The Lost Art of Being Happy: Spirituality for Sceptics

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Living happily is dependent on the quality of our inner life, and our inner life is largely based on habits. By training and changing these habits, in other words by acquiring inner skills, we can live with more serenity and peace of mind. This is an ancient idea, but somehow it repeatedly gets lost. The Lost Art of Being Happy shows how this idea is relevant, indeed vital, in our lives today. It also explains why the process of training the inner life by practicing these skills amounts to a form of spirituality, albeit one which doesn’t require a belief in anything supernatural.

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Tony Wilkinson studiedphilosophy at Cambridge University. While pursuing a career in the civil service and later investment banking, he practised meditation, became a long-term student of Aikido and studied the religions of the East. Table of Contents Part One: Happiness and the Inner Life Chapter 1: Somehing to think about Chapter 2: Introducing the inner life Chapter 3: The inner life and happiness Chapter 4: Habit, change and the habit basis Chapter 5: A short zoology of the inner life Chapter 6: Basic skills Part Two: The Skills of Happiness Chapter 7: Mindfulness skills Chapter 8: Mindfulness practise Chapter 9: Benevolence skills Chapter 10: Benevolence practise Chapter 11: Story skills Chapter 12: Story in practise Chapter 13: Applications of the story skills - Things and the self Chapter 14: Letting go skills Chapter 15: The practise of letting go Chapter 16: Enjoyment skills Chapter 17: Enjoying practise Part Three: Connections, speculations, conclusions Chapter 18: Spirituality, riligion and science Chapter 19: Some thoughts about death and dying Chapter 20: A way of life Appendix: Standing on the shoulders of giants