Happiness Lessons of The Ancients: Sikhism and Daily Habits

come down. But Simmern's fear is about the events unfolding in New York, in DC one beyond just the tragic terrorist attacks that were unfolding that afternoon. The death threat started first by phone, then people driving bys. I mean, it was a really intense moment in my life. Simren and his family are sick members of a major religion that sprang up in India around five centuries ago. Part of their faith, sick men grow beards and wear turbans.

Even though their faith had nothing to do with the awful attacks of Osama bin lauded, Simren and his family became immediate targets for abuse in their small South Texas town. That afternoon, Simren's mom locked their front door. I remember that vividly because we had never locked the doors. Followers of sickism are no strangers to assault in persecution. The threat of oppression has even shaped their faith. But Simren was still surprised when his father pondered their situation soon

after nine to eleven and gave thanks. My dad said something to me like, aren't we so fortunate? You know, We're so lucky that your neighbors have been coming by to give us food, that your teachers and your teammates have been checking in to see if you're okay. I mean, aren't we so lucky to have all these people around us. This story is a pivotal moment in Simren's hip book, The Light We Give How Sick Wisdom can Transform Your Life.

The memoir tries to unpack different strands of Simren's sick faith and explores how following these ten can make us all feel a little happier. So let's hear more about the well being wisdom of sickism on happiness Lessons of the Ancients with me, doctor Laurie Santos. We heard the story of Simren's family and the abuse they suffered following nine to eleven in the last episode. But what I wanted to dig deeper into this time was the reaction

that Simren's father had to this difficult time. If your family was under siege, with strangers calling in death threats, an abuse being screamed at you from passing cars, would you ever think to say, are we so fortunate? And I look at him like he's lost his mind? Right? In what world is there something to feel fortunate about?

And yet this is what Simmeren's dad thought. His religion valued optimism and gratitude even in the face of negative events, and prize the bonds that formed between people of different backgrounds. Rather than forgetting all those teachings in such a stressful moment, mister Singh kept them at the forefront of his mind. He committed to putting those teachings to action day in and day out until they were simply second nature. And this powerful lesson fits with the advice that we get

from scientific work on happiness. If we want to weather the bad times well, we need to practice good habits when things are less stressful. We need to flex our happiness muscles regularly to build them up for when we'll need them the most. If this sort of practice makes perfect metaphors, sounds like something a sports coach might say, Well, that kind of makes sense because it's an analogy that

I've borrowed from sports obsessed to Simren. As an avid teen soccer and basketball player, Simmeren realized that his father's example of putting in daily practice was exactly the thing he was learning from his coaches who were helping him

to shoot hoops and pass soccer balls. Good habits or bad habits or lack of habits shape us in all kinds of ways, and so sports, to me was probably just the best way that I've come to understand this, because I would say probably like fifty percent of my childhood waste basketball, soccer, or baseball, and the other fifty

percent was thinking about practice or games. So yeah, when I was in school, there was there was actually very little attention that I was paying to what was actually going on, which I think is probably true for a lot of us. But yeah, I mean, it's it's super interesting because I think the way that we function as a society, at least what my experience was growing up, is that in sports we talk about practice as a way to prepare ourselves for the big moments in school too, right,

like homework and test preparation. Whether you actually do it or not, is it or find shortcuts is a different story. But but like we're trained to understand that if we want to succeed academically, like there is there's a process that you go through. And then for whatever reason, when it comes to living life, generally, we tell ourselves like all I need to know is the right ideas. All I need to know is that it's important to love my neighbor. And as long as I know that in

my brain, then I can feel empathy for anyone. And to a degree it works, right, Like on a micro level, day to day, you see your neighbor and you say hi, and you feel good about yourself and you're like, see, I'm I'm a good person, I'm empathetic, I'm compassionate. Whatever. I watch TV and see this earthquake in Turkey and I donated a hundred bucks and like that's that's it, and like those are those are good and they're fine.

