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 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.
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