Change your Mind Change your Brain

The Inner Conditions for Authentic Happiness

Matthieu Ricard

If happiness is an inner state, influenced by external conditions but not dependent on them, how can we achieve it?
Ricard will examine the inner and outer factors that increase or diminish our sense of well-being, dissect the underlying mechanisms of happiness, and lead us to a way of looking at the mind itself based on his book, Happiness: A Guide to Life's Most Important Skill and from the research in neuroscience on the effect of mind-training on the brain.

Matthieu Ricard, a gifted scientist turned Buddhist monk, is a best selling author, translator, and photographer.
He has lived and studied in the Himalayas for the last 35 years.

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The habits of Happiness - Die Glücksgewohnheiten

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/de/matthieu_ricard_on_the_habits_of_happiness.html
TED Talk mit deutschen Untertiteln

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After training in biochemistry at the Institute Pasteur, Matthieu Ricard left science behind to move to the Himalayas and become a Buddhist monk -- and to pursue happiness, both at a basic human level and as a subject of inquiry.
Achieving happiness, he has come to believe, requires the same kind of effort and mind training that any other serious pursuit involves.

His deep and scientifically tinged reflections on happiness and Buddhism have turned into several books, including The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet.
At the same time, he also makes sensitive and jaw-droppingly gorgeous photographs of his beloved Tibet and the spiritual hermitage where he lives and works on humanitarian projects.

His latest book on happiness is Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill; his latest book of photographs is Tibet: An Inner Journey.

"Matthieu Ricard, French translator and right-hand man for the Dalai Lama, has been the subject of intensive clinical tests at the University of Wisconsin, as a result of which he is frequently described as the happiest man in the world."

Robert Chalmers, The Independent