If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It: A Zen Guide to Ending the Pursuit of Happiness

If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It

A Zen Guide to Ending the Pursuit of Happiness

2008 • 209 pages

We all have a right to the pursuit of happiness. But what if we realized instead that happiness can't be gained by pursuit. What if we were happy with the way things we are? In this warm and occasionally wry book, Barry Magid challenges us to take another look at what we assume is broken, at what we are sure needs fixing-in our lives, in our hearts and minds, in our spiritual practice, as manifest by all the parts of ourselves we don't want. Yet Magid makes a powerful case that nothing whatsoever is broken and we don't need fixing after all-even amid our very real suffering, and very real problems. He gently invites the reader to entertain the notion that our certainty that we are broken, that parts of us just can't possibly be okay, may be one of the very things that is turning our "pursuit of happiness" into a source of yet more suffering. And along the way, Magid lays out a rich roadmap of a new "psychological minded Zen" that may be among the most important spiritual developments now taking place.

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