Instructor Luis

Interests

Improving Happiness

• Exploring methods to develop a happiness which is facilitating independent happiness and morality.

Improving Virtue

• Exploring methods to develop habits that are of moral benefit.

Improving Moral Understanding

• Understanding what is good & bad and their respective causes.

Benefits of Practice

Happiness

Month by month I notice a weakening of my negative reactions and a strengthening of my positive responses. Difficulties definitely remain for me, however I have found a way to skillfully be with them and nurture my well-being sustainably.

Moral Virtues

• Moral Intent

  • Increasingly automatic response to everyone & everything.

    • Near-complete replacement (~95%) of self-directed anger with kindness

  • Moral intent (kindness) as my logical and mindful choice for interacting with everyone & everything

• Moral Clarity

  • Increased ability to understand different moral frameworks

  • Feeling tone (valence) as well as virtue/vice as unit of good & bad

  • Moral Circle expanded to include all sentience

  • Moral Weight given to all habits - animate or innamite

  • Improved humility i.e., ability to update beliefs via non-attachment and understanding causality

• Moral Capacity

  • Energized via releasing exhausting variables such as compassion fatigue, guilt & anger

  • Increasingly taking action via releasing fear and shame and cultivating sympathetic joy and compassion

Every day I am witnessing and learning from the relationship between skills, happiness and causing good.

Influences

Happiness Practices

• Theravada Buddhism (Goenka, Pa Auk Sayadaw, Mahasi Sayadaw)

• Secular mindfulness (Shinzen Young's Unified Mindfulness, Stephen Procter's MIDL)

• Psychotherapy (EMDR)

• My own investigation

Moral Theory

• Theravada Buddhism

• Utilitarianism

• Virtue Ethics

• Effective Altruism

• My own investigation