But what I found is without real intention behind bringing those ideas into practice, like they just are so distant from who we actually are and part of the reason that this really came to me was in trying to understand what I was noticing on the front lines of hate violence, which is that for certain communities, and I worked with many six and we see this particularly among faith communities, when when certain communities are targeted and beaten

and assaulted in these nasty, hateful attacks, they have an ability to respond with the best of their values in a way that goes beyond human understanding. Right, Like, it's so hard to watch these people as they're in the worst, most vulnerable positions of their lives because somebody couldn't control their own anger and their own hatred. And they'll sit up and they'll be like, I don't want them to be punished, Like I've seen people who've lost family members,

and then like, I don't believe in capital manishment. I don't want that person to die. I want to forgive them. And like, however, this plays out, and it's super complicated, and I don't think there's a clear formula for it

in terms of what people should do. But what I can say is I've seen that in their most vulnerable moments, when people have lived lives where they've practiced daily what their values are like they're ready to show up in those difficult moments, and so that that's become the inspiration for me, Like what am I doing every day to prepare so that when the hardship comes, and it's going to come, like life is life, things are hard when hardship comes, I'm ready to respond in a way that

reflects my values and makes me feeling good about what I can control, kind of kind of like my dad and in that moment in nine to eleven where you know, there's a lot that he couldn't control, the world was spinning out of control, and he was able to really look into his values and find a way to claim his own agency in that moment. And I think that's that's really powerful way to live. And I think part

of it is recognizing the power of the moment. You know, there are so many faith traditions that really focus on the kind of redemption or liberation that will happen to you after you die, right, you know, I'll try to get into heaven or you know, after life will be so great. But I think one of the powerful things about Sick philosophy is there's a real emphasis on the here and now, right the liberation doesn't happen when you die,

It's happening kind of as you're living right now. And so talk about this idea of mindfulness, something that the happiness literature has talked about a lot, and how that sort of plays out with kind of making sure you're practicing all these good values and these good deeds in the here and now. Yeah, yeah, it's it's interesting because you know, I study a lot of religions and philosophies.

I'm a professor of religion, and even as a kid, one of the things that never really made sense to me was this approach to life that said life is an illusion, don't take it seriously. Real happiness comes after you die, Like, just set yourself up for that happiness. And you know, to each their own, it's it's fine if that's if that's the way you want to live. But like, what I've learned and understood and what I

really appreciate is um, life is finite. We don't know what we don't know, and what we do know is what we experience right now. And here's here's an analogy that that might be a little bit basic, but but but I think it pertains here. So my wife is a physician, and when she was in high school, I didn't know here them, but this is sort of how she's described it to me. She was like, all I need to do to be happy is to get into

good college. And then she was like, all I need to do to be happy is to get into Gate good med school. And then it was all I need to do to be happy is get into the right and like, you just keep giving yourself these distant goals of like I will be happy then if I do this now, and it's it ends up being so conditional, and like who really looks at people? Who? I mean, we see it in movies all the time, we see it in literature all the time, right, Like it's not

like this is a foreign concept to us. We live this too. But we know that the greatest way of finding happiness is to live in the present moment, right Like that's that's what every romcom teaches us, and so and so it's it's it's it's in our faces. It's it's not a surprise. But it's so hard to live that way for a lot of reasons. And and there are all sorts of challenges that we face on a daily basis. But but I think for the people that we know who are the happiest, they're the ones who

are really engaged and taking seriously that. I mean, those are the people that I have most fun being around. Are the people who are happy and enjoying life, and like, that's who I want to hang out with. And anybody who's planning for happiness twenty years from now, I'm like, Okay, hang out with me in twenty years. You'll be more

fun then. And part of making sure that you're doing the best that you can do for yourself in the moment is really like taking a good heart and oftentimes courageous look at yourself and noticing when you're straying from that path. Right. I think you sort of this term the Hohokam, like this idea of acceptance even when you're

