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perspective and the thoughts, feelings, and actions that come as a result.
Scientific research consistently supported so much of the dialogue
that was unfolding over the week. The factors that psychologist Sonja
Lyubomirsky has found to have the greatest influence on our happiness
supported a number of the eight pillars. The first concerned our
perspective toward life, or, as Lyubomirsky described it, our ability to
reframe our situation more positively. Our capacity to experience
gratitude and our choice to be kind and generous were the others.
A healthy perspective really is the foundation of joy and happiness,
because the way we see the world is the way we experience the world.
Changing the way we see the world in turn changes the way we feel and
the way we act, which changes the world itself. Or, as the Buddha says in
the Dhammapada, “With our mind we create our own world.”

•           •           •

or every event in life,” the Dalai Lama said, “there are many
different angles. When you look at the same event from a wider
perspective, your sense of worry and anxiety reduces, and you have
greater joy.” The Dalai Lama had discussed the importance of a wider
perspective when he was telling us about how he was able to see the
calamity of his losing his country as an opportunity. It was jaw-dropping
to hear him “reframe more positively” the last half century of exile. He
had been able to see not only what he had lost but also what he had
gained: wider contact and new relationships, less formality and more
freedom to discover the world and learn from others. He had concluded,
“So therefore, if you look from one angle, you feel, Oh, how bad, how
sad. But if you look from another angle at that same tragedy, that same
event, you see that it gives me new opportunities.”
Edith Eva Eger tells the story of visiting two soldiers on the same day
at William Beaumont Army Medical Center at Fort Bliss. Both were
paraplegics who had lost the use of their legs in combat. They had the
same diagnosis and the same prognosis. The first veteran, Tom, was lying
on his bed knotted into a fetal position, railing against life and decrying