How Four Simple Nutriments Can Ultimately Lead to Either Happiness or Suffering

According to Thich Nhat Hanh, events in our everyday lives can have a major impact on our wellbeing. Based on Buddha’s four nutriments in our life, edible food, sense impressions, intention, and consciousness, a person makes mindful decisions every day that ultimately lead to either happiness or suffering in their life. By purposely practicing these four nutriments, pain can be severely lessened, allowing happiness to overtake it. One may not even realize that the foods they each may cause them bad health, the things they observe may cause then to act out a certain way, thinking negatively about a certain person or event can lead to harmful behavior, and containing their pain can ultimately tear them apart.

The first nutriment, edible foods, is easy to forget about in everyday life, especially when a person is so busy they eat whatever they have the time for. There are some foods and drinks that are clearly healthy, and many that are harmful. Hanh states “we must be able to distinguish between what is healthful and what is harmful…when we shop, cook, and eat” (31). This nutriment is not only what we eat, but also anything that we consume. Smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, and doing drugs slowly eat away at a person’s body and despite many thinking they get happiness from these actions; they are really suffering my destroying their bodies. By mindfully choosing what we consume can lead to a healthy life and therefore contributing to your happiness. I know that even though many harmful food and drinks are not totally avoidable, it makes me feel better when I consciously make the decision to choose something good for me over something harmful, no matter how good I think it is. Also from personally seeing what drugs and alcohol do to people, how

they affect families, I am conscious to never get myself into those habits that have had such an impact on the lives around me.

The second nutriment, sense impressions, is impacted by all that we see, hear, smell, and taste. These sensory images then “enter our consciousness” and impact how we think and act (32).  Many of these senses feed the craving, violence, fear, and despair in all of us” (34). In the growing age of technology, movies and television have never been more popular. Many movies and TV shows give false impressions of the world and how to act, but many feed into what they see, and cannot tell that this is not the way you should act. Mindful thinking can allow you to still watch what you want to watch, but be mindful that it is not real life. With mindful thinking, we are able to “know whether we are ‘ingesting’ the toxins of fear, hatred, and violence” and not let it affect our actions if we are. Being someone who watches a fair amount of movies and TV, I am able to distinguish what is real life and what is not, but I also know that it is easy to feed into what you’re seeing and let it affect the way you think. The movie “Mean Girls” for example is a movie that I think made younger viewers think twice about how high school really is before experiencing it, but in reality my high school was nothing like that, therefore showing the false impressions movies give off to young viewers.

The third nutriment, volition, intention, or will, is all about not allowing any thought, positive or negative, completely consume you to the point where it is all you think about. If all you can think about is something that is negative, it will eventually consume you and everything you do from then on will be destructive. According to Hanh, we all “dream of revenge, and we think this will liberate us from our anger and hatred” (34), and believe that if we get our revenge on something, we will suddenly be happy from then on. But in reality, getting revenge will only haunt you and lead you to suffer. “We need to be able to see the kinds of intention-food that we are consuming,” (36) and whether it will ultimately lead us to happiness or suffering. I know from experience that you cannot allow your thoughts to completely consume you and take you away from the life you’re living. Last year, something really emotional was going on back home in my family, and no matter how upset I was that it was happening, I couldn’t let it affect my school work. There were times when I just wanted to go home and be with my family and take time off from school, which only made my stress worse. But with my family not allowing me to be consumed by it and making me focus on school, I was able to continue the semester and get good grades that I was proud of. If I had allowed myself to go home and constantly be surrounded by what was going on, I know that I wouldn’t have been able to deal with it and move on from it.

The fourth nutriment, consciousness, is about being aware of everything that you are experiencing and the way it is going to affect you in the long run. “Our conscious is eating all the time…and what it consumes becomes the substance of our life. We have to be careful which nutriments we ingest” (36). This nutriment involves practicing the Four Noble Truths, and being mindful of what we are experiencing. It involved looking deeply into what is causing both our pain and our happiness, and acknowledging what we have to do to lessen our pain and keep our happiness present. “…If you keep your suffering to yourself, it might grow bigger every day…just seeing the causes of your suffering lessens your burden” (38). I have learned from experience that talking about what you are going through, no matter how much you don’t want to face it, definitely helps you come to terms with everything that is happening. With everything that was going on for me last year, having a friend with me here at school that was also from home definitely made things easier. I was able to talk about what was going on and her being able to relate to the people I was talking to made it a lot easier. Just being able to talk about it and get all that I was feeling you and not having to keep it in really helped me deal with everything and eventually move on from it.

The four nutriments Buddha refers to are all about mindfully making the choice for your life to either involve suffering or happiness. Almost every decision you make and act you do can affect your life happiness in the long run. By practicing these four nutriments, it is possible to see how to make your life as happy as it can be, and it is all up to you.