kind of off track. And this was something that I really admired that you talked about doing in the book, again not necessarily through your spiritual practices, but just in terms of your priorities and like taking a good, hard look at that and so you know, talk about how you did that in terms of paying attention to whether you were really prioritizing the things that you loved in life. Yeah,

you know one of the things. As you're saying this, somebody asked me recently, like, when you write about your own life memoir style, how do you choose what's write about? And I was like, I hadn't thought about that, Like what are the moments? And I realized I just reflected on where I messed up the worst. I was like, let me just tell everybody about these moments in my life. And so this is one of them where this experience that I had, and I think all of us lived

this way. In my head, I would describe my priorities as being, you know, family first always, and I had these young kids, and I would say that that's the most important thing to me. And I would say, you know, my own personal happiness, spiritual practice and the like. Last among that is work. And I think that's really reflective of how I see the world and where priorities should be. And I wasn't sure exactly how to how to check

if that's I mean. It felt to me like I was off balance and I wasn't quite I wasn't quite where I where I thought I was, and things weren't really lining up. And so I had this exercise where I said, okay for today, Imagine that an alien comes from outer space and is just watching me and observing me, and based on those observations, they're going to see how I spend my time, and based on how I spend my time, they're going to tell me what my priorities are.

And so I go through this exercise and what it enabled for me was almost a third person distance, right, Like I'm observing myself going through through the day, and as I'm going through it, I'm like, oh my god, Like I'm sitting here with my kids getting them ready for school. But even when I'm sitting with them, I'm so distracted by what I need to do for work that I'm not I'm not even actually here. And for me, like I could tell myself the story every day that

like I'm such a great dad. I'm you know, getting my kids ready for school, I'm doing their hair whatever. But really, if somebody else is watching me, they're like,

you're half present. And I go through this process like the entire day of reflecting on both what I'm doing with my time, like what am I prioritizing and actuality, and also what my headspace is when I'm there, and that that exercise was really illuminating for me in understanding that I was I was very much off base in terms of what my actual priorities were and how I

was living my life. And it revealed to me a source of my own unhappiness, right, Like I wasn't actually doing the things that I cared about, and the things that I cared about I was like half doing. And so it was just a nice way to recalibrate not just how I spent my time, but but where I spent my time. This also seems to be something that's

consistent with at least some sick philosophy. I know you mentioned in the book that Grew John talks about this idea of setting fire to any practices that take you away from love. And I love this specific phrasing because it's like you got to set fire to it, right, This is a hard task that you really need to kind of detonate what's going on in your life if it's not working, but if it's taking away from love, it's sort of worth doing that hard work to some

interesting extent. No, I love it. It's it's such a Again. I think I think some of these ideas. They're so obvious, Like it's not like we haven't heard that concept before, right, Like, do what matters to you, do what takes you towards your goals, Like, I mean, we hear this since childhood,

but the reminders and having them package indifferent way. I mean, the original Punjabi for Gurugen's line is ja lo scd jiti metada vis today And he's talking like you can translate it as rituals right in a in superstitions, and you could make it very specific to a critique of religious practice. But my read on it is it's actually applicable to all of us in all aspects of life, right like, just burn the things that are taking you

away from your goal. And for me as someone as I'm reflecting on that story, it was actually a really instructive, practical mechanism for dealing. I mean, you know, I could sit here and say my priorities are misaligned and I'm

going to change them. That's so hard to actually do, right, Like, there's actual psychological impact, right Like, Okay, So one of the examples specifically is that at the time that I went through this reflection, so much of my headspace was tied up with social media, Twitter in particular, so I would be like doing my kid's hair and thinking of, like, what's the cool tweet that I'm going to put out today?

