddhists, who follow the precept of non-killing, this is “a nightmare scenario”, he says with a smile. Mindfulness without kindness is incomplete and superficial, he says.
“Of course, mindfulness benefits us emotionally. But the best way to practise mindfulness is to view it as a tool that will also help other people. That’s why one of our teachers, Ajahn Brahm, likes to call it ‘kindfulness’.”
Now my feeling is there’s so much out there. I don’t know. There might be a god, there might not be a god.
Developing what Fernando calls our “mindfulness muscle” means practising meditation, which can be in the traditional sense (sitting quietly) or done in the course of daily activities such as walking, washing the dishes or eating.
Fernando is a keen ocean swimmer; he’s a member of a swimming group based at Kohimarama on Auckland’s Waitematā Harbour. When swimming, he uses techniques of noting, counting and feeling to make it mindful.
“While doing a right stroke, I note it as ‘right’, and same with the left. Sometimes, I count my strokes up to six, followed by looking out of the water.
“Feeling involves noticing the sensations of the water against my head, face, neck, arms, body and legs.”
Music is another source of mindfulness; Fernando plays the cello, something he says gives him joy as well as mindful moments. “When you’re with the instrument, you’re not overthinking it, you’re just present. It’s a different type of joy. It’s priceless.”
Life Hacks From the Buddha: How to be calm and content in a chaotic world, by Dr Tony Fernando (HarperCollins, RRP $39.99), is out now. To read an extract, go here.
