• The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living
    Drawn from interviews between psychiatrist Howard C. Cutler and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, this book explores what Buddhism says about cultivating happiness by shifting one's thinking and engaging in regular spiritual practice. Detachment, contentment, and a sense of inner worth are the basic sources of happiness.
  • Be Happy: Release the Power of Happiness in You
    Robert Holden offers an entertaining and enlightening survey of being happy. He reviews 16 years of work with the Happiness Project which he directs, an eight-week course he created around it, and a variety of spiritual practices. Holden discovered that happiness is not only very important to people around the world, it is a goal that unites everyone.
  • Choosing Happiness: Life & Soul Essentials
    Against a modern milieu where people can find great material and career success and yet remain basically alienated and depressed, Stephanie Dowrick, a psychotherapist and interfaith minister, presents practices to help readers achieve greater self-understanding and confidence to cope with the real world. Her analysis probes the riches and depths of happiness.
  • Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill
    Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk, shares his understanding of happiness as the deep sense of flourishing that arises from a healthy mind as well as a way of interpreting the world. It is not a mere pleasurable feeling, a fleeting emotion, or a mood, but an optimal state of being. Thoughts such as desire, hatred, and envy become our own worst enemies, whereas happiness is connected to kindness, humility, optimism, going with the flow of time, and facing death with equanimity.
  • Guideposts to Happiness: Prescriptions for a Wonderful Life
    A lecture given in 1989, this book contains the teachings of Ryuho Okawa, a self described doctor of soul who is very popular in Japan. Believing that much of what ails modern humans is spiritual in nature, rather than simply mental or physical, Okawa emphasizes the need to resist being brought down by negative thinking. Instead, we should retrain ourselves to draw happy images on the blank canvases of our minds.
  • Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment
    This book offers material on how to be happy from the positive psychology professor, Tal Ben-Shahar, whose course on the same topic at Harvard is very popular. In chapters on happiness in education, happiness in the workplace, and happiness in relationships, Ben-Shahar shows how we can reframe and add richness and depth to our everyday experiences of this pursuit.
  • Happiness: Essential Mindfulness Practices
    This is a glorious, down-to-earth and practical book containing the key practices developed by Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh over the past 60 years. He offers ways of being mindful in every moment of life, including those in which one might be angry. Being truly present is the key to a genuinely happy life.
  • Happiness: How to Find It and Keep It
    Using a dialogue format between a seeker and a wise friend, this book by Joan Duncan Oliver offers a broad range of material to help us understand the elusive bluebird of happiness. She links happiness to such qualities as kindness, beauty, love and faith.
  • Happiness and the Human Spirit: The Spirituality of Becoming the Best that You Can Be
    Abraham Twerski, a self-improvement psychiatrist and rabbi, explores what he calls "Spiritual Deficiency Syndrome (SDS)," a malaise that seeks to find comfort in various forms of nefarious self-indulgence. He probes the connection between happiness and spirituality, in which happiness is shown to be "becoming the best human beings we can be" and is found to be the only real cure for SDS.
  • The Happiness Makeover: How to Teach Yourself to Be Happy and Enjoy Every Day
    M. J. Ryan is convinced that happiness is a feeling of lightness and well-being that can be achieved through mind-training, but that we are frequently disrupted by habit energies that interfere with our natural ability to tap into contentment in our lives. This book presents many basic mindfulness and positive thinking practices that can be used to achieve happiness and get beyond hindrances at work and at home.
  • How to Be Happy
    Co-founder of The Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, an international network of Buddhist projects, Lama Zopa Rinpoche explores the path of happiness via meditation, compassion, the good heart, and subduing the mind. He writes that the dissatisfied mind is one of the main causes of stress; we burden ourselves with expectations that are basically selfish. Dedicating everything we do to the well-being of all people and being compassionate through serving others helps us experience every moment of life as precious.
  • The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
    Through extensive research, Sonja Lyubomirsky reveals that 40 percent of our capacity for happiness is within our power to change through the ways we act and think. In light of these findings, Lyubomirsky debunks three myths about happiness and where it can be found, and suggests 12 happiness-enhancing activities from expressing gratitude to taking care of your body. She makes a good case for practicing optimism and putting others ahead of ourselves.

More Books on Happiness