And it sounds so ridiculous when you say it out loud, like it's I'm definitely I was gonna say, I'm a little ebarrassed. I'm a lot embarrassed to say that. But like, you get addicted to these things, and there are all kinds of addictions in life, and it's not so easy to just say, Okay, starting from today, I'm not going to do this thing. Like it actually takes real effort to get there. And for me, this teaching jo lo

sd like burn that thing. For me, that meant just top off social media for a few months, and like it doesn't mean, you know, you have to make some like huge commitment or radical change in your life, but just like get away from that thing and you can come back to it later. So anyway, it's it's it's it's a really powerful teaching that I come back to, especially in moments where I find it difficult to step away from the things that I that I'm actually really

attached to. Auditing what we actually spend our time doing and honestly comparing that to our aspirations can be a sabring experience. If you've listened to the Happiness Lab before, you've probably heard that I often struggle to match my behavior with what I know should be my priorities. I far too often choose tasks that satisfy my it's to seem busy and productive instead of simply having fun with my loved ones. But there's another mismatch between intention and

reality that trips a lot of us up. And that's the gulf between knowing that we should do nice stuff for the people around us and the temptation to just concentrate on pleasing ourselves. After the break, we'll look at how Simren's parents tackle that problem by taking away his birthday presents. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. There are so many arresting moments in Simren Jeet Singh's book The Light We Give How Sick Wisdom Can Transform

Your Life. The memoir features powerful quotes from sick gurus, difficult encounters with intolerance and outright hatred, and brutally honest anecdotes about Simron's own triumphs and failures. But there was one image that wouldn't leave my mind when I first read the book. It was the story of young birthday boy Simmeren being taught a radical lesson about the value

of sharing with others. The practice in our household growing up was you don't keep all the birthday presents you get, so you have you have the big party, like that's fun. Everyone shows up and it was great, and we do it in our backyard and I always look forward to it. And then and then the next day you go through the birthday presence and you keep one sometimes two, and

the rest are for donation. And so it was I mean, it was painful as a kid, But but the practice that that engendered for us was, you know, your birthday is not just about you, Like this is an opportunity to think about others as well. And I mean, I'll say, my younger daughter's birthday was just two days ago, and my wife and I've developed our own practice around this. She gets to keep her presence because I don't have

the heart to take them away. But one of the things we've developed with her is on her birthday, we give her a list of charities that we developed throughout the year, and she gets to pick which charity she wants to give amounts of dollars too that we assigned to her, And what that creates is a similar kind of dynamic, right Like you even on days that where culturally you're told the day is all about you, Like even on those days where we're not doing this this

approach of like self centeredness, where we're going to think about others as well and we're going to give. And ultimately, like you know, people hearing this might think that this is about charity or about I don't know, fe feeling good about yourself, which I mean in a way yes, And ultimately it's about happiness, right, Like what do I want for my kids? I want them to be happy. And my experience and what I've learned is generosity is

a real driver of happiness. And so I want my kids to learn and really feel what generosity is like in their daily lives, so it becomes something that they carry with them forever. And this is something we talk about a ton on this podcast. Right, there's so much evidence that serving other people's happiness is a way to serve our own happiness, Like the best way to spend money to feel good yourself, to experience happiness yourself is suspend on other people. It's just we kind of don't

realize that. And I think this is the problem with serving other people, as we think it's a chore, but it can be a path to feeling good ourselves, even when serving other people who you might not necessarily want to serve or who might not react well to your service. And here's where I wanted you to tell the story of the woman that you helped on the street, because not all of our attempts to serve others go well. Sometimes they just reinforce, you know, some of the discrimination

that you know many marginalized groups are facing. Yeah, yeah, this is this is another one of those that's I mean, racism is so funny in a lot of ways. I mean, if you if you're willing to look at it that way, it's just so ridiculous. So this this moment with this woman on the street, she was older, We're living in

New York City. She fell in the middle of the crosswalk as she was crossing so so on a street, busy, busy Manhattan Upper East Side, and she's laying there and she can't get up, and I just run over and put on my hand to help her up, right, Like, no, no big deal, like anything anyone would do. And so she reaches up to grab my hand and then she looks up and she sees my face and she immediately jerks her hand back and she's like she just shouted. I mean, it was so weird. She goes go back

to where you came from. And I'm, I mean, I've dealt with all kinds of situations like this before, but actually nothing nothing like this where the person who's being racist towards me actively needs help and they're in a dangerous situation. I mean, it's it's New York. Cabs aren't going to start going to stop for her, and so

