Feelings are only your history being occasioned by the present moment. If that's your enemy, then your history is your enemy. If sensations are your enemy, your body is your enemy. And if memory is your enemy, you'd better have a way of controlling your mind in such a way that you never are reminded of things that are painful from the past. If you avoid people, avoid having your buttons pushed, avoid going to places that might occasion anxiety; if you're hammering down drugs and alcohol; these are all methods of trying to mount that unhealthy agenda.

The definition of happiness being very emotion-oriented - the problem is that there's too many quick and dirty ways to chase that in ways that end up being unhelpful to people. If you just have another martini or even more severe substances. But commercial culture and our media is constantly encouraging us to think that if we feel good we live well. We're only too happy to sell you goods and services from the dancing oivoids and the pill you can take, or the trips or the cars or the clothes or the women that you can get with - whatever that is that will give you the quick route to that.

Holding anxiety as your own enemy, and that it has to go down, diminish it, go away and not happen here is a kind of self-invalidating, interiorly focused process that would get you even more entangled with these processes. Instead, what we're going to need to learn to do is to allow your history to bring into the present thoughts and feelings and memories, and to sort of hold them mindfully and self-compassionately, and then focus on what you do and bring them along for that journey.

There is a middle path between indulgence and suppression, but the culture has overwhelmed that in the cacophony that has been created in the modern world and the commercial encouragement of avoidance and indulgence on the one hand, or suppression and "just do it," treating yourself as an object on the other. We've got to find a way that's more compassionate, softer, that allows us to move forward towards the kind of lives that we really want to live.

When we fly planes over countries, dropping bombs on the evil ones, I think we're doing something very similar to what's being done when the infidels are getting their comeuppance with planes going into buildings. So it's gotten to the point where if we are not healthy psychologically as a human society, we will not have a planet to live on. And that's what keeps me up at night, when I see so little focus on the behavioral side of these problems, and the idea that just politics, or just physical science, is going to solve this.

Let's take something like antidepressant medications. There's decent science saying it has an effect, but it's shockingly small after you control for penetration of the blind, people knowing that they're getting the active pills versus sugar pills, if you use an active control. It's probably only a few points. But it's a multi, multibillion-dollar industry. And by the way, has huge side effects. 40 percent of the people taking them have significant sexual side effects. And that's just one. A single antidepressant medication can be worth a billion dollars to a company.

Most people are hurt deeply by betrayals in relationships. It might be better to really get up against and sort of contact that caring, and maybe take a more loving stance even with your own pain, and keep your feet moving towards what you really want, because the cost in terms of intimacy and connection and caring that comes when you try not to be vulnerable, when you're constantly looking out for betrayals of trust, is too great. It makes it very hard to have relationships of the kind that you really want. One, look where the pain is. Flip it over; you'll find that's where the values are.