I mean, I'm not quite sure what to do. And in a way, right, this is the story of racism in a nutshell, right, and people would rather people rather be hurt than to take help from from others who they who they don't like for whatever reason. But I'm, you know, I'm sort of stuck in this in the situation and unsure of what to do, and we don't have that much time, and in my head I'm thinking she needs help. I'm also thinking she doesn't want to

help from me. And a really natural reaction, and I acknowledge this would be to just walk away and be like whatever you you hate me, like, I don't care what happens to you. But I think, I think the practice of service as I developed it over the years had helped me understand that actually service is not about yourself and what you need to feel good. It's about

other people and showing up for them. And so the the the immediate thought in my head was help this person in a way that is comfortable for them, in a way that meets the urgency of the moment, but without making it about myself. So I mean, the quick response then is get other people over who she's willing to take help from um and bring her to safety in a lot of ways, It's it's a really simple story.

It happened very quickly. It's probably what a lot of us would do in situations like this, right, But some of the particularities of the story that made it challenging for me helps me understand what it would look like for us to show up for one another in moments of need in ways that aren't necessarily self centered and could really apply generally to social progress. The reason I find this story so amazing is it's not just kind

of not being so self centered. You're helping a person, but you're really doubling down on humanity during a time when you're experiencing like really awful discrimination yourself. And I feel like, you know, this is kind of really getting back to this idea of Ekoknar, right, like where it's like, these are the moments when you have to remember this

radical connectedness. But if you can, then you can use these moments not just to be these awful moments of racism, but you can really educate people about your heritage and about what you're about in these kind of awful moments. And I love the book because in the book you talk about so many cases where you've done that so elegantly.

My other favorite story in the book was when you experience yet another racist incident in New York, this time involving some teen boys, but you were actually able to teach them and so tell me a little bit about this story. Yeah, yeah, thank you. I mean, one of the things I try to do in the book is just share with people what it's like to walk around in my shoes and in my skin every day, but in a way that you know, I want to be

honest about my experience and not overstate. I mean part of the way that I experience, as you can probably tell from my tone and tenor is you know, these these moments are hard, but they're not the worst moments in my life. They're not the worst things in the world. I can I can manage them. I can I can find even happiness within them. So it's it's fine. And I think that's that's an important thing for me to

acknowledge too. And in this moment with these kids when I'm running also in New York City, happens actually just after I start a practice of taking ten seconds every day to see the humanity in strangers that I see on the street. Part of part of the goal there was to move beyond this feeling of strangeness and to develop a sense of familiarity with with people who I

didn't know. And so I've started this practice, and pretty soon after I'm running on the West Side Highway in New York and I hear this this guy shouting at me. He's calling me Osama, and he has a couple of additional descriptive, colorful words coming with it, and I'm so annoyed. I'm just trying to enjoy my run. It's a beautiful day and this guy's ruining it. And so I keep running at first, and as I run by, I see

him and he's probably eighteen twenty years old. And as I pass by, I had no intention of, you know, saying anything or stopping or anything. But as I pass by, this practice kicks into my head and I look at him, like, oh my god, he is just like one of my students, same age, right, same same background, all the things right, Like, it's so interesting for me to observe him in this way, in this moment, and I decided to stop and to see him and treat him as one of my students.

And so I go over to him and we end up having a really brief conversation. He must have been terrified. He must have been like, oh, I'm sorry, sorry, yeah, exactly. This was like a combination of teacher mode and dad mode because I go to him and he's like, sorry, sorry, I was just kidding, And I knew he was trying to dismiss it and I would have to, but my dad, my dad in me, is like, oh no, we're gonna have a quick conversation about this, like it's not it's

not that easy. And at first, you know, again it was. It was probably thirty second conversation. So in the first ten or fifteen seconds, he was just trying to get out of it, like waiting for it to be over, like any teenager would. But as I, as I shared with him why it was what he said was so hurtful, I could I could see his eyes often like he got it in a way that he hadn't thought about it before. And then and then with the sincerity he was like, I'm sorry, like I wish I hadn't done that.

And again it's like this really Mike Rome moments, right, it wasn't the worst thing in the world. By engaging with him, I didn't change the world or fix the world. But again, like thinking about my dad after a nine to eleven, like what does it mean for us to meet these moments with our values, to reclaim our agency in ways that give us hope to say, actually, like the world doesn't just happen to me, like I can

contribute to it. I can have a positive impact, And for me, that meant I could enjoy the rest of the beautiful day, right, like I walked away being happy with how I dealt with it, rather than being annoyed or frustrated as I would have been. I just ignored it. And and same for him, right like he got something out of it too, rather than just being enabled to

continue in the way that he had. So to me, it's it's just this really simple practice of seeing people for who they are in a world where we're often bogged down by by the fear of engaging with people who are different or people we don't know. And it

made all the difference in that moment for me. And these moments of connection don't just you know, bring you happiness in the moment, I think in ways that we don't expect, right because to put that emotional labor in is a pain in the butt, and that kind of thing falls on marginalized individuals. But if you can do it from a place of this idea of connectedness, sometimes

you can get happiness out of it. But but beyond that, you can be that one moment or at least one person is taught like it's a small act, but it's kind of moving in the right direction. And this leads to the you know, the metaphor that I know the story you use that for which you named your book, this idea of the lantern story. So I'm wondering if we can end with that today, just kind of sharing that story and how it's been a philosophy that you

use to try to do more good in the world. Yeah, it's it's a parable a Punjabi voge tale that I learned from one of our greatest human rights leaders named just Fansancola, and it's about a lantern in a village that is it with a collection of lanterns, and as the sun starts to set in the evening, they start to feel fear and they wonder what's going to happen to us as the darkness comes, like we're not going

to be able to see anything. And one of the lanterns, as the darkness sets in, announces I challenge the darkness, and it flicks on its light and you know, there's no intention of anyone else doing the same. There's there's also no intention of conquering darkness entirely, but it's it's just this one little lantern saying I'm going to do what I can. But what happens after that is the other lanterns around it start to feel inspired and recognizing that they can do the same, and that there is

a real possibility and challenging the darkness continually. And then all of the lanterns, one by one flick on their their lights. And I think part of what I love about this parable is that it encapsulates the humility and the possibility at the same time, right that the two are often attention, but both both are true. And I think what else I love about it is that it's so easy to feel the overwhelming darkness in our lives.

I mean all the time. I feel it all the time, and I know so many people feel it constantly, And to know, in the way that we're taught in my tradition and in so many others, that that light is already inside of us, and what we really need to do is to see it, to recognize it, to take it.

I mean, I think there's profound implications for our for what we're facing today, whether it comes to you, the crisis around mental health, depression rates, I mean, so much of that could at least be affected if we could learn to see the light within ourselves and really see our own inherent value that's already there. But it's it is really hard to see, so this parable is a nice reminder for me about that as well. I hope you've found some light in all the episodes we've shared

together in this season of Happiness. Lessons of the Ancients, the philosopher's texts and thinkers we've examined are all, in their own ways, small lights that have helped guide people on the path to happiness for centuries. But it's time to step out of the past and into the present. So when The Happiness Lab returns, we'll be back to presenting some of the latest research to come out of

happiness science. So I hope you'll join me for more well being light in the weeks to come, and return once again for the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co written by Ryan Dilley and is produced by Ryan Dilley, Courtney Guerino, and Britney Brown. The show was mastered by Evan Viola and our original music was composed by Zachary Silver.

Special thanks to Greta Kone, Eric Sandler, Carl Migliori, Nicole Morano, Morgan Ratner, Jacob Weisberg, My agent Van Davis, and the rest of the Pushkin team. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and by name doctor Laurie Santos